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I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

underscorehao.net

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Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#21

Post by magicsmoke »

godelski wrote: post #6

I'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…

> this book doesn't teach you how to read -- or speak -- but that doesn't mean it isn't useful

That's how chinese characters became a lingua franca between diplomats in ancient East Asia. They didn't have to speak each others languages, they just had to know the same character and communicate their ideas effectively enough on paper.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#22

Post by _hao »

magicsmoke wrote: post #21
godelski wrote: post #6

I'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…

> this book doesn't teach you how to read -- or speak -- but that doesn't mean it isn't useful That's how chinese characters became a lingua franca between diplomats in ancient East Asia. They didn't have to speak each others languages, they just had to know the same character and communicate their ideas effectively enough on paper.

I've shared an excerpt from the book as an answer to @jmchuster below confirming this exact same thing.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#23

Post by wegs »

olivernyc wrote: post #2

Shameless 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

Aside from Android support, my key suggestion would be to clearly think through on-boarding. Visiting the page, I see a $13 monthly plan, in an era of free and $5 iPhone apps. I don't know if it's any better or worse than free, so I'll pass.

On the app's page, I'd suggest clearly describing what one gets for free (before paying for a plan), so people can try it. For an app like this, I'd want to know what I'm getting before I install. Many apps just install and ask you for a credit card before anything happens. From there, I'd like to know what I'm paying for before I swipe my credit card. Clearly describing free versus paid version is key.

But my last iOS device is an iPad 2, so I don't think I can even do the free version.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#24

Post by peterburkimsher »

nneonneo wrote: post #15

Learning 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 th…

Yes, learn words not characters! The hardest barrier to that is the lack of spaces.

I wrote https://pingtype.github.io to add spaces, pinyin, literal and parallel translation so I can read interesting text (song lyrics, Bible) instead of just textbooks.

It also has a keyboard which uses radical decomposition, but usually it's easier to copy paste the input.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#25

Post by dang »

dak1 wrote: post #3

Note 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…

That somehow reminds me of how APL languages work. Operators with low-level meanings compose into phrases that act like higher-level operators. Eventually you read the language in phrases.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#26

Post by yorwba »

> Let's do some simple math of how long it's going to take you conservatively to learn the 8105 characters given in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters if you follow my velocity of 50 characters a day. And I'm going to add another 30 minutes, so we have 2 whole hours a day.

...

> 324.2 hours for all characters in the course of ~6 months. This seems very possible to me and a very good investment of time at that. After these 6 months you'll be free to pursue gaining vocabulary in the form of combining the characters you know into words, pronunciation and listening/speaking.

That's treating language learning as batch job, even though pipelining it would probably make more sense. You don't have to first learn all the characters and then all the words and then how to pronounce all the words and then finally you can dare to utter your first sentence.

I think it's better to do it the other way around: find a sentence you want to say or understand. Look up all the words in that single sentence, their characters and pronunciations, then memorize only those. Then learn another sentence. That way you always have some context for the new knowledge, instead of just treating it as a random collection of facts.

If you frontload on characters, it's easy to overlearn things you don't actually need. I have an Anki deck with 9385 Chinese words and 4174 distinct characters, so I know only slightly more than half of the 8105 characters the author intends to learn. But I'm functionally fluent, since the other characters basically don't appear in modern texts, except for very specific contexts. I picked a random character I didn't recognize from the list: 笸. According to Wiktionary, it's only used in the words 笸箩 and 笸篮, each of which refers to a specific kind of basket. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#27

Post by peterburkimsher »

wegs wrote: post #23
olivernyc wrote: post #2

Shameless 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

Aside from Android support, my key suggestion would be to clearly think through on-boarding. Visiting the page, I see a $13 monthly plan, in an era of free and $5 iPhone apps. I don't know if it's any better or worse than free, so I'll pass. On the app's page, I'd suggest clearly describing what one gets for free (before paying for a plan), so people can try it. For an app like this, I'd want to know what I'm getting…

I wrote another web app, https://pingtype.github.io which is free.

However, I have no idea how to do "onboarding". You just copy-paste some text into the Chinese box at the top, and/or type characters into the decomposition keyboard in the bottom, or pick a topic from the heading row for some pre-prepared material.

I haven't got any users though, since 2017, so obviously I'm doing something wrong.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#28

Post by _hao »

yorwba wrote: post #26

> Let's do some simple math of how long it's going to take you conservatively to learn the 8105 characters given in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters if you follow my velocity of 50 characters a day. And I'm going to add another 30 minutes, so we have 2 whole hours a day. ... > 324.2 hours for all characters in the course of ~6 months. This seems very possible to me and a very good investment of time a…

Actually I don't really intend to go for that list like that. I just wanted to illustrate that time wise it's possible.

What I do intend to do is to follow the same approach for the second book and learn the other 1500 characters. I've written in another comment that I've already bought some HSK1-3 graded readers and grammars that I intend to use. Maybe after that I can use the "batch" approach once more for new characters that I encounter. But the initial 3000 I think are really good base for me and my desire to start some simple reading relatively fast.

For what is worth I've tried the approach you listed and it didn't really work for me.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#29

Post by yorwba »

_hao wrote: post #28
yorwba wrote: post #26

> Let's do some simple math of how long it's going to take you conservatively to learn the 8105 characters given in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters if you follow my velocity of 50 characters a day. And I'm going to add another 30 minutes, so we have 2 whole hours a day. ... > 324.2 hours for all characters in the course of ~6 months. This seems very possible to me and a very good investment of time a…

Actually I don't really intend to go for that list like that. I just wanted to illustrate that time wise it's possible. What I do intend to do is to follow the same approach for the second book and learn the other 1500 characters. I've written in another comment that I've already bought some HSK1-3 graded readers and grammars that I intend to use. Maybe after that I can use the "batch" approach once more for new char…

1500 characters should be more than enough for HSK-3 level reading. I just checked the vocabulary list for HSK-4 I downloaded in 2017 (but I guess it didn't change much in the meantime) and it contains only 1200 words. So my recommendation for you is to start reading now rather than learning another 1500 characters you won't have much use for until your vocabulary is much more advanced.
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