[ファブリス]

I have received approval from Mr James Heisig and Mr Timothy Richardson, the authors of Remembering Hanzi, for creating the chinese equivalent to the current website. So this is confirmation that I will indeed, start working on a Reviewing the Hanzi website.

It could take a few months still for the website to be available, I will first put online a test version, over the period of the summer.

The books
Please use the following Amazon affiliate links to buy the books (as well as other related material), to support my work on "Reviewing the Hanzi", as well as continued work on "Reviewing the Kanji", thank you.


Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1
How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters
by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson


Remembering Traditional Hanzi: Book 1
How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters
by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson

Official page from the authors
Official page from the authors, with errata

Sample chapters
The Introduction and a sampling of the first lessons for each course is available for downloading free of charge (this is from the page above, which is in very small print)

Sample chapter for Remembering the Hanzi, Simplified
PDF, 520kb, 67 pages, approx. 100 hanzi covered in 6 lessons.

Sample chapter for Remembering the Hanzi, Traditional
PDF, 520kb, 67 pages, approx. 100 hanzi covered in 6 lessons.

WOOOHOOO!!!! Time to donate everybody.

Congrats, I've only just returned here to redo Heisig after a year off and I'm really surprised how things have moved along here.

I wish you the best of luck.

Nice!! Thanks !

thank you. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

great great news, I plan to use this down the road for certain.

I am sooo excited for this!!

Thank-you so much for your generous work! I've just donated 1€ and will remember to make a more substantial donation the next time my financial situation improves.

Yes this is great news, thanks! I hope its up soon!

Great news, I use both books to varying degrees so I can't wait for this!

How's this coming, out of curiosity?

is it still going ahead, faburisu-san?

[ファブリス]

Still going, but slowly. I need to be more strict with the RevTK todo list, it seems I always end up working on something else for RevTK. That said most of the work I'm doing now is necessary for RevTH. I wrote a tool for compiling the front end code, and with next release I'm putting the site under version control which will also be essential. I think after next release I have to freeze RevTK to create and publish a test version of RevTH. Thanks for the reminder.

Still eagerly awaiting this! I'm probably going to China next year so I'd like to be able to use a model just like RevTK when I study up for it. Thanks!!!!

Ahh, come on! Release the site already!

thecite Wrote:Ahh, come on! Release the site already!

...Patience

[ファブリス]

Yeah unfortunately it's going to be a patience thing. There is no question it'll come but there are always distractions. Now I am on a hectic preparations to volunteer abroad. I'll take a portable along.

My top priorities now are:
- Fix the open source codebase release to the last stable production release so that people can run the site fully.
- Then I might create a new branch for RevTH without waiting for endless extra refactoring, I got this idea recently and it may be a more practical approach. So the open source release is not directly related, but the exercise of setting up the open source codebase got me into version control; and then into the better possibilities through version control.

I didn't want to make a "quick hack", having two codebases is a really really bad idea.

However.. with version control this may be an option, because all the RevTH changes could be traced from the RevTK stable codebase, and a patch can be made, and the changes can be reapplied later onto a more recent release of RevTK. So that's a direction I will explore soon.

Right now I am busy setting up advertising with a new sponsor. The extra income could support me on my trip abroad. It's a great partner too.

As soon as the new open source codebase is up, anybody a little savvy with MySQL could upload new data into the database, replace kanji and keywords, without changing much code, it should work. Might have to replace some xml language tags too, easy stuff. Just make absolutely certain that you commit to a new branch!! I hope someone could help me with that. If it works I'm happy to put that online as the first RevTH version. I'll just fix some images. It may be a bit hack-ish but so long as it is based on a stable RevTK and traced through version control (Git), it will be fine. It would have to be refactored at some point, by that I mean, to create a separate "RevTH" application instead of a RevTK+hanzi hack, and I will take care of that. But for the first version (assuming someone can help me set it up), I could just checkout to a RevTH "hack", upload that, and checkout to another branch for RevTK. It's kind of simulating two apps but as branches instead of separate applications. Keep in mind that in that scenario anything not modified such as the flashcard stack display, or flashcard list page and so on, will keep on using the RevTK updates, so it's "hack-ish" but not quite as bad as a -hack, it's a workable solution to get the site up sooner.

加油！

Don't take offence to this,
but will the site be released some time within the next five years?

I think once ファブリス comes back from India things will speed up. As far as I know the second book is not due until fall (which means it will probably come out a little later, like sometime in 2011) so we got more things to wait for.

[ファブリス]

Hi thecite, I take no offense. I apologize for making early promises. I always found it hard to work on personal projects after the day job. Perhaps I sapped my own energy because I have never been comfortable with being "employed"... but I will not bore you with the details of my psyche

HerrPetersen is correct. I'm out of job when I come back to Belgium, and happy. I'll live back with my father for some time, he just asked me to cover my food expenses. I have some savings to last me for a year or so on very low expenses if it comes to that, but thanks to you all, on the good months the donations will cover a large part of my food expenses. Meaning, I'll have far more time to work on the site than I used to. So my goal now is to do the best I can to develop this site and RevTH and even if it doesn't pay the rent if I can sustain myself with the websites' income then gradually I may be onto something

THanks for your incredible patience >_<

PS: I'm currently working on a redesign with a consistent grid layout between pages which is sorely needed, as adding new pages with the current "box" design is a lot of hocus pocus.

HerrPetersen Wrote:I think once ファブリス comes back from India things will speed up. As far as I know the second book is not due until fall (which means it will probably come out a little later, like sometime in 2011) so we got more things to wait for.

I'll honestly be surprised if we see Book 2 before 2012. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised still.

Ganbatte!

I know I'm new, but take it from someone who also has massive projects that are taking too long:

It's usually a sign that it'll be done with love, tender care, and intense concentration on the small details.

I think a site that takes years is probably going to be a much better site than one that takes months. ^_^

You can do it!!

I haven't visited this site in over a year, but I thought I'd check back to see if Reviewing the Hanzi is up. If the specs are not yet set in stone, I recommend that for Hanzi, find a way to add:

1. Pronunciation (pinyin for both traditional and simplified would be extremely useful)
2. Compounds (or what they call 熟語 in Japanese)

Reasons are based on how how Hanzi are different from Kanji:

1. There is one pronunciation (in fact, one syllable!) for each Hanzi: true like 99% of the time
2. If you can remember how to read ONE of the compounds, you will know how to read the Hanzi in any context.

This is very different from Kanji where you usually have at least one 音読み and several 訓読み per Kanji, which really complicates study.

Although it's useful to go from keyword to writing a Hanzi, in general, the more connections to a Hanzi you have (sound, compounds, etc...), the easier you will remember it for the long run.

Also, for students who have already completed Reviewing the Kanji, just going through the Hanzi is too small a step - the overall learning will be much more productive to go for the pinyin readings as well.

[ファブリス]

Thank you kfmfe04, I really appreciate.

Do you know of any free Chinese equivalents of JMDICT and KANJIDIC ?

ファブリス Wrote:Do you know of any free Chinese equivalents of JMDICT and KANJIDIC ?

CC-CEDICT?