Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1 and Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1

[Hedge]

For characters that are mostly used in one specific word, I add a little hint in the question field. For example 应该 - should, 应 will have "1st char" in the question field and 该 will have "2nd char".

[imron]

Read more native language material and see how these words are used in actual context rather than trying to remember them by English terms which can seem similar.

[zedar]

I am having problems with some groups of very similar keywords. Take, for example, 喜 Joyful 1137 and 欢 Joyous 640. Or 揪 Hold tight 770, 把 Grasp 1329 and 握 Grip 887. Or 应 Ought to 1432, 须 Have to 1309 and 该 Should 1200.

Does anyone know how to keep these apart in your head?

Heres what i used, hope its of some help.

hold tight is holding onto something like a hat or scarf in strong autumn winds.

grasp, someone with fat fingers cant grasp the fine technique needed for mosaic making

grip, a hippy protesting with no grip on reality gripping a piece of human habitation (like a door) in front of demolishers

ought to, someone aught to clean up that owl crap all over the bottom of the cave

have to, you have to eat the stuffed lizard from tail to head for the cure to work.

should, someone should have had words with me telling me acorns were poisonous to eat when I was little.

[m.ellison]

hedge: I can try adding hints, maybe the pronunciation will do.

imron: this is specifically for my flashcard drill using anki, as I suppose I should have said. I'm working from the keyword to the character as per Heisig's advice [RSH1, p48], so the meaning of the character in context is not relevant to my problem.

zedar: you must have much more imagination than me. I shall try to work in your stories. Hopefully, the Reviewing the Kanji people will come up with a site for Hanzi stories. I suppose this means I should go back and come up with better stories.

[sunyata]

waiting for a freeware version of this

time to put those scanners to use!

[m.ellison]

sunyata: freeware is not making illegal copies of other people's copyright works. I suggest that you buy a copy of Heisig's book.

[roddy]

Good to see you back Sunyata, sure you haven't forgotten this in your absence . . .

[m.ellison]

Here are some more comments additional to those I made 1 May.

p204 (Lesson 21 introduction pt 3): uses the traditional character for book.

677 meeting: should be wall not rising cloud.

Minor points, but could someone please check (also the previous set), so I can send them to Heisig.

Edited May 26, 2009 at 09:13 AM by m.ellison
clarification

[sunyata]

Roddy: thanks and glad to be back! thanks for keeping this website alive and kicking.

I suppose you were referring to my other post, shamelessly promoting a website? Of course, I am not indulging in online piracy activities - I just expressed my opinion.

Being the cheapskate that I am, I will no less be proud to inform you that I own a legal copy of RTK, which I bought for the sole purpose of studying Chinese. I was about to embark on writing a Chinese version of it myself, but finally Mr. Heisig came to his senses (after 30+ years!) and noticed the large deficiency in the Hanzi-learning market.

Having said that, I believe it will be easy to understand why I see no need to spend another $40 on the new Chinese edition. Hell, I might even buy it if it were printed in China and more affordable (*hint hint* Mr. Heisig).

Anyway, don't get me wrong, but everything good gets pirated sooner or later - it's reality. While some people may take advantage of this fact, it certainly does not imply you can't support and endorse the original authors as much as your heart pleases.

peace

[fluxs]

Hi,

I just wanted to give my personal experience now that I am finished with the 1500 characters in Book 1 of Remembering Traditional Hanzi.

-Disclaimer:

I should add that I did ´not start from scratch. A large part of the characters (at least 800-1000) I had at least seen before or could even read, however I could not write at all anymore. Even simple stuff I would find myself looking up in the dictionary.

-Time:

In total it took me a little over two months with ca. 2-3 hours daily studying time where a majority was spent on new characters (30 new per day). Usually, I split my studying time so that I had 1 hour in the morning before work and then 1-2 hours at night after work.

This all worked fine until two weeks ago where I got a new project so I was stuck at ca.1460 characters - the remaining followed very slowly over the past two weeks.

-Retention rate:

I am using Anki as a tool to drill vocab. On average (from start to now) I have a rate of 88,5%. Could be better but for now I am quite happy with that.

-Conclusion

I think the method does work pretty well for me. I have tried many times to learn the let's say 1000 most common characters but so far I had always failed. I guess 30% of the success can be attributed to me finally consistently putting in 3 hours a day. Another 30% can be attributed to using Anki, which helped a great deal. And I guess the remaining 40 % go to using the Heisig book.

My plan is now to continue on my own but using the same technique for awhile, however not a rate of 30 characters per day. I feel that I am loosing the fun in learning if I force it too much.

[leosmith]

Does anyone know how to keep these apart in your head?

Two sugestions:

1) write the pinyin as a hint

2) write the name of one of the primitives as a hint

Read more native language material and see how these words are used in actual context rather than trying to remember them by English terms which can seem similar.

FYI, you are telling people in the Heisig thread not to use Heisig. Are you going to do this each time someone has a little problem? Just curious.

[imron]

I'm not telling them not to use Heisig (at least not in that post ) I'm suggesting they can use other methods too and that once you know a bunch of characters, the best way to make them sink in is to use them. Going by the numbers listed, m.ellison would appear to have studied at least 1432 characters with Heisig, which to me seems more than sufficient for allow for reading a whole range of native materials, and surely that's the whole point of Heisig anyway - you're not doing it just so that you'll feel good about being able to get 100% on all your flashcard repetitions, but rather to be able to read and write Chinese.

Often it can be tricky trying to differentiate two different Chinese words by their English meaning especially if the English is similar. In such cases, knowing how the words are used in Chinese can reduce much of the confusion.

[m.ellison]

m.ellison would appear to have studied at least 1432 characters with Heisig

I'm now through all 1500 in the Simplified group, though that is not to say I can remember them all (hence my earlier post). My problem is not distinguishing 喜 from 欢 (for which reading practice will help) but distinguishing joyous from joyful.

So now I am trying to read 喜羊羊 in the original.

Edited June 1, 2009 at 01:35 PM by m.ellison
more info

[Hedge]

A Remembering the Hanzi subforum has been set up at RevTK as a first step towards a fully fledged RevTH site.

[Magnus1977]

Since I work with books books and more books I came across a couple yesterday that I wanted to bring up to you all.

REMEMBERING SIMPLIFIED HANZI 1

How not to Forget the meaning and writing of Chinese Characters.

By James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson

University of Hawaii Press

ISBN: 978-0-8248-3323-7

Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1

How not to Forget the meaning and writing of Chinese Characters.

By James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson

University of Hawaii Press

ISBN: 978-0-8248-3324-4

They look fascinating but I've never heard of them before. Have you?

What do you think?

[tacoface]

This is my opinion on the RTH.

I am up to 1200 characters now and it has been hard. I work full time from 3am in the morning and do university, so time is a real pain. When I first got it I tried to ignore Heisig's advice about starting off slowly and building up, I started off at 80 a day but soon regretted it. You need to take it slowly to begin with to allow the primitives to be built solidly into your memory, as they're the basis of the whole concept. I recommed maximum 10-20 for the stories, 20-30 for the plots, and you can probably work the rest out yourself.

My advice is DO NOT RUSH. You will be setting yourself up for failure unless you have lots of time on your hands or you have godlike self discipline. if you take it easy (more haste, less speed) you will achieve it in reasonable time.

Now I do around 40 a day, which for me is good. I want to reach at least 2500 before I start my Mandarin immersion, AJATT style.

I find Heisig's imaginative memory concept to be a load of shite. I found it much, much, much (MUCH!) easier simply to create a sentence out of the primitives that related to the character's meaning. Example

散 - Scattered: A SALAD SCATTERED with MEAT you made for your TASKMASTER.

I recommend going at a steady pace, 40-50 a day is plenty and you will be done in 2-3 months.

Use it in conjunction with Anki and you have a foolproof system for Remembering Traditional Hanzi.

[m.ellison]

Magnus, that is what we are talking about here...

[m.ellison]

According to my calculations, Heisig's first book covers 70% of the words in the HSK lists. Sorry about the formatting but the forum appears not to allow tables.

Level In Out Not out %

A 1033 930 103 90%

B 2018 1595 423 79%

C 2202 1490 712 67%

D 3571 2169 1402 60%

Total 8824 6184 2640 70%

(level = HSK level, In = HSK words at that level; Out = words that can be written using Heisig's characters, Not out = In minus Out, % = Out/In).

Something like this excerpt...

Compare (456)... Relatively (1048) 比较 bǐjiào compare; contrast; relatively A

Compare (456)... Competition (1206) 比赛 bǐsài match; competition; game A

Pen (1423) 笔 bǐ pen; pencil A

Certainly (583)... Have to (1309) 必须 bìxū must; have to A

[leosmith]

Wow, what happened to everybody? Is there a new site/thread that Heisig learners migrated too?

[m.ellison]

This site does have other threads. And there's here.