I am making a game where writing Mandarin characters is to be the primary input mechanic. I am interested in striking a balance between fun and optimal character retention. Any papers related to memorizing shapes or glyphs are welcome.
I know that sounds traditionally, but I think that there is perhaps no really easy way, in particular for adult learners: in my view the most reliable way is still to repeatedly write several hundreds of each character, in particular at the early stage of learning, until one develops a visual memory for characters.
Having said this, there are many recent softwares, which should be useful and make learners' lives easier.
I hope this answers.
Best wishes,
Daniel
This confirms what I suspected. This is the way that I learned beginner Chinese! Do you have any knowledge of the cognitive processes involved in learning to write?
First of all, you need a cultural shift, stop thinking as you do when you learn how to write in an alphabetical script. And take a step to storytelling and mental association, imagination. Chinese character writing is an amazing world that makes your mind expand. When I started learning how to write, my Chinese teacher used to tell me the story of each character, it may not be hundred per cent accurate but it surely helps, as it triggers the brain mechanisms for memory processing. So check for a book that tells the story behind each character (I can send you a list, if you wish), in the meantime pay attention to learn correct stroke order from the very beginning and study radicals deep down, as both semantic a phonetic radicals that make up the character are essential.
Christina, I too have studied the language. I'm aware that the radicals each correspond to primative pictures such as shell, roof, spear and so forth. The way the story telling and culture seeps its way into the characters is incredibly fascinating. I'm not trying to take a western alphabetical approach. Regarding your resources I would gladly read them all(provided I have the time). Do you think animating the characters in a way that tells the story would be effective? For instance if this game demanded drawing a character as a quick time event, I can envision the character exiting the screen in a way that tells a mini-story. If you have any recommendations for how to map stroke order to gameplay it would be most appreciated. For now all I can imagine is rewarding the player for proper stroke order although I'm sure there's plenty of creative ways to incorporate it into a learning app. Incorporating the education of spatial patterns of where the phonetic and semantic indicators into core gameplay is also a must. Sorry for vagueness about the gameplay, but it's a bit too distant from this question to get fully involved with.
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