I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
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I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
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Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#2Shameless self promotion: I made an app for learning Chinese characters, Noodle Chinese [0]. It uses handwriting recognition and spaced repetition to focus on the words you need most help with. If anyone has feedback please feel free to reach out! hello@noodlechinese.com
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-chinese/id1375293467
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#3Note that there's a large difference between learning characters and learning to read.
Simple examples: 可口可樂, 手機, 大哥大
If you just knew the characters, you would understand those as: 1) Can Mouth Can Happy 2) Hand Machine 3) Big Older Brother Big
Those are actually: 1) Coca-Cola 2) Cell phone 3) Cell phone (slang)
And those are just for simple nouns. There's also grammar patterns and characters like 把 that can modify sentence structure, to name a couple more examples.
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#4Note that there's a large difference between learning characters and learning to read. Simple examples: 可口可樂, 手機, 大哥大 If you just knew the characters, you would understand those as: 1) Can Mouth Can Happy 2) Hand Machine 3) Big Older Brother Big Those are actually: 1) Coca-Cola 2) Cell phone 3) Cell phone (slang) And those are just for simple nouns. There's also grammar patterns and characters like 把 that can modify…
This is entirely correct and I don't disagree with it. I already have some basic HSK1-3 level readers bought as well as some grammars (AllLearning + some others) that I intend to use when I finish my character learning.
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#5I figured this was Heisig method before clicking on it. Very good. It took me 9 months to learn how to write ~2000 Japanese Kanji (3 months is doable though) on kanji.koohii.com (plus buying the book). 1 month for 1500 is fast, although it looks like it didn't take too long each day.
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#6I'm also going through these books, but I am suspicious of the author's claim. That's about 50 characters a day. I use Anki and it is clear that the shuffling of cards makes a big difference. RTH is really about creating mnemonics and presenting characters together building from roots (that's why I like it). But you NEED to shuffle them.
I'm also finding that my biggest barrier is pronunciation. I'll see the character and immediately know the meaning because I created a good mnemonic. But getting the pinyin right is harder (shuffling matters here too!).
Lastly, as dak pointed out, this book doesn't teach you how to read -- or speak -- but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. It is helping me to read, but that's because this isn't the only tool I use. In Chinese, words are really compound words. For example, 熊猫 means panda. But 熊 means bear and 猫 means cat. This makes these unbounded morphemes, which is different than what we do in the Indo-European languages. And Chinese is composed of radicals that make things harder. 果汁 is juice, but 汁 is juice. The three ticks on the left are the symbol for water but 十 means 10. The book focuses on the latter cases but you'd be very confused if you read about the bear cats of China. And these are just the simple examples. I'm sure others will write some more fun ones below (I'm a real novice at Chinese).
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#7Shameless self promotion: I made an app for learning Chinese characters, Noodle Chinese [0]. It uses handwriting recognition and spaced repetition to focus on the words you need most help with. If anyone has feedback please feel free to reach out! hello@noodlechinese.com [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-chinese/id1375293467
What I really like about RTH over these types of apps that focus on HSK is the groupings/ordering it is presenting characters and the focus on mnemonics. I'd love an app like this that presented characters in a similar fashion.
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#8I'm also going through these books, but I am suspicious of the author's claim. That's about 50 characters a day. I use Anki and it is clear that the shuffling of cards makes a big difference. RTH is really about creating mnemonics and presenting characters together building from roots (that's why I like it). But you NEED to shuffle them. I'm also finding that my biggest barrier is pronunciation. I'll see the characte…
I've explained in the article that I didn't concern myself with pronunciation at all which is the book authors advice. I have pronunciation on my answer side of the Pleco flash cards (they are shuffled and the algorithm decides which card to show me based on the ones I've marked as learned and their score) but I didn't make any effort to memorize it.
I focused entirely on how to memorize the characters and how to remember to write them based on the keyword + primitive.
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#9I've always enjoyed this forum post from YesJapan (japanese learning site), not exactly Chinese but maybe directionally applicable.
http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-on...
Highlights:
> 100 kanji - basic signs
> 500 kanji - 50% of printed material
> 1000 kanji - 85% of printed material
> 1945 kanji - 97% of printed material
> 8000 kanji - 100% of anything japanese kanji in electronic form (still only about 99.99% in printed material as a lot of ancient texts have some pretty obscure one time only kanji).
> Learning kanji is uber important in increasing your ability to communicate effictively in Japanese. What [YesJapan] does, and does well, is give users an excellent base of Japanese from which to work from. With a base of about 2000 vocabulary words and enough grammar to get by in most situations, the kanji comes secondary as they will then help to start bridge the gaps between the beginner/intermediate level and the advanced/fluent level.
> As far as learning speed goes, there is a fast assimilation of the first 100 kanji. After that, the learning pace levels off to a slow progression until around the 800-1000 kanji point when the pattern recognition starts to kick in, then past 1200 the pace picks back up again until around 2400-3000 where the pace levels off again because at this point the literacy level is of that of a graduate student, and only obscure or rarely used kanji are available for further study. You can judge your kanji learning speed through the first 100 kanji benchmark. It takes one unit of time to learn the first 100 kanji, then about 14-30 units of time to learn the 800-1000, and then another 7-15 units of time to finish off the joyou list (and name kanji). So if it took you 1 month to learn your first 100 kanji it should take you another year to 3 years to learn your next 1000, and then another half a year to a year and a half to finish the list. Again, faster learners will find themselves closer to the earlier stages of the spectrum, while casual learners and slower learners towards the further end of the spectrum.
> Another nice benchmark to keep in mind when studying Japanese is that going from a western to asian language (meaning no prior fluency in an asian language) takes 88 weeks (5 hours a day study) or 2200 hours of study to go from 0 to complete fluency. 44 weeks, or about a year of intensive study should put you at around the JLPT 3-2 level, and another 44 weeks to put you at the JLPT 1 level. Again this is assuming 5 hour a day of dedicated language study, so if your study time is less then that, you can plan your progression accordingly. One of the benefits of living in country is that the 5 hours comes a lot easier and quicker then living outside the target country where the material has to be self or externally generated.
> In case you were wondering - western languages to other western languages take about 22 weeks (550 hours of intensive study), non-western/non-asian languages 44 weeks (1100 hours of intensive study) and asian languages [88 weeks] (2200 hours of intensive study). The other benefit of learning a language in one of the other two language families is that if you decide to learn another language in the same language family (region 1 2 or 3 as described above) it takes only 22 weeks of study.
> Which brings about another intersting topic. Korean takes about 52 weeks of intensive study to master from a western language (because their writing is mainly hangul, the necessity to learn a complicated script is lessened, thus easier to learn then chinese or Japanese). Thus learning Korean first, followed by Japanes will only take 74 weeks of study, vs 110 weeks of study going to Japanese first then Korean.
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#10I figured this was Heisig method before clicking on it. Very good. It took me 9 months to learn how to write ~2000 Japanese Kanji (3 months is doable though) on kanji.koohii.com (plus buying the book). 1 month for 1500 is fast, although it looks like it didn't take too long each day.
Thank you! The method really clicked in my head and the way I approach learning in general is close, so maybe that's why it's working so well for me.