Hey, any updates for remembering the Hanzi? I remember reading it is set for a fall 2007 release....

Hey.. I don't want to hijack this thread, but since this concerns Hanzi, I thought it would be ok.

I was just curious about how much one would benefit from knowing Kanji when studying Hanzi. I already did some digging on this subject and I now know that:

-it requires mastery of much more characters in Chinese to be considered literate
-many(?) Kanji have a different meaning as Hanzi
-many(?) Hanzi now look different from their Kanji counterpart
-Hanzi can be written traditionally or simplified

What I don't know however, is to what this all amounts. How much would one benefit from having done RTK1 (and RTK3) when studying Hanzi? How much 'overhead' is there to learning Hanzi? How many characters would need reviewing? Are there many frequently used Hanzi that are not Kanji?

I guess it boils down to the question : Is 'Remembering the Hanzi' really necessary? (Last I heard, it was coming out in November)

nycity Wrote:Hey.. I don't want to hijack this thread, but since this concerns Hanzi, I thought it would be ok.

There is some info in here: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=113

nycity Wrote:What I don't know however, is to what this all amounts. How much would one benefit from having done RTK1 (and RTK3) when studying Hanzi? How much 'overhead' is there to learning Hanzi? How many characters would need reviewing?

6,000 or so.

nycity Wrote:Are there many frequently used Hanzi that are not Kanji?

Sounds like you need to do more digging. This is basic stuff in public domain. Once again, the above thread has some useful links on this.

nycity Wrote:I guess it boils down to the question : Is 'Remembering the Hanzi' really necessary?

No. It's a waste of time. BUT: do RTK 1 first to get the general idea of the method. Or read something else to get a very good grip on the key elements and their meanings, as well as understanding of phonetic components, etc.

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

nycity: I think knowing Kanji is a big advantage for learning Hanzi. It's probably not enough of an advantage for someone to go thru RTK1 if they have no intentions of learning Japanese though (you probably aren't suggesting this, but I was just making sure).

Serqe: I thought 3000 Hanzi gets one to the 99% level in Mandarin. Or are you including simplified in your 6000? And why do you think RTH will be a waste of time? Is it because you already know the method?

According to the Wikipedia article on Hanzi, about 3000 are required for basic literacy (i.e. reading a newspaper), and well-educated people will know 4000-5000.

I'm trying to learn 1000 before I go to Taiwan in July.

Is this Hanzi book purely intended for people learning Chinese though and therefore has little or no relevance to people who are studying Japanese? If the target audience for the book is different then ofcourse it's not a waste.
When i've visited China i've found the way of writing so different to in Japan that it is very difficult to understand. In mainland China they used a simplified form which is very difficult. Simplified in the sense that less strokes are used in order to increase writing speed.
On the other hand though, imagine thinking up story for this one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bi%C3%A1ng.svg

leosmith Wrote:Serqe: I thought 3000 Hanzi gets one to the 99% level in Mandarin. Or are you including simplified in your 6000? And why do you think RTH will be a waste of time? Is it because you already know the method?

I am basing my number on calculations from this book: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=1853#p1853 There are 10 pages or so describing why you need to know more than 3,000. The number does include simplified characters but only those that are significantly different from the original ones (i.e., not the ones where the radical is just slightly modified).

The RT-K gives you the Method that can really be described in 2 paragraphs: i.e., take the elements and connect them with the mnemonic technique. The rest of RT-K is the list of kanji and the elements that a studious person can pull together within 30 minutes of intelligent 'googling'.

For Hanzi, the frequency lists are out there in great numbers, so are the lists of radicals and phonetics with their meanings, etc. And if the method is known, nothing should stop one from starting the work already.

kyotokanji Wrote:When i've visited China i've found the way of writing so different to in Japan that it is very difficult to understand. In mainland China they used a simplified form which is very difficult. Simplified in the sense that less strokes are used in order to increase writing speed.

When I first went to the PRC last year, I had about 2,500 of traditional kanji under my belt and thought I'd be all right reading simplified texts. Unexpectedly, I had lots of trouble as some of the forms are truly very very different, especially the ones where they've simplified it in such a way as to bring out the phonetic component. I have since then significantly increased my exposure to 'simplified' texts and my ability to read 'simplified' has sort of caught up naturally.

Don't forget that Japanese characters have been somewhat simplified too. So the truly traditional forms one may see in Taiwan are even a step 'more traditional'...

Did your ability to read simplified kanji get better purely through observation? Or did you study through a book too?

I don't think it's possible to figure out simplified characters just by looking at them, but I wouldn't say one has to go as far as actually "studying" them. And actually after I think about it, if you are comfortable with reading traditional Chinese, I reckon you could figure out what a lot of the simplified characters were replacing by "predicting" from the context which character you think would go in a certain spot.

What I'm doing right now is learning the traditional characters and tacking the simplified ones on as an addendum. It's not that hard to learn the simplified variants, but I think one does have to be shown what they correspond to at first.

I know of a website (http://www.zhongwen.com) that's great for looking up hanzi, and it gives the simplified variants, but doesn't allow one to search by simplified characters and I have yet to find a website that does.

There are plenty of websites allowing to search by simplified characters. Yellowbridge.com is probably one of the best.

In fact, it's the most frequently used simplified characters that give one the most trouble when coming from a traditional character environment. I never 'studied' them as such, I just started reading more texts in simplified script and figured them out one-by-one through a combination of contextual guessing and dictionary look-up. Also, a lot of pointing to words and asking native speakers how to read it... often followed by: 'Ah!!! so THAT's how you spell it in simplified!..'.

With any new words I learn today, I note both forms.

Wow! thanks for the all info. I'll be watching out for Remembering the Hanzi.

Serge Wrote:There are plenty of websites allowing to search by simplified characters. Yellowbridge.com is probably one of the best.

Yellowbridge was indeed helpful, yet somewhat annoying, for about a month, but now they've started to get really stingy. Now the free section only allows searching among 2000 characters (not nearly enough), and they've taken away the box for "look up copy/paste character."

I'm going bonkers not being able to look up these wacky looking characters. Is there any other good site for searching simplified characters? Is there a free standalone program for it? That would be even better.

JS: not sure what you mean... http://www.yellowbridge.com/language/chi...ionary.php still works for me, on the full set with both simplified and traditional, including copy-paste. Have just tested it...

I guess you can go a roundabout way through pasting into the C-E dictionary, but I'm talking about this page:

http://www.yellowbridge.com/language/cha...ionary.php

There used to be a box where you could paste a character and it would take you straight to that character's info. There's now a dropdown box that says "Top 2000 characters" (the other option is Top 1000 characters). Searching for a character by its parts used to work pretty nicely that site and now I can hardly find anything, and I'm guesing it's because they've decreased the available characters. I'm trying to find a character that has 口 on the left and the right half of 姨, but no matter how I search, it won't come up.

I see what you mean... Well, cutting & pasting still works fine if you go through 'Word Search' (the tab to the left). I have never used their look-up option: I usually just type the character through Pinyin input method or cut and paste it from an electronic source. Looking up by components works best for me in JDict which contains an amazing number of Hanzi.

The search by parts feature was by far the most useful part of yellowbridge.com (even though they've always been greedy by making the "real" search a pay-only feature). If I knew the pinyin, I would look on zhongwen.com, and if I copied from an electronic source, there are dozens of sites I could use. JDict has 6000+ kanji, but not the simplified forms (which, as you know, can be wildly different from the Japanese kanji). Without search by parts, I'm pretty much out of luck if I come across something like 孙, 让, 护 or 识 (or the one I described above, which I still can't identify) in a non-electronic medium.

Do you know of anything else that would let me search for simp. characters by parts? Maybe there's even a standalone program out there that would do it.

Do you mean 咦? The good thing about simplified characters is that one only have to learn the most common ones that are really different from their traditional versions. And then most derivatives come with easy phonetic components. I happen to know that 姨 is a [yi] and from here it takes seconds to find 咦...

Similarly, 护 or 识 are quite obvious through phonetics. 孙 and 让 are not - but they are so frequent that one ends up learning them anyway. I bought a great book in New York's Chinatown some time ago that explained the principles of simplification in great detail...

Anyway: Zhongwen also has a component seach engine but I'm not sure if one can use it to look up simplifieds. I have to say, I've never run into this problem, somehow. If I look up subtitles from a movie, I usually go by the sound. And every printed book I've come across so far seems to have an electronic version (e.g., here: http://xxsy.net/).

But see if any of these help:

http://hmarty.free.fr/hanzi/
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=radicals

Or invest a few hours into learing the Wubi input method. Or the 'four-corners' method - it seems to be quite efficient as well.

Serge Wrote:Do you mean 咦?

Ah! I tried searching under yi, but I guess the problem was that 咦 isn't simplified, but zhongwen.com just doesn't have it.

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=radicals
will let me search by radicals+additional stroke count, which isn't as lovely as yellowbridge, but good enough. Sometimes simplified characters are wacky and it's hard to identify the radical. Thanks for that link.
Zhongwen.com's search feature was the same thing, but it won't allow searching of simplified characters.

But http://xxsy.net/ is an incredible site. You have just saved me a whole lot of time and money. Molto grazie!

JimmySeal Wrote:Do you know of anything else that would let me search for simp. characters by parts? Maybe there's even a standalone program out there that would do it.

Hasen't Wakan supported all of this for a few years now? It isn't updated anymore but out of the box, it supports look up by parts, cross-references simplified and traditional radicals and characters, has a database of 18522 characters, and supports clipboard lookups.

It even has a system wide screen pop up tool something like peraperakun/rikaichan but you have to hack your system a bit to keep it from sending you to the BSoD.

Perfect. I knew there was a program out there and had heard people talk about it, but I'd never used it and didn't know what it was called. Thanks.

Edit: Rats. It too has simplified characters, but I can't seem to find a way to search for them. May not be much help after all.

JimmySeal Wrote:Rats. It too has simplified characters, but I can't seem to find a way to search for them. May not be much help after all.

I am not sure what you are having trouble with in Wakan, as far as I know there should be no trouble looking up any character. You can type pin-yin, you can select radicals, you can search from clipboard, it has both traditional and simplified characters, with cross-reference. What am I missing?

As I found out, that character is actually a traditional character. Maybe I'm missing something, but when I do a character search in "Chinese mode" the top of the results says "Found traditional characters (number)," and the only ones displayed in the search results are traditional characters.

JimmySeal Wrote:As I found out, that character is actually a traditional character. Maybe I'm missing something, but when I do a character search in "Chinese mode" the top of the results says "Found traditional characters (number)," and the only ones displayed in the search results are traditional characters.

Try changing "Chinese Character Mode" on the "General" tab in the settings. That should do the trick. As for dictionary lookups see this thread

Oh, awesome. That works. Thanks.