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Life after Heisig’s RTK/RTH | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| ihoop Newbie United States Joined 4611 days ago 29 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 8 13 January 2014 at 5:07am | IP Logged |
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Hey all,
I have a question about how to continue studies after Completing Heisig's books on character recognition and specifically how to learn the readings/pronunciation of characters. My situation is in regards to Heisig's Remembering the Traditional Hanzi, since I am studying traditional Chinese characters. My original idea was that after completing Heisig's two books on traditional characters I would begin a sort of "Intensive Reading" regimen with a computer to learn the pronunciations of characters. Find interesting texts online and use a pop-up dictionary to give me the readings of characters that I already know the meaning of. I figure that after enough intensive reading character pronunciation would have to begin to stick. The other option is to put all 3000 characters into Anki and just use rote memorization to get the readings into my head. While this may be effective, the idea of doing this sort of rote memorization with Anki really does not appeal to me......I would like to avoid it if possible. So, what do you all think? Would intensive reading with a dictionary be sufficient in this situation? Would Anki, while being a bit more boring, ultimately be more effective in learning the pronunciation of characters? I would love to hear the thoughts of other who have gone through the same thing with Heisig's books! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 2 of 8 13 January 2014 at 3:56pm | IP Logged |
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On my journeys through the world of ipad apps, I accidentally found something you might like. Scritter is a paid srs based on writing the characters on the device (it is available for ios, android and your computer somehow as well). It contains kanji/hanzi and word list of most commonly used coursebooks, both beginner and intermediate. It looks really good but it may be a bit expensive.
Other than such memorisation, input is surely useful. Do you know AJATT? All Japanese All The Time is a blog by an american who taught himself awesome Japanese in a few years. He used Heisig, anki, lots (really lots) of input etc. You may find a lot of good advice on his blog. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 8 14 January 2014 at 2:28am | IP Logged |
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Suggest start reading/skimming by the time you hit 700 characters....unless your memory for characters is extremely good, waiting until you learn 3000 will probably be a huge lesson in frustration. Good luck!
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| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3893 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 4 of 8 30 March 2014 at 7:12pm | IP Logged |
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You know the meaning for 人 and the meaning for 口. That's good. But Heisig does not teach you what 三口人 means and what the word 人口 is all about. 适合 and 合适 have very different usage, 水泥 and 泥水 are two very different things indeed.
The character 得 has three different pronunciations, same as the character 的. 好 and 要 has two each. The easiest way not to confuse these is to learn the words (mostly one word = two characters) as whole entities, together with the whole sounds-and-tones package. If you learn to think in single characters only, it might become a habit hard to overcome later on. What I'm trying to say is, modern Chinese is built from words and not single characters. Knowing the characters will help you learn the words faster, but you will still need to learn the words. Use Heisig as a good, useful supplement, but do not rely on it as your basic primary learning resource. Otherwise your "Life after Heisig's" is gonna be tough and full of frustrations. A good link for your post-Heisig ANKI study: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Mandarin_Frequency_li sts Edited by day1 on 30 March 2014 at 7:48pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ascendant Newbie United States Joined 3870 days ago 2 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 8 22 April 2014 at 11:10pm | IP Logged |
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I did something similar to what you're planning, ihoop. I first got through the first 1000 characters--using Anki all the way, since there are shared decks available that you can just download. After learning 30-50 characters' mnemonics for the day, I would set Anki to add the same number of new characters to my active reviews. During reviews, I would write each character as the keyword came up.
Once I hit the 1000 mark, I started learning vocabulary: about 30 words a day. I use dialogues, discourses or writings from many sources, including CSLPod, Popup Chinese, Slow Chinese, and FluentU. My method is pretty much just to find a media item that I consider interesting and learn all the words in it; then, I put the dialogue into Anki as an MCD, which generated a new card for every word I didn't know. Heisig doesn't teach words, of course; it only teaches parts of words. Nevertheless, I find that when new words contain characters I learned through Heisig, I remember them far, far better. Pronunciation does indeed seem to stick, as does intonation after a while. At this point I am still working on vocab, as well as actively practicing the words I learn in tutoring sessions via iTalki. I'm also continuing Heisig, albeit at a slower pace, and expect to finish Book II this summer. Edited by Ascendant on 22 April 2014 at 11:11pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 8 22 April 2014 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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Heisig is basically a set of building blocks. I suspect that people who think Heisig teaches vocabulary are imposing their understanding of what words are onto the Chinese language.
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| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 7 of 8 23 April 2014 at 4:08am | IP Logged |
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80% of words in putonghua are disyllables, and knowing the components (isolated characters) is helpful to get the pronunciation right, while it can be overwhelming for deciphering the meaning (compare it with English:
you may know what UP is and what TIGHT is, but UPTIGHT is something completely different). Edited by Medulin on 23 April 2014 at 4:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3893 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 8 of 8 23 April 2014 at 8:18am | IP Logged |
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There is a nice textbook "Rapid Literacy in Chinese" (Zhang PengPeng) that teaches 750 carefully selected common characters (unlike Heisig, who chooses easy to explain characters, even if rare) and 1300 words made out of these 750 characters. it's 25 lessons 30 characters each, plus sentences to help memorizing all 750, plus small dialogs and texts to practice. You have to make up your own mnemonics, but memrise.com might help there.
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