Is it a good idea to add pronunciation to RSH along with its keyword or meaning, given that Chinese has fewer readings than Japanese?

If so, is there an Anki deck available for this?

Thanks
Aqua

RTH?

Of course, it's a good idea. If you can handle that much information at once, go for it.

There is an anki deck that includes all the information including stroke count and pinyin readings, just search for Heisig or Remembering the Hanzi.

I display the pinyin along with the keyword, but I don't make any effort to remember it. Just passive learning for me. I actually waited until I made it through all 1500 cards before setting it to display. So now I see them as I do my daily review. Reinforces the vocabulary I'm learning.

I would add all the readings, but not specifically study them. Once you are learning "real" material, you will have the aha-effect when reviewing your hanzi.

i think it's totally worth it and it's what I intend to do when I start mandarin. Just think of some mnemonic for each possible character reading and use it as a primitive element in your stories. It might even be possible to learn the tones in this way. Just make a primitive element for each tone (could be colors or shapes or whatever) and add it to the story.

Thanks. However, doesn't adding the readings and attempting to rememer the tones defeat the purpose of the program? Wouldn't it be deleterious to your progress given that the author himself made an effort to seperate the two learning processes?

Or, becuse Chinese usually only has 1 reading per hanzi, compared to Japanese, perhaps it makes sense with Chinese and the author failed to realise this?


I just downloaded the main Hanzi Anki deck from the Anki download option. However, I have no idea how to get the Pinyin displayed, also the character looks miniscule on my 15inch monitor. Can anybody familiar with Anki help me out?

Thanks
Alan

aqublue Wrote:Thanks. However, doesn't adding the readings and attempting to rememer the tones defeat the purpose of the program? Wouldn't it be deleterious to your progress given that the author himself made an effort to seperate the two learning processes?

Or, becuse Chinese usually only has 1 reading per hanzi, compared to Japanese, perhaps it makes sense with Chinese and the author failed to realise this?

Yeah. That's it. Also, I think the preface to RTH might be a rewrite of RTK. I've not looked at it yet so I can only assume.

When I move from RtK to RTH, I plan to have the audio, pinyin, and color coding for the tones to be shown on the answer, but will only actively work on learning keyword -> hanzi.

It's amazing how much you can retain from passive exposure, and I'm sure a second pass through will show that it's easy to pick up the readings after having seen and heard them several times.

@aqublue - Most of us (here at least) don't adhere precisely to the book's recommendations. In that sense, adding readings whilst doing RTK is fairly common in different variations. I probably would keep them separate but learn the readings in batches as I went along (per my recommendations late in the Japanese Keywords thread), but I could also see mixing readings into stories. I've done that after finishing RTK when I come across new kanji, perhaps because at this point kanji-learning with the RevTK method is old hat for me.

Also, are you learning both Chinese and Japanese? Because you asked about Japanese methods post-RTK before, no?

Myself, I'd just wait until starting on the actual language. Until you're learning words and sentences, it's just a bunch of "zhong"s and "you"s. I don't know how to include a mnemonic for a sound that is probably new to begin with(when the heck does "zhong" sound similar to to a monolingual English speaker?)

I agree with yukamina and think you should wait until you start learning sentences. Right now you don't have any contextual information to go along with the sound. On the other hand, when you're learning a new word or sentence, for example 他有一个哥哥 (ta1 you3 yi1 ge ge1ge), you will have 4 words to anchor in your mind, and instead of just being a bunch of zhong's and you's it'll sound more like a musical progression of sounds and tones. The sentence meaning and form itself will help you remember the sounds.

Montrealer Wrote:It's amazing how much you can retain from passive exposure, and I'm sure a second pass through will show that it's easy to pick up the readings after having seen and heard them several times.

I had the audios on the hanzi side of the cards so it would automatically play upon display and eventually I should inevitably think “zhòng” and “yóu” whenever I’m confronted with a “眾” and a “游” respectively. I’m not sure about how effective it really was. If nothing else, it didn’t hurt either.

What I also did was incorporating colours for tones into the stories (as suggested above), which I often felt restrained me in creating them but occationally also helped come up with a picture. There was plenty of blood for the first tone and green grass for the third. It gets old. Try not to associate the colour with one of the primitives or you’ll soon get them mixed up.

Whenever I failed to remember the tone for a particular character I rated it as “hard”. Now I’m using the same colours in the sentences deck.

“zhóng” and “yòu” whenever I’m confronted with a “眾” and a “游” respectively.

You've got these tones wrong, 众 is zhong4 and 游 is you2. (ie. 观众， 旅游）.

This is part of the problem with learning readings out of context. Although most characters only have one reading, characters with two or more readings are not by any stretch rare.

By all means, show the reading if you like, but the main thing with Heisig is to get it out of the way as fast as possible so you can start in on real Chinese (and not be handicapped by sucking at Hanzi).

zer0range Wrote:By all means, show the reading if you like, but the main thing with Heisig is to get it out of the way as fast as possible so you can start in on real Chinese (and not be handicapped by sucking at Hanzi).

So many people seem to stop right here, or jump straight from RTK to RTH or vice-versa...forgetting that when doing this method this just brings you to the starting point.

Don´t specifically study the readings yet.

You can put them on the front of the cards without having any problems/wasting a significant amount of time, though.

The whole point of this system is that it is far easier to learn how a character is read when you already know how it is written.

transalpin Wrote:...

What I also did was incorporating colours for tones into the stories (as suggested above), which I often felt restrained me in creating them but occationally also helped come up with a picture. There was plenty of blood for the first tone and green grass for the third. It gets old. Try not to associate the colour with one of the primitives or you’ll soon get them mixed up.

Whenever I failed to remember the tone for a particular character I rated it as “hard”. Now I’m using the same colours in the sentences deck.

I just meant showing the hanzi in the color that represents its tone, which can be done automatically by the Mandarin plugin for Anki.

how hard do you think it is to think up a consistent mnemonic for each reading?

learning onyomi with RTK was a complete no brainer for me, but I just checked a pinyin chart and there look to be over 500 unique readings....
What if you just assign a mnemonic to each of the 21 consonant sounds and work that into the story? Having just the first consonant might be enough to recall the full pinyin reading.

zer0range Wrote:You've got these tones wrong, 众 is zhong4 and 游 is you2. (ie. 观众， 旅游.

Corrected, thanks. When I added the accents at 2 am I wasn’t all too attentive anymore. Nevertheless, tone mnemonics did work for me, even if it doesn’t seem like it.

Montrealer, I was referring to nadiatims’ post.

nadiatims Wrote:how hard do you think it is to think up a consistent mnemonic for each reading?

Your idea is nice, but I’m not convinced. I wouldn’t recommend learning the readings explicitly, you’d be giving it all away!

You might have noticed that many of the ma’s contain a 馬, and from there it’s only a small step to using the pronunciation as a mnemonic for the character. Great for native speakers, however, this would defeat the whole purpose of the Heisig method. The idea behind RTH is that at the end of the day (or year?) you can use these primitive elements as a mnemonic for the pronunciation, not vice versa. I guess that’s what HerrPetersen was referring to with “aha-effect” above.

In other words, associating the character to a reading which in turn is mapped to its meaning doesn’t stick just as well as associating the character with the English keyword directly. I hope that makes sense.