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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

#51

Post by thiagocesar »

timr wrote: post #36
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 "learn…

I disagree. It was impossible for me to just learn words, because kanji made no sense to me.

After RTK, I created ways to mentally breakdown and identify the characters. Then, suddenly, I was able to learn words much faster too - instead of struggling with “well this one has this curve here and then it points there and it means that”, reading became automatic, and I could focus on the word itself.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#52

Post by dickjocke »

rabboRubble wrote: post #50

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.

isn't most text you'll see nowadays going to be printed and standardized? I can't remember the last time I read a handwritten anything, aside from my own notes.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#53

Post by godelski »

zebrafish wrote: post #14
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…

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?

I mean shuffle the review cards. Presenting them in order I think is part of the magic to these books (RTH and RTK share an author). It is the default behavior of Anki, if you add them all at the same time. It gets more difficult when you don't have all 1500 and start with, say, 100 and then build as you go (you don't want review time to be one month away for the first hundred characters just because you added them first). Because there is pronunciation and meaning clues to the radicals, the shuffle matters for long term memory. But the ordered helps get them into short term memory and to passively learn radical structures.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#54

Post by godelski »

thiagocesar wrote: post #51
timr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 "learn…

I disagree. It was impossible for me to just learn words, because kanji made no sense to me. After RTK, I created ways to mentally breakdown and identify the characters. Then, suddenly, I was able to learn words much faster too - instead of struggling with “well this one has this curve here and then it points there and it means that”, reading became automatic, and I could focus on the word itself.

This has been my experience too. Like I said before, just learning characters doesn't let you read in of itself because there are compound words. But you have to think of characters as building blocks. Then you repeat the process with words and it is easier to form mnemonics because you already have the base structure. The idea is to start from the ground up and build a strong base before you move to building the house. This is opposed to the classical Western style that is building random walls first. The thing is that the latter will get you conversational faster, but the former leads to a better understanding but takes more time.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#55

Post by james_s_tayler »

yorwba wrote: post #46
james_s_tayler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 learnin…

Mostly works out fine. There isn't a perfectly strict separation between grammar ant vocab like you imagine. I do it through sentences, so naturally a little vocab is required for that, and that's ok. The goal in the grammar phase is to collect and Anki enough sentences to be able to parse sentences grammatically. I usually need about 3 to 5 sentences for each grammar point.

The vocab phase is purely about vocab. Grammar is done at this point.

I remember first year of Japanese study was Kanji then grammar. At the end of that first year I knew about 2000 words. The second year was purely vocab. I managed to acquire 10,000 new vocab by the end of the second year.

After that point I could understand most spoken and written things with patches here and there. I could hold conversations for hours with a single person.

In the 3rd year of study I did much the same. I remember my Anki vocab deck getting up to about 17k words before reviews were at about 300 to 400 a day and the returns were diminishing, so I just deleted the deck. Stopped cold.

End of that 3rd year I could read novels pretty well. Hold conversations on any topic for any length of time in group settings.

It worked remarkably well. It was damn hard work though.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#56

Post by morninglight »

Many years ago, my brother was booking a lot of large jobs in China. The equipment he worked on was located in small towns throughout the countryside and usually required him to be onsite for several days. He had minimal familiarity with the language, and it was rare to find english speakers in these remote locations. It was especially a problem in restaurants because the menu would only be availabe printed in kanji.

Since I could read kanji, he asked for help. In return, I sent him pictographs for fish, chicken, pork and beef. He wasn't going to become fluent, but at least he could point at something on a menu with some confidence.

He memorized the four characters before his next visit to a restaurant. As he skimmed the menu, he found the character for chicken and pointed to it. The waitress nodded and within a short time she returned with an enormous platter piled high with chicken's feet. Nothing else, just chicken's feet.

No, they were not intending to prank the foreigner. In China, chicken's feet are a delicasy....and I will never hear the end of it.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#57

Post by peterburkimsher »

geza wrote: post #38
peterburkimsher wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/wa…

I saw that at the time! I also tried subtitles, for a famous movie (You Are The Apple Of My Eye) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhIooD7mFhphhT5nDdhK0...

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#58

Post by kristianov »

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?

For sizzle.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#59

Post by kelnos »

core-e wrote: post #47
telotortium wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a riddle that uses a pun as a critical component to throw the person answering off the trail.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#60

Post by knolax »

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?

大哥大 dates back to at least the Sino-Japanese war. It's northern slang equivalent in meaning and connotation to "da boss" (eg. the term is mostly used sarcastically). I've never heard anybody use it as a term for cellphones. So no, the term predates Orwell.
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