J.W. Heisig’s new books are out and about (at last):
* Remembering Traditional Hanzi, ISBN 978-0-8248-3324-4
* Remembering Simplified Hanzi, ISBN 978-0-8248-3323-7

There is a huge demand for a Hanzi adaption. This is a thread on how this web site could be useful for learners of Chinese.

There are several reasons for why this would require two new sections for RTH and RSH respectively:
* Many keywords will differ, not only from the Kanji version but also between the two hanzi editions.
* Heisig doesn’t want to burden the learner with pīnyīn romanization and rightly so. However, some users might find listening to sound files useful, which appears to make sense for Chinese. (I am not suggesting that one should learn the character from the pronunciation, but vice versa, the pronunciation from the character, since most hanzi include phonetic hints.)
* 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……)

Then again, there are also good reasons for integrating the Hanzi into kanji.koohii.com as it is today. The font problem could be solved via an “options” page, and keywords could be made editable.

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I am looking forward to make a chinese version of the site. I still need the green lights from Heisig though.

Lately I have gotten confirmation from him that both him and publisher are fine with the current site, so it's likely he will agree.

But before that I want to finish the redesign I'm working on. The site is getting old. So my plan is to ask Heisig to check out the new version when it's done, so he can see what it would look like.

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)

Quote:I am looking forward to make a chinese version of the site. […] But before that I want to finish the redesign I'm working on.

This is great news. May I ask for when you estimate the revamp to go live? What exactly are you changing with respect to Chinese? (Sorry if this has already been mentioned elsewhere in the forum.)

I just don’t want to see Traditional Hanzi neglected yet again, even though I’m aware that most learners probably couldn’t care less about them.

At present I use a flashcard app which also plays a sound file for each answered character, and I wouldn’t want to miss this feature after switching to your site. I benefit from just hearing the pronunciation with the tone every time I see the character. Not sure whether Prof. Heisig would agree, though.

Codexus Wrote:But it's possible to display both on the same page as long as html tags are used to specify language.

True, at least for Firefox. Btw, I prefer my characters displayed in a Kaiti font (e.g., BiauKai) which is more informative of stroke order, IMHO. As Heisig writes in his introduction:

Quote:You will notice variations from time to time between the printed form and the hand-drawn form of the same character. […] In any case, we recommend that you stick with the hand-drawn forms as a model for writing.

Cheers,
Georg.

Being able to see the pinyin and hear the reading of the Hanzi would be fantastic!

If we could turn it on/off for people who don't want those features, that would make everyone happy...

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@Codexus : thanks, very interesting. I heard about that, but I am still confused as to where it's useful if you encode the page in UTF-8 ?

@transalpin : Estimate for the revamp... 1-2 months? I'm working 2h30 a day on the site on average. It takes several days to design a page that looks decent... even if I had 8 hours straight it wouldn't work as after ~2h you can't see problems, you have to sleep on it. I'm not a professional designer so it's mostly incremental changes until I'm happy with something. Originally I wanted to redesign just the homepage, but then I figured the rest should follow, plus a larger layout will be handy.

Unfortunately I don't have the means to produce audio samples for each character.

ファブリス Wrote:Lately I have gotten confirmation from him that both him and publisher are fine with the current site, so it's likely he will agree.

This is welcome news... I would hate to see kanji.koohii.com go away because of some perceived copyright violation (those with the most lawyers win). Thanks again for all you do on this site!

Character variants:
The thing is, in Unicode, some characters are not encoded separately for TC, SC, J and K, even though more often than not their appearance is different in all four standards. Look at the characters 草，請，道，骨 in a Ming and a Song font respectively (Mincho is known as “Ming ti” in ROC and “Song ti” in PRC).
It just wouldn’t make sense to have two encodings for every Hanzi which contains, say, the grass radical. In TW and HK they are used to see both variants, [⺾] and [⺿] , but at school only [⺿] (4 strokes) is valid.

Audio samples:
Standard Mandarin uses only ~1300 syllables, so this is not an issue. There are several free/public-domain sound set recordings out there (quality may vary):
http://swac-collections.org/download.php
http://www.chinese-lessons.com/download.htm
http://njstar.com/mandarin_sounds.zip
http://chinesepod.com/resources/pronunciation
to mention just a few. Anyway, this is not a priority.

Site relaunch:
I’m intrigued, are you adding new features? If only the layout changes, and the backend/database stays the same, I see no compelling reason why a hanzi section should wait, but that’s up to you, of course. (And whoever did the initial design, it looks decent and professional.)

Separate or integrated Hanzi:
To answer my own question, from all that has been mentioned, I would separate T and S Chinese from Japanese, with the option of exchanging stories between Japanese and Chinese.

ファブリス Wrote:@Codexus : thanks, very interesting. I heard about that, but I am still confused as to where it's useful if you encode the page in UTF-8 ?

This is a different issue. The same unicode character could look different with a Japanese font or a Chinese font (remember that whole mess with the first version of the kanji poster?). Even though technically that's the same character, the style used can vary enough to be a problem especially for people learning to write those characters.

By specifying the language, the browser can choose to use a Chinese font to render the parts written in Chinese and a Japanese font for the parts written in Japanese.

Even if a website uses only Chinese or only Japanese, if the language is not specified and the encoding is language neutral (like utf-8), the browser can't know which font is best. This can cause problems if for example Japanese is the default font and the text is in Chinese, some characters missing in the Japanese font may be rendered with a different font.

Like many people I used to think that just using utf-8 meant that I could use any language without problems but unfortunately this isn't the case.

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@Codexus : awesome, thanks.

transalpin Wrote:There are several free/public-domain sound set recordings out there (quality may vary)

Yeah that's what I had in thought, if there is one sound per character. Definitely a possibility, but yeah this can always be added later.

Site relaunch: I am not really adding new features, although I am fixing the navigation to clearly separate "member" areas from "guest" pages. As it is, it's all mixed up. There are many small details I put on the end of the to do list because I don't have the heart to do it in the current layout. The new page presents the book straight on the frontpage. The homepage is really important and it's not doing a good job now. The main goal is to introduce more Japanese learners to RtK. Because the layout is wider (950px base, fitting into a 1024px wide desktop), I can rearrange the layout of some pages.

The Hanzi site is more work than seems at first. I'll have to figure out how to handle traditional and simplified (most likely a user setting). Make sure the proper characters are being displayed, find out the public databases where I can extract the info, rewrite the Perl scripts to extract that data into the hanzi equivalent database, figure out what to do with the Study area if trditional/simplified use different primitives, etc.

Quote:I'll have to figure out how to handle traditional and simplified (most likely a user setting).

Fabrice,
as argued previously, I recommend setting up two completely separate environments for Traditional and Simplified Characters, the main reason being that Heisig also wrote two distinct books with different frame numbering, different keywords, etc. Traditional Hanzi have arguably less in common with Simplified Hanzi than with Kanji. Take the character [愛/爱], for instance. A lot of S have more than one T equivalent each, e.g., [干] (in Simplified) can mean any of the following, 乾 or 干 or 幹 in Traditional Chinese!

However, it would be useful at some point to allow for comparison between the three variants, so one could copy good stories for those characters which look identical on both sides of the Taiwan strait. But bottom line is, that not much rewriting of the Perl scripts will be required to accommodate the Hanzi sections.

Let’s set up a test environment in a collaborative effort now rather than later (I would help inputting the keywords from the RTH book).

I am really excited about a (Simplified) version of this website.

I will wait to buy Remember the Simplified Hanzi till after this website is ready!

Thanks man.

Any update on an RTH site?

Just a note.. I welcome the Hanzi on the site, but really we should keep the traditional and the simplified completely separate I think, and hope.
Not to be picky but it seems to me a political matter as well and should not be forgotten, since mainland china uses the simplified version and Taiwan for ex. the traditional one.
and they are not "one" chinese country as mainland China wishes and brag out loud...

sorry, but I have to ask, I simply cant wait


How's work going on the RSH/RTH site? What's the timeline for it?

In the meantime has anyone made Anki decks of RTH?

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@diephysiker : I don't have a timeline I'm sorry. I am well underway with the site's refactoring though (about 40% done, been very busy the last 3 weeks), and that is the absolute requisite for creating another site. I'm really hoping to push the refactored site online before end of February, I would expect a RTH version to take a month maybe next to the day job.. Don't hesitate to bug me in a couple weeks or a month, or bump this thread, always help to see people are interested. Also please don't forget that I still haven't asked Heisig directly about this, I expect he would agree on the same terms than RevTK, however he's not alone this time, we have to hope that Dr. Timothy W. Richardson will also be sympathetic to it. I don't wanna put the cart before the horse so I'll contact them when I feel ready to start coding the site in question.

Is there anything non-coding related that we could do to help with the creation? Donations? Typing in stories?

Looking forward to the Hanzi site!

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Well I will need the indexres at some point (character, lesson number, keyword) for both simplified and traditional. I don't know if it was discussed before. Perhaps someone has already made Anki/Mnemosyne decks for it?

I have the Simplified Hanzi book, and have just started going through it.

If you let me know what specific format you need that information, I could prepare the file for you as I proceed through the book.

Let me know if you need the help, and I'll see that it gets done.

- Harvey

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Hi Harvey the information I'll need eventually for a possible RtH site is similar to Ziggr's "heisig-data" file, eg. "heisig number", "character (utf8)", "lesson number", "keyword". Anything else is filled in by cross checking with a hanzi database, I think there is a chinese equivalent of KANJIDIC somewhere. I don't have the RtH books.

[Katsuo]

saikyo Wrote:I could prepare the file for you as I proceed through the book.

I've have a file for this (number/keyword/hanzi/reading). But I haven't checked it through for errors. Would you like a copy? – it's easier to check data rather than type it all in yourself. You would need to add the chapter numbers.

Fabrice,
I can give you the excel file I made for the traditional book. It has the hanzi number, keyword and pronunciation.

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@majesticmarquis : sure, please send me a hello from the contact form, that way you'll get my email address and you can reply with an attachment. (I avoid posting, even mangled email address here since I still received some spam from time to time x_X)

Katsuo, sounds good. I'll contact you privately so that I can get the file.