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I've been checking out @OutlierLinguist Chinese character course. It's really good! Some thoughts below. (full disclosure, John from Outlier gave me a review copy)
For starters, I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy the course because I've studied characters for a long time, I'm able to read fairly proficiently (or at least character recognition is rarely the main obstacle), and I've been using their Pleco add-on for awhile.
However, the course actually does a lot more to make sense of what characters are, and why some squiggles in a square have come to represent the things they do. The nerd in me loves it, because characters were part of the reason I got interested in Chinese in the first place.
From a beginner perspective, however, this is really the right way to prime you to think about learning characters. The course is relatively short to the amount of time spent learning characters in total, so I think its safe to say that the gained efficiency > time invested.
When I started learning, the focus was mostly on radicals. But this was just a convention for looking up characters in paper dictionaries, and doesn't always respect the way the etymology or evolution of the characters over time.
The approach taught (+ the Outlier Pleco add-on) make it a lot easier to use mnemonics that actually respect the origins of the characters rather than made up stories which can confuse things later.
The % of my Twitter followers who are learning Chinese, or are nerdy enough to want to learn Chinese characters without it, is probably pretty small, but I thought I'd share it regardless. outlier-linguistics.com/collections/ch…
