Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters

"Volume 1 uses mnemonics (like Heisig) in order to teach the meaning, the stroke order and the pronunciation of over 800 characters and about 1400 compound words (everything you need for HSK level A plus some additional common characters). As opposed to Heisig, this book gives stories for every single character as well as an extra story for the pronunciation. Each story is very short and about half of the stories include an image. The book is excellent and applies very well to Chinese (unlike Heisig's book about hanzi)."


Sprachprofi is an active member in HTLAL. She says:

Sprachprofi Wrote:I so wish I had had this book when starting to learn Chinese! While studying on my own, I was fascinated with Chinese characters, but I never managed to retain them. During an immersion course in Beijing, I learned to memorize Chinese characters by rote, just writing them over and over again - it worked for the 6 weeks I was there since I had classes every day and used the characters a lot. However, back home and only studying Chinese once a week or so, I quickly forgot all but the most common ones again.

Then I stumbled upon James Heisig and his method for learning Kanji (Chinese-derived characters used in Japanese). It was enlightening! I actually remembered the characters, and I can still remember them several years later! Unfortunately many characters in his book aren't really useful when learning Chinese, or they may even teach you incorrectly due to the meanings having changed over time. But I had learned what method would work for people with an analytical Western mindset like me, people who don't have a good memory for pictures and who hate the dull, time-consuming and ineffective Eastern method of writing characters over and over again.

From then on, I used a similar method to learn new Chinese characters I'd encounter or old ones that refused to stick. It was tedious though. My incomplete knowledge of Chinese characters wouldn't let me see the most useful order in which to learn characters and their parts; wouldn't let me distinguish between really useful ones and obsolete ones, and so on. I also had trouble memorizing the pronunciation and especially the tone with each character.

The sample of Heisig for Chinese was a disappointment, as it didn't tackle these problems. The characters introduced are mostly the same as in the Japanese version, never mind their usefulness (or lack thereof) in Chinese, the book doesn't even mention the pronunciation of a character and after the first few lessons you're left alone to invent stories and links.


When I got this book, "Learning Chinese Characters", I immediately knew that I had found the answer to all those years of searching. This book is everything I would have wished for as a beginning student of Chinese and more:

- explanation of how Chinese characters work and how to write them, plus stroke order diagrams with each character
- introducing basic elements through pictures
- introducing more complex elements through short and memorable stories that combine the basic elements, sometimes also accompanied by an illustrating picture
- stories also remind you of the pronunciation, including a special mnemonic for the tone
- teaches the 800 most basic Chinese characters, with a focus on the ones necessary for the HSK Level A exam, and there's a story or picture for *every single character*. It doesn't leave you alone after the first few steps.
- the most useful characters (e. g. the ones for "to be", "I", "you", "good", and so on) are actually taught in the first few lessons, even though these are hard to teach and some books avoid them on purpose. This will be extremely useful for students using this book alongside a beginner's Chinese course.
- also teaches words if they can be formed using only characters that were already taught
- based on simplified characters, as these are the most common ones today, but equivalent traditional characters are given in brackets if different

Great job, authors! I haven't yet found anything worth complaining about, so my rating is 5 stars!

Level A is just the grade of the kyuu. It just depends on the total score you get.

800 hanzi is actually just basic kyuu, the equivalent of jlpt4. Advanced kyuu is 2865 hanzi.

I'll keep an eye out for this though. If it has a system for tones it may be worth it.

Ok Jarv lol, I think the answer to your question is a No.




I doubt this would be efficient at all, I mean it reminds me of this guy who used to make stories here that were a crock of shit. Don't get me wrong, I love to hear about new methods and what not, but I do think people get a little materialistic with these sorts of things. There is a point where we can do nothing but raw memorisation, I ain't no acoustic psychologist but I don't see the point in associating an extra story just for learning the sound, when I can learn the sound directly. It may work fine for N = 1 to 10 or something characters, but when you take N to 100, 200,... 3000 the algorithm will be inefficient

Jarvik7 Wrote:800 hanzi is actually just basic kyuu, the equivalent of jlpt4. Advanced kyuu is 2865 hanzi.

I know, but remember it is volume 1.

Volume 2 will come out soon.

I am learning the characters for Chinese and my system is to just incorporate the tone as one element of the story. Basically, I assigned a meaning to each tone, and make sure to consistently use it.

* For 1st tone, there must be an image of something stretching out, like an arm or a gaze
* For 2nd tone, there will be an image of something being lifted
* For 3rd tone, something in the story will be upside-down
* For the 4th tone, something in the story will be falling/tripping/dropping

Since I already know the radicals (or am able to make up names for the new ones), it has been easy enough to just go through a frequency list in order. The one I am using is http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

If I already know a word from my listening practice, then the pronunciation is super easy, but if not, I use a variety of methods to remember it. One is using something in the story that sounds like it (shu: shoe, zhan: John), another is to relate the hanzi to another with the same pronunciation that I already know (原:yuan, 員:yuan).

The book includes special mnemonics for tones.

You can browse a large part of this great book from Google Book or this link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=YweFHwP...4#PPA15,M1

Read page 18 in the link above for tones.

By the way, is there any way to download from Google Books?

About the simplified stuff. They are most common in China. In Taiwan and Hong Kong this is not true. Simplified X Traditional depends of course of where you want to go, and what you want to do.

I have played around with mnemonics for tones but found out that for me works best:
Brute force the pronounciation (without tones) and only occasionally add Heisig-style mnemonics for the tones.

I like how it describes the stories process on Page 16 "More about stories".

Quote:"Again, it is only the meaning you need to remember. Don't try to remember the whole story verbatim. Use the story as a bridge to get you to the meaning.

We should also stress that this story is simply an aid to remembering that the character X means Y; the story does not represent the historical reason why X has come to mean Y. The stories are simply our way of helping you to familiarize yourself with the characters and to remember them in a simple and effective way. Often the stories will be humorous, a bit strange or bizarre, or may even seem silly, but that is just what's needed to make them stick in your memory.

If you really picture the scenes in your mind's eye, that is all the work you need to do, and the story will stick. Brute force repetition is not needed. ...

At this stage it may seem quicker to simply learn the equations off by rote, but it will be a different matter when you have covered dozens of equations and are trying to remember them without mixing them up. Using pictures (and later on, making your own vivid pictures in your mind's eye) makes it much easier to remember them all, even though on the face of it you are trying to remember "extra" information. Think about how easily you remember the basic story of a movie despite the background "richness" of hundreds of details, and compare this with how hard it is to remember isolated "bold" facts such as addresses or lists."

That's a great explanation, and applies equally well to RTK. All too often when we see people who say Heisig is not working for them, it's because of not following this information.

I like that the stories for pronunciation follow on from the story for the writing, and they have a specific keyword for the pitch. This book looks a lot better than pict-o-krapix.

ahibba Wrote:Sprachprofi is an active member in HTLAL. She says:

Is that Judith from germanpod101? She's awesome.

Codexus Wrote:Is that Judith from germanpod101? She's awesome.

Yes, she is.

D'you work on commission?

Codexus, you are Swiss, so you must speak German very well. But I noticed that you speak to Judith in English, why? Don't all people in Switzerland know German?

aaronvanvalen Wrote:D'you work on commission?

Why do you ask?

@ahibba: Haha, no unfortunately I don't know much German. I did have some lessons in school 20 years ago (I feel so old when I say that v___v) and even got good grades most of the time but that didn't mean I was learning anything beyond what was necessary for the tests. Kids in the French speaking part of Switzerland are always very reluctant to learn German. So as soon as I didn't have to continue I forgot everything.

I'd like to get started again and finally learn some German but I've been trying to start too many languages at once and gave up. But at least I know that Japanese is my priority.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Level A is just the grade of the kyuu. It just depends on the total score you get.

800 hanzi is actually just basic kyuu, the equivalent of jlpt4. Advanced kyuu is 2865 hanzi.

I'll keep an eye out for this though. If it has a system for tones it may be worth it.

Biang-Biang.

Has anybody compared RTH simplified to Tuttle and identified if all 800 HSK Hanzi are in the Heisig book? I own the Tuttle book, and in my opinion Heisig is FAR superior, so I don't have much motivation to read through the Tuttle book. I do like the way it has the 800 HSK in it though. I think Heisig is better because it forces one to be creative instead of being spoon fed. I am a college math teacher, so I really appreciate not being spoon fed information forever! Just my opinion.

lavallo, there are HSK lists all over the place online. Use Heisig, then glance over an HSK list to see if there are any you didn't learn from RTH/RSH. It should be relatively painless to learn a handful of HSK A characters, especially since you'll encounter them very frequently anyway.

I'm sure Katsuo will bang out a non-heisig hsk list at some point.