learning characters after the first 600

[leosmith]

I speak Mandarin fairly well, and have a background in Japanese Kanji, so I've dedicated myself to getting from 0 to reading at the 1000 character level in about 3 months.

I've been using this nice little character book published by TLI. Each lesson has 15 characters. There are 3 pages of charts showing the characters really big, how to draw them, pinyin and meaning. Then there are 30 sentences with no pinyin(except for the occasional character that's never been studied). Finally, there is a 2 page story, again no pinyin. There are 15 lessons, or 300 characters.

Book 2 of the series is essentially the same, except it has 280 characters.

Unfortunately, book 3 is quite different. It's very thin. Each lesson has a 2 or 3 page story, followed by a lists of 30 compounds. Each compound contains one new character. So they went from spending about 4 pages to drill 15 characters (books 1 &2) to spending 2 or 3 pages to drill 30 (book 3).

Does someone know of character work books similar to Book 1 & 2 above, that cover more than 600? I'd settle for 1000, but would like to do up to 3000 this way.

[chrix]

Moved.

If I may ask, how many kanji do you know?

[leosmith]

If I may ask, how many kanji do you know?

I finished book 1 in 3 weeks and can now read at the 300 character level. chrix, do you know of a character/reading workbook structured like book 1 & 2 that I mentioned?

[chrix]

The reason I asked is that I have a background in Japanese as well, and skipped all these character workbooks when studying Mandarin, concentrating on the characters that Japanese doesn't use and the differences in form between simplified and traditional hanzi and Japanese kanji. My personal opinion is that one should consider the hanzi/kanji script as one unified system with a lot of variants, instead of building up parallel structures in your brain for Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji.

[leosmith]

It's off topic, but interesting so I'll reply. In the long run, it seems like it would be impossible to avoid having a single source in my brain as you describe. This is something that I suspect will occur naturally, as it has already with quite a few characters, so I won't spend any time "concentrating on the characters that Japanese doesn't use and the differences in form between simplified and traditional hanzi and Japanese kanji" as you have. For me, it's much easier to study/learn "new" material than to edit old material.

Now, someone please answer my question, as I only have one more day in China.

[leosmith]

FYI - I found what appears to be a better alternative to the 3rd book in the TLI series. A Key to Chinese Speech and Writing II.

Comparison:

TLI books I and II: 4 pages of practice for 15 characters per lesson; characters 1-580

TLI book III: 2 or 3 pages of practice for 30 new characters per lesson; characters 581-1031

Key to Chinese: 4 or 5 pages for 20 new characters per lesson; characters 401-900

The more characters I know, the more difficult it gets to distinguish and remember them. So it makes no sense to me that TLI actually decreased the amount of practice for each characters when it put out book 3. They should have increased it, but I would have been happy if it had remained the same. I'm wondering if they use other readers to supplement this. I'll have to investigate when I go to Taipei.