So Heisig let me go...

[Andrew 45]

Hey! I just got to #500ish (actually 520, but this experience is still fresh in my mind: I do 10 new characters per day and so this happened two days ago) and Heisig has stopped spoon-feeding me the stories to remember the characters. I know I'm trying to be persistent, but to be honest, I am a little nervous about this new world where I am only taught the primatives and the meaning.

I use Anki, I really enjoy Anki.

I suppose my question is... when I make a new story for a character... should I write down the story? This makes sense as I may forget it and will have to relearn it all over again... but if I forgot, isn't that evidence that the story was not that memorable?

Also, now that I have to come up with my own stories (to be honest, I "adjusted" a few of Heisig's stories for earlier characters because they just were not memorable...) each session takes longer. I would say that when he gave me the stories, I got 10 new characters done in 20-30 minutes, but now I think it takes about an hour... is this normal?

Thanks for any advice!

[Lao Che]

You could use memrise. It's basically Heisig with a wiki. You can create your own story or use other people's stories for each character or word you come across.

[Andrew 45]

Very good idea. I think I will do that.

Thanks!

[Olle Linge]

I don't write down my mnemonics very often, but I do make sure that I record the parts I use for the mnemonics.

I suppose my question is... when I make a new story for a character... should I write down the story? This makes sense as I may forget it and will have to relearn it all over again... but if I forgot, isn't that evidence that the story was not that memorable?

I think this is spot on. If you have forgotten the mnemonic entirely, it wasn't all that good in the first place and creating a new one might be a good thing. If you have to learn a mnemonic through repetition, that sort of defies the whole purpose. Sure, reviewing is necessary, but re-learning bad mnemonics isn't a good idea.

[大肚男]

you can try rememberingthehanzi.com

it has a section with user generated stories. i am not the Creative type, so the website was really helpful

[Confused Laowai]

As awesome as mnemonics can be, I think it can become counter-productive as Snigel mentioned when you focus too much on the mnemonic itself through repetition rather than it aiding to learn the character.

If you do use mnemonics, I also think it's not necessary to write it down.

I quite like using primitives (radicals) myself, so maybe I'm biased. You can also find awesome stories by looking up the etymologies of the characters. No need to create mnemonic. Unfortunately, I haven't found a good English resource that provides it clearly.

[Lao Che]

@ Confused Laowai: did you ever check out this book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966075005/zipubooks? A lot of the etymologies used in this book are not accurate (they are based on a 2000 year old work which itself was based on an incomplete set of information), but they are memorable. Memrise has the potential to be an incredible resource, but it's a wiki so it's only as good as its contributors.

[lechuan]

I'm at about character 1100, and I found that my ability to throw together mnemonics got better as I progressed through Heisig's later chapters. Hang in there and the speed should come. I'm also doing 10 per day, and create mnemonics for the pronunciation, Matthews' style.

[realmayo]

When I learned how to write the characters, using mnemonics and Anki, I definitely wrote down the "stories" in Anki. Also, if there was anything else noteworthy about the character, that would help me remember it, or not confuse it with another character, I'd put that in Anki too. Not to test myself on that information -- but just to see it alongside the 'Answer' field: if I'd got the answer right I rarely looked at that extra info, but if I got it wrong it was helpful to pause and read the extra stuff (the mnemonic story, other info, perhaps a couple of common words that use this character) before moving on.

It can be time-consuming inventing the mnemonics, I remember finding it difficult to do lots in one go, but then I found from the learning point of view it was better to do a few new characters a day rather than hit 100 of those things and then no more new ones for a week or two.

Edit: just to be clear, I wasn't testing myself on my recall of the story, just of the character. Because over time I forgot the stories (don't think I remember a single one now!) but remembered how to write the character.

[Confused Laowai]

@Laoche: No, I haven't seen that book before. Going on to growing wish list of linguistics & Chinese-related textbooks.

I usually get my etymologies from ZDIC or Longwiki. Longwiki is basically ZDIC in wiki format which I prefer. It's all in Chinese though, so it's not accessible to beginner learners.

[Andrew 45]

Neat, thanks for the advice, friends!

I am at #690 now (yay! almost halfway to my goal!)... how should I go about learning the pinyin? Should I start over, but just learning the pinyin? Or take another approach?

Thanks!

[大肚男]

assuming that you have also been learning Chinese vocabulary, you will notice that you already know the reading for the great part of characters. for the rest, you could add pinyin to flashcards.

I think the lack of pinyin is the major shortcoming of heisigs book, which made sense in Japanese but not Chinese

[Andrew 45]

Well, he's actually got the pinyin in the back (simplified hanzi), that's how I'm typing them into a document to keep some track of what I ought to know. I also write them down five times when I learn them, but it's nice to know what it'd look like if someone who were... you know... good at writing them wrote them.

[lechuan]

If you like Mnemonics, check out the preface to Matthew's "Learning Chinese Characters" here: http://books.google.ca/books?id=YweFHwPd05EC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

I use that system to create mnemonics for pronunciation.

[zhuangzidisciple]

When I was learning, I never used mnemonics, as pointed out they can slow you down and confuse you, and I think basing your memory on radicals can be a mistake too because you are basically trying to recall two or more combinations of god-knows-how-many radicals and components, so it's easy to get messed up if you haven't learned the character in its entirety. Instead I based a lot of my memorization on muscle memory and visual memory, learn the entire word, write it down 20-30 times (i know it sounds time consuming but it really gets the job done well I find). When you have all your characters down in full, then you can start picking them apart by radical. A sort of learn and unlearn scheme. This is what I told some students of mine and they say it makes sense, not sure if it will be helpful here.