If you have learned a lot of Hanzi, how did you do it?

I don't know what you consider a useful amount of characters to know (I'm sure there's a billion threads about that taking up most of the internet), but as it is more than what you need for Kanji, I'm just wondering how you have successfully broken up the learning process/gone for it full throttle.

E.g. It's easy to say you can do RTK1 in 6 weeks if you keep up the pace, but are you then going to say that you can do a similar proportion of Hanzi in 'only' 12 weeks - if you keep up the pace?

I hope you get my point.

I will need to get a good approach sorted out soon!

Many thanks for your advice.

Just start doing it, you can plan forever.

Adjust your method to suit as you progress.

(disclaimer: I've not done the Hanzi, and am just under half way through the Kanji, after starting in January).

edit: I realise that was a bit flippant. If I'd spent a little time searching online I'd have discovered RevTK and shaved a few months off my (still ongoing) Kanji studying. Although I actually discovered RTK because I'd started to teach myself the Kana, got frustrated doing them rote after about 4 characters, and found Heisig after searching around for a more effective method.

amillerchip Wrote:(disclaimer: I've not done the Hanzi

hah caught you!

Thanks for your input though!

If you have done RTK, you already know a fair amount of Chinese characters, enough to acquire 20-30K (my guesstimate) of fairly frequent Chinese words. It's simple: most multi-characters compounds in Japanese are themselves Chinese words. You can say the same for multi-character compounds in Korean.

So if you have done RTK, just jump in the deep end of the pool and learn Chinese words ***with what you already know***.

Then just add the new characters you need to your production line (Anki) as you did when you were doing RTK, as you encounter them in your readings. If you have done RTK, you shouldn't have a need for other people's stories, I presume.

Most estimates I've seen is that you need in the order of 6K Chinese characters to understand newspapers. But that is misleading as a metric, since 6K characters create 10 times (my guesstimate) more compounds, and so "knowing" 6K characters does not mean that you can understand the meaning of all the compounds in which they appear.

louischa Wrote:If you have done RTK, you already know a fair amount of Chinese characters, enough to acquire 20-30K (my guesstimate) of fairly frequent Chinese words. It's simple: most multi-characters compounds in Japanese are themselves Chinese words. You can say the same for multi-character compounds in Korean.

So if you have done RTK, just jump in the deep end of the pool and learn Chinese words ***with what you already know***.

Then just add the new characters you need to your production line (Anki) as you did when you were doing RTK, as you encounter them in your readings. If you have done RTK, you shouldn't have a need for other people's stories, I presume.

Most estimates I've seen is that you need in the order of 6K Chinese characters to understand newspapers. But that is misleading as a metric, since 6K characters create 10 times (my guesstimate) more compounds, and so "knowing" 6K characters does not mean that you can understand the meaning of all the compounds in which they appear.

Nice to know, I did RTK up to 3007 characters. I have deleted a lot of it, because i no longer need it(non-common+super rare/awkward meanings). People say you could do RTH fast, within a few weeks or possible the best way I think would work is: (not sure if someone has done this before) just have the characters that weren't in RTK and what you have left over is good enough.

ta12121 Wrote:People say you could do RTH fast, within a few weeks or possible the best way I think would work is: (not sure if someone has done this before) just have the characters that weren't in RTK and what you have left over is good enough.

Now, I haven't done any studying of Chinese, but from the little exposure I've had to Chinese sentences (and trying to decipher them ) I have noticed that there are some different meanings between the Chinese meanings of the characters and that of the Japanese ones (though I'm not certain how frequent this kind of thing is).

One such incident I can think of is with 回, which seems to mean 'return' (equivalent to 帰) (though I'm not sure what is put in RtH) in Chinese and not '-times' or 'spin' or any of those Japanese meanings.

If I ever learn Chinese though, I'll probably do something along those lines, but just search for different meanings as well.

Use RTH to learn how to learn and remember characters, and then take a pragmatic approach, learning characters that are unfamiliar in whatever materials you're using.

Thanks for the replies. So you are all "pragmatists". That makes sense...

You are quite right that RTK will help a lot with the Hanzi situation. Plus of course learning new characters gets easier as you have more experience.

I was thinking of perhaps consolidating the RTK ones by checking up on any Chinese variants of characters I already know, then maybe working from there with a frequency list (minus the RTK of course).

To Sizen who mentioned differing meanings like 回, I would try to put the new meaning in the same mental box as the old one, as they are likely to be related. In this case, I would say that "something that returns" can also be something that returns a certain "number of times". If you have a spinning plate with a dot on it, the dot keeps coming back to you repeatedly, so it's exemplifying both meanings. -I just look to see how the the ideas can be linked. If they ever were really different (I think unlikely) then I would "attach" the new meaning to the old one by saying "it means A, B, C, but sometimes X" so they get filed in the same place anyway.

I am in the middle of the FINAL RTK pass-through. Yes, I will learn EVERY ONE this time. I can hardly believe how long this has taken since I first wrote a Kanji. It took a few years to find the right method. It has taken a few years to actually use the method properly! Well, at least I know how to do it now

Thanks everyone, ありがとう, 谢谢 AND 謝謝!!

I know one needs to learn new meanings for hanzi characters, as the meanings between the two kanji may have different meanings in the 2 languages. But i remember I had to learn the real meanings of kanji characters in context and it didn't come from doing RTK. It came from doing context+vocab learning

I would be curious to hear from the hardy souls who have decided to tackle both languages (日本語 and 中国語) at the same time, because I think there is a great risk of confusion.

Some years back, I took Korean 101. In Korean for instance, library is "tosogwan", but I already knew "tu2shu1guan3" in Chinese, and there was much interference, as my brain was constantly trying to say the Chinese version when I was hesitantly trying to utter Korean sentences. Add that to the Japanese "toshokan" and a few thousand words later, your brain becomes a huge mess.

I concluded that the "troïka" Korean-Japanese-Chinese are like Italian, Spanish and Portuguese: choose one and learn it to mastery before tackling any other, because you'll mix them up. That said, I know several people who speak Spanish and Italian. I can't vouch of their accuracy, though.

Or perhaps learn to **speak** the language you feel most interesting for cultural, business, romantic (!) or whatever reason you have, and just learn to **read** the others. That would perhaps make sense.

In any case, your job is considerably easier to learn another member of the "troïka" once you know one already. Apart from the deep confusion it may throw you in, I would say 80% of the work is already done. Think of Chinese natives learning Japanese: it's so easy-peasy for them, I just wanna throw up in disgust!

Well to be honest I find this a help not a hindrance!

I haven't learned much Korean so I didn't know that word (thanks though) but to my mind this is just three ways of saying the same word, and each way is specific to its own language. I mean, you couldn't accuse the Korean word of sounding Japanese, and you wouldn't really suspect that the Japanese word was Chinese (this assumes you have a bit of experience of the sounds of those languages). So for me I would pretty much be remembering "toshokan図書館", because that's the first one I learned, then I add to that "túshūguǎn图书馆" which I actually just learned yesterday. First I remember ka- goes to gua-. Then I add the tones. I can remember the first two as a pair because it's the same contour as toshO (pronounced with an English accent, which you don't do, but which is obvious for me to remember). Add the last tone, and you're there. Total time, 3-10 seconds?

But if I had to learn "library", "toshokan", "kirjasto" (Finnish, sorry, I just got that from Google translate, hope it's right ), then wouldn't it be harder?

I think that all of what you are saying is correct: that in some ways it seems confusing to have similarities, and in some ways it makes life easier.

Let's exaggerate the situation though, and see what it looks like. What if you had more than three languages that were slightly similar?

French: bibliothèque
Spanish/Portuguese/Italian: biblioteca
Dutch: bibliotheek
Danish/Norwegian: bibliotek
Swedish: biblioteket

I'm going to be radical and say this is the same word but with a different pronunciation.

OK let's say I have to learn all these now. First of all, I think they have in common "bibliotek". French words never end like that so obviously it's -thèque. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese don't end in -ek so it is credible that they all go to -eca (I say "credible", i.e. it can be easily retained in my mind without any great leap). It makes sense that Dutch would be -theek. Then I have to remember the Swedish one as an exception. I know a bit of Norwegian but not Swedish so all I can relate it to is that when Norwegian words end with -et it's the same as saying "the ...", so I just pretend that that's the reason for it in Swedish (it isn't, but I don't know that until I study Swedish a bit more).

In the cases where I have knowledge of the language, I can translate/transmute it into the style of each language. In cases where I don't know the style of the language I have to relate it to something I do know. In any case, I think I know all the words now. I'm going to write it from memory now: French bibliotheque, Sp, Po, It biblioteca, Dutch bibliotheek, No, Dan bibliotek, Swe, biblioteket. Left out the accent on the first one to save time finding it on the keyboard (I'm not looking at the screen). Got a bit tired at the end and spelled the Swedish one wrong then corrected it. By a freak I got them in the right order!

I can do that because: I see the countries on a map in my mind and for most of the countries I know how "bibliotek" will be pronounced/spelled; when I don't know I relate it to something I do know by some simple process that may be wrong but which is vivid. That's exactly how we do it with the RTK stories.

So, to go back to the topic, it should be the same for remembering several "styles" of writing what I would call the same character. If I can read characters at all, it's easier. If I've had a lot of experience, it is a lot easier. If they are similar, then it is easy (they have a "local pronunciation"*) - for example I can recognise the primitive "言" in traditional and simplified system (語->语) so, with that knowledge, these two are the same character but "pronounced differently"*, i.e. the style changes when you go to mainland China. [*NB of course here I don't mean pronunciation in a literal sense, I just mean a local style of writing the same thing, just like I suggested a "local style" of making a similar sound earlier on in this reply]

Even if there is a "radical" change (sorry, making a pun >< ) like あ is derived from 安, you can see that, given the local rules/rules of style, if you can see how the two are related then you can remember them both.

In conclusion, as soon as you know one (character, language), you can start to remember variations of it. But it's sometimes a long way to go to learn the first one. Until then, we can only relate it to something we do know. The sooner the better!

Apologies for any language errors in this reply

@Mizunooto - You like the sound of cascades, I presume?

À propos our discussion - I had a talk this Summer with a Ukrainian fellow who spoke apparently perfect Korean - I cannot judge how accurate he was, but he sounded impressive - at a Korean studies workshop at UBC.

I asked him - would that be easier to learn Korean vocabulary through the hanja (= Korean version of the kanji) than through the standard Korean 101 textbook approach of individual phonetic word memorization (just like what people do here post-RTK)? And he said that not only that is better, but that's what he recommends. Just like for kango (= Sino-Japanese words, about 60% of the contents of the Japanese dictionary), knowing the composition of a word in terms of its hanja constituents often allows you to guess its meaning and its pronunciation.

See for instance:
http://hanjadic.bravender.us/%EC%9E%90

For learning Korean, this hanja approach would be considered unnecessarily complicated - why bother with characters that foreigners don't know and that are complex and not used in modern Korean publications? But this is something that RTKers can easily do, if they so choose. One more door that RTK opens.

The sad part is that he told me that it took him about ten years to learn Korean! The un-sad part is that I saw his wife and, ... I can only say that Korean women are possibly the best-looking women in the whole of Asia ;-) Man! That was a piece of kimchi!

By the way, I should have written "library" as "teoseogwan" - "eo" would be the closed "o" as in French "la porte".

@ SoundOfWater,

BTW as for your original question: with what you already know
from RTK, most of this should be already familiar to you, so
you can do this right now:

Go to http://www.zhongwen.com/

Click on "Learn".

Click on "Chinese Vocabulary with Linked Characters"

And then "Frequency of Chinese characters"

You'll see lists of the 2000 most frequent hanzi. All characters
are linked to a dictionary entry, which usually lists several compounds,
which you then can directly input into Anki. This of course assumes
that you know how to pronounce pinyin!

Sometimes you see no compounds - that's because many hanzi are used
alone in Chinese than in Japanese. Don't forget to make sure you know
these as well.

So if you want to learn Chinese vocab, you could just go through the
list, learning the compounds as you go along. That should introduce you
to the most common vocabulary.

For reading, you can get the series of 5 books by John Defrancis, his
"Chinese readers" (Beginning 1 and 2, Intermediate 1 and 2 and Advanced).

This collection of 5 books is the most impressive graded method in any
language I know. I wish we had the same for Japanese, that would have
simplified my life greatly. Check them out, they are available @ Amazon.
Skip the other books by Defrancis - if you're interested in Chinese grammar,
there is one good book (200 pages only) by Oxford University press that
is all you will ever need to know. If you are interested, I'll track it down
for you.

Salut! Actually the sound might be a frog jumping in the pond...do you know this poem? (Basho)

Thanks for your reply, lots of things to answer!

>Hanja ... I hadn't thought of doing that. Of course it seems cumbersome, but maybe if you already know Ch or J then it might be useful. It looks useful to me as, according to what I was saying before, you are adding just one more similar word to the written word you already have - Kanji/hanzi/hanja. I will remember this! I would like to learn a bit of Korean in the future. Maybe I will find it easier now with the Sino-root words. Thanks! Also I'm always in favour of being hyper-literate, so if you did learn it that way you'd be equipped for obscure/scientific literature in Korean.

>Zhongwen ... Thanks once again because this is very helpful! My only complaint about that site is that they use gifs for the entries so it's hard to copy/paste. Other than that it's good, and I have the book too. I use it for Chinese study.

>Grammar book ... I don't know the book you mention but I have just got "Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar", published by Routledge. There is a textbook and a workbook with test questions. I think these Routledge "Modern ---- Grammar" (insert name of language) books are very good. Also this one is good because it has trad, simp, and proper pinyin i.e. mā má mǎ etc.

I think ten years is a long time for a language, but I'm sure you will know it well after that time.

What I have concluded from this discussion is that learning traditional characters is important (we didn't discuss that but I concluded it anyway ) - basically then you only need to learn the characters once, then study the way they are varied (simplified), and you're prepared for several languages.

I think ideally I'd start with Chinese if I wanted to learn several of the languages in that region. It gives you the written background and also I'm imagining knowing Chinese for Japanese, Korean etc is like knowing Latin for Spanish, and so on.

Anyway I started with Japanese so that's the way it is. Actually there was a reason for that: I found Kanji AND tones difficult, so I wanted to study one at a time. Now I know something about characters I am starting to get the hang of tones.

Ah! The gifs on http://www.zhongwen.com. Yes, very annoying, you actually
cannot cut and paste. Zannen desu ne!

mizunooto Wrote:OK let's say I have to learn all these now. First of all, I think they have in common "bibliotek". French words never end like that so obviously it's -thèque. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese don't end in -ek so it is credible that they all go to -eca (I say "credible", i.e. it can be easily retained in my mind without any great leap). It makes sense that Dutch would be -theek. Then I have to remember the Swedish one as an exception. I know a bit of Norwegian but not Swedish so all I can relate it to is that when Norwegian words end with -et it's the same as saying "the ...", so I just pretend that that's the reason for it in Swedish (it isn't, but I don't know that until I study Swedish a bit more).

I don't know why Google Translate puts library as the past tense biblioteket in Swedish and not in Norwegian, but it's like you say;
In Swedish, biblioteket = the library
bibliotek = library

I really should not use it - it gets everything else wrong!

Thanks for pointing this out. Oh g@@gle! I mean Googlet.

Weird, this chick on YouTube learning Korean speaks about the Hanja -
and the problematic is exactly what we were discussing.

1 hanja -> multiple Korean pronunciations, whereas in Chinese, 1 hanzi ->
1 single pronunciation, except from a few exceptions such as 中: zhong1
(middle) and 中 zhong4 (to strike), as in 中風 (palsy; stroke).

Alors Fabrice-san, peut-être faudrait-il mettre sur pied un troisième site:
Remembering the Hanja! ;-)

Shine the Heisig light o'er these poor Korean language learners who are still
in the stone age!

But seriously. RTK is all you need. You don't need anything else once you
graduate from Heisig, because at that point it is a very simple matter to
learn the new characters/pronunciations you need.

Right, I'm on the side of the hanja now for definite. You have persuaded me! Plus I like her because she said the same thing as me (about Latin) - isn't that why people like people anyway (I'm joking but also being serious )

Presumably there are multiple pronunciations in Korean because of the lack of tones?

louischa Wrote:RTK is all you need. You don't need anything else once you
graduate from Heisig, because at that point it is a very simple matter to
learn the new characters/pronunciations you need.

This is quite right too. Still you could easily have to learn the same number of new characters, or even twice as many new ones, but you will be prepared for it.

mizunooto Wrote:Presumably there are multiple pronunciations in Korean because of the lack of tones?

Actually what I wrote previously was misleading; learning Korean vocabulary through Hanja is far easier than learning Japanese vocabulary through Kanji. 1 hanja -> 1 Korean reading, but as you say, Korean has no tones, so then it is unavoidable that multiple hanja be mapped into the same Korean syllables.

Ths is of course a mess, but a lesser mess than in Japanese, where 1 kanji -> multiple Japanese readings.

Actually, to start learning Asian languages with Japanese is to start with the most insane writing system in all of Asia. If you have enough discipline (or are insanely determined enough yourself) to stay the course, then you can do pretty much anything else.

But need we any more evidence of our collective insanity than this very forum? ;-)

louischa Wrote:whereas in Chinese, 1 hanzi ->
1 single pronunciation, except from a few exceptions such as 中: zhong1
(middle) and 中 zhong4 (to strike), as in 中風 (palsy; stroke).

Just as a side note, it's estimated that, among the 3000 most used characters in Chinese, around 700+ of them are polyphonic, mostly comprised of tone variations; therefore, the remaining ~2300 have only one accepted pronunciation. (And, out of a list of 12,000 characters, ~2700 of them are polyphonic.)

louischa Wrote:But need we any more evidence of our collective insanity than this very forum? ;-)

Eek, I was just searching for polyphonic Hanzi and ended up in a 'Chinese-learning forum'. I'm glad I'm here again~

gdaxeman Wrote:among the 3000 most used characters in Chinese, around 700+ of them are polyphonic, mostly comprised of tone variations;

I'd be interested to know the proportion of polyphonics that would be considered independent, i.e. not just tonal variations. Though that fact is very useful and interesting in itself.

I'm actually learning things in this thread!

mizunooto Wrote:I'd be interested to know the proportion of polyphonics that would be considered independent, i.e. not just tonal variations. Though that fact is very useful and interesting in itself.

I don't have the exact numbers, but you can take a look at this list with the 3000+ most used characters to have an idea: → Google Docs - Hanzi Readings

Notice that there are three worksheets in this spreadsheet: one for characters with multiple pronunciations, other for characters with only one pronunciation, and the last one for simplified characters with multiple traditional versions. It's a little disorganized but it's somewhat relevant to what you've asked, so there it is.

louischa Wrote:Weird, this chick on YouTube learning Korean speaks about the Hanja -
and the problematic is exactly what we were discussing.

1 hanja -> multiple Korean pronunciations, whereas in Chinese, 1 hanzi ->
1 single pronunciation, except from a few exceptions such as 中: zhong1
(middle) and 中 zhong4 (to strike), as in 中風 (palsy; stroke).

Actually that's not quite the problem she was explaining, and Korean is similar to Chinese in that 1 hanja has only 1 pronunciation. The issue she was talking about is that many hanja have the same pronunciation (although obviously the meaning is different).

An example:

山 is always read as 산 (SAN)
BUT the pronunciation 산 (SAN) could be written as 山,産,算,傘 etc....

This is different from Japanese where most kanji have one more more (on/kun) readings. For example 山 could either be YAMA (Japanese origin word) or SAN (Chinese origin word). Luckily though Korea only use hanja for words of Chinese origin, and so you only need to learn a single pronunciation for each character.