What do you think is the most efficient way to study Chinese Characters?

I haven't used HanziHero but almost every tool can be useful in some way. But at some point you should move on to other methods. If you aren't sure about continuing with HanziHero, look for something else.

As for me, I prefer to learn words as I encounter them. I've almost never used flashcards. Using the language in daily life has spaced repetition flashcards already without the app. The important characters you will regularly see and learn quickly, and the less important characters you can just look up if or when you need. Eventually after enough time and exposure you will learn those less common ones too.

Once you get past a certain level and know the basic characters it's not really worth continuing to learn from other people's lists. You end up learning characters and words that you might not actually need or at least not anytime soon.

Some topics you are not likely to encounter, so there is no need to focus on that vocabulary. If I do decide to actively study then I mostly focus on the topics I'm interested in for the content and situations I'm likely to encounter. I will expand to learn vocabulary from other topics when I need or want to at my own pace.

I personally recommend not tracking your progress by individual characters. It's much more efficient, at least for me, to learn words. The Chinese characters are distinct enough to where learning to recognize 2 hanzi together is very doable. I suppose if you're doing both it can't hurt inherently, but if you have limited time, I think it's okay to drop the individual hanzi study.

I actually don't even know how many hanzi I know. That's like asking how many root words I know in English.

If it helps you in other ways, great, but I'd strongly recommend focusing on vocabulary unless you were learning writing or something.

No idea but my wife got me a bunch of preschool textbooks, covering 600 characters. I enjoy them very much and I am almost 40.

Just writing them down. Almost every day I write. Eventually the Hanzi gets etched into my mind. This also helped me a lot when I was still learning German (and English too).

But admittedly it took me a while to remember some characters despite writing them down for YEARS. And there are times when I can instantly recognize a character when I see them but I cannot write them down from memory.

Not sure if it works for Chinese, but I used a variant of Heisig's Remembering the Kanji for learning Japanese kanji, so perhaps consider Remembering the Hanzi by Heisig for that. Just use Hanzi Hero to get three example words per character and also use HSK levels to focus on groups of 150 (skip over Hanzi not at that HSK level).

You have golden keys in your hands, yet you are still complaining!

The only thing you did wrong is your doubt!

The component approach is the ONLY right path.

Anything else is iron or dirt!

The only thing you should improve is to do it more determined, faster, repeat many times.

The key is, must faster.

Do not try to memorize them forever, just go through them as quickly as possible, and then, repeat.

When you are doing it, only try to understand them, and, only focus on the primary “raw” “original” meaning.

There are only about 200-500 components. So, it is VERY easy to do — again, do not try to memorize them, only understand them, and, repeat the cycle again and again.

while you are doing this, simultaneously, you read and understand phrases.

Because you have been doing the components, you will find most of the time, you guess is pretty close. So, most of the time, you do not need to use a dictionary. Even sometimes you do, you can figure it out quickly and can remember it easily.

Note that, when we talk about Chinese, it is better to avoid the word “words”.

Because otherwise it would be very confusing. A character is a “word” in Chinese, traditionally. In English, it is equivalent to a root/suffix.

A typical Chinese phrase has two syllables, ie, characters. “Chengyu” has 4 characters. There only about 300 often-used “chengyu”. There are only a few dozen 3-character phrases.

As you can see, if you know those 200-500 components, you know the whole vocabulary, of a sophisticated language that has thousands of years!!

Those components are truly the golden keys.

Once you know the components, you can guess the phrases, and, reversely, remember the characters.

The key is, there are only 200-500 components.

If you do not use them, that would very silly.

But there are many — actually most people are silly. The reason: it is still a kind of “secret” that there are only 200-500 components.

Even Hanzihero itself has no clue!!!

It is a new concept.

The old concept is “radicals”. It is only used as indexing tool.

So, the idea to componentize all characters is new and revolutionary!

By the way, you did the right thing, we should avoid the word “radicals”.

We should use “components” to replace the word “radicals”.

But more importantly, the key of the new concept, “components” is that we can componentize all characters, absolutely no exception.

In others words, Hanzihero went just the half way. That is why it is not effective.

The most primitive ways such as conversation, TV drama and movies. Also TV shows that interview with celebrities and travel program. Play word games like 接龍。

Try pick some songs you like and learn the lyrics, there are plenty Karaoke video with lyrics on Youtube I recommend this very slow folk song 橄欖樹 during 70's

Practical things you need when you travel. Formulate some imaginary travel plan and go through train stations, major tourist spots and menu of restaurant, review of hotels etc. check out some travel vlog to learn more about these places.

If you have some hobby or serious college major, check out relative wiki page to get to learn the key words

I used pretty much the same method (the "Marilyn Method") and for me it worked very well, although I also encountered the same issues as you. Plus I didn't create mnemonics for words with multiple characters, I never felt the need to. I don't know HanziHero, but here are some comments towards your points.

1. I guess the motivation to teach random words is to reinforce how the individual characters can be used. So while you probably won't be able to use a word if you learn it in isolation and don't know how to use it, it might still reinforce your knowledge of the individual characters. I do something similar from time to time: use a rather infrequent, but easily learned character to reinforce my knowledge of the components used in that character.

2. Regarding words, I'd recommend to skip this level and directly go to sentences. I think the best way is to learn individual characters and complete sentences. In that way you learn how to use individual characters in words, how to use the words in sentences, and grammar. I used "subs2srs" systems in the past to create hundreds of sentences from movies and import them in Anki, that worked well for me.

3. Hundreds of daily reviews is the biggest issue I had as well. It was such a burden to me and one day I just stopped doing it altogether. Also it always bugged me that in Anki and similar systems all reviews are isolated: if I review a sentence and I know every character, it should "pass" all the individual characters and words in that sentence as well. Nowadays I'm working on a "infinite scroll review" system where I get the front side of the cards in a list like on reddit. Scrolling down on this stream of reviews each review is "passed" automatically if I don't click on it and the interval for that review is increased a little bit in the background. But if I don't recall the answer to a review, I click on it to see the answer. Then the reviews for connected parts (words in a sentence, characters in a word, components in a character) get "failed" appropriately, I don't even need to select "hard" / "good" / "easy". I hope that this approach will enable me to do dozens of reviews in just a few minutes. Does it make sense?

4. I think it's reasonable to ditch learning words with mnemonics and only learn characters. Learn words by learning sentences instead.

In essence using mnemonics for learning Chinese characters worked really well for me, and I recommend you to keep doing it as it becomes even more useful for rarely used characters. I can see how one could learn the most common few hundred characters just by lots of immersion and dedication, but when it comes to increasingly rare characters, that's where mnemonics really shine. Don't use mnemonics to learn words with multiple characters though, learn words and grammar through sentences with tools like "subs2srs" (there are several systems available I think).

idk i'm a calligrapher so i just increase the amount of characters i know every time i study a poem

Hey, one of the co-founders of HanziHero here. Thanks for the feedback! I wanted to share my comments on some of your points.

1. The core philosophy behind HanziHero is to teach characters first-and-foremost, so some of the words we teach are "more rare", mainly so that we can teach some word that contains certain characters early on. E.g., there may be some HSK 1 characters that are not really used within any HSK 1,2,3,etc words, since they are mainly used by themselves. In those cases, we have more rare words like the one you mentioned. We do this because we believe learning some word concurrent to learning the character is key to help remembering the character. However, I can see why some people may prefer to just not learn the rare word in the case, which is why we have recently added an initial version of word skipping. Additionally, our word selection algorithm prefers lower-HSK words when everything else is equal, so we hope adding more earlier-HSK-words may remediate this problem for future learners.

2. We are exploring a way to expose all of the words in CC-CEDICT within the application in the near future. We are still working on the design, but we think we will call it "Dictionary Words" or similar. This will allow one to add any one of the ~100k+ words within that dictionary for those that want to use HanziHero as a generalized SRS. Those words of course won't have any mnemonic or anything, but this is something that I think will help many users who want a greater word-focus in their learning. It would work by manually marking any of those words in the UI, after which they will be immediately added to one's reviews.

3. We currently use our own SRS algorithm, but plan to port over the the main SRS algorithm that most applications use (including Anki) called SM-2. We believe our current scheduling algorithm leads to a higher-than-needed review load, and hope this will reduce it, while also making our SRS algorithm more similar to how other SRS systems work. We (myself and my brother) both use the app, and agree the review load is a bit too high, so this is a high priority item for us.

4. Can you expand on this a bit more? Do you mean that it would be better to just get to word learning as fast as possible, without the intermediate step of character familiarity? If so, perhaps the addition of "Dictionary Words" mentioned above may help users who share a similar view.

Thanks again for the feedback! I'm really glad to hear HanziHero helped you learn a bunch of characters, reports like these motivates us to keep on improving it.

I personally use Skritter. I find having to hand write the character pretty therapeutic.

You can drill words by HSK level which is handy.

I started from the HSK 1 deck and In the last 188 days I’ve studied 4153 words with unique 2136 characters. I can definitely feel it helping.