Hereby I suggest a tread for All Things Chinese (maybe merits a separate header in the Index?) as there seem to be quite a few people around here who, just like myself, are trying to install Chinese on top of their Japanese.

Rather than picking up grains of knowlegde amidst other subjects, we might as well bring it all together in one place.

Suggested contents: links to share (I will post my humble favourites when I have a moment), tips to share... And maybe an occasional story for a particularly colourful Character?..

[ファブリス]

Hi Serge, great idea!

Quick post because the browser ate my reply... argh!!

Here's two good links:

"Chinese characters and culture"
http://www.zhongwen.com

"Signese.com is a collection of photos of Chinese characters in action."
http://www.signese.com

I have two shared stories based on chinese history, "copy" and "tempering"

I became quite fascinated by china's culture and history after looking up various characters while studying RTK 1. This compelled me to read a book about the records of Sima Qian, a famous chinese historian. I really enjoyed it, and all the bits of wisdom that can be found in Sima Qian's stories. It inspired my story for "copy".

I'll be very interested in your list of links!

Here's an excellent forum:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/forums.php
but I wouldn't recommend it for RTH discussions; they're quite anti-Heisig.

Here's my textbook - nice pictures, big characters, traditional characters, VCD's
http://www.cheng-tsui.com/product.cfm?si...=13424&c=0

Great links, gents. Here's a few more:

http://chineselanguage.org/ - a great alternative to Zhongwen, the one that actually does work with my Blackberry...

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html - mentioned this one already, it contains 3,000 most used characters... (around 2,400, in actual fact... no one knows what happened to the rest)

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html - very entertaining, I'm sure even Japanese learners will see his point...

http://www.internationalscientific.org/why_study.aspx - makes interesting reading, too...

And did anyone mention the one and only http://www.chinesepod.com yet?

More to come...

Here is a handy tool for converting Simplified characters (boo!!!) to Traditional and vice versa: http://www.khngai.com/chinese/tools/convert.php

Note that Apple users don't actually need it as MacOS has a built-in conversion option (although not always accurate when converting towards Traditional).

Japanese learners can also have some fun with this tool: try typing in the characters for 'spot' or 'doctor' to see what they REALLY look like...

That link with the 3000 (or slightly less) most frequently used characters is very handy to know which characters are most useful to learn. There are other frequency lists though. I've come across this one: http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/ I'm not sure which list is best to use, but at least it has some interesting statistics: the first 2000 characters already cover 97% of the characters in the source material, the first 2838 cover 99% and it takes 9933 characters to reach 100%. I believe Chinese schools teach children somewhere between 2500 and 3000 characters, which is apparently more than sufficient.

Continuing on the subject of lists, here is a great list of all the kanji and the vocabulary required for the different levels of HSK:

http://www.unige.ch/lettres/meslo/chinois/hsk.html

(Similar lists are around for JLPT - hugely helpful, in my opinion...)

A great tool explaining some principles behind simplified/traditional conversion:

http://www.language.berkeley.edu/fanjian/tier3.html

I have stumbled upon a great work designed for bulk-learning Chinese characters. The title is 'Cracking Chinese Puzzles' and it is by T.K.Ann. A limited number of copies is available from Amazon.

It contains 5 hard-back volumes and is quite pricy... I have now bought Volume 1 in London and will look for the remaining volumes when I am in Shanghai next week.

The beauty of the book is that it takes you from the absolute basics through systematic explanation of radicals to the full proficiency in both Traditional and Simplified to the Grand Total of 5,888 characters. With examples from both modern and classic Chinese, it even touches upon the Japanese usage. Volume 1 treats around 1,850 characters and it is arranged not so much in the order of frequency as in the logical order of components. Hence, together with the obvious 我 and a rather frequent 餓, such obsure characters as 鵝, 娥, 蛾 and 峨 are also covered - and explained in such a way that definitions stick in your memory.

I have gone through a couple of hundred pages in a couple of days and I'm truly excited with what an absolute gem this book has turned out to be. Consider this excerpt:

QUOTE
'Or' is translated 或 huo4. 或 huo4 was the original character of 國 guo2 'country', 'state'. To circumscribe 或 with a large 口 was a later development. In its Metal Script the first stroke of the character 或 was cut in the middle. It therefore had 2 parts: the left part <..> had the connotation of 'boundaries of fields' and the right part 戈 'spear' or 'weapon'. Early people had nothing in writing to define ownership or boundaries. <..> A country could thus change its size depending upon its military power, and the drawing of boundaries became desireable. The character for country hence needed a circumscription, i.e. 口. In the meanwhile, the occurrence of boundary disputes conceived a lot of 'doubts'. Thus the central part 或 was made to mean 'perhaps'. The concept 'or' must have developed therefrom.

In later dynasties scholars thought it incorrect to leave a character signifying 'perhaps' in the centre of a character which meant prestigious 'state'. A new character 国 (S.: in the book without the dot) with 王 'king' in the centre was thus invented. The revolutionists eventually changed it to 国 by placing a piece of jade (S.: 玉) inside the circumscription - a very easy way out by just adding a dot. This is now accepted as the simplified form of 國. And 或 just means 'or' and nothing else.
QUOTE END

And the book goes on to describe practically every character in a similar fashion. Although some explanations may be a bit corny, it does stick.

Another great idea in the book is that 'the common difficulty for foreigners (S.: and one I have definitely experienced!) is how to break up a sentence into two-character expressions and to single out the singletons.' The book then proceeds to list all possible prepositions and link words consisting of one character only...

It goes without saying that Heisig's method can be applied when actually memorising all this material.

I am preparing a review set on iFlash as I go through the book and am happy to share with anyone upon completion. However, it probably is of limited interest to most people here as none of my translations are in English.

Serge Wrote:I have stumbled upon a great work designed for bulk-learning Chinese characters. The title is 'Cracking Chinese Puzzles' and it is by T.K.Ann. A limited number of copies is available from Amazon.

Vow that sounds like one hell of an impressive text. I definitely have to check it out.
...а скачать такое чудо нигде нельзя?

Ok, here's the mother list:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=9739
They keep it updated. I was going to copy/paste, but the links get lost.

I finally started studying Chinese in ernest last week. I'm studying pronunciation only. Next week I'll start Pimsleur, and use pinyin only. I can't study characters yet; everyone, even Heisig, recommended against studying Chinese characters (for chinese) before I've mastered reading Japanese. So, I'm continuing my Japanese, while trying to learn Chinese on the side (1hr per night). I figure it will be a year before I start to learn Chinese characters for Chinese. By then my speaking/listening should be pretty good. Here are some pinyin sites that I really like.

Pinyin table:
http://lost-theory.org/chinese/phonetics/
According to the chinese forum dudes, this seems to be the only table with "standard" pronunciation.

Pinyin practice:
http://www.pinyinpractice.com/tones.htm

I'm sure most people here are aware of this - but Hanzis Matter is always fun, worth having a look at if you've not seen it yet. Mind you, it is dedicated to badly drawn Chinese characters, so maybe not so good as a learning tool; just for getting familiar with the characters and a bit of light relief, though, I always enjoy it.

laxxy Wrote:...? ??????? ????? ???? ????? ???????

highly unlikely... besides, it would be very unwieldy in a scanned form considering that only Volume 1 runs to 700 pages...

On a different note, I have spent the last couple of week in Tokyo and couldn't help noticing how much more books for students of Chinese are available there than in Europe...

Hot off the press - here is Dr. Heisig's response to my question about when Remembering the Hanzi will be out:

"Dear Leo,
Thanks for the note. In the end, we decided it is best to make 2 sets of 2 volumes each, one for the traditional hanzi and the other for the simplified. The first vol. would contain about 1,200 hanzi and the second about 1,800-2,000. The sorting out of the most used characters was a very time-consuming process, as is the ordering. We worked on it full-time in the summer and Tim Richardson is coming back to Japan from January to April so we can finish the thing off. That would mean a publishing date in the fall of 2007. Sorry for the delay, but the new plan seems much better in the long run. When we have the first few hundred of each volume done, we will post them on the net (probably around the end of January) to get some feedback as we continue the work.
Regards,
Jim Heisig"

A bit of a bummer; I'll keep a lookout for the preview in January.

Any news on Heisig's 'Remembering the Hanzi' preview. I found a link for it on the Nanzen Institute's website, but it's not working yet!?

A lovely alternative to the defunct jp.chinesepod:

http://chugokugo.com/hot_station_chinese_jt.htm

Tottemo kawaii...

leosmith Wrote:I wrote to Heisig several days ago about RTH, to see if there's an update. No response so far.

Just got it.

James Heisig Wrote:Dear Leo,
Thank you for your note and your suggestion. I am glad that the books have been useful to you. I wish the Chinese version were finished, but we are committed not to releasing the first part (of two) of the Traditional hanzi until the Simplified are also completely done. My guess is this coming Winter or Spring at the latest.
All the best in your studies.
J. W. Heisig

Bummer. Also bummed that he didn't seem to like my suggestion, but that's to be expected. FYI, my suggestion was:

leosmith Wrote:Here's a post I made recently. Any chance of you guys adopting something like this for RTH?

"If I had to do it all over again, I get a list of all the kanji with similar keywords, and give all the kanji in a group the same base keword, followed by a name of a unique primative for that character. This eliminates difficult english words that were chosen merely to differentiate the characters, and leaves no doubt as to which variation you are to write."

I learned characters first when I started Japanese; I finished RTK1 within my first year of study. There are many advantages to doing this. However, there are also many disadvantages. Because of my circumstances, (1) not yet fluently reading Japanese and (2) not wanting to spend more than 1 hr per day on Mandarin, I'm waiting to learn characters. My friend's wedding is coming up soon, so it's time to ease up on the Japanese and really crank up the Mandarin. I just finished Pimsleur II. I'll continue with Pimsleur III, and try to get a tutor, skype, etc to pick up as much of the spoken language as possible. I'd like to have at least 2000 words well under control by August.

And I see my avoidance of the written language continuing until the end of the year, in order to allow me to finish up Japanese. This could be a very interesting and exciting comparison of when to learn characters. I could have over 5000 words before I start learning them. I picture myself finishing RTH, and then flying through the thousands of words I already know, becoming literate very fast. This is a really appealing idea to me. Hope it works!

leosmith Wrote:I could have over 5000 words before I start learning them. I picture myself finishing RTH, and then flying through the thousands of words I already know, becoming literate very fast. This is a really appealing idea to me. Hope it works!

I've no idea how many Japanese words I know, or not. But I didn't start Heisig until 3 years after moving to Japan. I reckon the earlier you start, the better. However, since completing RTK1, I really do feel like I'm "flying"! Hope it works for you.

leosmith Wrote:I'm waiting to learn characters. My friend's wedding is coming up soon, so it's time to ease up on the Japanese and really crank up the Mandarin. I just finished Pimsleur II. I'll continue with Pimsleur III, and try to get a tutor, skype, etc to pick up as much of the spoken language as possible. I'd like to have at least 2000 words well under control by August.

And I see my avoidance of the written language continuing until the end of the year, in order to allow me to finish up Japanese. This could be a very interesting and exciting comparison of when to learn characters. I could have over 5000 words before I start learning them. I picture myself finishing RTH, and then flying through the thousands of words I already know, becoming literate very fast. This is a really appealing idea to me. Hope it works!

Hm-m... You'll have a hard time keeping apart your 5,000 words without knowing how to write them - homonyms are everywhere and characters are enormous help to understand the origin of the words.

I find that studying Hanzi only helps my Japanese studies as it helps me see where the ON-readings come from. Also, I rarely happen upon a Kanji these days that I haven't previously encountered as a Hanzi...

My Chinese studies are happily chugging along after about a month. What I'm doing is watching Hong Kong DVDs with the mandarin audio track and Chinese subtitles on. When I see a character that keeps popping up, I write it in my notebook, then look up the pronunciations (only) and feed those into mnemosyne. I do the same thing if I notice two-character combinations appearing often. Following along with the dialogue and subtitles allows me to constantly review what I'm learning, sometimes flipping through my notes to make sure I heard it correctly. I'm not studying any Chinese-English vocabulary equivalents and I'm not reading anything about Chinese grammar, just picking it up as I go along.

Next week I'm going to start reading Harry Potter in Chinese using the same technique. Though of course I won't have the audio track to help me out with that, static prose has its own benefits.

兵 - /bing/

乒乓 - /ping pang/ (=table tennis)

Awesome.

leosmith Wrote:Here's an excellent forum:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/forums.php
but I wouldn't recommend it for RTH discussions; they're quite anti-Heisig.

If anyone reading this post is a member of the above forum, do you know how many posts you have to have before you can post without getting approval for every post? It's like a nazi lockdown. I made a few posts about 3 days ago and the mods have yet to approve any of them.

Hi,
Has anyone ever bought Timothy Richardson's thesis from ProQuest.com? It's supposed to have the 1st 1000 Chinese characters for 'remembering the hanzi'. However it appears to only devote 40 or so pages in the index, as given in the free preview on proquest's website.

Hesig's RTK seems to put 4 words on a page.
Anyone know if you can learn from the thesis, or not?

Thanks,
Jonny

It's not the "first" 1000, but 1000 chosen as a demonstration project. The author has some commentary on his thesis, where he states:

Timothy Richardson Wrote:Importantly, the 1,000-character Chinese adaptation was never intended to be a usable final-form version. It was created only for the purpose of learning what adapting Heisig?s system for use with Chinese would entail. A version intended to be fully usable for Chinese should perhaps employ a set of 2,500 characters, or more, as an adaptation of this size would contain important economy-of-scale advantages over a smaller one.

If you want to look over the thesis, you may be able to request it via ILL from a local research library. (However, speaking from entirely too much personal experience, most Ph.D. theses are terribly boring reading for people other than researchers in the immediate field.)