Should You Learn Chinese Characters or Words?

Learn words. A word is the unit you speak, hear and look up, and its characters come with it. Then use the characters inside each word to build a second layer of knowledge that makes later words cheaper to learn. You do not have to choose one side. You need a card design that gives you both.

This article sets out why words come first, what characters give you on top, and how to run both from one card.

Why words come first

Chinese words are often two characters long, and the meaning of the word is not always the sum of its parts. 馬上 (mǎshàng) looks like “horse” plus “up”. In the Ministry of Education dictionary, the first meaning is “on horseback”, and the meaning you will use is 立刻, “immediately”. 東西 has two readings in the same dictionary: dōngxī for “east and west”, and dōngxi, with a neutral second syllable, for “thing”. A character list does not tell you which to use. A word in a sentence does.

Some words are sounds, with no meaning in their characters at all. 咖啡 (kāfēi, coffee) is described in the MOE dictionary as a transliteration of English “coffee”, and 巧克力 (qiǎokèlì, chocolate) is another. The characters are there to carry the sound. If you study 啡 on its own, you learn nothing useful. If you study 咖啡, you can order a coffee.

Words are also what you need first for speaking. Your first weeks need 你好 (nǐ hǎo), 謝謝 (xièxie) and 多少錢 (duōshǎo qián), plus a few hundred others. Learning a character first, with no word to attach it to, slows you down where it matters.

Why TOCFL and Dangdai are word-based

Both of the common structures are word-based:

• TOCFL. The suggested vocabulary base is counted in words and is cumulative: 500 at Level 1, 1,000 at Level 2, 2,500 at Level 3, 5,000 at Level 4 and 8,000 at Level 5. The 華語八千詞表 (2023-07 edition) has 7,517 entries. It does not set a character count. The level overview lists them.
• Dangdai. A Course in Contemporary Chinese is organised into lessons, each with a vocabulary list of words.

If you are preparing for a test or following a textbook, you will be tracking words in any case. How many Chinese words you need has the figures.

What characters give you

Characters repay the effort once your word count is past the first few hundred. The reason is transfer: a character you know inside one word makes the next word that contains it easier.

Take 電 (diàn, electricity). It comes first in 電話 (diànhuà, telephone), and then returns in 電腦 (diànnǎo, computer), 電影 (diànyǐng, film) and 電視 (diànshì, television). You do not relearn it; you recognise it and learn only the new part. In Taiwan, that kind of repetition is everywhere: the same characters recur on signs, menus and screens, so each one you know lets you read a little more without help.

Characters also help you make a guess at a word you have not met. If you know 火 (huǒ, fire) and 車 (chē, vehicle) and 站 (zhàn, station), then 火車站 (huǒchēzhàn, train station) is readable the first time you see it. The guess is only a guess, and the earlier examples show where it fails, but it will be right often enough to be worth building.

Finally, characters give you the parts that make characters stick, which is the subject of how to memorize Chinese characters.

Getting both from one card

You do not need a separate character deck. A word card can carry the character layer:

1. Front: the word in Traditional characters, and the sound as audio if you can.
2. Back: the meaning, the reading (Pinyin or Zhuyin), and a line naming the parts of each new character, for example 電 has 雨 (rain) on top. Keep it short.
3. A note on a character you have already met. If 電 appeared last month in 電話, write “like 電話” on the back of 電腦. That small link is the transfer mechanism.

For characters you want to write, add a handwriting card only for the words you want to write. Recognition vs recall explains why you do not need to start with a writing card for every word.

Zhong teaches words in Traditional characters with native Taiwanese audio, schedules reviews with FSRS, and includes handwriting practice with stroke checking.

A simple order

1. First weeks: learn the sound system and your first few hundred words by ear and sight.
2. After that: read the characters in each new word and note any parts you recognise.
3. After a few hundred words: choose a few characters per week to look at more closely, and write the ones you want.
4. Alongside: read short texts, so the words you have learned appear in sentences. Learning vocabulary in context covers this.

If you already have a long list of words and little feel for characters, the fix is to add the character notes to your existing cards. Doing so costs a few seconds per card and does not require a new deck.

Related reading

• How to Memorize Chinese Characters (and Keep Them) — parts, writing and review.
• How Many Chinese Words Do You Need? By TOCFL Level — the word counts by level.
• Learning Chinese Vocabulary in Context — words in sentences and reading.
• Recognition vs Recall: Which Chinese Flashcards? — card directions.