Reddit reviews Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1: How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

The book remembering the hanzi from what I understand is pretty much this but an entire book. I dont know if this book is anygood tho because I have never had it.

I have the japanese version remembering the kanji and its the most usefull book ive ever had for learning a language.

To learn them. For Japanese, this is great and widely considered one of the best ways to learn the kanji (and some vocab along the way); for Chinese, this (Traditional) and this (Simplified) are two of your options. Another is to just learn them out of whichever textbook you get and while studying vocabulary separatedly. There are probably some other hanzi books too; you might wanna have a look over in /r/chineselanguage for that sort of thing.

However, I suggest getting a good base in one of the two character sets (Japanese or Chinese) before you start with the other, to minimise any confusion. I knew probably 1.3k kanji (as in, I could recognise them and sort of figure out the meaning; I couldn't pronounce all of them) when I tried learning Chinese as well, so I didn't have any problems with that.

There's actually a book series that made memorizing characters really easy. I'm learning Japanese, and with it I was able to commit 2000 kanji to memory in a bit over a month. It doesn't go over readings at all, but you can at least write everything without issue.

And Chinese grammar is great, it takes all those things like conjugation and irregular verbs and noun genders and just laughs at them

EDIT:

Books I used was this for Japanese

Chinese equivalent

Unfortunately there's nothing out there like this for Chinese. Heisig does have a Remembering the Hanzi book series though.

Personally having studied both, I feel that Chinese is easier to learn to use because it lacks the psychedelic grammar of Russian. With Chinese, all you have to do is learn the word order (usually pretty close to English) and then plug in the word that you just learned. As long as you practice the tones, you'll be fine.

In Russian, you have to learn all the different verb conjugations, and you have to learn how to change nouns and if you want to use an adjective with a noun, you have to make it agree too.

Get this book about Chinese characters and you'll see how the characters aren't all just random squiggles, but actually have a logic behind them. Once you start learning them, they become easier.

With that said, Russian is a really cool language and so is Mandarin. There is no reason that you couldn't learn either of them on your own, and you'll have to do that at some point anyway after your classes are over.

I just started learning Mandarin with Anki, and here's what I'm doing.

Characters: I'm working through Heisig's Remembering Simplified Hanzi. His strategy (which Japanese kanji learners seem to be a big fan of) is to associate a unique English keyword with every character to serve as a prompt. He orders characters in a rational way, so that you learn radicals first that are used to build other characters later.

For each character, I look it up on Wiktionary to try and find a gif of stroke order (if Wiktionary fails, I use Google images). Then I create cards both from [character] —> [keyword] and from [keyword] —> [character gif]. The second one is where the money is at: I trace out the character on my phone's screen with my finger to answer keyword prompts, and to learn new ones I trace my finger along with the gif to practice.

For example, you can grab a gif for 九 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9D#Translingual

Pronunciation I'm still working this out. But I like using audio, so I've started making one-way cards from [character] —> [audio + pinyin] (ex. 九 —> audio + jiǔ). Wiktionary is also a great source of audio clips for individual characters.

​

Everything else: as usual for any other language. Personally, I make large numbers of audio cards for words, phrases, and practice sentence fragments using my own voice (right now Duolingo is my main source of vocab and example sentences—bonus that it has audio I can mimic carefully when recording my own voice). I write both the hanzi and pinyin on the cards in case I need to refer to them, but I rely on the audio most of the time (and I pretty much "think" in pinyin).

Te recomiendo éste libro: Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1 . Es un método de enseñanza muy controversial, pero a mi me sirvió mucho.

I'd start with memrise. Memrise has four courses on Hakka. I browsed them all, and this one looks like the only one worth your time: https://www.memrise.com/course/51837/hacking-hakka/

There's one Hakka T.V. station, Hakka TV: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdqg95tSArchPfQaAWquDwg It's worth watching just to get the sound of the language down.

If you have money, definitely try to find a tutor online. I searched for "Hakka" in iTalki and got nothing, but you could probably put an ad out or find a friend-of-family or something.

If I understand it right, Hakka is usually written in Chinese characters. Heisig's books teach you how to read Chinese without learning how to talk in Chinese, so they may of may not be worth your time: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236

Just wanted to add in that if you went with Heisig's method, it wouldn't have to be rewritten for Chinese. He's made books for that as well (for both traditional and simplified.)

On Writing and Reading Chinese

Heiseg - Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1

As a native Mandarin speaker I wish I had this book as a kid, would have made learning to read and write so much less... dull. Using his Remembering the Kanji Book 2 to memorize Japanese readings at the moment, and the use of mnemonics is just gold (his breaking down characters into radicals and learning them component-by-component is also probably non-obvious to a non-native -- worth mentioning). Just make sure you don't skip over the Introduction though, and you'd be fine. His selection of characters to teach is somewhat arcane, but after completing this book pick up something like a character frequency ranking so you're not missing out on the common characters.

On Other Resources

Warning: When learning a language I like to dive off in the deep end, with a piece of text targeted at native speakers in one hand and a monolingual dictionary in the other. Apparently not everyone enjoys this.

Grabbing materials targeted at native spekers seems to be the best bet:

• Some stuff from Popular (Singaporean Book Chain)
  
• 
  
  I don't know that many online resources myself, but here's a little something after a little Googling:
  
  
• http://xuele.edumall.sg/xuele/slot/u107/index1.html, also take a look at C10.
  
• http://www.hanyu.com.cn/oldedition/en/htm_newlesson/mulu.htm
  
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/ Practising reading the news in a new language is something I do.
  
  You might want a textbook oriented towards English speakers to get you off on your feet, can't help you much there, I'm afraid.

Here's a few tips, although this is without knowing your level and your aims:

1. Naturally, there are plenty of choices of schools. I happen to run LTL Mandarin School, which is located in the French Concession but can also send teachers out to students' locations. A class like this once/twice per week, focusing on specific points of interest, can be a good start for acquiring new knowledge/vocabulary/grammar/etc.
   
2. For further practice of listening comprehension, listening material such as the stuff they have on [FluentU] (http://www.fluentu.com/), the ChineseClass101 Audio Blogs or Youtube channels like this thing I used before are very good.
   
3. For writing and memorization of characters, there's Skritter, as well as Heisig's Remembering Hanzi book
   
4. For vocabulary memorization, simple: Anki
   
5. For reading, I personally like using subtitles of movies I know (helps also with review and learning of new vocabulary). A good resource for this is Zimuzu and Zimuku. Also, you would need a dictionary to use - Unfortunately, it does not work on the Mac, but for Windows users, Wenlin is an excellent dictionary, even though GUI-wise, really bad.
   
6. For speaking... You just need to speak with people. If your level is not up to the task of speaking in a comfortable speed yet, get a Chinese person who agrees to sit with you every week and listen to you botch his language for some sort of payment (otherwise, he will very quickly tire of it and find excuses for why he "doesn't have the time" and so on).
   
   There you go, hope this helps! 加油！

Remember that writing of any language is essentially just a recording of the spoken language; also, in Chinese, most content words are two or more characters, so by just knowing the meanings of individual characters, you can't understand written Chinese.

Also, I've found personally that it's very hard to properly learn the pronunciation (especially tones) unless you actually hear and speak the words.

Somebody here has already mentioned the book Remembering Simplified Hanzi (and its counterpart "Remembering Traditional Hanzi"), which is very interesting -- its approach is to learn the basic meanings of the characters and how to write them first through through mnemonics -- I think it's a good idea. And fun. But not really necessary.

He really ought to have mentioned that their actually is a fast and easy way to learn characters

Pleco http://pleco.com.
Popup Chinese http://popupchinese.
Heisig and Richardson http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y + Anki http://ankisrs.net/.

it's called, "Remembering the Hanzi". Here's the link to book 1 and book 2 if you're learning simplified characters. For the traditional character books, here is book 1 and book 2. Also, if you don't want to buy a hard copy, here is a link to the 1st simplified book in PDF format.

I found the book "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" to be extremely useful in memorizing characters. I used it to memorize about 1200 characters well enough to write them in about 3 months. There is a Simplified Hanzi version of the book as well: http://amzn.com/0824833236

Thanks! I'm living in the UK at the moment, and about to move to a new city. I think i'll be able to find some chinese students there (it has two universities), so this should really be useful in practicing my mandarin!

Someone earlier recommended this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1CVOOAPOKFUGL&coliid=I3KK8RBNU3V7L0

I've been reading the sample version on amazon, and it seems to have a very well-thought out approach to learning chinese symbols; basically showing you the basics first (sun, mouth, companian, old, etc.) and then suggesting how they might alter the meaning of symbols when they form part of a symbol. Then it builds on chapter on chapter. It also comes with neat little stories! Is this the kind of thing you were suggesting?

And your general advice on writing chinese is very good! Once i've nailed a few basic phrases and greetings, i'll give the webchat one a go!

My plan of action is currently to take a listening course. Chinesepod seems to be the one that comes highly recommended, whilst at the same time working my way through the book of characters I posted earlier, and trying to find chinese friends to talk to!

In january I hope to start a proper chinese course at a local college.

Does this sound like a reasonable aim?


Thanks so much for your help. I have been quite overwhelmed by the level of enthusiasm and commitment on this subreddit!

I have always used the Chinese Link textbooks. I also see Integrated Chinese everywhere. Also, I highly highly highly recommend all of the Demystified books! I have both the Chinese and German and they are fantastic! Also Heisig's books are really popular and they also come in traditional. Hope this helps! I am pretty experienced in trying out tons of different resources for Mandarin! :)

Seeing no better advice yet, I would try italki (what I use, though in my case for Japanese). Particularly in the case of Mandarin you should be able to find native speakers via italki willing to help you 1-on-1 over Skype for less than the cost of any kind of instruction from people living here in North America. If italki is too expensive, I would look for other online options with as small of class sizes as possible to maximize your practice time. If learning Mandarin is anything like learning Japanese (my experience), you will also want to avoid hearing other non-native speakers (ie. students) speaking your target language so you don't pick up their bad pronunciation.

Assuming you go the italki route, check around for vbloggers on YouTube giving away italki promotions before you sign up (or wherever you can find a promo). Usually you can score an extra $10 for your lessons.

If you want to learn Chinese writing, I'd recommend a system like the one used in this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Book-Characters/dp/0824833236. I used the equivalent by the same guy for Japanese ("RTK"), the idea being that Chinese characters can be broken down into simple parts you can recognize easier. An fast example is that forest (森) uses 3 trees (木), so if you learn 木 first that's easier to remember than the 12 individual strokes... Another quick one, "difficult" (難) can be reduced to 2 components most people call "Sino-" and "turkey", etc... Heisig then uses mnemonics (little stories) to tie them together and help you memorize them.

Anyways best of luck. I've heard getting used to speaking a tonal language is tricky, but that Mandarin grammar is relatively straightforward (compared to Japanese).