Sprachprofi Wrote:I so wish I had had this book when starting to learn Chinese! While studying on my own, I was fascinated with Chinese characters, but I never managed to retain them. During an immersion course in Beijing, I learned to memorize Chinese characters by rote, just writing them over and over again - it worked for the 6 weeks I was there since I had classes every day and used the characters a lot. However, back home and only studying Chinese once a week or so, I quickly forgot all but the most common ones again.

Then I stumbled upon James Heisig and his method for learning Kanji (Chinese-derived characters used in Japanese). It was enlightening! I actually remembered the characters, and I can still remember them several years later! Unfortunately many characters in his book aren't really useful when learning Chinese, or they may even teach you incorrectly due to the meanings having changed over time. But I had learned what method would work for people with an analytical Western mindset like me, people who don't have a good memory for pictures and who hate the dull, time-consuming and ineffective Eastern method of writing characters over and over again.

From then on, I used a similar method to learn new Chinese characters I'd encounter or old ones that refused to stick. It was tedious though. My incomplete knowledge of Chinese characters wouldn't let me see the most useful order in which to learn characters and their parts; wouldn't let me distinguish between really useful ones and obsolete ones, and so on. I also had trouble memorizing the pronunciation and especially the tone with each character.

The sample of Heisig for Chinese was a disappointment, as it didn't tackle these problems. The characters introduced are mostly the same as in the Japanese version, never mind their usefulness (or lack thereof) in Chinese, the book doesn't even mention the pronunciation of a character and after the first few lessons you're left alone to invent stories and links.


When I got this book, "Learning Chinese Characters", I immediately knew that I had found the answer to all those years of searching. This book is everything I would have wished for as a beginning student of Chinese and more:

- explanation of how Chinese characters work and how to write them, plus stroke order diagrams with each character
- introducing basic elements through pictures
- introducing more complex elements through short and memorable stories that combine the basic elements, sometimes also accompanied by an illustrating picture
- stories also remind you of the pronunciation, including a special mnemonic for the tone
- teaches the 800 most basic Chinese characters, with a focus on the ones necessary for the HSK Level A exam, and there's a story or picture for *every single character*. It doesn't leave you alone after the first few steps.
- the most useful characters (e. g. the ones for "to be", "I", "you", "good", and so on) are actually taught in the first few lessons, even though these are hard to teach and some books avoid them on purpose. This will be extremely useful for students using this book alongside a beginner's Chinese course.
- also teaches words if they can be formed using only characters that were already taught
- based on simplified characters, as these are the most common ones today, but equivalent traditional characters are given in brackets if different

Great job, authors! I haven't yet found anything worth complaining about, so my rating is 5 stars!

Jarvik7 Wrote:800 hanzi is actually just basic kyuu, the equivalent of jlpt4. Advanced kyuu is 2865 hanzi.

Quote:"Again, it is only the meaning you need to remember. Don't try to remember the whole story verbatim. Use the story as a bridge to get you to the meaning.

We should also stress that this story is simply an aid to remembering that the character X means Y; the story does not represent the historical reason why X has come to mean Y. The stories are simply our way of helping you to familiarize yourself with the characters and to remember them in a simple and effective way. Often the stories will be humorous, a bit strange or bizarre, or may even seem silly, but that is just what's needed to make them stick in your memory.

If you really picture the scenes in your mind's eye, that is all the work you need to do, and the story will stick. Brute force repetition is not needed. ...

At this stage it may seem quicker to simply learn the equations off by rote, but it will be a different matter when you have covered dozens of equations and are trying to remember them without mixing them up. Using pictures (and later on, making your own vivid pictures in your mind's eye) makes it much easier to remember them all, even though on the face of it you are trying to remember "extra" information. Think about how easily you remember the basic story of a movie despite the background "richness" of hundreds of details, and compare this with how hard it is to remember isolated "bold" facts such as addresses or lists."

ahibba Wrote:Sprachprofi is an active member in HTLAL. She says:

Codexus Wrote:Is that Judith from germanpod101? She's awesome.

aaronvanvalen Wrote:D'you work on commission?

Jarvik7 Wrote:Level A is just the grade of the kyuu. It just depends on the total score you get.

800 hanzi is actually just basic kyuu, the equivalent of jlpt4. Advanced kyuu is 2865 hanzi.

I'll keep an eye out for this though. If it has a system for tones it may be worth it.