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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

#31

Post by prewett »

wibr wrote: post #17

I'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 sou…

Heisig's method is for kanji, which have different pronunciation depending on which word they are in, since Japan imported the meaning but not always the pronunciation. Note that the book is called "A Complete Course in How Not to Forget the Kanji", not "How to Read". All he's doing is endowing the character with an image that conveys a commonly used meaning and how it is written, so that you can remember it. Actually reading or pronouncing a text is out of scope.

If you're learning hanzi you can take advantage of the pronunciation hints. Plus the fact that modern hanzi generally have only one pronunciation per [traditional] character, and only one syllable per, too. The characters made so much more sense learning Chinese.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#32

Post by saagarjha »

nneonneo wrote: post #20
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…

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…

How do you tell them apart in speech? Just context?

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#33

Post by powersnail »

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…

> The three ticks on the left are the symbol for water but 十 means 10.

The right part in this case signifies a similar pronunciation:

汁 (zhi)

十 (shi)

This is a typical setup in Chinese character, part of it relates to the meaning, the other relates to the pronunciation.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#34

Post by _hao »

yorwba wrote: post #29
_hao wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I've taken a small break from studying (just reviews since I finished this experiment). I might follow your advice while still going forward with the second book, but not with the 50 chars/day pace, I'll perhaps tone it down. You're right that HSK1-3 (or even 4 as you suggest) are very trivial in terms of vocabulary.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#35

Post by saagarjha »

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…

I'm guessing the last one is not an Orwellian reference?

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#36

Post by timr »

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…

"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."

I'm intermediate in Japanese (conversational + able to read at an N2 level, albeit slowly), and my first response to anyone who says they "learned X kanji" is "how many words do you know?"

There's probably some value to learning the meaning of individual kanji in isolation, but it's very limited (especially in Japanese). Most words have only tenuous relation to the meanings of their individual kanji, and "learning kanji" is kind of a crutch for beginners to pretend that they're making rapid progress.

I suppose from that perspective, "learning X kanji in Y days" is a useful meme, because it pushes people to quickly move on from the approach. But that said, for most learners, it's much better to simply start learning words.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#37

Post by pixelperfect »

I learned Chinese characters using this method and found it very helpful. It's not very popular among Chinese learners or teachers because it's unintuitive. In many cases the keywords of the characters you are learning are imprecise or goofy. But the point of the method is to rapidly form mental chunks at the character level so that later you can focus on a higher level of abstraction.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#38

Post by geza »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #27
wegs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect the reason for few users is because it's relatively simple to build such an app and so you have tons of competitors, such as Pleco. For example, the visualization you have is pretty similar to a learning tool that annotates subtitles I built in 2013 - it's no longer online but you can see screenshots at https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/90411/Miller_... and a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-eXUB3eaA

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#39

Post by james_s_tayler »

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…

When I learned Japanese back in the day I did 35 Kanji a day with RTK + Anki and I made up all my own mnemonics.

It was an absolute grind. But it worked.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#40

Post by yorwba »

saagarjha wrote: post #35
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…

I'm guessing the last one is not an Orwellian reference?

According to Chinese Wiktionary, it originated in the period when mobile phones where large, expensive bricks and were carried as an accessory by triad bosses ("big brothers") in Hong Kong movies. https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E5%93%A5%E5%A4%A7
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