I have almost completed Remembering Traditional Hanzi volume 1 and wouldn't mind contributing my stories. I wonder if Fabrice knows a way to mass-add stories (1,000+).

I have received a file from katsuo that has all of the characters, readings, and meanings from remembering the hanzi. It's on a google spreadsheet now. I'm going to check it for accuracy as I go through Hesig. Once done I guess I can share it with the admin here for use in the new website if it gets done.

ooh... I am a newbie here, so I apologise for butting in. I painstakingly learned my hanzi via the book by Alison and Laurence Matthews 'Learning Chinese Characters', which has a pronunciation guide in addition to a meaning and reading. It's an awesome book and I would recommend it to anyone.
I am now turning to Heisig's Simplified Hanzi book to add another 700 or so hanzi and make an anki file out of it, so if anybody had a file (word, google or excel) of the characters, readings and meanings for Remembering the Simplified Hanzi I would be eternally grateful.
I have also been doing some mindless but important(!) work by trying to create an anki file of 10,000 sentences in simplified hanzi (as per AJATT's advice). I chanced upon this list here:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/files/chin...tences.zip
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/node/115
It contains 20,000 sentences which is therefore twice as cool as Khatzu's method! Because I am generally ignorant to the ways of coding and software, I was taking this list of 20,000 sentences, then copying and pasting one hanzi sentence into one side of an anki flashcard. In the other side, I copy and paste both the pinyin sentence and the english translation. It's working okay, but I have only uploaded about 800 flashcards to the anki file, and my eyes glaze over as my brain turns into a copy-and-pasting robot. Is there a quicker way of setting up an Anki deck with all these sentences? I will happily email anyone my 800-odd-sentence anki deck if they fancy.

thank you for reading.

LondonHanzi Wrote:I am now turning to Heisig's Simplified Hanzi book to add another 700 or so hanzi and make an anki file out of it, so if anybody had a file (word, google or excel) of the characters, readings and meanings for Remembering the Simplified Hanzi I would be eternally grateful.

There's actually an anki file of Remembering the Simplified Hanzi (Book 1) in the downloads section of the official Anki site, if I'm understanding you correctly.

Does anyone know, when the second books are due?

No one knows, but it could take a while, as the first book was delayed for a long time.

Edit: Having finished RTH1, I am going to use Rick Harbaugh's dictionary to learn another 2700+ characters to bring my total up to 4200+. I have decided this is actually the best route since the characters are organized in such a way to make large groups easy to learn all at once (much like Heisig). Since I am learning traditional characters, this resource is truly invaluable, especially to a Heisig graduate. The only trade-off is that there is no way to learn only the most frequent 3000 in this order, so you have to learn them all, but I can definitely live with that.

HerrPetersen Wrote:Does anyone know, when the second books are due?

I asked Prof. Heisig and he says, book 2 “should be ready to give to the publishers by the end of the summer.“
Don’t hold your breath, though. As Tak47 mentioned, the first book was eventually published years after it had been initially announced.

I learned RTK first, then started learning Chinese adopted the Heisig-method for Hanzi. Right now I am learning the lists from iKnow. A week or two before I start each list, I first filter out unknown charachters and learn them Heisig-style. Works pretty good. Sucks a little to do the work of finding good keywords, but better than waiting for the books to come out .

Ethicsgradient,

Thank you for alerting me to this. I just downloaded that Anki file and for some reason it won't open on my anki. I have a Mac, but I don't think that should cause any difficulty. I can't figure it out.
Also if it's based on the Tom Swarthout cards, it's very cool, but not quite the way I do my Anki files. The way I set them up, I have the hanzi on one side, and then on the reverse side, I have the pinyin and english translation, but I also add the complicated Heisig-ish story (eg. the *fortune-teller* ran to steal the *fish*, so he could use it to play *baseball* against the *eminent doctor*).
This makes the cards a little full, but it has the advantage that when I forget something completely, I don't have to go fishing in the book for the story to remember it. That's why the file sent by Katsuo sounds so nice if it has all the stuff on it. I await with excitement the day that it is ready for release!

-LH

@LondonHanzi - Did you set up different fields for your model? If not you should try it out (best with a test anki-deck). It should improve the usability of you anki-stuff. My heisig-model in anki has already 10 or so fields (which are only partially displayed).
Also if you want the Katsuo hanzi-file right now, just pm katsuo (or me, he sent it to me already ) .

@HerrPetersen,

Brilliant! Thanks, I just PM'd you my email for the Katsuo file. I will have to investigate this multiple fields thing. I usually don't look at any more buttons or things to click on than I strictly have to. Multiple fields in Anki sounds like several dimensional chess to me,no? What do I know, I can barely start my computer.
One thing that I *would* love to see in Anki is an incremental reading function. I have a mac at home, so I can't use Supermemo, but I am intrigued by tales of people digesting 800 articles at a time with incremental reading. Once I know my hanzi, I could incrementally read Journey to the West and other bits of Mencius!

Hello,

Sorry to repost this but in a post just at the top of this page I mentioned my plan to stick 20000 hanzi sentences into anki and become a *hopefully* Chinese-reading whizz. A very kind person emailed me to caution that I shouldn't stick all these 20,000 sentences into Anki manually because there is some incredibly cool (I am barely computer literate!) method of transferring them onto Anki, and said they could email me an anki file with the 20000 sentences on them.
I emailed back but got no response, so if the hanzi benefactor is still out there, I would like to take them up on the offer. I foolishly embarked on the Sisyphean endeavour of manually sticking these sentences into Anki and got up to a few hundred before I gave up as my eyes watered in pain. Ideally I'd like hanzi on one side of the card and pinyin on the other, with the english translation just below the pinyin. I can email anybody who likes my mini anki file of this so far if they like. I would attach it here, but I can't add files to the forum.

thank you all,

LH

Hi,

I just saw, that the German version is out.

http://www.amazon.de/Vereinfachte-Hanzi-...3465040686

I have the English book, but would be quite interested in the German keywords, so that I learn them as anyone else will. I know its early, but if anyone has already compiled such a spreadsheet, as is available in English already, I'd be very interested

Cheers

transalpin Wrote:

HerrPetersen Wrote:Does anyone know, when the second books are due?

I asked Prof. Heisig and he says, book 2 “should be ready to give to the publishers by the end of the summer.“
Don’t hold your breath, though. As Tak47 mentioned, the first book was eventually published years after it had been initially announced.

Ah. I should have checked the forum for this information first. I just emailed him today, and he responded with the same response...so they're still shooting for the end of summer for "Remembering the Hanzi 2". He said he's got the organization of the Traditional Hanzi down, and needs to do so now with the simplified Hanzi.

Using his method makes things so easy and fast, I'm sure there'll be hordes of Heisig fans, hungry for more!

I have RTH1 simplified, but really I barely need to look at it when I encounter a new hanzi in text. I already know the majority of them from Japanese, even if the simplification or meaning is a bit different.

I haven't started doing the book systematically since rth* doesn't mesh well with classwork (I was taking Chinese classes).

Hopefully vol2 will come out sooner rather than later though. I've already added more than 30 non-rth1 characters to the RTH deck, and I'm still only using a non-intensive first year Chinese textbook. It would probably be more than 100 characters but I've been skipping supplemental vocab for now.

Codexus Wrote:

transalpin Wrote:* It?s important to note that several variants should not and cannot be displayed with the same font for Japanese, Traditional and Simplified (e.g., 草，請，道，骨??)

But it's possible to display both on the same page as long as html tags are used to specify language. The browser can then select the appropriate fonts. Wikipedia uses this technique extensively and everything is displayed correctly.

The way to do that is:

Code:

<span lang="ja" xml:lang="ja">japanese text</span>
<span lang="zh-Hant" xml:lang="zh-Hant">Chinese with traditional characters text</span>
<span lang="zh-Hans" xml:lang="zh-Hans">Chinese with simplified characters text</span>

(I'm not sure why both lang and xml:lang parameters are used)

Yeah, good luck with that.

I have some bad news for you guys.

The major problem (you'll soon discover) is not merely displaying "appropriate" fonts. The problem is that there is a significant amount of variations between Trad Chinese fonts. And we're not talking minor cosmetic quirks ... we're talking structural differences that mess with the Heisig/Richardson "primitive" order and the user's attempt to forge usable stories (ie: "animal legs" appear in this font, but they're "human legs" in another).

I have not seen A SINGLE FONT that will faithfully render the Heisig/Richardson characters set AS THEY APPEAR in their book. I know they use something from the Arphic font family. I have several of these, yet they all deviate from the book versions at times.

And even if you find the exact font (if one exists), how can you ensure that the user will have it on their system?

In the end, I'm afraid you're going to be forced to use .gifs or .jpgs.



And don't even get me started on the headaches in store when you finally add pronunciation. The list they provide in the book is a hybrid of Putonghua (Mainland) and Guoyu (Taiwanese) pronunciation. Thankfully, this really only affects a handful of the 1,500 from RTH-1, but users need to be aware that there are some key differences.

Quote:The problem is that there is a significant amount of variations between Trad Chinese fonts.

I've been using the Taiwan government's standardized character style, which is also used for Taiwanese schoolbooks and official documents. It has several names and versions:
* 教育部標準楷書 ("Ministery of Education Standard Kaishu"),
* TW-Kai/YU,
* CMEXKai,
* 標楷體/BiaoKaiti/BiauKai (a derivative included in most OS) ...
http://www.edu.tw/mandr/content.aspx?sit...nt_sn=3591
http://www.cns11643.gov.tw/cns11643/imag...95_1_3.ttf

Obviously, Heisig and Richardson wanted to accommodate some of the characters to the stories already used in Remembering the Kanji and to the Simplified Chinese version, in order to facilitate switching and to iron out some irregularities and exceptions. E.g., in their book, there is no difference in appearance between the flesh ⺼ and moon 月 radicals.

This is totally legitimate, but I prefer to learn the official standard first, even if this means that I have to adapt some of the stories. The 全 is really a 入＋王 (not an "umbrella") and the "butcher" element 刖 becomes a "sickle moon" in my stories. The "superfluous" 冗 has a wind 几 primitive in both standards, but when it appears as a primitive it develops "human legs" 儿. It’s really not more than a handful of characters. You’d have to come up with your own stories for 2500 of the 3000 字 anyway!

On the other hand, I found the various "tree" primitives (left, top, bottom) more regular in the MoE standard than the ones Heisig suggests. The only exception here was the "hemp" character 麻, which actually depicts drying hemp plants, not two trees, after all.

I’m not sure, but those who want to pass the Huayu proficiency test in Taipei might be better off sticking with some of the styles taught in Taiwanese schools.

[ファブリス]

FuDaWei, thank you for the clear ups.

Unfortunately manually maintaining a collection of RTH-specific images is not a viable solution. That will be way too much trouble for little benefit. While the RtH books will be the basis and guide for the RtH site, the website needs to accomodate other ways to look up or index characters if the need presents itself. In other words I want to keep things flexible and adaptable.

What about reading chinese on the web? What is the standard there? What is the font that all chinese people see when they browse? Wouldn't that be a correct font to use?

Actually using images in a few select areas, like the Study page, to allow the user to see the characters without first downloading the correct font (one we agree on), is something I CAN do. Because the images can be generated from the font itself (eg. one of those linked by transalpin perhaps). Just like the kanji avatars on this forum! (which btw I just realize will have to be chinese on the chinese site )

It means a character may be displayed in image form, the same way to all users regardless of browser or installed fonts, but using a truetype font as the basis, meaning there are no countless hours spent trying to manage images, update them, fix corrections from the book etc. This also allows adapting the image size freely.

In fact going one step further, different fonts may be stored on the server, and for specific characters one or the other may be used to generate the image. The images are then cached and it's fast. If we can display the correct RTH characters like this, this is a viable solution. The key is, that the images are AUTO generated from existing truetype font(s).

If would be great in the meantime, if we can discuss about what existing TTF font would be best to use, and then what would be the next-best choice for all other parts of the site where chinese characters/compounds are displaying as HTML text (edit: the latter could be specified via stylesheets and recommended clearly on the site for download).

ファブリス Wrote:Manually maintaining a collection of RTH-specific images is not a viable solution. That will be way too much trouble for little benefit.

I agree. The few minor differences between the book and the standard characters are really not worth it, and you cannot copy&paste images into a dictionary. Users may want to write their stories for the variant of their choice.

Quote:What about reading chinese on the web? What is the standard there? What is the font that all chinese people see when they browse? Wouldn't that be a correct font to use?

In a perfect OS, depending on your System Preferences and/or the lang= attribute in the html source. Windows Vista comes with "Microsoft JhengHei" (微軟正黑體) for Taiwan users and "Microsoft YaHei" (微软雅黑) for Mainland users, both looking almost the same. Apple’s upcoming Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will include a new Heiti font with J, TC, SC variants for the same reason. (At the moment, the Mac sometimes uses Japanese style sans-serif characters even for traditional Chinese.)

These sans-serif (hei 黑) fonts are legible at small sizes but not a good model for handwriting.
As mentioned earlier, a handwriting style (kai 楷) fonts for traditional Chinese is included in both Win ("標楷體" in older versions, now "KaiU" or "DFKai-SB") and Mac ("BiauKai"). At least one simplified handwriting style font is also found on every Chinese OS ("Kai" on the Mac, "Kaiti" or "STKai" for Win).
There is no need to use images (unless for stroke order), everyone serious about studying Chinese should have these installed. And if not, there is always the free download from the MOE site.

I’m not sure if you really want to purchase the Arphic fonts from the Heisig books just for this site. They sure have some beautiful typefaces, but probably not for free: http://www.arphic.com/usa/fontgallery/big5_kai.htm

ファブリス Wrote:FuDaWei, thank you for the clear ups.
...

In fact going one step further, different fonts may be stored on the server, and for specific characters one or the other may be used to generate the image. The images are then cached and it's fast. If we can display the correct RTH characters like this, this is a viable solution. The key is, that the images are AUTO generated from existing truetype font(s).

That's do-able.

It will be a bit of a headache, but it's do-able.

On the plus side, it only has to be done once.

I have all the Heisig/Richardson Trads in a spreadsheet. I created a test sheet composed of just the numbered characters, side-by-side in columns, and rendered each column in a different font. Some do come much closer than others and can be used for the bulk of the characters (currently, I prefer "AR PL Mingti2L Big5", but I'm anxious to test drive the fonts transalpin linked to).

As I mentioned earlier, Heisig/Richardson use some font produced by "Arphic.com" (That's the *AR* in the font I like, btw). Most any of those will get you close, but there will be some crucial deviations. [nb: someone ask them outright which font they use -- might save us all some headaches]. Also, close are the Adobe suite of Asian fonts. Oddly enough, "Arial Unicode MS" (standard on most MS machines) is better than you'd expect -- though ugly as sin.

Sometimes the deviations are just cosmetic and can be ignored (ie: a dot slanted right instead of left), but several times a key component used as a primitive will be changed entirely. Since that primitive goes into making the next several characters (if you study the list in order), it really needs to be rendered faithfully or it defeats the whole purpose of the Heisig/Richardson method.

transalpin Wrote:

ファブリス Wrote:Manually maintaining a collection of RTH-specific images is not a viable solution. That will be way too much trouble for little benefit.

I agree. The few minor differences between the book and the standard characters are really not worth it, ...

A "few minor differences" that reverberate through the next couple dozen characters and pops up later on down the road.

For some reason, I can't get transalpin's 2nd link to work, but I found the font (along with two others) on:

http://www.cns11643.gov.tw/AIDB/download...B%E8%BC%89

Really liking the "CMEXKai" font from the first link.

http://www.edu.tw/mandr/content.aspx?sit...nt_sn=3591

[ファブリス]

All this information is going to be super-useful for building the chinese version. Glad to have some experts aboard. Thank you!

FuDaWei Wrote:A "few minor differences" that reverberate through the next couple dozen characters and pops up later on down the road.

Could you maybe give some examples? This sounds like a big deal the way you're talking about it, but I've run into no such problems. I mean, yeah, I've seen a few minor variations but nothing that has been a problem of any sort.