So, my brother is learning Mandarin and he saw me using RTK for Japanese. I explained to him the advantages of the Hesig System, ect. And encouraged him to try it for Mandarin. He did, but gave up, pointing out that Hesig doesn't cover pronunciation. While this makes sense for Japanese (multiple readings, etc.) a majority of Chinese characters have only one reading, so it would be a waste to not include the pronunciation while learning the characters.

How did you guys deal with the pronunciations?

RTH is a system to help you learn to *write* the hanzi, which is probably the most difficult aspect of learning an Asian language. It also has the bonus effect of helping you tell similar looking ones apart.

You could memorize the readings while going through RTH, but this would be difficult and not very useful. I believe it's better to learn them in context, i.e. learn them via chinese words and sentences, which is what I'm doing (via a combination of textbooks and the AJATT sentence method)

Edit: some people on the Japanese forum used the "movie method" to learn the readings while learning the kanji. If your brother needs a system, that's a good one. However, again I reiterate that learning thousands of out of context sounds doesn't sound that useful to me, considering you're going to have to study each individual vocabulary word anyway.

I think perhaps ideally, you'd have two tracks going at once when you first start out. Track 1 would be going through something like RTH, learning the keywords and writing of ~3000 characters, without worrying about the pronunciation. Track 2 would be learning to speak the language at a basic level, without worrying about the writing. Eventually, when you start learning to read/write words and sentences, it will be easy to connect the two. At least in theory.

In the next...oh I dunno, 10 years or so? Things will change. A friend of mine is devising a system/book/dictionary that will teach not only the characters, but exactly why each one is what it is. His system, or at least what I know of it so far, is brilliant, and so logical that it should stick in your head pretty easily. Once you know why the character is written the way it is, it's pretty hard to forget. By "why", I mean what is each part of the character actually doing there (sound/meaning/form). And not some made up stories (Heisig) or ridiculous traditional etymology (my favorite is 傘: one big person carrying 4 little people across an intersection = umbrella? But I'll never forget how to write it!). This will be what each component is actually doing there, how it's doing it, and why it's doing that.

I can't be more specific than that, unfortunately, because it's related to his PhD research and he hasn't published anything on this specific thing yet (and because of this he hasn't even explained the whole thing to me yet). But it will be pretty awesome once it's finally finished and put into publishable form.

Marble101 Wrote:[...] I explained to him the advantages of the Hesig System, ect. And encouraged him to try it for Mandarin. He did, but gave up, pointing out that Hesig doesn't cover pronunciation. While this makes sense for Japanese (multiple readings, etc.) a majority of Chinese characters have only one reading, so it would be a waste to not include the pronunciation while learning the characters. [...]

If that's his only objection, then he would do well in using (in conjunction with the books, ahem) the spreadsheet that I made — see the TH Read field in this partial screenshot:



The TH Read field gives you not only one reading associated with the keyword (as they are in the RSH/RTH books indexes) but all almost all possible readings for the characters in Mandarin, which helps identifying which ones work this way depending on context. Of course, someone using it while studying the character forms at the same time would have to find a way to "incorporate" them in their studies, either in one or (better) two steps.

As for me, I actually think it's better to separate things just as Heisig does, even for Chinese/Mandarin — first learn the form of the characters, then the sounds associated with them using whichever method they prefer (structured or not) — but to each his own. I also think it's better not to start learning how to "read" the character before everything else but to link them with what you already know, that is, the starting point should be the spoken language.

I wouldn't say it contains "all possible readings". 他 doesn't have tuō, for instance, and that's just the first thing that popped into my head when I read that. Another is 叶, which I think you'll find is pronounced xié. It was borrowed during the destruction of the writing system in the last century to write 葉, which is pronounced yè, but really (and correctly), it is its own character with its own meaning and pronunciation. Another is 會, which, at least according to some scholars in Taiwan (who tend to be more conservative about these kinds of things than their Mainland counterparts who have party ideology to worry about upholding), ought to be pronounced guì in at least one instance (會稽, an ancient place name).

I could keep going, but I think you get the point.

I also don't know how useful it is to have all the pronunciations there anyway. The differing pronunciations are due to the character having different meanings in different words (which in turn is due to the characters originally having been used to write down more than one word), and to divorce the pronunciation from its meaning doesn't make much sense. I don't know how you'd fix that in a spreadsheet though, especially one that doesn't contain the meanings of the characters anyway.

This is all separate from the fact that I'm starting to question Heisig/Richardson's choice of which characters to include. I didn't complete the books, or even the first book, but I've looked through the list and found some odd choices. Obviously no list is perfect, but the books have quite a few characters I've never come across (apart from the ones obviously needed to build other characters), and plenty of characters I see all the time that aren't in RTH (off the top of my head, 匣 and 呷, which go nicely together).

Really though, they would need to release volumes 3 and 4 to really do it right, but nobody is going to sit down and learn 6000+ characters in this way. Even if they did, studying this way would become inefficient long before that point (or even before the end of volume 1, IMO), and there will always be unknown characters if you read enough.

Just some observations.

Ok, so to be more specific, it's "all possible readings listed by the Wenlin 4.0.2 dictionary", which is a very comprehensible one for Mandarin from Mainland China (not Taiwan's, even though I used the TH characters as the source just because.) The readings, together with all the Heisig keywords, are for the same intent as — and to use it together with — a dictionary: for reference. I actually don't use the spreadsheet directly for study, just to check it here and there because they're very helpful for me to remember how to write the characters (note: my version of it includes primitives that compose the characters, but according to what Fabrice has said before Heisig doesn't approve of sharing that), and the readings in there sometimes can reactivate in my mind something I knew but forgot.

As for the characters that are not covered in the books, in the spreadsheet it's easy to add whatever one wants, and there's even an "Additional Chars" worksheet just for that. The nice part is that, with the characters and primitives that Heisig and Richardson have covered in the two books, it's possible to compose mostly any other character now.

Also, in case anyone cares about what I do because it might be relevant to the "how to learn the real meaning and correct pronunciation" part, then here it is:

• The structured part of my studies at this moment includes me writing characters and words using a Wacom Bamboo tablet with a pen for input-comparison in multiple cloze-delete sentences (an Anki 2 feature) after hearing the full audio, with the non-clozed part in there so that I know where I'm supposed to fill in. I also have a word deck for concrete nouns and action verbs where I do the same, with an image for disambiguation (and for everything I hide the English translation in a hint field which I rarely use);

• The unstructured part is just me following subtitles in movies, TV series and cartoons in Youku/PPStream/Sugoideas, song lyrics, reading stuff and so on. My primary goal is to understand things in Chinese/Mandarin and I don't have any intention to live in China or Taiwan (the part of Brazil where I live in is just so good that I can't think of living anywhere else; it's just like Benny Lewis describes), so the spoken part gets a little neglected for now.

bflatnine Wrote:Another is 叶, which I think you'll find is pronounced xié. It was borrowed during the destruction of the writing system in the last century to write 葉, which is pronounced yè, but really (and correctly), it is its own character with its own meaning and pronunciation.

About this specific point, I was checking it and the reason xié is not listed for 叶 in the spreadsheet is because the character wasn't in the TH list (which I used as the source for generating the readings, hence the TH in the column name, which stands for Traditional Hanzi) and 葉 is not right for when it's read this way. Here:



I now added this character to where it belongs, which is in the same line as the kanji for 叶 'within my ability'.

他 should have included tuó, so it seems that the way Wenlin 4 chooses the readings with the automated tool in some cases doesn't list all possible readings included in the dictionary, so I scratched that out.

Ah, man I was just being ornery. I get that way sometimes. Of course it's just a reference, and there's really not much reason for most people to know the readings I mentioned, unless they really like reading 文言文 (and even then, their importance is debatable). It's a good, useful spreadsheet, and I actually made a similar one a while back before Heisig released book 2 (which I promptly quit using almost as soon as I finished making it because learning like that just doesn't suit me).

No problem, what you said made me aware of some things I hadn't thought about. Anyways, since you've been part of this forum for a long time, you know how many people have asked "Don't most characters have only one pronunciation? Which ones don't? Where are the readings? Heisig was such an #@*% for not including them in the frame next to the character!" and so on... so there it is, and now everyone can make use of them as they wish. Many of the characters in the spreadsheet have their readings ordered in the TH Read cell roughtly by frequency (in absolute terms) whenever possible, so that can be another plus.