Comments on: Hanzi Mnemonics Project

By: D

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:58:09 +0000

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.

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:51:32 +0000

No, I used RTK methods combined with
http://www.zhongwen.com/

By: Susan

Susan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:33:23 +0000

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!

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:22:19 +0000

>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.

By: Charley Garrett

Charley Garrett — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:25:44 +0000

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?

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:54:44 +0000

@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?

By: Charley Garrett

Charley Garrett — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:17:55 +0000

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?

By: Sweatpig

Sweatpig — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:26:25 +0000

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.

By: Rmss

Rmss — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:14:36 +0000

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.

By: Rmss

Rmss — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:01:00 +0000

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).

By: Ivan the Terrible

Ivan the Terrible — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:55:35 +0000

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.

By: Ivan the Terrible

Ivan the Terrible — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:54:31 +0000

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!

By: Rmss

Rmss — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:53:31 +0000

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?

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:22:03 +0000

@Zack
CONGRATULATIONS!!! You’re the man now, dawg! Seriously, well done. Welcome to the world of kanji . I’m going to go buy some Jelly Bellies today and dedicate them to you (and Chiro-kun, who also finished recently).

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:17:36 +0000

@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.

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:59:23 +0000

@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 .

By: Zack

Zack — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:24:38 +0000

(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.

By: Dereck Hammond

Dereck Hammond — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:16:52 +0000

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?

By: JDog

JDog — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:13:37 +0000

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?

By: Zod

Zod — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:55:15 +0000

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.