Haha, very cool. I look forward to getting my copy.

Amazing. So that character in Jarvik7's avatar is a real character after all. Since according the wikipedia article it's not in dictionaries, why is it known as "#50,001"?

It is the final character Heisig presents (in a second postscript of the book). He used 50,000 as an estimate of the number of characters in a modern dictionary and as this isn't included in modern dictionaries he presents it as the final character... #50,001.

Oh, that makes sense.

kusterdu Wrote:Amazing. So that character in Jarvik7's avatar is a real character after all. Since according the wikipedia article it's not in dictionaries, why is it known as "#50,001"?

It's just a silly made-up character invented by a noodle company (hence not in dictionaries)

However, its not that complex once you break it down into individual components. Pretty interesting Heisig included it; presumably it's just there so you can bust it out and show of the RTH method to your friends, and also wow Chinese people (most of whom will know it but won't be able to write it).

To be honest, I'm not even sure it would be worthwhile to go to the trouble of making up a story for it. Once you observe all the primitives that are contained in it, it should be easy enough to remember.

I tent use my stories to remember the primitives and placements of them; not sure if I could do it without (long term I mean)

Also the order in which you write the primitives is highly unusual. Check out the mnemonic in the Wikipedia entry, the ordering goes against everything previously learnt.

Aphasiac, you make a really important point when you say "remember the primitives and placements". This might not be the right thread to debate this in detail, but when I did Heisig, I was very careful to make sure my stories represented the positioning of the primitives. In an article entitled "Tips & Tricks for Heisig Visualisations" (you can find my blog through my ID if you want) I give some examples of how I did this, and how I felt the stories were - at those times - better than the Heisig ones. IMHO :-)

aphasiac Wrote:Also the order in which you write the primitives is highly unusual. Check out the mnemonic in the Wikipedia entry, the ordering goes against everything previously learnt.

I noticed a couple of irregularities:
long 長s before horse 馬
heart 心 before moon 月 and knife 刂
Weird.

***If anyone's already received RTH2, is there any way we can convince you to post just a quick list of characters from lesson 6 and possibly 7?***

(No detail needed: just the characters themselves would be enough.)

I ordered right away when the books were announced and my order shipped, but given that I live in Canada, I still haven't received my books and I'm chomping at the bit to study.

If someone could oblige so that I can study farther than the L1-5 online sample, I would really appreciate it and owe you a huge one. If you need any favours, let me know and I'd be happy to help in any way I can. (I'm an upper intermediate Chinese student, and have loads of downloaded Chinese movies, so I could send you some on DVD or help you with your studies in some way.)

What bad timing! I just moved to China, where I currently have no permanent address, plus shipping will take longer and be more expensive...

I would be interested in working on a RTH2 deck, but I can't contribute much! One thing I can do is add the Wubizixing codes for each character. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, look it up, it's a great input method to make sure you don't forget how to write characters when you type on your computer. It's only for simplified characters though.

My RTH2 book arrived today!

Shipped on Feb 10th so took 13 days to get to Taiwan - not bad!

How are we doing on the shared deck idea. Should I start by making the spreadsheet on google docs?

Ok here's my shared spreadsheet for Remembering the Traditional Hanzi book 2:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...HpLVnVNbGc

Only added the hanzi from the online sample so far, but will start on the new book asap. If you want to be a contributor/editor, PM me with your gmail address and we'll try and share the workload somehow!

On the same topic; anyone have any tips on entering new hanzi quickly, when you don't know how they're pronnounced? Is sketching them using the Microsoft IME drawing pad really the best way?

I just had an idea to make input faster. Type the keyword into the spreadsheet, then cut and paste the keyword into translate.google.com (set to English > Traditional Chinese). Almost certainly, one of the words it translates to will contain the target hanzi in the correct computer font (worth noting; sometimes Heisig uses non-standard hanzi forms in his book that don't exist in the real world)

Just got mine in Taiwan today too! Have a final tomorrow but ready to start working on this over the weekend. I pm'd you, Aphasiac.

As for input of characters with unknown pinyin, wouldn't it be best to just flip back to Index 1, which lists characters by Heisig # order and includes pinyin?

Got RTH2 yesterday and already learned 100 Hanzi o.0
I want to be a part of the google doc thingy too.
I pm'd you also, Aphasiac.

How long did it take to get to Antarctica?

The real question is "how did the delivery man not get eaten by penguins?"

Thanks peeps, got your PMs. Have added you as editors on the spreadsheet, and have made a start adding data.

The way I want to share the workload is simple; just when you want to contribute, just go to the spreadsheet, find the next blank lesson and input all keywords/hanzi/info for that lesson. Try to do a full lesson at a time, and don't worry about version control; Google docs tells you if someone else if editing, allows us to chat and highlights the cells that are being edited (if someone is already working on it, go to the next lesson and add that instead).

As for the actual Anki deck; you can currently download the spreadsheet as a CSV, and import into Anki however you like. Once the spreadsheet is complete I will add it all to the RTH1 deck already available, and share it via ankiweb.

Unfadeable Wrote:As for input of characters with unknown pinyin, wouldn't it be best to just flip back to Index 1, which lists characters by Heisig # order and includes pinyin?

Yes that makes sense, though the index doesn't contain keywords, so might involve a bit of page flipping.

On a side note, anyone know an IME that outputs pinyin with tonemarks as well as chinese characters? To be honest I'm still in 2 minds as to whether to type in the readings; The reading field may be useful to some, but they can be easily auto-generated in Anki making it redundant.

Does anyone know if Remembering the Traditional Hanzi and Remembering the Simplified Hanzi are structured differently? Obviously the characters look different but I'm wondering if they're still introduced in the same order.

drungood Wrote:Does anyone know if Remembering the Traditional Hanzi and Remembering the Simplified Hanzi are structured differently? Obviously the characters look different but I'm wondering if they're still introduced in the same order.

This thread contains a spreadsheet showing a full Comparison between Reviewing the Kanji 1 (RTK), Reviewing the Traditonal Hanzi 1 (RTH) and Reviewing the Simplified Hanzi 1 (RSH):

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7263

As you'll see, a number of keywords are different and a number of hanzi are introduced in a different order (mainly due to differences in primitives). The 2nd books are likely to be different too.

aphasiac Wrote:As for the actual Anki deck; you can currently download the spreadsheet as a CSV, and import into Anki however you like. Once the spreadsheet is complete I will add it all to the RTH1 deck already available, and share it via ankiweb.

Great to hear you'll be handling uploading it to the Anki shared decks. This is definitely the most efficient way, thanks for quarterbacking everything.

aphasiac Wrote:To be honest I'm still in 2 minds as to whether to type in the readings; The reading field may be useful to some, but they can be easily auto-generated in Anki making it redundant.

Yeah in the interest of saving time and getting us into those hanzi as soon as possible, why not let the toolkit handle it? I don't even try to do pinyin in conjunction with Heisig so it makes no difference to me.

I like the idea of having the pinyin in the spreadsheet. I won't use it immediately, but after I learn all the Hanzi (which will be in like 2 or 3 weeks), I want to learn how to pronounce them. It's just way easier to have it in a spreadsheet with the pronunciation so you can print it off and learn it while you're in the middle of class or going on a walk or something... Also, I plan on adding 100 Hanzi a day to the spreadsheet. Yesterday, I added about 150.

To generate the readings, I've just been cutting and pasting entire columns of hanzi into google translate (set to chinese > chinese). The translation gives a column of pinyin with tone-marks which i can paste back into the spreadsheet - takes about 10 seconds per lesson

Only issue using this method, just one reading is given per hanzi, presumably the most common one. Some have multiple readings, some might be wrong, and some might not match the Heisig book - i've not been checking.

Don't assume it's the most common. I uploaded a deck to Anki maybe two years back called "Taiwan all grades" or something like that with something like 5000 characters with automatically generated tones and definitions. I never used the deck or I would have caught it, but on closer inspection (only a couple months ago) I found that it had basically just taken whichever was the first reading and definition in CC-CEDICT, which is certainly not always the most common (中 was zhòng, for instance). I don't have the time to go back through and correct it, but I also don't want to take it down because it has proven to be fairly popular (as such things go), so I'm unfortunately just leaving it there and hoping people figure out that there are errors.