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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

#41

Post by james_s_tayler »

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…

I treat language learning as a batch job at the beginning. Works pretty superbly for me. I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab.

All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can.

There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#42

Post by astrobe_ »

_hao wrote: post #12
jmchuster wrote: post #9

I'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... >…

We have the exact same situation in Europe: if you some of the many words English inherited from French, they are written exactly the same, have exactly the same meaning, but are pronounced in a very different way.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#43

Post by james_s_tayler »

vkaku wrote: post #30

Good for you, Author. It is not about speed, but usability. Learning random characters that are seldom used does not feel like a great way to learn a language.

I did similar thing to the author about 10 years ago. What I found after completing that portion of study was that I could recognize any character I saw. This gave me the ability to quickly perform dictionary lookups on any text. This gave me incredible access to reading. Through reading I was able to acquire vocab 5 times faster than just through listening.

It really gave me a significant boost. I got to usable language pretty fast as a result.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#44

Post by telotortium »

saagarjha wrote: post #32
nneonneo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Usually they will form compounds with other characters, and the compounds will be unambiguous. For the first two characters, you have stuff like 水果、苹果 （"fruit", "apple" respectively); 包裹 for "package". 裹 is also a verb by itself meaning "wrap":

> 我把身子用毯子裹上。

> Wǒ bǎ shēnzi yòng tǎnzi guǒshàng.

> I wrapped myself up in a blanket.

This last example shows that just like in English, words that are pronounced the same in Chinese can be distinguished by part-of-speech. You'd rarely confuse "red" the color and "read" (past tense), even though they're pronounced the same, because the first is an adjective and the second a verb (except in the old pun "What's black and white and read all over?", where you think "read" is actually "red" due to the grammatical structure of the sentence).

This is a pretty good explanation of how Chinese characters work, explained via English words: https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

(The other three "guǒ" characters are quite rare, so may be literary-only.)

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#45

Post by _hao »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #43
vkaku wrote: post #30

Good for you, Author. It is not about speed, but usability. Learning random characters that are seldom used does not feel like a great way to learn a language.

I did similar thing to the author about 10 years ago. What I found after completing that portion of study was that I could recognize any character I saw. This gave me the ability to quickly perform dictionary lookups on any text. This gave me incredible access to reading. Through reading I was able to acquire vocab 5 times faster than just through listening. It really gave me a significant boost. I got to usable lang…

That is my goal as well! Good that I have confirmation from someone else already done something similar!

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#46

Post by yorwba »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #41
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…

I treat language learning as a batch job at the beginning. Works pretty superbly for me. I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab. All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can. There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work…

> All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can.

Then you have already parallelized the process, have you not?

> I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab.

How does that ordering work in practice? I can imagine learning to pronounce each individual sound in isolation, and learning to write and pronounce each letter in the writing system before you know any words, but how do you learn about grammar without vocabulary to apply the grammar to?

> There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you.

Agreed.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#47

Post by core-e »

telotortium wrote: post #44
saagarjha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Usually they will form compounds with other characters, and the compounds will be unambiguous. For the first two characters, you have stuff like 水果、苹果 （"fruit", "apple" respectively); 包裹 for "package". 裹 is also a verb by itself meaning "wrap": > 我把身子用毯子裹上。 > Wǒ bǎ shēnzi yòng tǎnzi guǒshàng. > I wrapped myself up in a blanket. This last example shows that just like in English, words that are pronounced the same in C…

> What's black and white and read all over?"

This is a riddle not a pun.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#48

Post by [deleted] »

saagarjha wrote: post #32
nneonneo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#49

Post by wegs »

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.

On-boarding mostly happens before users even install it:

1) Run the page by users unfamiliar with it, and see if they'd install it, why, or why not. Especially language learners (e.g. go into a Chinese classroom). DON'T tell them what it is -- users don't have you to walk you through it ("I wrote this app. I'll buy you a coffee if you tell me what you think of it....")

2) Explain what the app is on the app's page. I can't tell.

3) Definitely show a clear feature table comparing free / paid. Is it usable if I don't pay you?

4) Shoot a video showing the app in use. That's super-concrete.

4.7 stars suggests it's good. 73 ratings suggests no one is using it. Your landing page is horrible. That connects the two.

I'm also not sure about the pricing model. $80/year suggests a pretty complete course. Is that what it is?

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#50

Post by rabboRubble »

ok, but can he read handwritten chinese? if you come away from your memorization process only able to read chinese newspaper fonts, you will have missed the ability to read handwritten notes on a whiteboard, the artistic renderings on product packages, the ancient forms of characters in artistic objects.
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