Hanzi Mnemonics Project
あけおめことよろ (Akeome kotoyoro).
Drs. Heisig and Richardson already have one of these going, but just for the heck of it, here are some free Hanzi Mnemonics anyway. The project will take some time to reach completion, but I’ll keep plugging away at it. The eventual goal is 10,000 characters (if the demand is there…4000+ is guaranteed) with funny cartoons, too. The cartoons are probably going to come dead last. I’ll just try (Try? There is no try!…yes, yes) to add at least some new characters every week.
The project is in TiddlyWiki for now because it’s easiest for creating inter-linking content in. At some point in the future it may be migrated to a more “linear” format. But until then…
Anyway, enjoy. If you have any questions or comments add them to this post, which will serve as the official, “collecting point” for this project.
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John B said,
January 7, 2008 @ 1:18 pm
It’s funny, I was actually thinking about starting something like this after seeing how effective the RTK method is for Japanese.
There are two difficulties. One is just the scope of the project, and the will to keep going, but you don’t seem to have any problems in this department.
Second is getting good data mapping characters by their components. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is nothing like that around, and so it becomes difficult (especially as you reach deeper into the character set toward characters that are seldom used) to make sure that you’re always teaching primitives before the characters they’re used in, and that you’re teaching the right primitives early based on their frequency of occurrence (this is the way that RTK does it, if I recall correctly, though perhaps not).
The results of a project like this would be a tremendous boon to learning Chinese. Even if Heisig and Richardson have something like this is the works… it’s been what, 30 years since RTK was first published? Something like this would be invaluable to the Chinese learning community, and having it be public domain would be even more invaluable.
I am 100% prepared to lend my support to this project. I think it would be a great asset.
David said,
January 7, 2008 @ 3:59 pm
Hey, that’s a really great idea! Highly appreciated! How can I share some of my own mnemonics?
ffhk said,
January 8, 2008 @ 8:27 am
This sounds like a great idea. It’ll be really helpful. I’m looking forward to it.
Zod said,
January 8, 2008 @ 1:55 pm
People learning these languages need to understand that RTK/etc makes such a big difference. I’ve been doing 100 per day, at 1900 right now, going to ‘graduate’ RTK1 tomorrow and move on to RTK3. Then I’ll go all the way to 3007 (plus quite a few other non-RTK characters I’ve encountered).
Anyway, being able to simply recognize the characters and know what they mean alone helps -tremendously- (or should I say, ‘甚’), and I feel like I can grasp the language much more than I ever could before.
Thank you for all your help katz, you’ve done so much to help learners of these languages.
JDog said,
January 9, 2008 @ 1:13 am
Yes, thank you. I am just at 260 kanji, and already I have noticed that I can see all the parts of characters much more clearly than ever before, even if I don’t know them. I will often look at a kanji now and wonder, “I know 2 out of 3 parts of that one, I wonder when I’ll learn that other primitive.” It’s fun to do that, and then when I hit that unknown primitive in the book, it’s cool because it’s like a treat that I get to learn it.
I recently found an Asian channel in my cable package that has Fujisankei news on every morning at 8! Yay! I have been looking for something that I could watch on a TV screen rather than sitting at my computer and watching it on there (somehow I feel less guilty when it’s on the TV). When I’m reading/trying to read the captions on there, should I just crawl through the katakana that I can read, or just try to look at the kanji, or just scan my eyes across all of it as fast as I would need to to read everything on the screen before it disappears (keeping in mind that this would probably lead me to comprehend the LEAST, at this stage anyway)? Does that make sense?
Dereck Hammond said,
January 9, 2008 @ 5:16 am
Hey Khatz, I’ve got a question about a 漢字.
http://www.smashbros.com/jp/index.html
At the top where it says 「スマブラ拳」, the furigana reads けん. The only dictionary entry I can find for 拳 is the げんこ reading on WWWJDIC or yahoo 辞書 (my electronic has the けん reading, but it’s in the J-J and I can’t read it yet). What does the けん reading mean?
Zack said,
January 10, 2008 @ 8:24 am
(was zod, changed my name to zack instead to sound less.. strange)
Finished RTK1! Surprisingly, the last 150 were thankfully easier to deal with than I thought.
khatzumoto said,
January 11, 2008 @ 8:59 am
@David
.
Thank you. I’m going to just get it up and running for now. Make it so that people can add alternate mnemonics later. I think that’s a great idea, especially since other people’s stories are often really funny and interesting
khatzumoto said,
January 11, 2008 @ 9:17 am
@General Hammond
(sorry! watched too much Stargate SG-1!) Um…my vote for the 拳（けん）is:
{名詞}こぶしを振るう武術｡｢拳法(ｹﾝﾎﾟｳ)｣
Basically, it’s using 拳 as a suffix, to make the name of a “new” martial art/style, i.e. Smash Brothers Ken(pou) [スマブラ拳法] — the Smash Brothers Method of the Fist. If it were in English, we might render the name “Smash Fu”, as they did with “Shaq Fu” (i.e. “Shaquille O’Neal(-style) Kung Fu”), a (Sega Genesis?) game from the early 90s.
khatzumoto said,
January 11, 2008 @ 9:22 am
@Zack
. I’m going to go buy some Jelly Bellies today and dedicate them to you (and Chiro-kun, who also finished recently).
CONGRATULATIONS!!! You’re the man now, dawg! Seriously, well done. Welcome to the world of kanji
Rmss said,
January 13, 2008 @ 12:53 am
I’ve been looking everywhere, but so far I’ve only found the sample book of remembering simplified hanzi. Hasn’t it been published yet or something?
Ivan the Terrible said,
January 14, 2008 @ 8:54 am
Ha! All this time waiting for Heisig to publish the Hanzi books, and you beat him to the punch! Well done, well done.
I have to admit, though, I’m slightly ambivalent about using the Heisig method as an approach towards Hanzi. As I understand it, the Heisig method makes sense in tackling Japanese, as Japanese have lots and lots of different readings of Kanji. But Chinese has far fewer readings of Hanzi, doesn’t it? Not to mention how many of the Chinese characters become easier to remember once you know the pronunciation of one of their parts (由 leads to 油 and 柚, 青 leads to 清, 情, 晴, 精, and so on).
Regardless, I’m giving it a shot. Great work, and let me know when you get any user input up; I have some of my own Hanzi stories I’d happily donate if people find them useful!
Ivan the Terrible said,
January 14, 2008 @ 8:55 am
Rmss, incidentally, I e-mailed Heisig about this subject. The reply: not published yet. Don’t know when it will be published. They’re still hard at work, though.
Rmss said,
January 15, 2008 @ 12:01 am
Thanks Ivan. In the meanwhile I’ve searched a like further, and I found a date on a Chinese forum. The reply stated that it’s scheduled for July 2008.
So I guess I’ll pick up Khatzu’s database for the stories, look up the stroke order myself and make my own database and flashcards (for when I’m traveling by train).
Rmss said,
January 16, 2008 @ 7:14 am
I ordered this book in the meanwhile: http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Simplified-Character/dp/0804835098
Doesn’t come with a story for every character, and has the pinyin. But I guess it’s better than nothing. A friend of mine who’s studying Mandarin aswell but achieved quite a higher level than me so far, used this book.
Sweatpig said,
January 16, 2008 @ 7:26 pm
Most motivating:
Fluent Japanese natives who can’t do simple arithmetic. (if idiots can do it, hey, you can do it too!)
Least Motivating (kanji wise):
Top female announcer COULDN’T WRITE THE KANJI FOR お風呂.. no kidding. In fact she was stumped. Boy that must have been embarrasing for her.
Charley Garrett said,
February 29, 2008 @ 6:17 am
I don’t think I understand the organization of the wiki. Are we trying to get the primatives, and then the characters that use them would be descendant characters? I see that “one” has a descendant of “eternity”. Huh?
khatzumoto said,
February 29, 2008 @ 2:54 pm
@Charley Garrett
久しぶり！！！You were about the first person to comment on this site and the first to email me…way before The Big Crash. Um…the characters are descendants in that they contain their “ancestors” as components. Does that make sense?
Charley Garrett said,
February 29, 2008 @ 11:25 pm
That does make sense, and that’s the relationship I was looking for, but couldn’t quite get it on this example. I was wondering if my understanding was wrong, or a mistake or what.
So, are you implying that “eternity” would be considered to use “one” as a component? The only relationship that I could perceive to “one” is “one drop”, but I suppose there might be some geneological relationship that is not intuitively obvious to the casual observer. Is that the case?
khatzumoto said,
March 1, 2008 @ 12:22 am
>So, are you implying that “eternity” would be considered to use “one” as a component?
Yeah.
If you look at 水/water, it doesn’t have that horizontal line at the top (other than the drop) that 永/eternity does. That horizontal line, I am calling 一/one.
Susan said,
September 16, 2008 @ 12:33 pm
Khatzumoto, you mentioned using “Remember the Kanji” for Chinese (can’t find that page right). Would you recommend just the first volume, or all three volumes? In a manner of speaking, I’m restarting Chinese and just started the first volume. Thanks!
khatzumoto said,
September 16, 2008 @ 12:51 pm
No, I used RTK methods combined with
http://www.zhongwen.com/
D said,
September 18, 2008 @ 7:58 pm
Khatzumoto, do you have any flash card files or spreadsheets of the zhongwen.com adaption? I’d like to do the same thing but entering 4000+ characters into Anki is an ordeal I’d love to avoid. I’m new to the site so if you mentioned or posted that information elsewhere, apologies.