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
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.
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.
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.
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_... and a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-eXUB3eaA
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
The radical (which is usually on the left, or bottom) is sometimes semantically meaningful. In your example, 汁 has the water radical, and it is indeed a liquid. The rest of the character aside from the radical is usually entirely meaningless, aside from possibly providing the pronunciation.
As an example: 果裹猓粿蜾 are all pronounced identically - guǒ - but mean “fruit, package, monkey, rice cake, wasp” respectively. The radicals are more useful: in the last three, you have the “animal” radical (monkey), one of the “food” radicals (rice cake), and the “bug” radical (wasp).
Usually they will form compounds with other characters, and the compounds will be unambiguous. For the first two characters, you have stuff like 水果、苹果 （"fruit", "apple" respectively); 包裹 for "package". 裹 is also a verb by itself meaning "wrap":
> 我把身子用毯子裹上。
> Wǒ bǎ shēnzi yòng tǎnzi guǒshàng.
> I wrapped myself up in a blanket.
This last example shows that just like in English, words that are pronounced the same in Chinese can be distinguished by part-of-speech. You'd rarely confuse "red" the color and "read" (past tense), even though they're pronounced the same, because the first is an adjective and the second a verb (except in the old pun "What's black and white and read all over?", where you think "read" is actually "red" due to the grammatical structure of the sentence).
> this book doesn't teach you how to read -- or speak -- but that doesn't mean it isn't useful
That's how chinese characters became a lingua franca between diplomats in ancient East Asia. They didn't have to speak each others languages, they just had to know the same character and communicate their ideas effectively enough on paper.
"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 "learned X kanji" is "how many words do you know?"
There's probably some value to learning the meaning of individual kanji in isolation, but it's very limited (especially in Japanese). Most words have only tenuous relation to the meanings of their individual kanji, and "learning kanji" is kind of a crutch for beginners to pretend that they're making rapid progress.
I suppose from that perspective, "learning X kanji in Y days" is a useful meme, because it pushes people to quickly move on from the approach. But that said, for most learners, it's much better to simply start learning words.
I disagree. It was impossible for me to just learn words, because kanji made no sense to me.
After RTK, I created ways to mentally breakdown and identify the characters. Then, suddenly, I was able to learn words much faster too - instead of struggling with “well this one has this curve here and then it points there and it means that”, reading became automatic, and I could focus on the word itself.
This has been my experience too. Like I said before, just learning characters doesn't let you read in of itself because there are compound words. But you have to think of characters as building blocks. Then you repeat the process with words and it is easier to form mnemonics because you already have the base structure. The idea is to start from the ground up and build a strong base before you move to building the house. This is opposed to the classical Western style that is building random walls first. The thing is that the latter will get you conversational faster, but the former leads to a better understanding but takes more time.
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.
"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.
> 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.
It's entirely applicable! Actually Heisig and Richardson make the observation that after you finish both books (3000 characters) you'll be able to approach Chinese like a Japanese person would. Meaning that you'll have the knowledge of the characters, but still no knowledge on their pronunciation. Here's the section from the introduction of the book - https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2013/11/RH-S1-sample.pd...
> Those of us who come to the language as adults can gain a similar advantage by tying each of the character forms to a particular unit of pronunciation and meaning, a “key word” in English, that we already know. Before you dismiss the idea of affixing English words to Chinese characters out of hand, consider this: all the Chinese dialects, no matter how mutually unintelligible they are when spoken, use the same characters for writing. These characters convey the same meaning, no matter how they are pronounced. What is more, when the Japanese use Chinese characters, they assign them still other pronunciations. In other words, there is nothing in the nature of a character dictating that it must be verbalized one way or another. Unlike students coming to Chinese from an alphabetically written language, the Japanese already know the meaning and writing of a great many of the characters. By the time you finish this course, you will be in a position similar to theirs. Of course, you will eventually need to learn Chinese pronunciations, just as Japanese students do. But adding difficult and unfamiliar sounds to a solid knowledge of character forms is a much more manageable task than trying to memorize meaning, pronunciation, and writing all at the same time.
We have the exact same situation in Europe: if you some of the many words English inherited from French, they are written exactly the same, have exactly the same meaning, but are pronounced in a very different way.
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.
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)
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.
Yes, learn words not characters! The hardest barrier to that is the lack of spaces.
I wrote 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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
1500 characters should be more than enough for HSK-3 level reading. I just checked the vocabulary list for HSK-4 I downloaded in 2017 (but I guess it didn't change much in the meantime) and it contains only 1200 words. So my recommendation for you is to start reading now rather than learning another 1500 characters you won't have much use for until your vocabulary is much more advanced.
Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I've taken a small break from studying (just reviews since I finished this experiment). I might follow your advice while still going forward with the second book, but not with the 50 chars/day pace, I'll perhaps tone it down. You're right that HSK1-3 (or even 4 as you suggest) are very trivial in terms of vocabulary.
I treat language learning as a batch job at the beginning. Works pretty superbly for me. I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab.
All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can.
There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you.
> All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can.
Then you have already parallelized the process, have you not?
> I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab.
How does that ordering work in practice? I can imagine learning to pronounce each individual sound in isolation, and learning to write and pronounce each letter in the writing system before you know any words, but how do you learn about grammar without vocabulary to apply the grammar to?
> There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you.
Mostly works out fine. There isn't a perfectly strict separation between grammar ant vocab like you imagine. I do it through sentences, so naturally a little vocab is required for that, and that's ok. The goal in the grammar phase is to collect and Anki enough sentences to be able to parse sentences grammatically. I usually need about 3 to 5 sentences for each grammar point.
The vocab phase is purely about vocab. Grammar is done at this point.
I remember first year of Japanese study was Kanji then grammar. At the end of that first year I knew about 2000 words. The second year was purely vocab. I managed to acquire 10,000 new vocab by the end of the second year.
After that point I could understand most spoken and written things with patches here and there. I could hold conversations for hours with a single person.
In the 3rd year of study I did much the same. I remember my Anki vocab deck getting up to about 17k words before reviews were at about 300 to 400 a day and the returns were diminishing, so I just deleted the deck. Stopped cold.
End of that 3rd year I could read novels pretty well. Hold conversations on any topic for any length of time in group settings.
It worked remarkably well. It was damn hard work though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
68 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] thread[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-chinese/id1375293467
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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).
I focused entirely on how to memorize the characters and how to remember to write them based on the keyword + primitive.
As an example: 果裹猓粿蜾 are all pronounced identically - guǒ - but mean “fruit, package, monkey, rice cake, wasp” respectively. The radicals are more useful: in the last three, you have the “animal” radical (monkey), one of the “food” radicals (rice cake), and the “bug” radical (wasp).
> 我把身子用毯子裹上。
> Wǒ bǎ shēnzi yòng tǎnzi guǒshàng.
> I wrapped myself up in a blanket.
This last example shows that just like in English, words that are pronounced the same in Chinese can be distinguished by part-of-speech. You'd rarely confuse "red" the color and "read" (past tense), even though they're pronounced the same, because the first is an adjective and the second a verb (except in the old pun "What's black and white and read all over?", where you think "read" is actually "red" due to the grammatical structure of the sentence).
This is a pretty good explanation of how Chinese characters work, explained via English words: https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
(The other three "guǒ" characters are quite rare, so may be literary-only.)
This is a riddle not a pun.
That's how chinese characters became a lingua franca between diplomats in ancient East Asia. They didn't have to speak each others languages, they just had to know the same character and communicate their ideas effectively enough on paper.
The right part in this case signifies a similar pronunciation:
汁 (zhi)
十 (shi)
This is a typical setup in Chinese character, part of it relates to the meaning, the other relates to the pronunciation.
I'm intermediate in Japanese (conversational + able to read at an N2 level, albeit slowly), and my first response to anyone who says they "learned X kanji" is "how many words do you know?"
There's probably some value to learning the meaning of individual kanji in isolation, but it's very limited (especially in Japanese). Most words have only tenuous relation to the meanings of their individual kanji, and "learning kanji" is kind of a crutch for beginners to pretend that they're making rapid progress.
I suppose from that perspective, "learning X kanji in Y days" is a useful meme, because it pushes people to quickly move on from the approach. But that said, for most learners, it's much better to simply start learning words.
After RTK, I created ways to mentally breakdown and identify the characters. Then, suddenly, I was able to learn words much faster too - instead of struggling with “well this one has this curve here and then it points there and it means that”, reading became automatic, and I could focus on the word itself.
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.
It was an absolute grind. But it worked.
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.
> Those of us who come to the language as adults can gain a similar advantage by tying each of the character forms to a particular unit of pronunciation and meaning, a “key word” in English, that we already know. Before you dismiss the idea of affixing English words to Chinese characters out of hand, consider this: all the Chinese dialects, no matter how mutually unintelligible they are when spoken, use the same characters for writing. These characters convey the same meaning, no matter how they are pronounced. What is more, when the Japanese use Chinese characters, they assign them still other pronunciations. In other words, there is nothing in the nature of a character dictating that it must be verbalized one way or another. Unlike students coming to Chinese from an alphabetically written language, the Japanese already know the meaning and writing of a great many of the characters. By the time you finish this course, you will be in a position similar to theirs. Of course, you will eventually need to learn Chinese pronunciations, just as Japanese students do. But adding difficult and unfamiliar sounds to a solid knowledge of character forms is a much more manageable task than trying to memorize meaning, pronunciation, and writing all at the same time.
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?
https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/collections/chinese
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.
I wrote 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.
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/
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.
...
> 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
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.
All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can.
There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you.
Then you have already parallelized the process, have you not?
> I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab.
How does that ordering work in practice? I can imagine learning to pronounce each individual sound in isolation, and learning to write and pronounce each letter in the writing system before you know any words, but how do you learn about grammar without vocabulary to apply the grammar to?
> There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you.
Agreed.
The vocab phase is purely about vocab. Grammar is done at this point.
I remember first year of Japanese study was Kanji then grammar. At the end of that first year I knew about 2000 words. The second year was purely vocab. I managed to acquire 10,000 new vocab by the end of the second year.
After that point I could understand most spoken and written things with patches here and there. I could hold conversations for hours with a single person.
In the 3rd year of study I did much the same. I remember my Anki vocab deck getting up to about 17k words before reviews were at about 300 to 400 a day and the returns were diminishing, so I just deleted the deck. Stopped cold.
End of that 3rd year I could read novels pretty well. Hold conversations on any topic for any length of time in group settings.
It worked remarkably well. It was damn hard work though.
It really gave me a significant boost. I got to usable language pretty fast as a result.
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.
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.
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