This is my occasional check of where I am going with my journey of learning Chinese characters. Last year was mostly spent in “maintenance mode” just reviewing stuff and adding only words that I encountered in wild.
@tkoola Very impressive! I know Chinese characters do share some common pieces (where characters have related meanings, right?) but it still strikes me that learning that many is an awesome feat of memorisation 😄
@jayeless yes, Chinese characters often are composed of simpler bits and one can build up pretty good memoization rules for characters like "sweet mountain yawn" for 嵌 （it means inlay or embed) or "tooth turkey" 雅 (proper, correct, refined). I find it harder to put simple, abstract characters to my long term memory, simply because it is hard to come up with emotion evoking memory rules.
In essence, learning characters is "just hard work". I've put in 20-40 minutes a day every day for more than 4 years now. While I may lack natural talent for language learning, I am good at handling boring repetition :)