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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5570 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 25 of 54 14 January 2010 at 4:54am | IP Logged |
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January 13:
I'm disappointed with how many characters I'm forgetting today. I missed 8 out of 156 due cards on Reviewing the Kanji! Either I'm just having a bad memory day, or I didn't take care to create vivid enough stories to remember them. I suspect it may be both. Sometimes Heisig's keywords for primitive elements (parts of characters) just aren't vivid enough to create a story I can easily recall, particularly when the keyword refers to an abstract concept. Heisig explains how abstract concepts don't work well for vivid mnemonics, but he repeatedly flouts his own principle. When this happens, I need to either change the primitive element's keyword completely (e.g. 必 "invariably" → "lover", 曼 "mandala" → "handsome", 付 "adhere" → "Scotch tape") or associate it with a specific person (e.g. 及 "reach out" → "Jesus", 代 "substitute" → "Joe Biden", 義 "righteousness" → "Martin Luther King, Jr."). I also find it useful to combine recurring combinations of primitive elements into new ones (e.g. 厉 "cliff + ten thousand" → "Grand Canyon", 夋 "license + walking legs" → "prostitute", 袁 "lidded crock + scarf" → "bomb") So today I am not learning new characters, but rather reviewing and tweaking my stories in this manner. Mandarin: • reviewed characters on Skritter • listened to an episode of ChinesePod (Fire in the Hallway!) Japanese: • reviewed characters on Skritter, Reviewing the Kanji Edited by Levi on 14 January 2010 at 6:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5850 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 54 14 January 2010 at 7:49am | IP Logged |
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It's very interesting, how you implement memnonics. I know that some people in this forum use this method, but I myself have no experience with it. I have to live my whole life with a weak memory, so I am always curious to know other people's memory tricks.
Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 14 January 2010 at 8:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5509 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 27 of 54 14 January 2010 at 8:00am | IP Logged |
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Yes, I am very interested in your mnemonics as well. I do use memory tricks like this
with other languages, but I have always had a hard time applying this kind of method to Chinese. How do you reconcile the needs to remember the meaning, the character, and the pronunciation? Pronunciation is especially hard for me to memorize with mnemonics because so many characters sound the same. If I don't already know a phrase with the character I want to learn in it, it can be pretty tough to learn the sound of the word. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5570 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 28 of 54 14 January 2010 at 12:32pm | IP Logged |
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The books I'm working with do not explain pronunciation; they only help you to remember the shapes of the characters and how to relate them to the meaning. Basically, every part of a character has a keyword associated with it (usually the same as the meaning of that character or something closely related) and you build a story out of the various parts of the character. For example, the character 逃 means "escape", and consists of two parts: "turtle" and "road", so I imagine myself trying to escape a Godzilla-sized turtle that's on the road crushing cars left and right. This being a particularly unusual and vivid image, I don't find it difficult to conjure up when I'm given the word "escape" and told to write the character for it. After I learned the character and its meaning, I started to notice it in sentences I came across, and with enough examples of it in real Chinese I've come to learn that its Chinese pronunciation is "táo". It helps that often a part of a character will give you a clue to its pronunciation (e.g. the bottom part of 草 "cǎo" is 早 "zǎo"). Edited by Levi on 14 January 2010 at 12:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5570 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 29 of 54 15 January 2010 at 9:18am | IP Logged |
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January 14
Mandarin: • did Lesson 28 of Remembering Simplified Hanzi (26 characters), practiced on Skritter • listened to an episode of ChinesePod (Computer Problems and Tech Support) Japanese: • did Lesson 29 of Remembering the Kanji (41 characters), practiced on Skritter and on Reviewing the Kanji 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5509 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 30 of 54 15 January 2010 at 10:05pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the explanation. I googled the book you mentioned and it looks like it's
Heisig, which would make sense after hearing your method :). I personally have not used Heisig before, but I hear a lot of commentary about it. Actually, inspired by you, today I went to track down a copy of Remembering Simplified Hanzi at the bookstore where I buy foreign language materials. But for some bizarre reason I couldn't find the book!!! This particular bookstore usually has an excellent selection of foreign language stuff and the Chinese textbooks/dictionaries/grammars/aids alone take up an entire small wall, so it makes no sense to me that they would be missing such a common book. I guess someone must have taken the last copy right before me! I guess that's a recommendation in and of itself! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6473 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 31 of 54 15 January 2010 at 10:18pm | IP Logged |
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I don't like Heisig for Hanzi nearly as much as I like Heisig for Kanji. It seems to me that he adapted it too little for the Chinese language. I wrote two detailed posts on this a while ago.
To learn Chinese characters, I recommend the following books, which use a similar methodology: - if you know 0-250 characters: "Learning the Chinese Characters" - if you know 250-1500 characters: "Reading & Writing Chinese" by McNaughton - if you know more than 1500 characters: "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles" by T.K. Ann The advantage of the first is that it has a complete solution, which teaches you not just how to memorize the characters, but also how to memorize the pronunciation & tone, how to memorize the basic elements, how to memorize characters that can have different pronunciations and different meanings, and it even goes into stroke and all the little things I only learned in class. It's also really well-optimized to quickly giving you the characters you will encounter in your textbooks, so you don't need to finish studying the book before enrolling in a traditional class. The second book doesn't provide the stories for you, so you have to know how to develop them already, but on the plus side it's also well-optimized and it teaches a lot more characters. Finally, the third is as badly-organized as Heisig (going simply by the components with very little consideration for character frequency), but it has better information for each of the characters, key words based on etymology, lots of examples (compound words and short stories) and it teaches almost 6000 characters total in 5 volumes. Edited by Sprachprofi on 15 January 2010 at 10:19pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5509 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 32 of 54 15 January 2010 at 10:33pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the recommendations. I'll check these out. I'm probably not going to end up
purchasing any of those or Heisig because this method has not worked especially well for me yet (although I'm willing to give it another chance! Perhaps with a library book?), but I'd love to take a look at the material just to gain familiarity with the style. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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