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I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

78 points by _hao 6y ago

olivernyc 6y ago
Shameless self promotion: I made an app for learning Chinese characters, Noodle Chinese [0]. It uses handwriting recognition and spaced repetition to focus on the words you need most help with. If anyone has feedback please feel free to reach out! hello@noodlechinese.com [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-chinese/id1375293467 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-chinese/id1375293467
- godelski 6y ago
  What I really like about RTH over these types of apps that focus on HSK is the groupings/ordering it is presenting characters and the focus on mnemonics. I'd love an app like this that presented characters in a similar fashion.
- wegs 6y ago
  Aside from Android support, my key suggestion would be to clearly think through on-boarding. Visiting the page, I see a $13 monthly plan, in an era of free and $5 iPhone apps. I don't know if it's any better or worse than free, so I'll pass. On the app's page, I'd suggest clearly describing what one gets for free (before paying for a plan), so people can try it. For an app like this, I'd want to know what I'm getting before I install. Many apps just install and ask you for a credit card before anything happens. From there, I'd like to know what I'm paying for before I swipe my credit card. Clearly describing free versus paid version is key. But my last iOS device is an iPad 2, so I don't think I can even do the free version.
  - peterburkimsher 6y ago
    I wrote another web app, https://pingtype.github.io 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.
    - geza 6y ago
      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_Smart%20subtitles.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/90411/Miller_... and a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-eXUB3eaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-eXUB3eaA
      - peterburkimsher 6y ago
        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=PLhIooD7mFhphhT5nDdhK00wZuobGbMtO0 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhIooD7mFhphhT5nDdhK0...
    - wegs 6y ago
      On-boarding mostly happens before users even install it: 1) Run the page by users unfamiliar with it, and see if they'd install it, why, or why not. Especially language learners (e.g. go into a Chinese classroom). DON'T tell them what it is -- users don't have you to walk you through it ("I wrote this app. I'll buy you a coffee if you tell me what you think of it....") 2) Explain what the app is on the app's page. I can't tell. 3) Definitely show a clear feature table comparing free / paid. Is it usable if I don't pay you? 4) Shoot a video showing the app in use. That's super-concrete. 4.7 stars suggests it's good. 73 ratings suggests no one is using it. Your landing page is horrible. That connects the two. I'm also not sure about the pricing model. $80/year suggests a pretty complete course. Is that what it is?
dak1 6y ago
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 sentence structure, to name a couple more examples.
- _hao 6y ago
  This is entirely correct and I don't disagree with it. I already have some basic HSK1-3 level readers bought as well as some grammars (AllLearning + some others) that I intend to use when I finish my character learning.
- hangonhn 6y ago
  The bit that helps me a lot with Chinese is that once you known the characters, you can deduce the possible meaning of the words, especially in the context of the sentence. For example, 手機 is "hand", "machine", 飛機 is "fly", "machine" which you can guess means airplane. 鐵路 is "iron/metal", "road" which you can guess could mean railroad. 火車 is "fire", "chariot" which I guess can be a little confusing but it narrows it down to either a car or a train (it's train).
- dang 6y ago
  That somehow reminds me of how APL languages work. Operators with low-level meanings compose into phrases that act like higher-level operators. Eventually you read the language in phrases.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I'm guessing the last one is not an Orwellian reference?
  - yorwba 6y ago
    According to Chinese Wiktionary, it originated in the period when mobile phones where large, expensive bricks and were carried as an accessory by triad bosses ("big brothers") in Hong Kong movies. https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E5%93%A5%E5%A4%A7 https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E5%93%A5%E5%A4%A7
drivers99 6y ago
I figured this was Heisig method before clicking on it. Very good. It took me 9 months to learn how to write ~2000 Japanese Kanji (3 months is doable though) on kanji.koohii.com (plus buying the book). 1 month for 1500 is fast, although it looks like it didn't take too long each day.
- _hao 6y ago
  Thank you! The method really clicked in my head and the way I approach learning in general is close, so maybe that's why it's working so well for me.
godelski 6y ago
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 character and immediately know the meaning because I created a good mnemonic. But getting the pinyin right is harder (shuffling matters here too!). Lastly, as dak pointed out, this book doesn't teach you how to read -- or speak -- but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. It is helping me to read, but that's because this isn't the only tool I use. 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. 果汁 is juice, but 汁 is juice. The three ticks on the left are the symbol for water but 十 means 10. The book focuses on the latter cases but you'd be very confused if you read about the bear cats of China. And these are just the simple examples. I'm sure others will write some more fun ones below (I'm a real novice at Chinese).
- _hao 6y ago
  I've explained in the article that I didn't concern myself with pronunciation at all which is the book authors advice. I have pronunciation on my answer side of the Pleco flash cards (they are shuffled and the algorithm decides which card to show me based on the ones I've marked as learned and their score) but I didn't make any effort to memorize it. I focused entirely on how to memorize the characters and how to remember to write them based on the keyword + primitive.
- zebrafish 6y ago
  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?
  - godelski 6y ago
    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.
jmchuster 6y ago
I've always enjoyed this forum post from YesJapan (japanese learning site), not exactly Chinese but maybe directionally applicable. http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-one-have-to-know http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-on... Highlights: > 100 kanji - basic signs > 500 kanji - 50% of printed material > 1000 kanji - 85% of printed material > 1945 kanji - 97% of printed material > 8000 kanji - 100% of anything japanese kanji in electronic form (still only about 99.99% in printed material as a lot of ancient texts have some pretty obscure one time only kanji). > Learning kanji is uber important in increasing your ability to communicate effictively in Japanese. What [YesJapan] does, and does well, is give users an excellent base of Japanese from which to work from. With a base of about 2000 vocabulary words and enough grammar to get by in most situations, the kanji comes secondary as they will then help to start bridge the gaps between the beginner/intermediate level and the advanced/fluent level. > As far as learning speed goes, there is a fast assimilation of the first 100 kanji. After that, the learning pace levels off to a slow progression until around the 800-1000 kanji point when the pattern recognition starts to kick in, then past 1200 the pace picks back up again until around 2400-3000 where the pace levels off again because at this point the literacy level is of that of a graduate student, and only obscure or rarely used kanji are available for further study. You can judge your kanji learning speed through the first 100 kanji benchmark. It takes one unit of time to learn the first 100 kanji, then about 14-30 units of time to learn the 800-1000, and then another 7-15 units of time to finish off the joyou list (and name kanji). So if it took you 1 month to learn your first 100 kanji it should take you another year to 3 years to learn your next 1000, and then another half a year to a year and a half to finish the list. Again, faster learners will find themselves closer to the earlier stages of the spectrum, while casual learners and slower learners towards the further end of the spectrum. > Another nice benchmark to keep in mind when studying Japanese is that going from a western to asian language (meaning no prior fluency in an asian language) takes 88 weeks (5 hours a day study) or 2200 hours of study to go from 0 to complete fluency. 44 weeks, or about a year of intensive study should put you at around the JLPT 3-2 level, and another 44 weeks to put you at the JLPT 1 level. Again this is assuming 5 hour a day of dedicated language study, so if your study time is less then that, you can plan your progression accordingly. One of the benefits of living in country is that the 5 hours comes a lot easier and quicker then living outside the target country where the material has to be self or externally generated. > In case you were wondering - western languages to other western languages take about 22 weeks (550 hours of intensive study), non-western/non-asian languages 44 weeks (1100 hours of intensive study) and asian languages [88 weeks] (2200 hours of intensive study). The other benefit of learning a language in one of the other two language families is that if you decide to learn another language in the same language family (region 1 2 or 3 as described above) it takes only 22 weeks of study. > Which brings about another intersting topic. Korean takes about 52 weeks of intensive study to master from a western language (because their writing is mainly hangul, the necessity to learn a complicated script is lessened, thus easier to learn then chinese or Japanese). Thus learning Korean first, followed by Japanes will only take 74 weeks of study, vs 110 weeks of study going to Japanese first then Korean.
Hamuko 6y ago
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.
- _hao 6y ago
  I can see that being an issue, but then again why would you trust in SRS completely and their algorithm? Why not create a measured review plan where each month you gradually pass everything (in my case Chinese characters) you've studied until that point?
- imtringued 6y ago
  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.
nicolas_t 6y ago
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)
- wibr 6y ago
  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 https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/collections/chinese
  - nicolas_t 6y ago
    Great, Thanks! I guess I can use hesig and at the same time refer to that as a complement :)
nneonneo 6y ago
Learning Chinese characters by trying to break them down and understand the parts is pretty much the same idea as trying to learn English by learning the etymologies of words. Linguistically, it can be useful and help you draw unexpected connections, but it can also lead you into bad traps that hinder future learning. To some extent, the same applies to trying to learn individual characters as opposed to the words they are a part of. I am ethnically Chinese and grew up listening to the language. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up learning the written language that well, so these days I’m working to catch up by learning more advanced vocabulary. The thing that I needed to realize at the outset is that Chinese is actually not much different from English, if you view it at the word level and not the character level. If you stop thinking of words as being a sequence of characters which each have their own meanings, and more as a single unit, the language is a lot easier to learn IMHO. This lesson came a bit late for me. I still have trouble sometimes with words that are similar and share characters in common. I sometimes incorrectly substitute characters within words with synonyms when I can’t come up with the correct one, which renders the whole word meaningless. Don’t get too hung up on characters when learning Chinese. Learn words. Some words are one character long - but the majority are two characters. Some characters have no meaning by themselves; others have so many meanings that it’s pointless to learn them in isolation. Many characters change their pronunciations depending on what words they’re contained in.
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  Yes, learn words not characters! The hardest barrier to that is the lack of spaces. I wrote https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io to add spaces, pinyin, literal and parallel translation so I can read interesting text (song lyrics, Bible) instead of just textbooks. It also has a keyboard which uses radical decomposition, but usually it's easier to copy paste the input.
wibr 6y ago
I've also learned the first 1500 characters using this book, not in one month though. The method works but has some problems. Maybe the biggest problem is that it completely ignores pronunciation. It does not help you remember the pronunciation and it does not make use of the sound components of the characters. Most characters are composed of one component which hints at the meaning and another which hints at the sound, e.g. 青 is the sound component in 情清輕請, all of those are pronounced qing (with different tones). Usually it's not that obvious, this is just a good example. The left component in those characters would hint at the meaning. The Heisig method instead creates a mapping between a keyword, which is derived from a single meaning of the character or invented for components which don't have a meaning, to the written form of the character using mnemonics. This works well in the beginning but once you reach a more advanced stage where you know how to say something in Chinese but maybe forgot how to write the characters this doesn't help you much since the pronunciation is not incorporated into the mnemonics. When you are just starting out and learning all those characters seems like an unmanagable task, the Heisig method can provide a good structure to quickly "learn" many characters (keyword<>writing). It's also fun to come up with stories and images. But in the end it can only provide a basic scaffold for learning more meanings, pronunciation, words etc. I even made a small game once using those character decompositions: http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/ http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/
- prewett 6y ago
  Heisig's method is for kanji, which have different pronunciation depending on which word they are in, since Japan imported the meaning but not always the pronunciation. Note that the book is called "A Complete Course in How Not to Forget the Kanji", not "How to Read". All he's doing is endowing the character with an image that conveys a commonly used meaning and how it is written, so that you can remember it. Actually reading or pronouncing a text is out of scope. If you're learning hanzi you can take advantage of the pronunciation hints. Plus the fact that modern hanzi generally have only one pronunciation per [traditional] character, and only one syllable per, too. The characters made so much more sense learning Chinese.
yorwba 6y ago
> Let's do some simple math of how long it's going to take you conservatively to learn the 8105 characters given in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters if you follow my velocity of 50 characters a day. And I'm going to add another 30 minutes, so we have 2 whole hours a day. ... > 324.2 hours for all characters in the course of ~6 months. This seems very possible to me and a very good investment of time at that. After these 6 months you'll be free to pursue gaining vocabulary in the form of combining the characters you know into words, pronunciation and listening/speaking. That's treating language learning as batch job, even though pipelining it would probably make more sense. You don't have to first learn all the characters and then all the words and then how to pronounce all the words and then finally you can dare to utter your first sentence. I think it's better to do it the other way around: find a sentence you want to say or understand. Look up all the words in that single sentence, their characters and pronunciations, then memorize only those. Then learn another sentence. That way you always have some context for the new knowledge, instead of just treating it as a random collection of facts. If you frontload on characters, it's easy to overlearn things you don't actually need. I have an Anki deck with 9385 Chinese words and 4174 distinct characters, so I know only slightly more than half of the 8105 characters the author intends to learn. But I'm functionally fluent, since the other characters basically don't appear in modern texts, except for very specific contexts. I picked a random character I didn't recognize from the list: 笸. According to Wiktionary, it's only used in the words 笸箩 and 笸篮, each of which refers to a specific kind of basket. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8
- _hao 6y ago
  Actually I don't really intend to go for that list like that. I just wanted to illustrate that time wise it's possible. What I do intend to do is to follow the same approach for the second book and learn the other 1500 characters. I've written in another comment that I've already bought some HSK1-3 graded readers and grammars that I intend to use. Maybe after that I can use the "batch" approach once more for new characters that I encounter. But the initial 3000 I think are really good base for me and my desire to start some simple reading relatively fast. For what is worth I've tried the approach you listed and it didn't really work for me.
vkaku 6y ago
Good for you, Author. It is not about speed, but usability. Learning random characters that are seldom used does not feel like a great way to learn a language.
- james_s_tayler 6y ago
  I did similar thing to the author about 10 years ago. What I found after completing that portion of study was that I could recognize any character I saw. This gave me the ability to quickly perform dictionary lookups on any text. This gave me incredible access to reading. Through reading I was able to acquire vocab 5 times faster than just through listening. It really gave me a significant boost. I got to usable language pretty fast as a result.
  - _hao 6y ago
    That is my goal as well! Good that I have confirmation from someone else already done something similar!
pixelperfect 6y ago
I learned Chinese characters using this method and found it very helpful. It's not very popular among Chinese learners or teachers because it's unintuitive. In many cases the keywords of the characters you are learning are imprecise or goofy. But the point of the method is to rapidly form mental chunks at the character level so that later you can focus on a higher level of abstraction.
rabboRubble 6y ago
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.
- dickjocke 6y ago
  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.
  - rabboRubble 6y ago
    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.
morninglight 6y ago
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.
- jack1243star 6y ago
  They are sometimes called 鳳爪 or phoenix's claws :)
houshuang 6y ago
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 https://notes.reganmian.net/a--chinese
du_bing 6y ago
We teach Chinese with the best teacher, if you want to learn Chinese, contact us: tarvos21@gmail.com

78 points by _hao 6y ago

Shameless self promotion: I made an app for learning Chinese characters, Noodle Chinese [0]. It uses handwriting recognition and spaced repetition to focus on the words you need most help with. If anyone has feedback please feel free to reach out! hello@noodlechinese.com [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-chinese/id1375293467 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-chinese/id1375293467

godelski 6y ago
What I really like about RTH over these types of apps that focus on HSK is the groupings/ordering it is presenting characters and the focus on mnemonics. I'd love an app like this that presented characters in a similar fashion.
wegs 6y ago
Aside from Android support, my key suggestion would be to clearly think through on-boarding. Visiting the page, I see a $13 monthly plan, in an era of free and $5 iPhone apps. I don't know if it's any better or worse than free, so I'll pass. On the app's page, I'd suggest clearly describing what one gets for free (before paying for a plan), so people can try it. For an app like this, I'd want to know what I'm getting before I install. Many apps just install and ask you for a credit card before anything happens. From there, I'd like to know what I'm paying for before I swipe my credit card. Clearly describing free versus paid version is key. But my last iOS device is an iPad 2, so I don't think I can even do the free version.
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  I wrote another web app, https://pingtype.github.io 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.
  - geza 6y ago
    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_Smart%20subtitles.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/90411/Miller_... and a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-eXUB3eaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-eXUB3eaA
    - peterburkimsher 6y ago
      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=PLhIooD7mFhphhT5nDdhK00wZuobGbMtO0 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhIooD7mFhphhT5nDdhK0...
  - wegs 6y ago
    On-boarding mostly happens before users even install it: 1) Run the page by users unfamiliar with it, and see if they'd install it, why, or why not. Especially language learners (e.g. go into a Chinese classroom). DON'T tell them what it is -- users don't have you to walk you through it ("I wrote this app. I'll buy you a coffee if you tell me what you think of it....") 2) Explain what the app is on the app's page. I can't tell. 3) Definitely show a clear feature table comparing free / paid. Is it usable if I don't pay you? 4) Shoot a video showing the app in use. That's super-concrete. 4.7 stars suggests it's good. 73 ratings suggests no one is using it. Your landing page is horrible. That connects the two. I'm also not sure about the pricing model. $80/year suggests a pretty complete course. Is that what it is?

dak1 6y ago

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 sentence structure, to name a couple more examples.

_hao 6y ago
This is entirely correct and I don't disagree with it. I already have some basic HSK1-3 level readers bought as well as some grammars (AllLearning + some others) that I intend to use when I finish my character learning.
hangonhn 6y ago
The bit that helps me a lot with Chinese is that once you known the characters, you can deduce the possible meaning of the words, especially in the context of the sentence. For example, 手機 is "hand", "machine", 飛機 is "fly", "machine" which you can guess means airplane. 鐵路 is "iron/metal", "road" which you can guess could mean railroad. 火車 is "fire", "chariot" which I guess can be a little confusing but it narrows it down to either a car or a train (it's train).
dang 6y ago
That somehow reminds me of how APL languages work. Operators with low-level meanings compose into phrases that act like higher-level operators. Eventually you read the language in phrases.
saagarjha 6y ago
I'm guessing the last one is not an Orwellian reference?
- yorwba 6y ago
  According to Chinese Wiktionary, it originated in the period when mobile phones where large, expensive bricks and were carried as an accessory by triad bosses ("big brothers") in Hong Kong movies. https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E5%93%A5%E5%A4%A7 https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E5%93%A5%E5%A4%A7

drivers99 6y ago

I figured this was Heisig method before clicking on it. Very good. It took me 9 months to learn how to write ~2000 Japanese Kanji (3 months is doable though) on kanji.koohii.com (plus buying the book). 1 month for 1500 is fast, although it looks like it didn't take too long each day.

_hao 6y ago
Thank you! The method really clicked in my head and the way I approach learning in general is close, so maybe that's why it's working so well for me.

godelski 6y ago

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 character and immediately know the meaning because I created a good mnemonic. But getting the pinyin right is harder (shuffling matters here too!). Lastly, as dak pointed out, this book doesn't teach you how to read -- or speak -- but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. It is helping me to read, but that's because this isn't the only tool I use. 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. 果汁 is juice, but 汁 is juice. The three ticks on the left are the symbol for water but 十 means 10. The book focuses on the latter cases but you'd be very confused if you read about the bear cats of China. And these are just the simple examples. I'm sure others will write some more fun ones below (I'm a real novice at Chinese).

_hao 6y ago
I've explained in the article that I didn't concern myself with pronunciation at all which is the book authors advice. I have pronunciation on my answer side of the Pleco flash cards (they are shuffled and the algorithm decides which card to show me based on the ones I've marked as learned and their score) but I didn't make any effort to memorize it. I focused entirely on how to memorize the characters and how to remember to write them based on the keyword + primitive.
zebrafish 6y ago
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?
- godelski 6y ago
  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.

jmchuster 6y ago

I've always enjoyed this forum post from YesJapan (japanese learning site), not exactly Chinese but maybe directionally applicable. http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-one-have-to-know http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-on... Highlights: > 100 kanji - basic signs > 500 kanji - 50% of printed material > 1000 kanji - 85% of printed material > 1945 kanji - 97% of printed material > 8000 kanji - 100% of anything japanese kanji in electronic form (still only about 99.99% in printed material as a lot of ancient texts have some pretty obscure one time only kanji). > Learning kanji is uber important in increasing your ability to communicate effictively in Japanese. What [YesJapan] does, and does well, is give users an excellent base of Japanese from which to work from. With a base of about 2000 vocabulary words and enough grammar to get by in most situations, the kanji comes secondary as they will then help to start bridge the gaps between the beginner/intermediate level and the advanced/fluent level. > As far as learning speed goes, there is a fast assimilation of the first 100 kanji. After that, the learning pace levels off to a slow progression until around the 800-1000 kanji point when the pattern recognition starts to kick in, then past 1200 the pace picks back up again until around 2400-3000 where the pace levels off again because at this point the literacy level is of that of a graduate student, and only obscure or rarely used kanji are available for further study. You can judge your kanji learning speed through the first 100 kanji benchmark. It takes one unit of time to learn the first 100 kanji, then about 14-30 units of time to learn the 800-1000, and then another 7-15 units of time to finish off the joyou list (and name kanji). So if it took you 1 month to learn your first 100 kanji it should take you another year to 3 years to learn your next 1000, and then another half a year to a year and a half to finish the list. Again, faster learners will find themselves closer to the earlier stages of the spectrum, while casual learners and slower learners towards the further end of the spectrum. > Another nice benchmark to keep in mind when studying Japanese is that going from a western to asian language (meaning no prior fluency in an asian language) takes 88 weeks (5 hours a day study) or 2200 hours of study to go from 0 to complete fluency. 44 weeks, or about a year of intensive study should put you at around the JLPT 3-2 level, and another 44 weeks to put you at the JLPT 1 level. Again this is assuming 5 hour a day of dedicated language study, so if your study time is less then that, you can plan your progression accordingly. One of the benefits of living in country is that the 5 hours comes a lot easier and quicker then living outside the target country where the material has to be self or externally generated. > In case you were wondering - western languages to other western languages take about 22 weeks (550 hours of intensive study), non-western/non-asian languages 44 weeks (1100 hours of intensive study) and asian languages [88 weeks] (2200 hours of intensive study). The other benefit of learning a language in one of the other two language families is that if you decide to learn another language in the same language family (region 1 2 or 3 as described above) it takes only 22 weeks of study. > Which brings about another intersting topic. Korean takes about 52 weeks of intensive study to master from a western language (because their writing is mainly hangul, the necessity to learn a complicated script is lessened, thus easier to learn then chinese or Japanese). Thus learning Korean first, followed by Japanes will only take 74 weeks of study, vs 110 weeks of study going to Japanese first then Korean.

Hamuko 6y ago

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.

_hao 6y ago
I can see that being an issue, but then again why would you trust in SRS completely and their algorithm? Why not create a measured review plan where each month you gradually pass everything (in my case Chinese characters) you've studied until that point?
imtringued 6y ago
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.

nicolas_t 6y ago

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)

wibr 6y ago
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 https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/collections/chinese
- nicolas_t 6y ago
  Great, Thanks! I guess I can use hesig and at the same time refer to that as a complement :)

nneonneo 6y ago

Learning Chinese characters by trying to break them down and understand the parts is pretty much the same idea as trying to learn English by learning the etymologies of words. Linguistically, it can be useful and help you draw unexpected connections, but it can also lead you into bad traps that hinder future learning. To some extent, the same applies to trying to learn individual characters as opposed to the words they are a part of. I am ethnically Chinese and grew up listening to the language. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up learning the written language that well, so these days I’m working to catch up by learning more advanced vocabulary. The thing that I needed to realize at the outset is that Chinese is actually not much different from English, if you view it at the word level and not the character level. If you stop thinking of words as being a sequence of characters which each have their own meanings, and more as a single unit, the language is a lot easier to learn IMHO. This lesson came a bit late for me. I still have trouble sometimes with words that are similar and share characters in common. I sometimes incorrectly substitute characters within words with synonyms when I can’t come up with the correct one, which renders the whole word meaningless. Don’t get too hung up on characters when learning Chinese. Learn words. Some words are one character long - but the majority are two characters. Some characters have no meaning by themselves; others have so many meanings that it’s pointless to learn them in isolation. Many characters change their pronunciations depending on what words they’re contained in.

peterburkimsher 6y ago
Yes, learn words not characters! The hardest barrier to that is the lack of spaces. I wrote https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io to add spaces, pinyin, literal and parallel translation so I can read interesting text (song lyrics, Bible) instead of just textbooks. It also has a keyboard which uses radical decomposition, but usually it's easier to copy paste the input.

wibr 6y ago

I've also learned the first 1500 characters using this book, not in one month though. The method works but has some problems. Maybe the biggest problem is that it completely ignores pronunciation. It does not help you remember the pronunciation and it does not make use of the sound components of the characters. Most characters are composed of one component which hints at the meaning and another which hints at the sound, e.g. 青 is the sound component in 情清輕請, all of those are pronounced qing (with different tones). Usually it's not that obvious, this is just a good example. The left component in those characters would hint at the meaning. The Heisig method instead creates a mapping between a keyword, which is derived from a single meaning of the character or invented for components which don't have a meaning, to the written form of the character using mnemonics. This works well in the beginning but once you reach a more advanced stage where you know how to say something in Chinese but maybe forgot how to write the characters this doesn't help you much since the pronunciation is not incorporated into the mnemonics. When you are just starting out and learning all those characters seems like an unmanagable task, the Heisig method can provide a good structure to quickly "learn" many characters (keyword<>writing). It's also fun to come up with stories and images. But in the end it can only provide a basic scaffold for learning more meanings, pronunciation, words etc. I even made a small game once using those character decompositions: http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/ http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/

prewett 6y ago
Heisig's method is for kanji, which have different pronunciation depending on which word they are in, since Japan imported the meaning but not always the pronunciation. Note that the book is called "A Complete Course in How Not to Forget the Kanji", not "How to Read". All he's doing is endowing the character with an image that conveys a commonly used meaning and how it is written, so that you can remember it. Actually reading or pronouncing a text is out of scope. If you're learning hanzi you can take advantage of the pronunciation hints. Plus the fact that modern hanzi generally have only one pronunciation per [traditional] character, and only one syllable per, too. The characters made so much more sense learning Chinese.

yorwba 6y ago

> Let's do some simple math of how long it's going to take you conservatively to learn the 8105 characters given in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters if you follow my velocity of 50 characters a day. And I'm going to add another 30 minutes, so we have 2 whole hours a day. ... > 324.2 hours for all characters in the course of ~6 months. This seems very possible to me and a very good investment of time at that. After these 6 months you'll be free to pursue gaining vocabulary in the form of combining the characters you know into words, pronunciation and listening/speaking. That's treating language learning as batch job, even though pipelining it would probably make more sense. You don't have to first learn all the characters and then all the words and then how to pronounce all the words and then finally you can dare to utter your first sentence. I think it's better to do it the other way around: find a sentence you want to say or understand. Look up all the words in that single sentence, their characters and pronunciations, then memorize only those. Then learn another sentence. That way you always have some context for the new knowledge, instead of just treating it as a random collection of facts. If you frontload on characters, it's easy to overlearn things you don't actually need. I have an Anki deck with 9385 Chinese words and 4174 distinct characters, so I know only slightly more than half of the 8105 characters the author intends to learn. But I'm functionally fluent, since the other characters basically don't appear in modern texts, except for very specific contexts. I picked a random character I didn't recognize from the list: 笸. According to Wiktionary, it's only used in the words 笸箩 and 笸篮, each of which refers to a specific kind of basket. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8

_hao 6y ago
Actually I don't really intend to go for that list like that. I just wanted to illustrate that time wise it's possible. What I do intend to do is to follow the same approach for the second book and learn the other 1500 characters. I've written in another comment that I've already bought some HSK1-3 graded readers and grammars that I intend to use. Maybe after that I can use the "batch" approach once more for new characters that I encounter. But the initial 3000 I think are really good base for me and my desire to start some simple reading relatively fast. For what is worth I've tried the approach you listed and it didn't really work for me.

vkaku 6y ago

Good for you, Author. It is not about speed, but usability. Learning random characters that are seldom used does not feel like a great way to learn a language.

james_s_tayler 6y ago
I did similar thing to the author about 10 years ago. What I found after completing that portion of study was that I could recognize any character I saw. This gave me the ability to quickly perform dictionary lookups on any text. This gave me incredible access to reading. Through reading I was able to acquire vocab 5 times faster than just through listening. It really gave me a significant boost. I got to usable language pretty fast as a result.
- _hao 6y ago
  That is my goal as well! Good that I have confirmation from someone else already done something similar!

pixelperfect 6y ago

I learned Chinese characters using this method and found it very helpful. It's not very popular among Chinese learners or teachers because it's unintuitive. In many cases the keywords of the characters you are learning are imprecise or goofy. But the point of the method is to rapidly form mental chunks at the character level so that later you can focus on a higher level of abstraction.

rabboRubble 6y ago

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.

dickjocke 6y ago
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.
- rabboRubble 6y ago
  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.

morninglight 6y ago

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.

jack1243star 6y ago
They are sometimes called 鳳爪 or phoenix's claws :)

houshuang 6y ago

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 https://notes.reganmian.net/a--chinese

du_bing 6y ago

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