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Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1 and Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1
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cming -

I too have used the Heisig method (together with flashcards!) for studying Japanese before, I
would like to offer the following suggestions to anyone considering it for Chinese: Its not for
everyone, but if you have the time, it will be time well spent!

For me it did work well, and I'm now going to continue on with "Remembering the Kanji 3" - for
Japanese, includes extra characters not included in the first 2 books. NB. for those not familiar,
you learn the meanings and radicals first (Book 1), and the pronunciation and usage follows (Book
2). Resist the temptation to even peek into Book 2 until you have thoroughly completed Book 1!

1) You need to follow it fairly religiously for it to work, no skipping sections, etc. Also review
regularly.

2) Do not worry if the method seems strange at first, you will understand it after a while.

3) Have a creative mind - that is probably the most difficult part - making up some of the
mnemonics yourself which you need to do after the first section - assuming he is following the
same approach as the Japanese one. (I personally found that once you've completed book 2, even if
you forget the mnemonics, you'll still remember the meaning and sound, and compound words easily,
and you will learn to think like a native speaker - quickly and efficiently - which you really
need if you want to evene be half good at your Chinese!).

4) It is possible to study Chinese using other methods whilst completing the course, but I'd
reccomend not doing this if you possibly can, once you start you'll want to finish as soon as
possible, and dont have any other distractions - I completed Books 1 & 2 in less than 6 months -
part time, but I did spend about 2 hours each day (including weekends), and regularly reviewed
what I had learnt - this is made easy.

5) If possible, once you have completed the first 50 characters or so, get a native Chinese, (or
at least someone who knows chinese characters very well) to physically check and give you some
pointers on your handwriting, and make sure you tell them not to mention the pronunciation of each
character, just show you how to write it properly - after this you probably won't need any extra
help, and your writing will be much neater, and well proportioned. You won't regret taking this
step!

Regards
Cming - Sydney, Australia



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leosmith -

Hey - I know 84 out of the 90 traditional characters in the PDF already (from my Japanese). A lot
of their meanings are different though........










Mugi -

Jimmy,

I quote from the first two lines of my original post: "This statement is fundamentally wrong for
the majority of characters ... While an individual character may not tell you directly how it
should be pronounced, characters in general are highly phonetic."
I agree that "there is nothing in the nature of a character dictating that it must be verbalized
one way or another" for characters that do not employ phonetic elements, of which 白 is one.
However, as I said initially, this is not true for the majority of characters. While you may be
legitimately able to attach /wait/ (white) or some other pronunciation to this character, that's
where it stops; you can't attach this pronunciation (and its associated meaning, which is the aim
of the authors) to 百, 柏, 伯, 佰, 泊, 舶, 铂, 箔, 帛, 魄, 拍, 迫, 粕 or 珀. You
can, however, attach the pronunciation of "bai/bo/pai/po" to each of these, to varying degrees.
And as soon as you move away from standard Putonghua, then you usually end up with only one or two
alternatives (as opposed to the four here). So for any person literate in Chinese (or Japanese or
Korean for that matter), there is a component in each of these characters telling you how to
pronounce it.

With regard to the mnemonics, although there is a disclaimer line, the author doesn't explain
which "etymologies" are accurate and which are pure fancy. If the pop etymologies were identified
in some way (marked with an asterisk?), then I wouldn't have a problem with them. The end result
is that while at an elementary level these mnemonics may help learners remember what the
characters mean, for those who go on to a higher level of language acquisition or more academic
pursuits, these pop etymologies end up confusing or sometimes even embarrassing the learner.










JimmySeal -



Quote:

"This statement is fundamentally wrong for the majority of characters ... While an individual
character may not tell you directly how it should be pronounced, characters in general are highly
phonetic."

The authors at no point say that there is no phonetic element to the characters. They said,
"In other words, there is nothing in the nature of a character dictating that it must be
verbalized one way or another."
That is, even if historically, 伯 is phonetically related to 白, there is nothing intrinsic
about it that dictates it has to be pronounced "bai" or "bo" or any other way, so there is nothing
inaccurate about the quoted sentence. The only truth is that in Ancient Chinese, these characters
were pronounced the same, so if someone assigns two unrelated English words to them, that is their
prerogative. As you yourself have said, the Japanese have been doing it for centuries.




Quote:

With regard to the mnemonics, although there is a disclaimer line, the author doesn't explain
which "etymologies" are accurate and which are pure fancy.

This is not a course in hanzi etymology. Learners would be well advised to not assume any of it as
historical fact, and there is no need to mark deviations from established theories. Anyone who has
read a few pages of the book (which you clearly haven't) will immediately see that the mnemonic
stories are mostly of the author's own design. Anyone who would confuse these with actual
etymologies shouldn't be trying to learn Chinese and should probably get their head examined while
they're at it:



Quote:

十 - ten
Turn this character 45º either way and you have the x used for the Roman numeral ten.



Quote:

九 - nine
...
* When this character is used as a primitive, we shall take it to refer to the game of baseball,
the meaning being derived from the nine players who make up a team.



Quote:

丸 - pill
One of the scourges of sports like modern baseball has been the use of performance-enhancing
drugs, those tiny little pills that have helped turn honest competition into cut-throat business.
Now look at the character and picture it as a bottle of pills hanging on the thigh of a baseball
player like a pez-dispenser, ready for the popping as the need arises.



Quote:

工 - work
The pictograph of an I-beam, like the kind that is used in heavy construction work on buildings
and bridges, gives us the character for work.
*Since the key word can be too abstract when used as a primitive element, we will often revert to
the clearer image of an I-beam.



Quote:

項 - item
To the right we see a page and to the left an element for I-beam. The item referred to here is not
some specific object but an entry on an “itemized” list. Each item in the list you have to
imagine here is preceded by a little I-beam—not a drawing, but an actual iron I-beam. Imagine
lugging a list like that around the grocery store!

What's more, the authors only provide mnemonics for the first half of the book, before leaving the
reader to invent their own stories for the rest of the book and (I presume) all of the second
book. If they were really trying to "pass off mnemonics and pop etymologies as genuine character
etymologies" they wouldn't do that would they?










Mugi -



Quote:

Originally Posted by leosmith
It sounds like you're saying in over 50% of the characters you can tell how it's pronounced by
looking at one of it's radicals. I've heard it's more like 30%. Am I understanding you correctly?

Not quite. The radical is the part of the character that hints at its meaning, or sometimes is
merely the part under which the character is listed in a traditional dictionary. It seldom acts as
a phonetic component in a compound character. Any given character only has one radical. I don't
have any figures at hand, but 形声字 make up the majority of characters, and by their nature
they have a phonetic component. In Modern Standard Chinese, the phonetic system is far from
perfect, but it's still good enough to narrow down the odds of a possible pronunciation
considerably. Take Jimmy's example of 白 - every single character that uses 白 as a phonetic
element is pronounced either "bai", "pai", "bo", "po", or in two cases (貊, 陌) "mo". A
character incorporating the 白 phonetic will never (I hesitate to use this term as someone is
bound to find an exception! ) be pronounced any other way - it will never be "dong", "le", "ma" or
any other of the hundreds of possibilities. This scenario is applicable to most 形声字 - at a
guess you're probably looking at 60-70% of all characters.



Quote:

I haven't read said book, but I read on a forum somewhere that one of the myths that DeFrancis
dismisses is the ability to read most characters by looking at one of it's radicals. Do I have it
backwards?

Essentially, yes. Firstly, as I mentioned above, the radical of a character points at its meaning,
not pronunciation, so DeFrancis doesn't say you can know the pronunciation by looking at the
radical. But the real point is that DeFrancis wants to dispell the myth that Chinese characters
are in no way phonetic. Anyone who has a working knowledge of even a couple of hundred characters
can't help but notice that some characters that share the same component are pronounced the same
or very similar. The phonetic system is actually much more complete than what many people think.
The more characters you know, the more apparent the links between them become. And if you know
another Sinitic language (dialect), things become even clearer. An understanding of how sounds
changed from Middle Chinese to the present also helps tremendously. Armed with all that knowledge,
it is indeed possible to fairly accurately guess the pronunciation of an unknown character. That
said, most people don't have all that knowledge, nor even wish to acquire it. But simply knowing
that a character containing 白 will be pronounced "bai", "pai", "bo", "po" or occassionaly "mo"
is a huge help - you don't need the know the whys and wherefors.

In my opinion, more effort should be made in emphasizing the phonetic value of phonetic components
when teaching characters; i.e., when teaching the character 白, I think it would be beneficial to
note that when it appears as a component of another character, that character will have the
pronunciation of "bai, pai, bo, po or mo". You can't expect someone to remember all that right at
the start when they first learn 白, but that information would serve well as future reference
when the student comes across 百, and then 伯 and so on.

Edit: Found a couple of anomolies - 怕 and 帕. The former at least had lost its final stop (if
it ever had one) by the time it was first recorded about 2000 years ago in the 說文解字.










gato -



Quote:

"In other words, there is nothing in the nature of a character dictating that it must be
verbalized one way or another."

JimmySeal and Mugi are both right. It depends on what one means by "nature."

If the nature of characters includes their history and etymology, then yes, their "nature" does
suggest that one pronounce them a certain way.

But if "nature" only includes something that is "intrinsic" to the characters, then no, you can
pronounce the characters however you want because the characters are just squiggles on a piece of
paper or on a screen (is there anything "intrinsic" to characters other than just lines or
pixels?) -- just as one can pronounce French words as if they were English, or English words as if
they were French.










OneEye -

I think the more important question (as opposed to the ones being debated) is "Does the method
work?" If it does, that should be enough. Anybody buying the book as a guide to etymology or an
explanation of the entire written Chinese language is misguided at best. It is a tool for learning
the characters, nothing more. And I believe the answer to the question, based on many reviews,
forum discussions, and blogs, is "YES!"










gato -

I'm sure the system works because it's just an expanded version of the mnemonic system that many
of us already use. The one issue I see is the suggestion (I'm not sure who made it) that one
should memorize 1500 or 3000 characters before learning any words or doing any simple reading.
That would take seven months of 2 hours a day of study given LeoSmith's experience. I think most
students would get incredibly bored studying just characters for that long.










JimmySeal -

It's a common misconception that Heisig prescribes studying nothing other than the contents of the
book until it's done. This is incorrect. He advises against learning hanzi readings, or deviating
from the order of progress in the book.
This still leaves people free to learn Chinese from a wide range of pinyin learning materials, and
children's books with zhuyin ruby text. It may feel a bit un-Chinese to be learning from pinyin
materials at first (in this, Japanese learners are a bit better off because they can still fall
back on kana), and it's true that learners can't take advantage of the benefits that come from
connecting a word to its characters until the book is finished. But I think in the long run, it's
worth the initial sacrifices.

Some people learn Chinese for years without approaching the hanzi at all (I know someone who has
been studying 4 years, is quite fluent, and can barely read a single character), so if it means an
easier time overall and a better understanding of the characters, then putting off other character
studies until the books are done is the right move to make.










leosmith -



Quote:

That would take seven months of 2 hours a day of study given LeoSmith's experience.

That's true, or a month for 8-10 hrs per day (don't laugh - there are several people who have done
this). But I know where you saw that piece of advice gato: 10,000 sentence method phase 2.












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