EDIT: We're no longer doing the Seal Script images, so disregard that part. I will be using them for my personal deck, however, and will post them all once I'm done gathering them if anyone wants them (which will be after we finish the spreadsheet, of course). Anyone who wants to help, please just let us know!

As many of you no doubt know, Rick Harbaugh's book Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary is a great resource (as is the zhongwen.com website containing the book's text in full). Even Khatzumoto supposedly used the book when he was learning kanji hardcore.

Many people have asked Khatzumoto for his SRS deck with all the hanzi from the book, but to no avail. To my knowledge, nobody has made such a deck public. I'd like to change that. I want to make a deck containing Harbaugh's hanzi, etymologies, definitions, pinyin, and reference numbers to the book, as well as an image of the Seal Script character corresponding to that particular hanzi (from chineseetymology.org).

Here's a sample of what a card would look like (obviously what fields show up on the Q and A sides would be up to the user):



It would likely take me months to do the whole deck on my own (since I would be using the book to learn the characters as I go along), but with a few people we could feasibly shorten it to mere weeks. That's not too much work for an extremely useful deck.

So is anyone interested in collaborating with me on this?

I don't have the book, and I've never done one of these collaborations before, but I'd be interested in helping.

Awesome.

Not having the book is OK, since Harbaugh has posted the entire contents online. It's a bit more tedious to click through all the charts than it is to flip through the pages, but it isn't too bad. Incidentally, I'm sure you could find a used copy for cheap if you wanted the book. I've seen it for about 5 bucks at used bookstores here in Austin.

I'm thinking (since I'm terrible with spreadsheets) that it might be best if I set up an Anki deck that everyone working on the project can sync to, and then we could just simply sync whenever we have a part done on our own computers. I'm not sure if that makes sense. Basically let's say I would do chart 1 and post it. Meanwhile you're working on chart 2, and once chart 1 is posted you could post chart 2. Some charts are really short (like charts 4-9) so we could combine them. Some are long (like 68-70) so we could split them up if need be.

I think the benefit of using an Anki deck rather than a spreadsheet is that we could each work the way we are comfortable working. If you like using spreadsheets, you could work from one and then import it to your Anki deck and sync it with the "master" deck. I could work in Anki's Add Items window since I prefer it. I'm also not sure how I'd do the images in a spreadsheet.

So far I have these fields:

1. Character
2. Simplified
3. Pinyin
4. Etymology
5. Definitions
6. Seal Script
7. Harbaugh No.

The Seal Script images come from this site. The first category under the character info box is called "Seal (說文解字來的篆軆字) Characters." These are the Small Seal forms as listed in the 說文解字. Occasionally there are two images, in which case I've been including both.

If you have other ideas, I'm all ears. I've never done a collaboration like this either. I'd be open to doing a spreadsheet if it would be easier...I'd just need a little instruction.

I've used the zhongwen site before, but find find it a little hard to navigate. Can you direct me to those charts? Before I used the pinyin directory to record hanzi by reading(for chaining/towns, but making the stories wasn't easy...).
I'm okay with the Anki syncing idea.

yukamina Wrote:I've used the zhongwen site before, but find find it a little hard to navigate. Can you direct me to those charts? Before I used the pinyin directory to record hanzi by reading(for chaining/towns, but making the stories wasn't easy...).
I'm okay with the Anki syncing idea.

Go to zhongwen.com and click "Search." Under "Other" click "Pictographs and Ideographs." Click 一. The first chart should show up in the third frame, with the dictionary entry in the second frame. The order of the first chart so you can see how to progress through it is 一二五伍吾悟晤語齬衙貳膩亟極 etc. When you see a big block of characters grouped together without lines between them, those go in a different chart, so ignore them. It just means they contain a component from the current chart (for instance 祝 and 神 are listed in a block group under 示, but their main entries are under other charts. You'll also notice the first part of their reference number is different from the others in the chart. All the reference numbers in chart 1 should start with 1 and so on. The reference number is listed at the bottom of the dictionary entry after 中文字譜. So you'll see 中文字譜 1-1 at the bottom of the entry for 一. In the deck I have colons, but I can change that pretty quickly.

It's getting late now, but tomorrow after class I'll put up the deck and send you the info on it.

I'm not sure if the synced deck idea will be doable. The seal script images aren't showing up on Anki Online. Of course, I'm not sure if the images thing will be doable anyway since the field points to a local file. Maybe there's a way around it, to make it point to its location on the web instead. Any ideas?

Wouldn't mind helping out, cuz I do plan on going to mandarin after japanese. So learning more kanji is vital to getting to a good level for that language as well as japanese.

I'm sure everyone would benefit from this deck (for people who are learning Chinese or wish to start soon, like me.)

Sweet. I'll send you the info.

Okay, I got the info.
How should we divide the work? Just work on alternating charts like this?
bflatnine - chart 1
yukamina - chart 2
ta12121 - chart 3
b - chart 4
y - 5
t - 6
etc

I'll start on chart 2 in the mean time.
I don't think we need the seal script images, personally.

yukamina Wrote:Okay, I got the info.
How should we divide the work? Just work on alternating charts like this?
bflatnine - chart 1
yukamina - chart 2
ta12121 - chart 3
b - chart 4
y - 5
t - 6
etc

I'll start on chart 2 in the mean time.

Works for me. Though maybe we should combine some of the short charts (like 4-9, which make up only 19 hanzi).

I should be able to finish chart 1 this evening or at latest tomorrow afternoon (work gets in the way). BTW, I'm US Central time zone.

Quote:I don't think we need the seal script images, personally.

Fair enough. I might just include them in my own personal deck, then.

bflatnine Wrote:Works for me. Though maybe we should combine some of the short charts (like 4-9, which make up only 19 hanzi).

I don't think it matters? We're aiming to make ~25 cards a day, right? So if one of us finished a short deck, we'll just move on to the next. 25... where'd I get that number from :?

25 cards per day doesn't sound that bad. I can start working on it this weekend or next week. Just send me instructions of what exactly to do and I'll get working on it. My time zone is eastern Canada

Here is the exact data
Standard time zone: UTC/GMT -5 hours
Daylight saving time: +1 hour
Time zone abbreviation: EDT - Eastern Daylight Time

Maybe a Google Doc spreadsheet would be better, just to make things simpler since we're not doing the images. That way we could each just post what we get as we go. That may actually work better. So once I'm done with chart 1, I can just get to work on chart 4, whether 2 and 3 are up yet or not (to avoid getting things out of order). This way we can each just worry about our own charts rather than worrying about time zones and when people will be syncing and all that.

I'm opening a Google Doc right now. It has the Harbaugh refs for charts 1-12, so we can each just fill in the charts we're working on as we go. I'll fill in the reference numbers for the rest of the book over the weekend. Here's who's got what for the next few cycles (hopefully more will join):

1 bflatnine
2 yukamina
3 ta12121
4 bflatnine
5 yukamina
6 ta12121
7 bflatnine
8 yukamina
9 ta12121
10 bflatnine
11 yukamina
12 ta12121

OK, I have a Google Doc spreadsheet up. I'll send the link to both of you. Chart 1 is just about done.

bflatnine Wrote:OK, I have a Google Doc spreadsheet up. I'll send the link to both of you. Chart 1 is just about done.

Sweet. Send the info once your done.

ta12121 Wrote:

bflatnine Wrote:OK, I have a Google Doc spreadsheet up. I'll send the link to both of you. Chart 1 is just about done.

Sweet. Send the info once your done.

I emailed to you both after I posted that. Let me know if you didn't get it.

bflatnine Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:

bflatnine Wrote:OK, I have a Google Doc spreadsheet up. I'll send the link to both of you. Chart 1 is just about done.

Sweet. Send the info once your done.

I emailed to you both after I posted that. Let me know if you didn't get it.

Just got it now. Going through it now.

The chart format on http://www.zhongwen.com/ site is confusing a bit. I'll try following the format you did, cuz don't want to make mistakes.

It is a little confusing at first. Once you figure it out how it's organized it shouldn't be too bad though. I do wish he had a way to just click through them in order without using the charts. And text instead of images. :/

Same here, it's confusing how the chart is positioned. Causes a lot of confusion. So I assume I do 25 per day, I can manage that, So what specific ones do you want me to do, cuz if I got more time I can easily do 25 or even 50 or more if possible. So do I do chart 3,6,9,12,etc Basically every 3rd number.

Pretty much, yeah. If you want to do more than 25 per day, go for it. 25 was just a number I threw out there, kind of as a guess of how many I'd do per day. More is cool, less is also cool. Do what you can. There may be some days I'm not able to do any (like in June I might be out of town for a week) and some days I'll do a bunch because I have the day off and my wife is at work. But yeah if we each average 25 per day we'll have it done in just under two months. If we get a fourth person, we'll have it done in less than a month and a half.

Just leave time for your other studies. :lol:

no problem. The reason why I said more than 25 is because I'm on my summer vacation, no school until the fall. I spend plenty of time on Japanese, almost 3 hours a day on active study now. But the rest is immersion/readings/writing. No active speaking practice just yet. But yea, this project can be done even faster if we can get some more people to join in.

Saw what's done on chart 2 so far. Looking good. Couple things though.

1) I was thinking that, since this is for learning characters, we should refrain from including actual components in the "etymology" field and use the English names or pinyin instead (or both when appropriate). However, one could always just hide that field while reviewing, or make it white. If you guys think that would be better, I'll go back in and edit my section. Whichever way works for me, but we should try to stay consistent.

2) In order to keep formatting consistent and clean-looking, let's put line breaks in between definitions. So for instance for 2-19, we have:

名 island in a river 名 continent

But if you put <br> there, it will come out in Anki (and Anki Online) as:

名 island in a river
名 continent

3) 2-23 had "tà 普 dá" as the pronunciation. I changed it to "國 tà 普 dá".


I should be finishing with chart 1 shortly. A little behind schedule, but no big deal.

P.S. I'm going to start working on chart 3 today. Been a bit busy lately. So I think I should be finished it,etc.

Personally I'm still kinda confused about the table, the way it goes is confusing.
I'm following what you did with the other lists and such

It helps me to check the 中文字譜 reference number each time I click a character. If it's not the right number (i.e. the previous entry's number +1), then I'm on the wrong frame.

Got chart 1 done. On to chart 4!