The soft-back abridged edition and hard-back volume 1 came in today.

A more detailed review later, but my first impression of the hard-back edition isn't that great. Haphazard formatting and use of fonts makes this volume appear more disorganized than it may really be. The text almost seems to be "conversational" with the author telling you stories about how characters came about, which some learners may be interested in, but others not.

POSITIVES:
- both simplified and traditional
- pinyin readings
- has compounds

NEGATIVES:
- chaotic formatting

The abridged volume looks to be more readable, but is missing compounds. In fact, I may just read through the abridged edition first.

I expect the RTH volumes to get here by early next week. Until then, I think I will read through the abridged edition to get a better sense of what Ann is about. BTW, I think having gone through RtK will make it easier to get through Ann.

That's really cool. I've always kinda wanted a tome like that. But I'm too cheap to fork out money for something that isn't a necessity.

What do you plan to do with it now? What's your study plan? Why have both RTH and Ann's book?

I believe it's helpful to get the index, also. That may help with the whole chaotic formatting thing. http://www.chinese-forums.com/showpost.p...ostcount=5

Cool. Good luck.

If you could give us a full review and comparison after you've read both books, that would be really useful.

I wonder, are there any resources like this in the mother tongue? Or even maybe a kanij resource like this in Japanese?

alyks Wrote:What do you plan to do with it now? What's your study plan? Why have both RTH and Ann's book?

Since going through with any methodology is so time and energy intensive, I thought it would be best to evaluate before I decide which method to follow.

One useful resource may be this:

http://unicode.org/charts/unihan.html

for generating SRS cards. However, the .txt file near the bottom of the page is a headache to use - it's in ANSI with Unicode numbers rather than actual Kanji embedded in UTF-8. The format looks like:

UTF-Code<TAB>fieldName<TAB>fieldValue<RETURN>

not as convenient as a CSV/table type format.

Having gotten used to Heisig in RTK1, CCP looks verbose (even the abridged edition). However, the use of Bushou looks appealing. The format is funky: the author writes stories and descriptions of how various Kanji came about - the right and left margins are marked with TK Ann's # for the Hanzi.

Not much time to look at it in detail yet - more later.

kfmfe04 Wrote:The text almost seems to be "conversational" with the author telling you stories about how characters came about, which some learners may be interested in, but others not.

Well, for sure, it's a very different approach than Heisig.

The whole value of Ann's work is in his stories. He is actually attempting to give real etymology for each character, there are loads of examples of usage, lots of words, a lot of insight into the culture, Chinese traditions, classic Chinese, etc.

It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea. Those who are not interested in any of the above but are only looking for a character list are better off just working off a dictionary, like Zhongwen.

I actually also started by buying Volume One only to see if I like the method. I loved it and went back to by the other four. You definitely need the index volume.

RTH Traditional and Simplified came in today.

There seems to be a lot of overlap with RTK, especially with respect to the Traditional version. A rough guesstimate: if you have already completed RTK1, doing RTH may only take 1-2 months or less, which makes me think that Serge's advice of learning the readings at the same time may be more efficient. Readings are not in the main text, but there is an index at the end, ordered by reading and by Heisig number.

Would it be better learn the RTH in groups of readings? Maybe, if you already know RTK1. If you already know RTK1, doing RTH may be like 20% learning characters (including some slight changes in characters wrt Kanji) and 80% learning readings.

But my first impression is, if you already know RTK1 and are interested in RTH Traditional, the shortest path may involve grouping the readings via alyks' movie method or practicing with a tool like Read The Kanji:

http://www.readthekanji.com/

if it can be adapted to a list of Hanzi compounds. Read The Hanzi in addition to Reviewing the Hanzi (a variant of this site) would be a great help.

Keyword -> Traditional, Simplified if different, Pinyin (voice playback would also be great)

would be very useful. This way, you can learn T and S at the same time.

But if you have done RTK1, you can probably just do RTH-Traditional off an SRS and deal with missing stories yourself. Too bad Heisig doesn't have the entire 3,000 yet.

Bottom Line:
1. If you are starting from RTK1, there is so little NEW material that you could do readings and perhaps T&S at the same time - in a funky way, this is like +1 learning (small step), because you already know RTK1, but instead of learning more Japanese, you are leveraging your RTK1 to pick up Mandarin
2. If you are starting from NOTHING, TK Ann's method could be better, if you prefer his stories

Will report more details later.

Hm, I don't know. I'm not sure how movies could acommodate the tones. I don't know much about chinese, but isn't only four different tones? Maybe you could assign each tone an image and incorporate that in each mnemonic. Then you could learn the readings without actually making mnemonics for them (I don't know if you did this or if you did it by rote, Serge). I dunno, I'm just thinking aloud here.

alyks Wrote:Hm, I don't know. I'm not sure how movies could acommodate the tones. I don't know much about chinese, but isn't only four different tones? Maybe you could assign each tone an image and incorporate that in each mnemonic. Then you could learn the readings without actually making mnemonics for them (I don't know if you did this or if you did it by rote, Serge). I dunno, I'm just thinking aloud here.

I don't know exactly how the movie method works, but I didn't mean the tones, I meant the readings (which includes one of the four tones).

If there is a methodology where you can do this:

keyword -> Hanzi -> reading

that would be be fantastic. If you can take advantage of the fact that there is only usually one reading (monosyllabic) per Hanzi, even better! For a given reading, so there is the temptation to group all the Hanzi according to reading - there is often a certain component, if it appears in a Hanzi, all the Hanzi with that component have the same reading so if you can pin that component to a mnemonic and reading, then you are set for the entire batch...

Well if you want to read about it, it's my website under my username. But I'll give you a quick rundown here.

Basically, you take a movie you know well and assign it an onyomi reading.

If you want to memorize a kanji with that reading, you find a spot within that movie that corrisponds with with the meaning. (This helps associate more the concept and less the English keyword.)

Then you take the components of the kanji which all have images assigned to them, and create a mnemonic image in that spot (not a story, there's a difference).

You do this in groups of reading. By doing it in groups like this and having them all share a "world", you pick up on the phonetic components really well without even trying.

For tones, perhaps what you will need is a code. So there are four tones, perhaps a simple one would be to choose a movie with either one, two, three or four words in the title. So Fight Club can be for a certain reading with tone 2, Gladiator for a certain reading with tone 1.

After jumping back and forth between using TK Ann and RTH, I'm leaning towards RTH, grouped by pronunciation, as the most direct and effective approach. The way I see it, if you already know RTK1, there is less of a need to go in Heisig order.

Perhaps if we assign a commonly-used-compound for each Hanzi, the reading would stick even better.

-------------------------

I have begun (very slowly) typing in the 1,500 Traditional RTH Hanzi.
Maybe a Chinese/Hanzi OCR is a better approach (which I don't have) - I wonder if a Japanese/Kanji OCR would work - will try it out later.

The plan is, if I can get the RTH Hanzi in a file, I should be able to grab a Pinyin dictionary somewhere for a lookup into the readings; I don't intend to type in readings manually.

alyks Wrote:(This helps associate more the concept and less the English keyword.)

Just wanted to point out that the English keyword IS a concept. That's why people mix up kanji where Heisig has put similar keywords, because they refer to the same concept and thus bring up the same images. This is even more true for native speakers of English where an English word at all times has a direct connection to a concept and isn't just a bunch of letters.