eschatokyrios
New member
From: Berkeley CA
Registered: 2008-01-15
Posts: 2
My university is offering several intensive language courses over the summer, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese among them. Now, it is my goal to learn both Chinese and Japanese, and, after a great deal of consideration, I decided to take the Mandarin course this summer. Ultimately, it came down to the fact that I have somewhat more interest in Japanese than Chinese culture (i.e. I watch a lot of anime 
), so it will be somewhat easier to learn to read and understand Japanese outside of the classroom than Chinese would be. Maybe that's a flawed reasoning, but I can only take one class over the summer and I had to pick one of the two.
I'm unsure as to how I should procede with Remembering the Kanji given this. I've done 200 or so kanji, although I've been slacking off lately, both because of general busyness and because I was still deciding what language to take. I'm confidant that I could start back up again relatively quickly. What worries me most is that knowing the heisig readings, without knowing the Japanese readings, will just confuse me if I try to apply that knowledge to learning to read Chinese.
Obviously, it would be great if I could apply the RtK method to learning to read Chinese. The problem here is, I don't know exactly how much of an overlap there is between kanji and traditional characters. Can I generally assume that a heisig reading will work just about as well for a Chinese character as it will for the corresponding kanji, or will this simply not work? And even if it doesn't work, would it still be worthwhile to continue going through Remembering the Kanji while taking the Chinese class (at the rate I'm going I certaintly won't finish before this summer) for applying it to learning Japanese later on?
You might be interested to know that there are some Remembering the Hanzi books coming out. You can download previews here: here
From a discussion on another thread, the traditional is apparently pretty close to the Kanji book.
If it was me, I would choose one language (and it'd be the language I'm more interested in because I'd stick to it longer) and really concentrate on getting to at least an intermediate level of the language before I thought about trying another language.
However, if you still want to do it the way you plan, I wouldn't give up RtK just yet. I would keep at it. For the most part it'll be transferable somewhat to Chinese and you wont be wasting time doing nothing as you lead up to your summer course.
For myself, I find it somewhat difficult to do the RtK method while having to learn other Kanji in a course I'm doing. I put RtK on the back burner and learn about 50 a week. It's a nice easy pace so that I am still moving through them while having plenty of time to focus on my other studies. And at least this way I should be done by the end of the year (especially if I then put it into the main focus of my studies during semesters)
Anyway, that was my thoughts and ideas, I hope I've given you some food for thought!
CharleyGarrett
Member
From: Cusseta Georgia USA
Registered: 2006-05-25
Posts: 303
I'm studying Mandarin too, and I'm finding that the strategy for learning hanzi is exactly the same for kanji. Make up an english reading for each kanji/hanzi. After you know the characters by this name, then you'll be able to link that character to the foreign language word (or reading). I'm enthusiastic about Mandarin because there is only one reading per character, and that reading is correlated to the meaning of the character. Also, in my reading about Mandarin, I came across the statistic that indicated that the college level speaker of Mandarin will only actively use between 3 and 4 thousand unique characters...perhaps not so far from the RTK 3 list?
AJATT has a "hanzi mnemonic" wiki, created as part of his Mandarin/Cantonese project. As I was scanning thru this, I realized that you really cannot tell that it's for Chinese, instead of Japanese. Well, some of the character forms are a bit different, written a bit different. It's almost like a different font...that sort of variation.
