As someone who has been doing Anki daily ever since the first of January, I can tell you that the amount of stuff that you forget when it starts asking items in intervals of several months compared to when it's asking items in intervals of days.
I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
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Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#12I'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 (sti…
It's entirely applicable! Actually Heisig and Richardson make the observation that after you finish both books (3000 characters) you'll be able to approach Chinese like a Japanese person would. Meaning that you'll have the knowledge of the characters, but still no knowledge on their pronunciation. Here's the section from the introduction of the book - https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2013/11/RH-S1-sample.pd...
> Those of us who come to the language as adults can gain a similar advantage by tying each of the character forms to a particular unit of pronunciation and meaning, a “key word” in English, that we already know. Before you dismiss the idea of affixing English words to Chinese characters out of hand, consider this: all the Chinese dialects, no matter how mutually unintelligible they are when spoken, use the same characters for writing. These characters convey the same meaning, no matter how they are pronounced. What is more, when the Japanese use Chinese characters, they assign them still other pronunciations. In other words, there is nothing in the nature of a character dictating that it must be verbalized one way or another. Unlike students coming to Chinese from an alphabetically written language, the Japanese already know the meaning and writing of a great many of the characters. By the time you finish this course, you will be in a position similar to theirs. Of course, you will eventually need to learn Chinese pronunciations, just as Japanese students do. But adding difficult and unfamiliar sounds to a solid knowledge of character forms is a much more manageable task than trying to memorize meaning, pronunciation, and writing all at the same time.
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#13I'd be interested in a method similar to hesig but that uses actual etymology to teach the characters instead of made up mnemonics. Does anyone know good book doing that? I'm more interested in learning the traditional characters instead of the simplified ones (mostly because I also speak Japanese and spent more time in Taiwan and HK than in China)
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#14I'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…
RTK, which i'm assuming is similar to RTH, requires you to learn the cards in order because previous cards build upon the new ones. Do you mean you should shuffle your review cards? Is that not default Anki behavior?
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#15Learning Chinese characters by trying to break them down and understand the parts is pretty much the same idea as trying to learn English by learning the etymologies of words. Linguistically, it can be useful and help you draw unexpected connections, but it can also lead you into bad traps that hinder future learning. To some extent, the same applies to trying to learn individual characters as opposed to the words they are a part of.
I am ethnically Chinese and grew up listening to the language. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up learning the written language that well, so these days I’m working to catch up by learning more advanced vocabulary. The thing that I needed to realize at the outset is that Chinese is actually not much different from English, if you view it at the word level and not the character level. If you stop thinking of words as being a sequence of characters which each have their own meanings, and more as a single unit, the language is a lot easier to learn IMHO.
This lesson came a bit late for me. I still have trouble sometimes with words that are similar and share characters in common. I sometimes incorrectly substitute characters within words with synonyms when I can’t come up with the correct one, which renders the whole word meaningless.
Don’t get too hung up on characters when learning Chinese. Learn words. Some words are one character long - but the majority are two characters. Some characters have no meaning by themselves; others have so many meanings that it’s pointless to learn them in isolation. Many characters change their pronunciations depending on what words they’re contained in.
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#16As someone who has been doing Anki daily ever since the first of January, I can tell you that the amount of stuff that you forget when it starts asking items in intervals of several months compared to when it's asking items in intervals of days.
I can see that being an issue, but then again why would you trust in SRS completely and their algorithm?
Why not create a measured review plan where each month you gradually pass everything (in my case Chinese characters) you've studied until that point?
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#17I've also learned the first 1500 characters using this book, not in one month though.
The method works but has some problems. Maybe the biggest problem is that it completely ignores pronunciation. It does not help you remember the pronunciation and it does not make use of the sound components of the characters. Most characters are composed of one component which hints at the meaning and another which hints at the sound, e.g. 青 is the sound component in 情清輕請, all of those are pronounced qing (with different tones). Usually it's not that obvious, this is just a good example. The left component in those characters would hint at the meaning.
The Heisig method instead creates a mapping between a keyword, which is derived from a single meaning of the character or invented for components which don't have a meaning, to the written form of the character using mnemonics. This works well in the beginning but once you reach a more advanced stage where you know how to say something in Chinese but maybe forgot how to write the characters this doesn't help you much since the pronunciation is not incorporated into the mnemonics.
When you are just starting out and learning all those characters seems like an unmanagable task, the Heisig method can provide a good structure to quickly "learn" many characters (keywordwriting). It's also fun to come up with stories and images. But in the end it can only provide a basic scaffold for learning more meanings, pronunciation, words etc.
I even made a small game once using those character decompositions: http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#18I'd be interested in a method similar to hesig but that uses actual etymology to teach the characters instead of made up mnemonics. Does anyone know good book doing that? I'm more interested in learning the traditional characters instead of the simplified ones (mostly because I also speak Japanese and spent more time in Taiwan and HK than in China)
Not a structured method like Heisig but a dictionary for Pleco which uses actual etymology to explain characters:
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#19Note 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…
The bit that helps me a lot with Chinese is that once you known the characters, you can deduce the possible meaning of the words, especially in the context of the sentence.
For example, 手機 is "hand", "machine", 飛機 is "fly", "machine" which you can guess means airplane. 鐵路 is "iron/metal", "road" which you can guess could mean railroad. 火車 is "fire", "chariot" which I guess can be a little confusing but it narrows it down to either a car or a train (it's train).
Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
#20I'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…
The radical (which is usually on the left, or bottom) is sometimes semantically meaningful. In your example, 汁 has the water radical, and it is indeed a liquid. The rest of the character aside from the radical is usually entirely meaningless, aside from possibly providing the pronunciation.
As an example: 果裹猓粿蜾 are all pronounced identically - guǒ - but mean “fruit, package, monkey, rice cake, wasp” respectively. The radicals are more useful: in the last three, you have the “animal” radical (monkey), one of the “food” radicals (rice cake), and the “bug” radical (wasp).