Students often assumed they have written correctly and did not even think of the possibility that they may be wrong.I observed that most students just turn a blind eye on their mistake in the hope that the mistake is overlooked by the teachers, yet they do not know that teachers have a pair of very keen and sharp eyes which are trained to catch error faster than a leopard running.
Despite the years of training, Students tend to be very careless and sometimes arrogant as not only that they do not check their work, they do not even read their compositions after it was given back for corrections, they simply do the correction and forgotten to study their mistakes.
Those mistakes would prevail composition after composition and their composition results will suffer. So how to avoid this number one mistake in composition?
1) Use a notebook to write down all the misspelled words in an orderly manner and study them everyday.
Taking notes has been very effective in helping students realize their mistakes and reinforcing their memory.
The key point is to scan through last years compositions and record all your mistakes in the note book.
Then you need to add more mistakes made by scanning for them in the compositions that are handled to students in the future.
Lastly students need to revise the note book eveyday.
2) Use mnemonics
Mnemonic devices turn words into a picture, a story, a sentence or anything that makes memorizing them easier.
For example,
a) 照: one japanese (日) standing with a sword (刀) at the door (口) and killed four people (灬)
b) 明: one sun(日) and one moon(月) makes the skies bright(明).
c) 赢: dead(亡) mouth(口)moon(月)seashell(贝)common(凡).
3) know your radicals
Radicals are the smaller components of a character,
Simple character are just one radical like 火、木、水、言、金etc.
Compound characters are made out of 2 or more radicals such as 炎、 林、淼、警、鑫etc.
Each Radical may carry meaning while some radicals carries the hanyu pinyin (sound) of the character. some radicals do change form like a transformer in a character like 土becomes地,火becomes煮（the 灬means火fire).
Radicals that provides sound are like 青, you know the sound when you see 请、清、情、晴、氰、蜻.
Radicals can be a category of things like 金 are like an element and you see words like 银(silver)、铜(copper)、铁(metal)、锡(tin)、铝(aluminum).
Here is a list of 100 common radicals to start your journey into Chinese characters.
http://www.hackingchinese.com/media/100-radicals-peter.pdf
4) Check the dictionary
Dictionary is your friend, use them well and learn the hanyu pinyin well too.
a) fuzzy check using 汉语拼音
You can check for two character words with hanyu pinyin like this:-
gaoxing 高兴
shangxin 伤心
You can check for certain phrases like chengyu and common phrases using the following method.
bgsqesy 不管三七二十一
b) strokes check 比划
normal if you see a word and you know how to count strokes correctly, then use this method would be fast for one word.
- count the strokes for radicals
- count the strokes for the rest of the character.
-choose a word.
c) writing check with a stylus.
change mode of checking (shu ru fa 输入法）to 书写.
then write the word on the screen.
(note: do not click on the screen as its not a responsive screen!)
wait a while for dictionary to recognize your writing.
choose the word.
Notes on the usage of dictionary in examinations, these are common advise by teachers:-
A) learn hanyu pinyin well.
B) write hanyu pinyin on the part where you do not know the writing of the word first.
C) check through all the blank words with the hanyu pinyin provided.
In practice, most students do not follow the above advise so they spent a lot of time on checking the dictionary and less time on the content and the flow of the story.
So I required all my students to be able to check dictionary in 15 seconds. Yes do not spend more than 15 seconds on checking dictionary, spent them on the content and the flow of the story.
5) Draw a picture of the word like
And the last one is to get all spelling 100 marks every time. Do spelling every day, start with 3-5 words a day to 200-500 words a semester.
So start on the quest to stop misspellings now and hope your compositions will improve very quickly.
