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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

#61

Post by nicolas_t »

wibr wrote: post #18
nicolas_t wrote: post #13

I'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: https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/collections/chinese

Great, Thanks! I guess I can use hesig and at the same time refer to that as a complement :)

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#62

Post by jack1243star »

knolax wrote: post #60
saagarjha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For example, one Taiwanese cellphone service provider is called 台灣大哥大

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#63

Post by jack1243star »

morninglight wrote: post #56

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.…

They are sometimes called 鳳爪 or phoenix's claws :)

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#64

Post by imtringued »

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…

You have to learn kanji the same way you have to learn the alphabet. If you don't knoe the symbol you're going to have an extrenely hard time when you are learning writte. Word because suddenly you need to learn 3 kanji at once to understand a single word. Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't a big deal. At roughly 15 Kanji per day you can finish the first 2000 in 5 months but your vocabulary deck meanwhile is far away from being finished. I don't know why you are saying "move on" because as I said, it is one more thing you have in your toolbox. Your toolbox should consist of multiple anki decks(one of which could be a hiragana, katakana and a kanji deck, a listen only vocab deck, a reading only vocab deck for example), listening exercises, speaking exercises, grammar exercises and so on.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#65

Post by imtringued »

Hamuko wrote: post #11

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.

My advice to Anki beginners: don't trust the default settings. For example setting a daily review limit will cause a massive backlog over time. Just do all your reviews for that day. If there are cards that you fail every day then answer them as hard. This will tell Anki to shedule the card differently. Annoyingly there is no skip feature so don't feel bad about hitting good on a card that you failed 3 times in a row. You can adjust the steps from 1 10 to 1 1500 for new cards so that you will not be asked twice for a new card on the same day. Once I did these changes I was going through twice as many reviews in roughly 75% of the time.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#66

Post by houshuang »

Interesting approach. I learnt Chinese in university 20 years ago, and spent a long time in China both with traditional text books (self study) and just living there... Very curious about the approach of learning characters without the pronunciation - would love to hear about how it goes in the future when the author moves on to learning words and grammar etc.

This made me think about my own process of learning and improving Chinese, wrote up a bunch of rough notes here. Might try to experiment with a few things going forwards. https://notes.reganmian.net/a--chinese

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#68

Post by timr »

imtringued wrote: post #64
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…

You have to learn kanji the same way you have to learn the alphabet. If you don't knoe the symbol you're going to have an extrenely hard time when you are learning writte. Word because suddenly you need to learn 3 kanji at once to understand a single word. Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't a big deal. At roughly 15 Kanji per day you can finish the first 2000 in 5 months but your vocabulary deck mea…

"You have to learn kanji the same way you have to learn the alphabet."

The RTK/RTH method is nothing like learning an alphabet: at no point in my education did we sit down for weeks and "learn the meaning" of A, B, C...etc. For phonetic alphabets like hiragana and katakana and roman and hangul, it's absolutely worthwhile to memorize the shapes of the characters, because there's a small set of them, and once you know them, you can convert written words to sounds. With RTK, that's not true at all.

An adult of average intelligence can learn to read kana in a week. That's time well-spent. Spending months memorizing the "meanings" of kanji is a whole other process, of dubious value.

"Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't a big deal."

This is true, and is the way that Japanese children learn the language: you learn a character, along with some words that contain the character. To the extent that individual kanji have meanings, you learn them in context.

"I don't know why you are saying "move on" because as I said, it is one more thing you have in your toolbox."

Most people who do RTK don't do it this way -- they do things like the OP, and try to "memorize X kanji in Y days". I think that's largely a waste of time.

Re: I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

#69

Post by rabboRubble »

dickjocke wrote: post #52
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.

Yes, but do you not have a whiteboard in your workplace? anything an actual chinese person writes on that will be in a personalized cursive. Normal cityscapes will be filled with italicized, cursive, traditional, simplified, archaic forms. Merely learning to read newspaper and computer fonts is great for reading a newspaper or computer screen. Not so great for a fully functional life.

I lived in Asia for 15 years, speak, read, and write JP/Ch-Trad/Ch-Simp and I still struggle with handwriting and cursive. At this point, I've resigned my self to a lifelong hobby to improve.

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