Reviewing the Hanzi replacement site?

Since this is now only Japanese, has anyone who used the Hanzai side found a new place to gather stories for Remembering the Hanzi (simplified)?

All google gets me is arguments about the Heisig method, and am abandoned bit on the AJATT site.

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Fyi I have made changes to RevTK (now "Kanji Koohii") when I moved accounts from RevTH. Here are the tips I shared then:

It is possible to use Kanji Koohii to go through the Remembering Simplified / Traditional Hanzi books from Heisig & Richardson, with some limitations.

Known limitations:
* Most important is to understand that the default index is RTK, therefore you should ignore "frame numbers".
* To search the Study pages, you have to type in either the decimal unicode number (ie. 23460), or the actual character ( 室 ), or the full keyword ( "room" ). Search box suggestions will not work (they are based on RTK).
* There is no pinyin readings on the cards.


Traditional & Simplified Flashcards
Always add cards by copy/pasting the characters into Manage > Add Custom Selection.

You can add characters in sequence by copy/pasting selections from the TH or SH (Traditional, Simplified) columns in gdaxeman's Heisig's Remembering the Kanji vs. Hanzi.

Do not not add characters by frame number, since the active index will be RTK.


Simplified Hanzi Keywords
Copy/paste the contents (click the raw button) of this keyword list into Manage > Import Keywords

Traditional Hanzi Keywords
Copy/paste the contents (click the raw button) of this keyword list into Manage > Import Keywords.


Tips for navigation
In order to ease navigation you can eg.
- add a batch of characters and immediately start a review, and then use the keyword link on the flashcard to open the Study page in a new tab.
- you could also use the Detailed flashcard list (Review page), sort by "last review" to find the cards not yet reviewed, and then you have the links to the Study pages.


Changing the fonts
There is no font option on the website yet. To change the font use an extension like "Stylish" or "Stylebot". You want to replace the .cj-k CSS rule. For reference, these are the defaults on RevTK:

Code:

.cj-k { font-family:"Hiragino Mincho Pro", "ヒラギノ明朝 Pro W3", "ＭＳ 明朝", "ＭＳ Ｐ明朝", serif; }

Simplified Hanzi example:

Code:

.cj-k {font-family:"Kaiti","STKaiti","Kai","AR PL UKai CN","Microsoft YaHei","Heiti SC",sans-serif; }

Traditional Hanzi example:

Code:

.cj-k { font-family:"TW-Kai","TW-Moe-Std-Kai","DFKai-SB","BiauKai","AR PL UKai TW","Microsoft JhengHei","Heiti TC",serif; }

This is pretty cool. It looks like the unicode character range has been extended:
马 and the like are there.

Unfortunately my biggest problem has always been making up stories.

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Yes the database of characters has been expanded with lots of simplified characters that were not included in KANJIDIC.

For Traditional Hanzi there is a lot of overlap with kanji so there will be a lot of stories already.

I am not aware of other RTK/RTH sites myself. Perhaps you could look into chinese Anki decks for RTH / RSH... maybe someone created a deck with their own stories?

I have a couple of people I could hit up, now that you mention it.

Is it OK to ask why you stopped doing that side? Lack of visitors?

(I am doing simplified so...)

(As always, this site is awesome, and your work is amazing. Thanks for this site until the end of time.)

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Hmm well sorry you missed the news. I gave a one month notice, and moved some accounts on request.

I'm not going to repeat the news post here. Briefly it was a combination of :
- extremely low activity on the site (like 1 sign up per day, the average was actually less than that)
- next to no inbound link activity (ie. no blogs or forums talked about the site, which is basically SEO death)
- most importantly I realized that even with all the work I did to run chinese and japanese in a single code base, it was still a lot of time spent deploying two different sites, and making sure every code I write is "dual site aware" ... so it was a cost that I had to pay, no matter if I updated RevTH less frequenetly or not at all, it would always incur an extra cost that made no sense, all things considered, for a single developer.

Running two sites from one codebase would have paid off if there was a modicum of activity. Since there was next to no activity on RevTH, that meant also no traffic, no advertising, no affiliate income, and very few donations.

So honestly if I kept running it it was a liability to Kanji Koohii, either directly in terms of time invested, and indirectly in terms of sapping my motivation.

Thanks for catching me up, and I completely understand, considering how slow it was.

I got in touch with one IRL guy who did use the Hanzi side to learn Chinese characters. (He still has an anki deck with all his stories! Happy dance!) He ended up winning, on the strength of character reading ability basically, a year's language full ride scholarship in China, and is now working in sales to the Chinese market. And he found language school a breeze because while everyone was scribbling characters and sucking on tones, he was just kicking back and making sure he nailed his tones. Basically he thanks me every time we talk for introducing the system to him, but as I told him, without your site, the RTK/RTH system is hardly useful for many people.

He then asked me to pass along his deepest thanks as well. I told him, "Once you get rich, there's still a paypal button on the site" He's not rich yet though, and I am still fighting to stop having to plow all my income into improvements in my own business.

As many people have said to me IRL, without this site, RTK (the book and system) would be a great, unfinished idea. With this site, it is way to learn to read incredibly quickly. You sticking with it past your own time using the system is praiseworthy beyond words.

Honestly, in my baby steps towards Chinese, I am amazed by how much I can just plop down and use, and also ever more convinced of the value of the English keywords, which I started off fighting against.

(One thing I have noticed is that the code used to link internally has changed; the {} ** ## is now displaying different things, so I have to rework my stories to not give away the answer. And I need to play with how to incorporate pinyin into the common to Chinese and Japanese characters. But I also have to get my feet week in Chinese to be able to input characters as well. If I get anything resembling a system put together for Chinese, using your site, I'll update in this thread. )

Thanks for the help, now and always. You have made a huge difference in a lot of people's lives just by your own personal efforts, and that's not something a lot of people in the world can say. Brag to the people around you in IRL that someone on the internet said you were their hero.

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Hmm, only the { kanji reference } notation should have changed. #keywords# and *primitive* formatting should remain the same.

Kanji references had to change when I finally implemented multiple editions support. A story couldn't link to say #200 because that is a frame number that would change between 5th and 6th edition.

Thanks for the kind words

OIC!

That's easy enough to fix. I have to get in there and bang around a bit!

Can I do the a page on the wiki that links in the Hanzi order to the flash card site using a shortcut like {} etc?

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Sure. A RTH / RSH ordered list of kanji which links to the study pages can make navigation easier. You can save some time by copy / pasting columns from gdaxeman spreadsheet above, and some regexp search/replace.

Kapalama, are you using RTH traditional or simplifed? I'm gonna be starting Chinese next year (already finished RTK 1). I was wondering about whether I should use RTH, but I figured I should since I'm going to be learning simplifed.

sokino Wrote:Kapalama, are you using RTH traditional or simplifed? I'm gonna be starting Chinese next year (already finished RTK 1). I was wondering about whether I should use RTH, but I figured I should since I'm going to be learning simplifed.

For me simplified (for both work reasons because the Mainland market is becoming dominant, and also because, at a certain age, traditional is simply not practical to use on a laptop computer screen, as a learner.)

I hope someone with better typing skills comes along to set up the list in the wiki and link to the characters on the story side. I don't really remember if there was an internal link code from the wiki to the story pages.

Do we still need to request rights to edit wiki pages? IIRC we used to have to request to be able to edit. I no longer have the long blocks of time to sit down and get familiar with new stuff that I use to.