After restarting RTH multiple times due to getting bored and burning out around the 700 mark every time I've been thinking of ways to make this a little less tedious.

How about combining sentences with RTH. For every character find a very short sentence that contains that character and learn it as well. At first the sentences will contain a lot of unknown characters but as you go on more and more of the sentence will be known to you. You could even rote memorize the most frequent 20 or so characters(I, You, him, them...etc) to start you off since many beginner sentence examples will contain those characters.

Any thoughts on this?

I have a couple thoughts on this. ^_^ - http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=84884#p84884

What you need to take from RTH is not the memorized thousand or so characters, but the ability to use mnemonics/visualization to acquire and retain new characters with relative ease.

So, if you feel comfortable in your ability to do this, to look at even complex characters and easily break them down into components and memorize them, ditch RTH and start doing sentences right away.

When Japanese learners finish RtK, they often go on to sentences. I've been looking for a good source of sentences for those who are working on or who have finished RSH and RTH, but without much luck.

I've seen two books that might be useful to mine, but I haven't found an Anki deck (or a text file) of their contents.
"Speak Mandarin in 500 Words" by the Government of Taiwan (http://edu.ocac.gov.tw/interact/ebook/di...asp?Lang=E) and
"Rapid Literacy in Chinese" by Zhang Pengpeng (http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Literacy-Chi...780052695X), which has 750 characters.

I did find two sources that I was able to process: "20,000+ Mandarin HSK Sentences v.2" Anki deck and "CC-CEDICT". Neither of these fits exactly what I'm looking for. For both, I filtered out the entries with hanzi not in RSH v.1 and then sorted the results by the Heisig RSH Index needed to read the entry. My results are summarized below.
Does anyone know of better source material?

== results ==

"20,000+ Mandarin HSK Sentences v.2" Anki deck
After sorting and filtering, a little less than 6600 sentence remained.
Some of the sentences are good: (from the first 40)
世界上有七大洲。 There are seven continents in the world. 259
江河大多流入海洋. Most rivers flow into the sea. 692
Some are a little odd: (from the first 200)
她安葬在亡夫的墓旁. She was laid to rest beside her late husband. 725
谁将起草起诉状？ Who will draft the indictment? 935
The biggest problem I have with this group is that so few sentences can be read in the beginning: Only 5 could be read by frame 500, 70 by 800, 350 by 1000, 600 by 1100, 1880 by 1300, and 3800 by 1400.
Also, only simplified forms are given.

"CC-CEDICT" -- a dictionary, not really a source for sentences
After sorting and filtering, I also removed the single character entries. As expected, 97,000+ entries provided many more results: over 46,000. But this was an embarrassment of riches since there are too many to handle. To be useful, the frequency of the entries would need to be found somewhere so the most commonly used subset could be learned first.
A couple of entries for the first few characters include
一五一十 lit. count by fives and tens (idiom); to narrate systematically and in full detail 10
晶晶 the full moon 23

Sounds like Hanzi needs the equivalent of 2001KO. With such an organized list, sorted sentences would be much easier to digest.

Yep, that's what I'm after. Anyone know if such a thing might exist?

Montrealer Wrote:Does anyone know of better source material?

The John DeFrancis readers.

2cents..

Check out the Zhongwen Red series, I mined all of it when I started; I also mined the first 30 lessons or so of the DLI materials but that was just to make sure I kept a 4.0 (as an aside, using immersion and Anki makes even 'fast' paced courses slow as molasses).

While you're doing this, there's no reason that you can't start in on simple materials like Disney movies. They're exact subbed, use pretty simple language/pronunciation and will get you used to the native materials that you're going to have to use to reach fluency.

http://www.nciku.com is a godsend. The comprehensiveness, Chinese-Chinese option, and massive amounts of example sentences are really impressive. An approach that I regularly use, especially now that I'm focusing primarily on news broadcasts, is that if I hear one word, instead of spending the next 5-10 minutes figuring out the entire sentence, just grab an example sentence of off nciku. You can do the same with any material.

There's always Assimil. Sentences with audio recordings, and all structured for a beginner, so they are n+1 (not quite so easy to do with Chinese, I'd imagine, but people reccomend the course). I have no experience with the Chinese course, but all Assimil courses are very high quality. I'm doing fine with the Japanese course now.