I’m having hard time with words sticking to my memory rather than character. With characters there’s visual mnemonic which I can remember better. With words, they don’t have it at all so they don’t stick as well to me. Is that normal?
Maybe also because English isn’t my first language. Is it better if I translate it first to my first language? but that would be a lot of work though
Also, what if I just focus on learning characters for now, maybe up to 500, and don’t worry too much about words yet. Is that a bad idea? Right now I’m at around 150 characters and still trying to learn both characters and words, but it’s getting a bit overwhelming.
If you have good reccolection of the characters and their meanings you might be able to rely on those to guess or recall what the word itself means.
For example:
炒饭 - I know the first character 炒 means to stir fry and 饭 is rice or meal. That lets me guess or remember a bit easier that it must be fried rice. This is one of the easier circumstances though where the two characters act like a compound word in English where you just put the two meanings together.
It’s an advanced word but I recently learned the word 孔隙 which is used to describe pores or little holes in a material. The first character 孔 means hole and the second character 隙 means crevice. So now I have two words that connect back to the final meaning of pore (a small hole similar to a crevice).
In the end, the best way to learn though is through exposure to using the word. If you have to use a word in a conversation like “I’m sorry I’m late.” You’ll remember the word 迟到 (chi2dao4; late) much easier! Take a look at some of those examples and write some of your own. I promise that if you work with the words more they will be given their own face in your memory so that when you look back at them during your reviews you will be able to more easily recall them on sight.
I kinda have the same problem, English isn’t my first or even my second language but I don’t think that’s the main problem - even better the more the merrier. I think that the main reason that I can’t remember words as well as characters is that when I watch something in Chinese (or sometimes even Japanese) I recognise a lot of Chinese characters that I know, and even though I’m not always pausing the video to remember the character (even though I sometimes do it) it does always have the effect to “stuck in my brain better”. In the other hand I rarely see words as often as characters, but I think that with the time ticking I evetually will recognise more and more words, so I’m not really worrying about it.
Words I already know how to say/understand outside of HH. I’m just learning the characters that map to that word. I have zero issues with these, they’re generally the easiest to learn.
Words where the characters make complete sense (e.g. 火山 - fire + moutain = volcano). Since these are so logical, they’re also usually also quite easy if I’m confident with the characters they contain.
Everything else - words I haven’t seen/heard in context that just show up in HH without context. I often find these quite hard to learn, and will have long strings of getting them wrong.
So because of how easy type 1 words are, I generally don’t push too hard in HH. If I focused only on HH, I’d overtake my spoken skill and all words would become type 3 words that I’ve never seen before. This means I go hard outside of HH getting enough input, and practising sentences etc, then when doing HH I generally have at least a passing idea of words before they appear (and if a word appears in the HH queue that is HSK6+ level and doesn’t automatically make sense I just suspend/skip it - I can come back later when I’m up to that).
TLDR: Try to get lots of input outside HH (either CI content on youtube or reading like DuChinese etc), and the words will start to make more sense and be much easier to remember.