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There seems to be really useful material here:

http://hanzi.unihan.com.cn/CoolHanzi/#down_paper

bflatnine Wrote: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.

Tell ya what ...

I have all my data in Excel. I'm gonna put it into an ANKI database and I'm going to use the CMEXKai font (from the http://www.edu.tw link you provided) as my default font.

I'll go through it and painstakingly compare it against the H/R book and provide the Admin with a full report. It will take me a few days, so we'll put the conversation on hold.

At this point I will confess I'm more optimistic than I was. The TW-Kai font is very nice too -- a bit better actually, from an aesthetic point of view. But I'll go with CMEXKai because I've already seen a few more places were TW-Kai deviates from H/R and my only metric will be : How useful will it be for the student using H/R.

I'll let ya know ...

Quote:Could you maybe give some examples?

See above for the most severe examples I came across so far. Heisig deliberately chose some non-standard variants in order to be "compatible" with RtK and RSH. E.g., 寺 ("Buddhist temple") is actually 士+寸 "soldier ... glue" in the Taiwan standard form, but 土+寸 "earth ... glue" in Japan and Mainland China. Heisig understandably prefers the latter, that's OK. The Taiwanese are not too picky about that either.

I could accept that some users will want to see the Heisig style rather than the official norm, but I prefer to learn the traditional variants as used in TW and HK. Maybe I am not the only one.

Before anyone suggests offering an Options/Prefs page: This would make the site unnecessarily complex for users. I'd rather we settle on some Japanese variant closer to Heisig's for characters where components and stories would otherwise have to be altered and use the standard appearance in less critical cases.

My concerns are more of a technical nature. Text is text and should be rendered with a font. There are ways like CSS3-style font embedding or JavaScript font rendering, but I simply doubt that this is necessary. (The CSS3 method is supported in all modern browsers, but it would require "font-splitting", so that the files wouldn’t get too big.)

In any event, please use a 楷體 (Kaiti) font of some sort (regular brush handwriting style). Heisig makes that clear throughout the book: The "printed form" (called Mincho in Japanese, 明體 Mingti or 宋體 Songti in Chinese) is given for the sake of completeness, but for your handwriting you should follow the style used in the stroke order pictures. That's why in Taiwanese primary schools, most text books show text only in Kaiti.

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transalpin Wrote:Before anyone suggests offering an Options/Prefs page: This would make the site unnecessarily complex for users.

I agree. I think usability-wise, the website needs to look at displaying ONE version of each unique character, understanding that variations are inevitable and should be for the most part inconsequential as far as read/written communication in Chinese is concerned (ie. let's be practical). I hope this is correct to say..

transalpin Wrote:I could accept that some users will want to see the Heisig style rather than the official norm, but I prefer to learn the traditional variants as used in TW and HK. Maybe I am not the only one.

Where choice has to be made, as far as RevTH is concerned, I would also prefer to lean towards established standards or most frequent usage. The books provide an excellent guide to the "remembering" method, while the website and its Study area allow learners to exchange tips about possible variants, and also create stories for these variants by using different primitives.

FuDaWei's experiment may give a better idea of the extent of differences between characters printed in the book and a typical chinese font.

transalpin Wrote:In any event, please use a 楷體 (Kaiti) font of some sort (regular brush handwriting style). Heisig makes that clear throughout the book: The "printed form" (called Mincho in Japanese, 明體 Mingti or 宋體 Songti in Chinese) is given for the sake of completeness, but for your handwriting you should follow the style used in the stroke order pictures. That's why in Taiwanese primary schools, most text books show text only in Kaiti.

Interesting! So what is the Kaisho equivalent in Chinese? Or did I miss something? Do you have links to example pictures?

ファブリス Wrote:So what is the Kaisho equivalent in Chinese? Or did I miss something? Do you have links to example pictures?

Kaisho/Kaishu 楷書 ("regular script") and Kaiti 楷體 ("regular style") are almost the same thing. You could argue that one would speak of 楷書 Kaishu, the historical script in the more basic sense, as opposed to 隸書 ("clerical script") or 篆書 ("seal script").
Then 楷體 Kaiti, 明體 Mingti/宋體 Songti, 黑體 Heiti ... would be calligraphic and typographic styles as in the context of a computer font. But that’s nitpicking, I pretty much use the terms interchangeably.

Thanks for the useful information in this thread. It solved my font problems: now Anki shows me the characters in a similar way as presented in the Heisig book (Rembember the Hanzi, simplified chinese).
Here what I did:

Donwload the font from
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t...rig.tar.gz
This is the Arphic font "AR PL KaitiM GB" version 2.11 of 1999, simplified chinese, handwritten style, free of charge.
(link found in http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/china.html )

Extract the compressed file with 7zip software into MyDocuments folder.
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sevenzip/7z465.exe
I get a file called gkai00mp.ttf

Install the font in Windows XP by dragging the file gkai00mp.ttf from MyDocuments into C:\WINDOWS\fonts

Then in Anki,
go into the menu "Settings" -> "Fonts and colours",
select the "Fields" tab,
select a field that contains the Hanzi characters (for me, "Field 1: Hanzi" and "Field 8: Color"),
check the "use custom font" and "use custom size" boxes,
select the "AR PL KaitiM GB" font,
set a size (70 for me),
close.

That's it!

I just met a school girl who will be spending the next year in China as an exchange student. I told her about RSH and she liked it. Does anyone have a list of German keywords to create an anki deck?

HerrPetersen Wrote:I just met a school girl who will be spending the next year in China as an exchange student. I told her about RSH and she liked it. Does anyone have a list of German keywords to create an anki deck?

May be a bit late for you, but Heisig has a German translation.