ChineseQuest

This blog is pining for the fjords

2011-12-01T09:56:00.003-06:00

It's not pining, it's passed on! This blog is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket. It's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! THIS IS AN EX-BLOG!

But my new blog can be found over at WordPress.

Good against the living...that's something else.

2011-08-18T23:20:00.001-05:00

Just wanted to post one last thing since I've arrived in Taipei. I've relied so heavily on SRS, I think I've forgotten Han Solo's sage words: "Look, good against remotes is one thing. Good against the living...that's something else." Seriously. Although I have surprised myself a few times. I used to freeze up every time my tutor asked me something, so I really expected to have a hard time getting around here, buying things, finding out where to go, etc. But I've really been OK, and have found that most people prefer speak to me in Chinese rather than English, so that's a good sign that my pronunciation is decent. I made conversation with a cab driver in Shanghai off and on over the course of the hour-long trip, asking about different buildings and such. I was able to go around 中山區 in Taipei looking for 3-prong grounding adapters using only Chinese and a picture (你們這裡有這樣的嗎？ and 你知道哪裡有？ are super useful). I've gotten most of my food using Chinese only. But still, it's a whole different ballgame compared to flash cards. My brain is fried at the end of the day. Sometimes I have to get people to repeat things when they say something I'm not expecting, even when it's something simple like 還有別的嗎？ And I get things wrong fairly often. But I've found most people are forgiving and will even offer a correction with a smile. I answered the above question with 不是, and she said "你應該說不用". I'll get there.

Moving! And last post.

2011-08-05T00:37:00.001-05:00

At long last, the wait is over and I'm moving to Taiwan 10 days from now. I'll be at National Taiwan Normal University studying Chinese intensively for the coming academic year. While there I'll be applying to grad schools back here in the US. If I get accepted, we (my wife and I) come back next year so I can start that. If not, we stay another year. I've been in touch with profs at several universities and I feel good about my chances of getting into a good MA program.

Which brings me to the sad news. It may be obvious that this blog isn't exactly high on my priority list. Well, things will only be getting busier from here on out, so it's finally time to say farewell. I've now had this blog for nearly four and a half years (much to my embarrassment when I consider my progress in that same time). We may or may not start a YouTube channel while I'm over there, mainly so our family and friends can see what we're up to, and if I do I'll post a link to it here. Otherwise, that's all folks! Thanks for reading!

Update on my upcoming move

2011-04-27T00:57:00.001-05:00

Well...we keep flip flopping back and forth on the China/Taiwan thing. I've now been accepted to the MTC program at National Taiwan Normal University, and since this program has been mentioned to me specifically by a few faculty members at various universities (and usually in the same breath as the very expensive ICLP and IUP programs), I'm seriously considering going there regardless of scholarship outcomes. This trip is, after all, about getting me prepared for grad school as well as possible. I think I've mentioned before here that if we end up living in Taiwan we'll probably just spend a month or so near the end of our stay backpacking through China, and it looks like that may be what ends up happening.

In other news, I'm writing a 15-ish page paper on the history of the Chinese writing system to use as a writing sample for my grad school applications. I have a good 30 books on the subject and probably a dozen journal articles sitting in my office right now, and I've been getting through them fairly well and writing as I go along. Very interesting topic, and I've learned so much in the last few weeks.

French is coming along well and, as I mentioned last time, I've started studying German as well. One lesson in Assimil per day each, and only worrying about learning to read (though I use the audio as well). This has been going well. This way during grad school I can focus on coursework, research, Chinese, Japanese, 文言, etc. without having to worry about my other research languages.

I take the GRE May 13th. I've been brushing up on my math and taking practice tests and reading test strategy books. Hopefully my score will be great. I would say 'good', but considering that I lack any academic training in this field, I need them to be great.

That's all for now. 加油！

Leaving on a jet plane, and lots of studying until then

2011-03-06T21:07:00.001-06:00

Mkay. Tickets to China have been bought. We fly out on August 15, so it's official, and I'm starting to stress a little the closer we get to that date. And I don't stress, EVER.

I know I said I'd be moving to Taibei, but I just couldn't make myself not move to China. It is, after all, China I'm interested in, not Taiwan specifically. I want to be able to use my weekends to see the Great Wall, the Terracotta Army in Xi'an, the Forbidden City, etc. My wife and I thought about spending a month next summer seeing China after having spent a year in Taiwan, but we decided we'd prefer to just live in China.

I still don't know where we'll be living. I probably won't hear whether I won the scholarship or not until July, so we won't know until then. So our tickets are for Shanghai, since it was cheapest, and we'll just take a train to wherever we end up living. I've applied for a few schools so we have some options in case I don't get the scholarship. We're kind of leaning toward Harbin, even thought my wife has never lived further north than Dallas, TX. It'll be good for her, right?

In other news, I'm studying quite a bit these days. I'm working primarily on my conversation skills for Chinese, since mine suck and I'll need to be able to get around. I'm also working on my French and Japanese reading skills, since I'll need both (and maybe more) for research in grad school. There's a Qing historian who does research in at least 10 languages. That's Chinese, Classical Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Russian, Manchu, Mongolian, and Uyghur in addition to his native English, and he's published in at least four of those (English, Chinese, Japanese, and French). So I have some real catching up to do, since I'm strongly considering specializing in late imperial Chinese history. Maybe I should also add in German while I'm at it...

I'm also reading a fair amount of history. Right now it's Valerie Hansen's excellent survey, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600. Once that's finished, it's onto Frederick Mote's massive (~1000 pages) tome, Imperial China, 900-1800. I've read bits of it, and it is quite good. I've checked out Pamela Kyle Crossley's The Manchus and Mark C. Elliott's Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World from the university library. These are two of the leaders of the "New Qing" history movement, and Dr. Elliott is the aforementioned reader of 10 languages. I haven't started either book yet, but they're both due by the end of the month so I'll get on them soon. Dr. Elliott's book The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China is checked out and overdue, so hopefully it will be back soon. I've read several papers by each professor and the New Qing approach is fascinating, so it's exciting stuff to read.

Other stuff I'm reading include Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. It is also very good, and very informative for someone like me who went to a music college where few students go on to grad school. It has helped me tremendously in understanding what I'm getting myself into, and how to approach grad school in the right frame of mind. Another one is Getting What you Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or PhD, although it is more of a "grad school survival" book than a "get everything you can possibly squeeze out of grad school" book.

So that's what's up with me right now. It also explains the lack of blog posts lately (I'm a little busy). I'll try to do better though. 加油！

Harbaugh Project Progress Report

2010-12-29T17:41:00.001-06:00

You may remember the project I was working on a while back with some collaborators from the Reviewing the Kanji forums. You may also remember that the project pretty much dies about a third of the way through. About a month ago I was contacted by someone who had read about the project, and it turns out he had already done pretty much exactly what we were trying to do, so he sent me his spreadsheet.

I've finally had a chance to look at it, and I'm making it into a usable Anki deck, which will be shared on Anki shortly. There are also references to Wieger's book, Chinese Characters, and some here and there to Karlgren's Grammata Serica Recensa and Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese which I have kept in the deck for reference but not included in the flashcards. Of course you'll be able to customize the deck any way you see fit.

So many thanks to Ed Bockleman, of the fantastic website Chinese-Characters.org for providing this data. I intend to continue the original plan of adding Seal Script images (and perhaps other scripts), 康熙 and 說文 glosses, and various other bits of info (Middle Chinese tones, rimes, and reconstructed pronunciation?) in the future, so keep an eye out (although this will be a fairly long-term project, so don't get your hopes up).

Shameless Request

2010-12-06T14:15:00.001-06:00

I know I've been a terrible blogger and silent for a good chunk of this year, but I have a favor to ask. I'm applying for the CSC Scholarship so I can study in China next year, and I need a guarantor. Basically it's just putting your name and contact info on my application; I'm told nobody is ever actually contacted. So it isn't a guarantor in the sense that one would normally think (no money is involved), it's basically just the government making sure I have a contact in China. So if you are reading this, currently living in China, and willing to have your name, phone number, and address on a sheet of paper, please let me know. It would mean a lot.

孔乙己 and 歷史

2010-09-12T02:22:00.001-05:00

I'm working my way through 魯迅 Lu Xun's 孔乙己 Kong Yiji. It's a short story written in 1919, well before 普通話 Putonghua had been standardised, so the going is a little tough sometimes. Here's the text if anyone's interested in reading. Here's a translation, and here's the Chinese-Forums discussion of the story from a few months ago when it was "Story of the month."

In other news, I've begun to get serious about reading Chinese History, so I'm amassing a collection of standard books to read through. I'm currently reading Treason by the Book by Jonathan D. Spence. It's my first Spence book and I'm enjoying it tremendously. I highly recommend it. Once I'm done with that (should finish this weekend), I'm going to start with the serious business of getting a good grasp of Chinese History. I'll be more or less following the order of books recommended in this thread at China History Forum.

General History

China: A Macrohistory
Ray Huang

The Cambridge Illustrated History of China
Patricia Buckley Ebrey

Imperial History

China's Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture
Charles O. Hucker

A History of Chinese Civilization
Jacques Gernet (translated from French)

Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900
David A. Graff

Imperial China 900-1800
Frederick W. Mote

Modern History

The Rise of Modern China
Immanuel Chung-Yueh Hsu

The Search for Modern China
Jonathan Spence

China: A New History
John King Fairbank, with a chapter by Merle Goldman

Cultural History (because I'm into that kind of thing)

Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilisation
Edited by Paul S. Ropp and Timothy Hugh Barrett

Now, I won't be reading every word of every page, since I believe that adds up to over 6000 pages. It will be more like reading for a class. Get the important bits and move on. I've also got others I'm going to add into the mix:

Cultural History

China's Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty 1644-1912
Richard J. Smith

Primary Sources (in translation)

Sources of Chinese Tradition Vols. I and II
Wm. Theodore de Bary

Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook
Patricia Buckley Ebrey

Historical Records
Sima Qian (Raymond Dawes, trans., Oxford World Classics)

The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection
Pei-kai Cheng, Michael Lestz, Jonathan Spence

Less "Textbooky" Books

God's Chinese Son
Jonathan Spence

Emperor of China
Jonathan Spence

Return to Dragon Mountain
Jonathan Spence

OK, so Half Price books had a bunch of Spence's books in great condition for only a few bucks each. I'm open to other recommendations for the "less textbooky" books. I figure those will be good for when I need a break from trudging through the heavier volumes. The books of primary sources will be used in conjunction with the other books. For instance, if I'm reading about the Tang Dynasty and want to dig a little deeper, I'll find the corresponding passages in de Bary or Ebrey.

I figure if I can get through this list (or at least reasonable chunks of it), I will have a good grounding in Chinese History should I decide to pursue that further in grad school (my specific research interests are still pretty unformed). It will also serve as a good background for any other topic I may end up studying, such as historical linguistics or literature.

開始！

Still living...

2010-08-14T22:10:00.001-05:00

I've been away a while, I know. Some updates:

The Harbaugh Deck Project has kind of fallen apart. We got about 1/3 of the way through, but life does get in the way. It's something I'd like to finish one day, but it isn't a priority right now.

Here's the priority: Taiwan. We've pretty much decided on Taipei for our destination for next year. I'll be there for maybe a year studying Chinese while my wife teaches English to support us (good of her, isn't it?). I'm hoping to study at Shida (國立台灣師範大學, or National Taiwan Normal University) or in the regular program at Taida (國立台灣大學, National Taiwan University). I'd love to be able to study in the ICLP program at Taida, since the professors I've spoken to recommend it almost unanimously, but it's a bit rich for my blood. I have a few (very few) contacts within Taiwan, and one friend of a former professor of mine (who is also a professor, of Chinese History no less) who I'm sure I could meet up with. Forumosa has been a very helpful resource, and I'm sure I'll get more active there the closer I get to next summer.

I'm working hard on my reading ability right now. I'll find a conversation partner or tutor closer to when we move, but I know the real improvement in speaking will come from living there. I've also recently begun to study Classical Chinese more seriously. I'm hoping to be able to dabble a bit in some original texts in my study of Chinese history. I found a pretty decent-looking public domain Classical Chinese textbook here. It has something like 83 lessons, starting with very simple phrases like 父言子曰，毋爲小人。 (A father said to his son, "Don't be a mean man.") The book was published in 1912, and focuses on the (then) current form of 文言, but there does seem to be some use of passages from the classics (Mencius, if I remember correctly). Each lesson has several (twenty-ish) sentences, followed by translations. Vocabulary is included, in (of course) Wade-Giles transcription. Due to this format, it is ideal for sentence mining, so I'm entering all the sentences into Anki. I like it so far.

Oh yes, speaking of Chinese history, I'd like to point out a site that I'm sure most are familiar with: the China History Forum. They have an interesting concept there: you can't make more than 30 posts until you pass an exam covering some Chinese history basics. It's open book and not timed, but at least you can expect most people there to have some understanding of the subject matter.

In other news (really, really awesome other news), Pleco is coming out with an OCR module for their iPhone software. You can basically point your camera at some text in a book and it will recognize and define the words. It looks amazing:

Pleco Chinese Dictionary Camera Recognizer Demo

Holy crap, eh? Also, they'll be releasing their first Classical Chinese dictionary for Pleco (古漢語大辭典), probably next summer. Great stuff. Mike Love said that the OCR module will hopefully be released this September.

OK, so there's the news-snippets-style update of what I've been up to. I probably won't update as often as I once did since I'm trying to devote more of my time to studying (I'm also learning to read French and Latin, which is going fairly well), but I'll pop back in every once in a while.

Update on the Harbaugh project

2010-06-21T13:18:00.000-05:00

In my last post I mentioned that I had teamed up with a few others to put Rick Harbaugh's book/website into spreadsheet form for easy importing into Anki. I just wanted to post an update.

There are four of us working on the project. We originally planned for each of us to do about 25 entries per day, but of course life intervenes, people go on summer trips, etc. However, we do have nearly 1500 entries finished as of today. Each entry looks something like this:

1–63 雲云 yún Rising vapors (yún phonetic) that form rain. 名 clouds

As you can see, the reference number, traditional character, simplified character, Mandarin pronunciation (in pinyin), traditional etymology, part of speech, and definition are all included. I'd like to eventually include Seal Script images, like I mentioned before, but we'll see. If there's enough interest and enough willing helpers, I'd love to also include things like 說文 glosses, known variants, and other such interesting things.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to ask for help. The project isn't difficult, it's just copying from a book (or website) into a Google Docs spreadsheet. The more hands, the better, of course. I believe this will really be a useful project, so if you're interested at all, let me know and we'll get you set up.

Moving to China, subs2srs, Rick Harbaugh, etc.

2010-05-09T20:34:00.001-05:00

This is Nanjing. Maybe I'll be there next year?

Mkay. So my wife and I have decided we're moving next year to either China or Taiwan. We're leaning toward China a bit more, but we'll see. I'm planning on enrolling in a non-degree Chinese Language Program at a university and tutoring English on the side, and my wife is planning to teach English.

I've read that a lot of Westerners have the most problems with learning characters, since they're having to keep up with the Korean and Japanese students in their classes. So I've taken up learning single characters again, but as a side project. But more on that in a minute.

My main approach will be SRSing sentences (as usual) and getting a local tutor so I can practice conversation. My speaking ability sucks. Hard. I've always focused on reading and listening, and my output has been close to nil. Obviously that won't do if I'm going to live in China next year.

I've also found a Mandarin meet-up group in Austin. They meet a couple times a week, sometimes for language purposes and sometimes for cultural things like kung fu lessons and movie nights. I haven't met up with them yet, but I'm going to try to make it to their lunch meet-up this week or the beginner/intermediate workshop this coming weekend. The workshop will be hosted by the owner of a local Chinese school/tutoring service, so that may turn out well for me.

For the SRS, I've finally figured out how to get subs2srs working! If you don't know, this is a tool that converts movie files into Anki flashcards. You give it a subtitle file and the video, and it outputs a spreadsheet complete with line-by-line subtitles, images from the video, and audio. Ideally. It isn't 100% accurate with the audio clips, but that's easy enough to cut up yourself in Audacity. And if you give it both Chinese and English subtitles, it will give you both in the deck. Sweet. I've got Infernal Affairs (無間道) done, but the audio needs cleaning up a little. I'll start working through that if it doesn't prove to be too difficult, otherwise I'll work through one of my Disney movies.

I'm also using ChinesePod lessons. Intermediate lessons are on the verge of being too easy, but I'll keep doing them for now. But I'll be focusing on the Upper Intermediates. Sentences and audio in Anki. I usually have it all imported into Anki by the time I finish listening to the lesson. Supa easy.

So, on to learning characters. I'm finally working through Harbaugh's book (available online here). I'm working with a few other members of the Reviewing the Kanji forums to put all the info from the book into a spreadsheet so we can make an Anki deck. Once we're done, I'll be including images of the 說文解字 Small Seal characters, since Harbaugh's book is more or less organized around the 說文 (I may also include other ancient forms from chineseetymology.org is there's enough interest). If you're interested in helping out with this project, please let me know! We would love some help! We've got almost 400 characters done so far, so about 10% of the total number of characters in the book, and the project was only started about 2 weeks ago With another set of hands or two, we should be able to finish in well under two months. This would be a great opportunity to learn about Chinese etymology and the history of the writing system. It's been really interesting for me so far.

So anyway, that's what's going on! Exciting stuff!

So...now what?

2010-04-23T10:44:00.001-05:00

First of all, yes, I'm still alive. I've been busy this semester.

Second, I finally got notification from the university about my application for this fall.

Oh well, I guess. Apparently there's some law in Texas that says that if you graduate in the top 10% of your high school class, you're automatically guaranteed admission to UT Austin. So many people were taking advantage of the opportunity that they had to change it to 8%. I guess a student who already has a bachelor's degree (albeit a Bachelor of Music) is pretty low on their priority list, which is understandable.

So here I am, with no clue what's next. I feel like I wasted two semesters taking general studies courses in hopes of transferring to UT, but I guess that's life. I'm not too upset about it, I just don't know what to do right now. I won't be getting a BA in Chinese any time soon, it seems. So I'm trying to look at other ways to get into grad school. Some MA programs don't require a BA in Chinese, just a certain level of proficiency. I don't have that level of proficiency, so I guess that's the next goal.

So to that end, my wife and I have been talking about moving to China or Taiwan for a year or two. We're in our mid-twenties, no kids, no debt, so it's a good time to do it. Of course, we also have no real savings to speak of. That's not such a big deal, because it will be another year or so before we could move, and my wife will probably be getting a pretty good job offer in the next week, so there's time to save up and figure things out.

In the meantime, I'll be studying Chinese like always and trying to figure things out. I'll probably hire a tutor since I'll need to be able to actually speak (right now I'm very weak in speaking, and stronger in listening and reading). If we do end up making the move, we'll probably both teach English there, so I'll be looking into that. If my wife does get that job, I may look for a teaching job of some sort (ESL, substitute, etc.) so I have some experience before we move.

Anyway, this is all just talk for right now. Serious talk, but still talk. But if you know where I can get some good information about moving to either China or Taiwan, or about teaching English there, or even about enrolling at a university there (I'm not ruling anything out), let me know.

Repetitio est mater studiorum...right?

2010-02-15T23:50:00.001-06:00

I'm sure the above Latin phrase is something we have all come across at some point or another. "Repetition is the mother of learning." The more often you repeat something, the better you will learn it. This is logical, common sense, tried and true, an' a' that (points for the reference).

So why is it that we use the SRS in our language learning? The purpose of an SRS is to space repetitions out (hence the name), so that a word is repeated the minimum number of times necessary for retention. This, as Keith points out in his latest blog entry, is at odds with how languages are learned. Go read that post. Lots to think about.

In addition, keeping up with your reviews, as I'm sure many have noticed, is a drag. Really. It sucks. Do you really need to read that sentence again to make sure you still understand it? Not likely. Will it bore you to tears to read it again? Yeah, probably.

And I think that's the problem with the SRS. It sometimes takes two hours just to review a bunch of crap you already know. I think we SRSers do way to much reviewing and not nearly enough learning. That's about as boring as it gets. It's very rare for me to have to fail a sentence card. Extremely rare. I'm certainly not going to forget how to read something within a couple weeks, so why review it three times in those two weeks? As long as you're reviewing stuff periodically, you shouldn't forget it. And of course I by "review" I don't mean reading an isolated sentence in Anki and marking a number. I mean simply going back to that newspaper article or comic book chapter or whatever it was you worked through a while back, and reading it again. If it was an audio clip, listen to it again. Do you still understand it? Yeah, probably.

So I'm thinking about going with a simpler, more traditional self-study method. I may give the SRS the boot altogether, but I'll probably still use it for character recognition. I mean particularly the rarer ones. This is a skill that I think will come in particularly handy for me, because as I get further into my study, I'll be using more and more classical texts and the likelihood of coming across more obscure characters will increase. If I've learned to recognize a fair number, I won't have to resort to a dictionary as often. And that type of thing is exactly what I think the SRS is best suited for: learning things you won't need to use very often. But as far as reaching fluency is concerned (as opposed to needing to read and decipher ancient texts), I think that if that word is important, it will show up again in other things you read. You may have to look it up again. Thankfully, with tools like Pleco, that's a pretty simple task. But you will, at some point, not have to look it up any more. And that point will be sooner rather than later if you're reinforcing your reading practice with writing, speaking, and listening practice with the same material.

I think the following seems to be a much more organic and effective approach (for me anyway):

Ideally, I'm fortunate enough to have both a text and an audio recording of the text. I can work through the text and look up all unknown words and characters in Pleco. Anything giving me trouble as far as grammar can usually be resolved by looking in my Dictionary for Readers of Modern Chinese Prose. I need to also get a grammar reference that goes beyond the beginner stage, but haven't yet. Once I've learned the new vocabulary and grammar, I'll read through the passage to make sure I can comprehend it. Next comes something like Dr. Arguelles's scriptorium method. I copy the passage out by hand and read it aloud. That's as far as it goes if I don't have the audio. If I do, however, I can then listen to the audio for comprehension. Many times, if I feel like I need to. That's the beauty of the iPod. I can also do something like Professor Arguelles's chorusing method, which I find helps a lot with speaking and pronunciation. I've quipped about his eccentricity plenty of times, but it turns out that his method is pretty solid.

Not that I'm recommending you march back and forth in a public space while making strange sounds in a loud voice, but his core approach to study is great.

Now, I know none of this is very exciting. It isn't sexy, it has no catchy acronyms or touchy-feely self-help BS, and it doesn't have an army of devoted, overzealous, fan boys. It's a fairly old school approach, with a few updates in technology (eg Pleco). But it's effective. And it doesn't make me want to shoot my computer when I sit down and realize it will take me 2 hours just to review a bunch of crap I already know.

Think about it. The big buzz word in second language acquisition is 'input,' not 'review.' Comprehensible input, i + 1, all that. I think if I increase the input and decrease the review time, my language skills can only improve for it. Or at least I won't be as bored.

We'll see.

Sidetracked by getting on track

2010-01-03T18:03:00.001-06:00

The Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas

I've been sidetracked from my "漢字 Sprint" by getting on track with the academic study of Chinese. After all, that's what I want to do with my life, right?

As I wrote before, my in-laws were in town for about a week for Christmas. They rented a lake house and we stayed with them for the week. I more or less kept up with my reviews during that time, but didn't learn any new characters. I figured that would happen, so no big deal.

However, I haven't learned any new characters since they left. And here's why.

I feel like I know enough characters now to be able to continue
studying Chinese without worrying about individual characters. It's
quite easy for me to pick up new 漢字 at this point, and I think I was
just wanting to finish Heisig to say I had finished it. I think it will
be more worthwhile for me to just worry about learning the language from here on out. There are other reasons too.

My brother-in-law is a theologian who has an MA in theology and is working on his M.Div., and then planning to work on a Th.D or Ph.D afterward. We talked a good bit about grad school and academia in general, and I realized what a huge knowledge he had of the relevant literature in his field. I lack anything even approaching that breadth or depth of knowledge, or even a shallow familiarity with the literature in Chinese Studies. I realize that his knowledge comes from the fact that he is working on his second graduate degree in his field, with an eye toward doctoral work, but there's no reason I can't start reading some of introductory books out there. He mentioned how great it is to find syllabi for courses at other universities and seminaries online, so I started seeking out syllabi for undergrad and graduate Intro to Chinese Linguistics courses, and ordered a bunch of books:

Jerry Norman: Chinese (Cambridge Language Surveys)

Sun Chaofen: Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction

John DeFrancis: The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

John Defrancis: Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Sys

Patricia Buckley Ebrey: Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook

Paul Rouzer: A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese

Edwin G. Pulleyblank: Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar

Wieger, L.; Davrout, L. (translator): Chinese Characters, Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification

I figured this should keep me busy for a bit. As you can see, I ordered a couple books on Classical Chinese. I'll be working through Rouzer this semester (following the syllabus for David Sena's Intro to Classical Chinese course), in addition to following the reading from Tim Xie's Intro to Chinese Linguistics course and Marjorie Chan's undergrad Intro to Chinese Linguistics course (I already have the Ramsey book that Xie uses). I only have a few classes this semester and I'm working part-time at Starbucks, so I'll have plenty of time for study. My classes are on Tuesday and Thursday only, and I'll be done by 3 pm and have asked my boss not to schedule me those days, so I'll have those days to read and use the library at the university. I may write a paper or two if I have time, just to get back in the swing of doing research projects. The last one I did was on Japanese folk music nearly 5 years ago. I may post the papers here, but I'm not committing to anything though. ;)

So from here on out it will be language learning, and study. I got an iPhone last week, and installed Pleco immediately. It's been quite a while since I've been able to use Pleco (I dropped my last phone and the touchscreen broke, but I had no insurance on it and no money to buy another). I've forgotten how useful it is to be able to look up an unknown character just by writing it on the screen. Should make reading 《鹿鼎記》much quicker. If you can recommend any other iPhone apps for Chinese learners, that would be great (stock iPhone only, I don't think I want to jailbreak).

So that's what's been going on here! I think this is a much more useful and practical direction for me to take in my free time, rather than obsessing over the number of characters I know. The Heisig books are useful, particularly for beginners, but you have to know when to put them down, especially if you've already reached a certain level in the language.

漢字 Sprint Days 7-9: Turned into a vegetable

2009-12-19T11:45:00.001-06:00

I had the last few days off from work. Seems like a good time to cram in some more characters, right? Well, it didn't happen. I think maybe something clicked in my brain and I finally realized I was done with the semester, so I spent the last couple days vegging out. Bad idea. I learned 59 characters last night (Day 9), but I now have 325 漢字 reviews due in Anki, plus about 200 cards in my vocab deck. I work this afternoon, and most of the rest of the day will be spent getting ready for the in-laws' arrival tomorrow.

I'm going to clear out as many reviews as I can today (with a focus on 漢字 -- vocab can wait) and tomorrow morning, then hopefully I'll be able to learn some tomorrow morning before the family arrives. While they're here...we'll see. I'll probably have some study time but I'm not counting on much. I'll probably just keep up with reviews, and maybe learn a few new kanji.

Once they're gone, I'll be back at it 100%.

漢字 Sprint, 第六日

2009-12-16T00:22:00.001-06:00

Today is Day 6 of my 漢字 Sprint.

I learned another 50 漢字 today, bringing my 6 day total up to 250 characters. Not bad for less than a week, eh? If you could learn 300 characters per week (which I intend to do) in this way, you could be done with the basic 3000 characters after just 10 weeks of intensive study. Not bad at all.

I noticed something today that might be helpful to other using the Heisig method. As I've mentioned in other posts in this series, I'll often assign a more concrete image to a vague character (see Obama for 人/亻 in the previous two posts). This is good, because it helps you to be more vivid with your mnemonic stories. However, don't feel like you have to use Obama (or whatever) just because that primitive is in the character. "Person" is just fine, and sometimes better. Case in point:

        Q: captured

        cnn captured obama's pent-in speech.


        A: 囚

Really? A person in an enclosure (or pent-in) isn't good enough for captured? No need to make things more complicated than they are. (Note: I sometimes use "enclosure" for 囗 because I learned it that way first)

        Q: captured

        I captured the person in the enclosure.


        A: 囚

Much simpler. Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler, right Einstein?

Anyway, I'm nearly caught up from my two missed days. At a rate of 43 per day (which is what I need to finish this Sprint on time), I should be at 258 characters so far, and I'm at 250. I might try to catch up with the 50/day mark though, so I can have a little leeway. The inlaws are coming in town next week, after all, so there may be a couple days I skip. I don't want to be antisocial when they traveled so far.

And as I mentioned in the comments yesterday, my 漢字 power level is now OVER 1000!!!

Yes, I know. Lame meme reference. It's my one time, I promise.

See you at 2593 漢字!

漢字 Sprint, Day 5

2009-12-14T12:18:00.001-06:00

Today is day 5 of my 漢字 Sprint.

Yesterday I mentioned that Days 2 and 3 didn't go so well, so I'm kind of catching up from that. I added 50 漢字 today. That means that so far I've added 200 new 漢字 during the "Sprint," so the catch-up is going well. I'm only 15 behind schedule (I need 43 per day to finish by the end of Christmas break). I may end up adding another 15 today just to finish catching up if I have time.

My retention for the 100 new characters I added yesterday was 97%. Pretty dang good. We'll see how that all plays out over the next few reviews though.

Lots more Obama characters today (I use Obama in my stories to represent 亻). Here's one I thought was funny:

        Q: double
        Obama put a muzzle on his double.


        A: 倍

See you at 2593 漢字!

漢字 Sprint, Day 4 + Supercharged 漢字 Mnemonics

2009-12-13T21:59:00.001-06:00

So today is Day 4 of my 漢字 Sprint.

Yesterday I wrote that I had done 50 characters on the 10th, none on the 11th, and 75 yesterday. Well, that was before I had actually done the characters, and I was hoping that saying I had done it would motivate me to make sure it got done. I didn't end up doing any.

However, today I learned 100 new characters. It really wasn't too bad. I really doubt I'd be able to keep up that pace, if only due to the volume of reviews I'd have, but for a single day it wasn't an unmanageable load. The One Kanji, One Picture thread really helps tremendously as far as remembering the characters. It almost feels like cheating because it makes it so easy. Here's an example (note: like the thread's author, I use Obama for the 亻 primitive because it's more vivid than "person"):

      Q: transmit

          Obama transmitted rising (smoke) clouds to communicate.


      A: 伝

Seems like cheating, right? However, I don't think it is for a few reasons. It still requires me to write the character from memory. But more importantly, I know I'm learning them because I remember them when they pop up in other characters. For instance, 臓 (entrails) is made up of 月 (primitive is called "part of the body") and 蔵 (storehouse). My mnemonic story is "When you die, your entrails get put with the other parts of your body in a storehouse." I have to remember "storehouse," which is a fairly complex character in its own right, in order to mark the card correct.

Anyway, by today (Day 4 of the 漢字 Sprint) I should be at 172 to be on track with a rate of 43 per day like I mentioned in the first post. Since I got off to a rough start, I'm only at 150, but I'm pretty happy with that. I'll continue at 50 per day, so I'll be caught up to where I should be within a few days. I'm going to be posting daily about this until I finish, so if I go a day without posting, harass me because it means I didn't learn any characters.

See you at 2593 漢字!

The 漢字 Sprint

2009-12-12T13:47:00.001-06:00

So I've gotten fed up with my constant starting and stopping of Heisig. I'm now on a nice, long Christmas break (Dec. 10 - Jan 19). That's 41 days. Since I'm only working part time, I've got plenty of time to work on finishing up RTK/RTH, so that will be my first and foremost goal for the break. I'll continue working through 《鹿鼎記》 but only after I've finished my 漢字 for the day.

In order to finish RTK1, learn all the traditional equivalents of the kanji (旧字体), and the remainder from RTH, I have 1768 to go. Some of them in RTK will be easy because I've learned them before when I was working through (and failed to finish) RTH. Likewise, some when I get to RTH will be ones I've learned before while working through it (got up to 800 or so). And many of the 旧字体 will be easy, because there isn't much change. Kanji 聴� becomes traditional 聽, kanji 覚 becomes traditional 覺, etc.

1768 characters over 41 days comes out to just over 43 characters per day. To be safe, I'm shooting for 50 per day to make up for days that I may not be able to learn them. That may seem like a lot per day, but it really isn't so bad. I've heard of people learning 100 per day straight through RTK, so they finished in 21 days. I'm sure the Anki reviews must be murder afterwards, but they've finished the book. So 50 per day isn't so bad. Plus, as I've mentioned before, the One Kanji, One Picture thread is worth its bandwidth in gold, so the process will be made that much easier.

I did 50 漢字 on Dec. 10, none yesterday (oops), and 75 today. So I'm still pretty much on track (43 times 3 days is 129).

Other goals for the break include continuing to work through A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations and some other reading. Here goes.

Reading!

2009-11-13T11:16:00.001-06:00

So I'm reading my first book in Chinese. Er...make that my first comic book (漫畫/漫画) in Chinese. It's 《鹿鼎記》 by 金庸/Louis Cha. This one is illustrated by 林政德.

This should be fun. It's slow going right now, and I'm having to look up a lot of words. Nciku makes this much easier. They have lots of example sentences and even recording of them (although it's TTS and not the best ever). This is making it super easy to mine sentences. Input the word into nciku, then find a sentence at your level and copy and paste it into Anki. The Chinese sentence, English translation, and pinyin are all given, so it's very easy. For example, this sentence is on one of the first pages:

我們來找一個人，跟旁人並不相干！

Well, it's actually in simplified in the book, but oh well.

So let's say you don't know what 並不相干 means. Look it up in nciku and you'll find that it means something like "to not have anything to do with whatsoever" (crazy how concise Chinese can be). So the sentence means "We've come looking for someone, and we're not concerned with anyone else!"

Then you can grab example sentences like this for more reinforcement:

這事跟我不相干。
This has nothing to do with me.

Some example sentences may have another word you don't know yet. Great! Look up that word and grab some examples for it too! Pretty soon you might have 10 example sentences in your Anki deck for one sentence in the book, and you've learned 3 or 4 new words for the price of one! Then, when you come across those words later, you won't need to look them up because you've already learned them.

So far this is fun. Plus, this is a story that tons of people in China know and love (along with 金庸's other work), so it's got the whole cultural value thing going for it. It's slow going, but I can see it being immensely helpful already.

So what are you reading right now in Chinese?

Refocusing

2009-11-10T14:29:00.001-06:00

Well, today I found out UT's admissions decision:

After careful review of applications from a highly-competitive pool of applicants, we are not able to offer you admission. Approximately three times as many students apply each year as we are able to enroll.

Oh well. I'll be applying again for next Fall. That was the original plan anyway, so no big deal. Spring admissions are unpredictable anyway, in my experience (I worked in a scholarships office). Sometimes they'll have plenty of spots because people have dropped out, and sometimes they'll have very few.

Anyway, I'm doing everything I can to look at this as a positive thing. I'll be able to finish all my core requirements in the Spring since I'll still be at a community college. So while I'm at UT, I'll be able to take nothing but Chinese, Japanese, and Asian Studies classes, with some electives. It's also much cheaper to go to Austin Community College, so I'll save some money next semester. And it gives me a lot more time to get my Chinese and Japanese up to snuff before I have to take placement exams.

That last one is the big boon, as far as learning goes. It won't take me very long to finish all the material for the first two years of Chinese courses (which is all they allow you to test out of) since I was planning on finishing by January anyway, so I'll have all that extra time between January and August. I've come up with a few ways that I can use that time:

I can cram all the material in as fast as I can and then spend the rest of the time learning more, using native material, etc.
I can stretch it out to August, thereby taking Chinese at a very easy pace, and study Japanese a little more intensively. I can only test out of 2 years of Chinese anyway, so it won't do me any good (from a classes standpoint) to go further; I'll still have to take the same upper-level Chinese classes.
Have fun in Chinese for a while, using books, manhua, movies, etc., then spot check a month or two before I start classes using the texts they use to make sure there aren't any vocab holes to fill in. Also, study Japanese on the side.

Japanese is becoming more and more interesting and important to me, and since, like I said, I'll have to take the same classes no matter what my Chinese level is (as long as its above 2nd year level, which will be no problem), it makes sense to me to focus a little more on Japanese. I like the idea of having fun in Chinese for a few months rather than the nose-to-the-book grind I've been doing, so I'll be using as much native stuff as I can in Chinese. For Japanese, I still plan on finishing Remembering the Kanji and then doing something like Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese followed by Smart.FM's Core 2000 or 2001.Kanji.Odyssey.

So I'll be tapping into my (admittedly meager) collection of Chinese material:

漫畫：

《鹿鼎記》(The Deer and the Cauldron)
《機器貓小叮噹》(Doraemon)
《火影忍者》(Naruto)
《加菲貓》(Garfield)

電影：

《哈利波特》(Harry Potter, 1-5)
《史瑞克》(Shrek, all 3)
《花木蘭》(Mulan, 1 and 2)
《森林王子》(Jungle Book)
《小美人魚》(Little Mermaid, 1 and 2)
《英雄》(Hero)
《大紅燈籠高高掛》(Raise the Red Lantern)
《十面埋伏》(House of Flying Daggers)
《殺手之王》(Hitman)
《花樣年華》(In The Mood For Love)
《2046》
《無間道》(Infernal Affairs)

電視：

《三國演義》(Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1993 version)
《七劍下天山》(Seven Swordsmen)

小說：

《鹿鼎記》(The Deer and the Cauldron)

報紙：

《大紀元時報》(The Epoch Times...free in Austin's Chinatown Center)

Pretty decent start. The HK movies on the list have a Mandarin audio track as well. I also have a bunch of Chinese movies that only have English subtitles, so I didn't list them. I'll start with some of the easier stuff, like the 漫畫 and Disney movies and work up to stuff like 鹿鼎記 (the novel). Now that I'm employed again I'll be able to start adding to the collection regularly.

I'm pretty excited about all this, even though I'm a little bummed about having to wait on classes. I'll only have 3 courses next semester, and all reasonably easy, and I'm working part time, so I should have plenty of time to focus on Chinese and Japanese. Should be fun.

Recommendations for books, comics, movies, TV shows, podcasts, etc. would be great! I want to stay away from getting any more 武俠 for a while, since I already have a bunch and I don't want to talk like some ancient warrior or something, so stuff with normal, modern language would be cool.

Removing my Leeches

2009-10-30T16:22:00.001-06:00

Is this really

what you want

to be doing

right now?

I've noticed lately how much of my time is eaten up by visiting language learning forums. I could (and should) be using this time more productively, for things like:

-Studying Chinese/Japanese
-Doing work for school
-Spending time with my wife
-Exercising
-Reading books

Or any number of other things that are more productive than mindless surfing. I've installed the LeechBlock add-on for Firefox and blocked those sites during most hours of the day. They are now only available from midnight until 9AM. I'm usually in bed before midnight or not long after, and most of the time I have to be in class at 7:45, so I'll have just a few minutes each morning to browse through the sites to see if there's anything useful. I suspect after a while I'll quit even visiting the sites.

The program has an option to re-direct you to another page if you try to visit one of the blocked pages. This is my redirect page, hence the message up top. Thanks to Merlin Mann for the idea.

The Heisig Files, Part III: The 漢字 Master List

2009-10-18T01:12:00.001-05:00

This is the third installment in a series about Dr. James Heisig's (and later Dr. Tim Richardson's) method of learning Chinese characters. The first dealt with the history of the method and some of the criticism against it, along with my attempted rebuttal of them. The second dealt with the return on your invested time. In this article I will present the work I've done so far on creating a "Master List" of the Chinese characters that are most useful for both Chinese and Japanese, based on adding to Dr. Heisig's original work.

My original plan for this post was to list all the kanji in RTK 1 and 3 together with their equivalents in traditional hanzi and simplified hanzi, followed by the characters from RTH and RSH that hadn't been covered by the RTK list so far. That turned out to be a lot more tedious work than I'm willing to do for the moment (although it is something I want to eventually complete just for personal interest). A more important and more practical project would be to have all the useful characters for people learning either language (or both). I think that basing this on Heisig's books will make the process of learning all the additional characters much easier. So rather than having all three versions on each line in the spreadsheet like this:

536 dragon 龍竜龙

I will have them listed on separate lines. So assuming you start with RTK, you will first see

536 dragon 竜

And then later you'll have

竜 (trad) 龍

And then later

竜/龍 (simp) 龙

It will make sense in a minute.

漢字之道 (The Tao/Dao/Dō of Hanzi/Kanji)

I've written before that 3,000 characters will not be enough for real literacy in Chinese, especially if you plan on reading any classical Chinese or doing any scholarly work with the language. From what I've gathered, students in Taiwan learn 5568 characters in grade school. Heisig himself even says that 3,000 characters will be a good baseline for learning Chinese. Plus, considering that you'll most likely need to know both traditional and simplified characters, the picture gets even scarier. Fortunately, it's perfectly fine to learn to read and write one set and just to read the other. Since I'm learning traditional, that's what I've got in these lists. I will link to some material for simplified hanzi too since I'm sure plenty of people will want it. It's just too much work for me to want to do by myself when I have so much else going on. I probably will eventually make such a list, though.

The situation with Japanese is a little more comforting, with 1,945 jōyō kanji (with more being added next year for a total of 2131), plus an additional 983 人名用 (jinmeiyō, "name kanji"). So right around 3,000. However, the Japanese government issues a test called the 漢字検定 (kanji kentei, full name 日本漢字能力検定試験), which tests knowledge of about 6,000 kanji at the highest level (Level 1).

The really scary part comes when, like me, you decide to learn both languages. Even if you leave off the Kanji Kentei list and only learn the characters from RTK 1 and 3, the remaining jōyō, the remaining jinmeiyō, RTH, and the Taiwan list, you're looking at nearly 6,400 characters. Obviously this is a longterm project for most people. I recommend getting the necessary parts done first, and then adding the rest slowly as you go.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the non-Heisig characters in these lists don't have keywords, or really any information other than the character itself. I'm leaving it up to you to look the character up and assign it a keyword yourself. You could do this in several ways. The most likely for Heisig Jedi would be to pick a single keyword, much like in Heisig's books. You could also paste a dictionary definition into the question side of the card, along with the reading (piniyn or kana, depending on your preference). A lot of people like using Japanese keywords rather than English, and I'm sure you could do this for Chinese as well. Whatever works best for you is great.

I want to make sure that it's clear that I'm not saying you "should" or "need to" learn this many characters. This is for the 漢字 addicts. You can get by in Chinese with 3,000 characters, and in Japanese with 2,000. This is for those who want more or feel they need more, for whatever reasons. Anyway, here are the paths I recommend if you want to take this journey this journey.

Note: I recommend installing a good font with support for as many characters as possible. One such font which I've written about before is Han Nom A and Han Nom B. It contains all the characters in Unicode, including CJK Extensions A and B, for a total of 70,207 different glyphs. Han Nom A is a 明體/明朝体 (serif) font, and Han Nom B is a 黑體/ゴシック体 (sans-serif or gothic) font. You may also want a good Japanese font, since some characters are displayed differently in Japanese (直 being one off the top of my head). I like the EPSON fonts on this page.

Note: The fonts in the spreadsheets may be kinda wonky. Should be easy enough for you to change but for some reason my (freeware) spreadsheet program didn't like me trying to change the font.

Chinese

If you're only learning Chinese, you'll want to start out with RTH 1. Follow this with the "Taiwan All Grades" list I posted on Anki a while back. Once RTH 2 is out, you can do both RTH books before continuing with the Taiwan list. There are 4,070 characters on the Taiwan list that aren't included in RTH 1 (bringing the total to 5,570 traditional characters), so there's quite a way to go once RTH 1 is finished. Fortunately, they're in grade-level order, so the more useful ones come first. If you get sick of learning characters after a few thousand, you can just be done with it.

There are 1,709 characters on that list that have simplified versions. I have those listed after all the RTH and Taiwan list characters. That makes a total of 7,279 characters for Chinese. I think you should be able to scrape by with that many, don't you?

Those of you (poor souls) who want to start with simplified characters, just do RSH, then the Taiwan list simplified, then whichever traditional characters you're missing. Here are some files:

RTH + Taiwan List with simplified equivalents (spreadsheet)
RSH List (spreadsheet)
Full Taiwan List with simplified equivalents (spreadsheet)
RTH + Taiwan List followed by simplified (Anki Deck)

The way I have the Anki deck set up, if you get a character in the question, it's asking you for the simplified version of that character. This is only for the last 1,709 cards. The first 1,500 cards are RTH, the next 4,070 are from the Taiwan list (and you need to make a keyword for these), and the last 1709 are simplified. There's no need for a keyword for the simplified charcaters, since you're given the traditional one as a prompt.

Japanese

If you're only learning Japanese, the task is a little less complicated, and made a bit easier due to the fact that both RTK books are available. This significantly reduces the number of keywords you have to make yourself. RTK 1 and 3 come first, followed by the 21 remaining jōyō kanji and the 80 remaining jinmeiyō kanji. After that is the rest of the kanji from the Kanji Kentei Level 1 test (3,266), for a total of 6,374 characters. You'll have to come up with keywords for the 21 jōyō, the 80 jinmeiyō, and the kentei characters. However, you can easily copy from the Kanken (short for kanji kentei) spreadsheet whatever information you need if you'd rather have definitions or whatever instead of keywords.

Here are the spreadsheets and an Anki deck incorporating all of them.

RTK 1 and 3 plus remaining 常用漢字 and 人名用漢字 (spreadsheet)
Kanji Kentei List (spreadsheet) many thanks to Katsuo from RevTK forums for this outstanding spreadsheet
Full RTK + 常用漢字 + 人名用漢字 + Kentei list (spreadsheet)
Full kanji list (Anki Deck)

The Anki deck starts with all the RTK 1 and 3 kanji, with their keywords. After that is the remaining 常用 and 人名用. Everything after 鷗 is the remainder of the Kentei list.

Both (aka, Are You Nuts?)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/p_h/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This is where it gets hairy. The following is entirely my own opinion, and how I'm doing things. If you want to approach things in a different order, all the spreadsheets are here and you can do that.

John Biesnecker wrote this recently:

I decided to start with Remembering the Kanji, rather than either the simplified or traditional versions of Remembering the Hanzi, for a number of reasons.
There’s a lot more material available out there for RTK, as it has existed for about thirty years, as opposed to like two years for RTH.
I already have a copy of RTK, and I didn’t want to invest more in something I wasn’t sure would work at all in the first place.
Of all of the overlapping Chinese character sets, I know simplified Chinese the best, and by going after Japanese (which is something of a combination of simplified and traditional – along with a number of Japanese-specific simplifications) I’d be getting a lot of traditional Chinese characters that I don’t know that well.
I’m going to learn Japanese eventually, and laying the groundwork ahead of time makes sense.
The first volume of Remembering the Hanzi only goes up to 1500 characters which, for Chinese, is pretty lame.

One of the best examples of #1 is the One Kanji, One Picture thread at RevTK. I've found that for many of the characters, having a picture works better than recalling a story. It may even seem like cheating because it makes it so much easier, but it isn't because you're still recalling the kanji from your memory.

Anyway, I agree with his reasons for using RTK first. Even for someone who is a complete beginner in both languages, it makes more sense just for reasons 1 and 5 alone. Once you finish RTK 1 and 3 (which again is made easier by the sheer number of resources available for those books versus RTH or RSH) plus the 常用 and 人名用 kanji, and then learn their traditional forms, you only need to learn another 300 characters from RTH and you'll know 3,558 characters. An additional 2,824 will give you the remaining characters from the Taiwan list, and another 1,280 will finish off the Kentei list, bringing the total to 7,662. After that, learn another 1,852 (which should seem like small potatoes at this point) and you'll know all the simplified versions of the ones you've learned so far. You sick freak. I mean, really, who in their right mind wants to know 9,514 different characters? Really? Okay, here it is.

漢字 Master List (spreadsheet)
Master List with Simplified (spreadsheet)
漢字 Master List (Anki Deck)

Again, anything that isn't Heisig has no keyword. Some cards will give you a kanji as a prompt, followed by (trad.). This is asking you for the traditional version of that kanji (these are the 旧字体 kanji that were simplified in Japan in 1947). If you get just a character in the prompt, it is asking for the simplified version of th character. Like in the Chinese deck, these cards don't need keywords. The "Master List with Simplified" simply lists all the characters from the Master List in one column, and their simplified equivalents in the other, in case you want it as a reference. If there isn't a simplified version, the same character is listed in the second column.

That's It!

You're done! You may never need another character as long as you live. However, there are always more to be learned if you're so inclined. Some linguists at Middle Tennessee State University have published frequency lists (available as spreadsheets or online) for modern Chinese (9,933 characters) and classical Chinese (11,115 characters) based on a huge corpus of text. Their combined list contains 12,041 characters. How does that sound for a goal? Really, if you've finished the Master List, you're nearly there! Riiiiight....

If anyone actually gets through any of these lists, I want to hear about it. If I manage to make it through the Master List, you can bet I'll blog about it.

If anyone wants to collaborate with me in filling these spreadsheets out with more information (number of strokes, readings, definitions, etc.) or knows of an easy way to run the whole list through something like the Unihan database and get that done automatically, let me know. I'm not too awfully spreadsheet-savvy, hence the rough, barebones layout of these files. There is a fantastic deck for RTH that Vaste at RevTK forums posted, which I have here, that would be great as a model. It has links for each character to stroke order animations, zhongwen.com, nciku, etc. I realize that this project is probably a pipe dream, or at best something better left to real researchers, but maybe eventually...

One note of caution: Although I'm confident all the kanji and traditional hanzi on all the above lists are correct since I got them from various already extant lists and spreadsheets from around the Internet, the simplified hanzi may have some errors because I ran them through a machine translator and have not checked them thoroughly. Let me know of any errors you find in any of the lists.

The Heisig Files, Part II: Return on Investment

2009-10-14T15:17:00.001-05:00

This is the second installment in a series about Dr. James Heisig's (and later Dr. Tim Richardson's) method of learning Chinese characters. The first dealt with the history of the method and some of the criticism against it, along with my attempted rebuttal of them. This article will discuss the time investment and the return you can expect on that investment.

Time Investment

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23065375@N05/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Here is an interesting question I got from John Biesnecker when I mentioned that I was writing this series and asked for input on what to cover: "Is it going to be a giant waste of my time over the next month?"

Now, after that was a :P so I'm sure he was joking, but still that's a good question. Of course the answer depends on the level of the person doing the asking. I'm not sure how far along John B. is, so I'll answer it generally. If you can already read and write Chinese or Japanese at a high level and feel very comfortable with the characters, then obviously your time will be better spent on something else. However, if you want to take your familiarity and facility with the characters to "a ho' nuvah levoh," RTK/RTH is for you.

There have been people who have finished RTK in about 3 weeks, starting from scratch. That's a pace of around 100 kanji per day. Of course, this is an extreme example. But on the more feasible end of the scale, if you just learn 30 per day you will have finished RTK1 in slightly over 2 months (68 days), or RTH in just under 2 months (50 days). You could learn all the kanji in RTK 1 and 3, plus the ones in RTH that aren't included in RTK (not accounting for variant forms such as 龍/竜), in under 4 months. That's nearly 3300 characters in under four months. If you really wanted to go the extra mile, you could learn the traditional, simplified, and kanji forms for each character (many of them are the same), and it wouldn't really be too much of a stretch.

Now, you may ask why you would possibly want to devote that much time to learning characters, especially when you have many people saying you shouldn't start to learn how to actually read until you've learned "the characters." Well, "the characters" is a vague term. This idea comes largely from Khatzumoto of All Japanese All The Time, where he suggests that you should learn all the Jōyō kanji (by going through RTK) before starting to learn real Japanese using his method. I can see the logic. Once you know all the characters (or at least all the ones on the "official list") you can more or less zip through sentences without having to learn new kanji.

This isn't quite the case in Chinese. Since Chinese is written entirely in characters, there will always be a character here and there that you don't know yet. Linguists at Middle Tennessee State University have analyzed a massive corpus of modern and classical Chinese text (consisting of 258,852,642 total characters) and found 12,041 unique characters in use. If you only take the modern texts into consideration, there are 9933 unique characters. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that you should learn all of them before actually studying the language. While you're at it, why don't you also tackle the 中華字海 and its 85,568 different characters?

I think Remembering Traditional/Simplified Hanzi Book 1 would be more than enough to get started with Chinese. You learn the most frequently used 1000 characters in RTH/RSH1, along with 500 others that are easily learned at that stage. That's definitely enough to get you started with reading, and to last you a while. Meanwhile, you can work through RTH2 (once it comes out) alongside your reading.

Return on Time Invested

All that was to say this: RTH/RTK is worth your time. For an investment of around 2 months (or less if you're going at a breakneck pace), you will have made your life significantly easier. Not only will you know the characters you encounter, you will have learned how not to forget their meaning and writing, and so will have no trouble picking up new characters as you go along.

There's also something slightly more intangible to be gained. You will be intimately familiar with the way the characters are constructed. Think, right now: can you picture every Chinese word you know in your head? Every stroke of each character? You can probably do this with English, but if you have not learned how to write the characters, and which components each character is made up of, I'm willing to bet you can't do it with Chinese. You will be able to after completing Heisig's books. They will no longer be foreign, unfamiliar, squiggles that you can maybe just recognize the shape of, but not accurately recall.

So why Heisig specifically? Why not just learn to write the old-fashioned way? Well, several reasons. Traditional courses dumb things down for you, taking you by the hand at a slow pace over the course of years. For instance, in the first year of Japanese at University of Texas, you learn some 175 kanji (they use the Yookosoo! textbook series). Words that normally use kanji in real Japanese are written with kana instead. At that rate, it will take you just over 12 years to learn all the 2131 jōyō kanji (the number on the updated list). And this is at a school with a very good Asian Studies department. Go to a school with a less well-established program and the rate will likely be even slower.

The situation with Chinese is a little better (likely out of necessity since Chinese uses characters exclusively). However, even in advanced literature classes, there is a significant amount of character lookup going on. The syllabus for one of these classes has a section that reads something like "You must look up all unfamiliar characters and come to class knowing their pronunciation and meaning). Shouldn't you be past that for the most part by the time you start reading serious literature?

So then why Heisig versus just drilling the characters individually, maybe from a frequency list? I suppose you could go that way, and I know of people who have. But Heisig teaches you how to use mnemonic devices to become more efficient at remembering the characters. I can recall characters I learned months ago and haven't looked at since, because I've learned to create these "hooks" in my memory to hang the characters on, and some of these hooks are so strong that I don't even really need to review. Can you say that about just repeatedly drilling characters?

Related to that is the order in which Heisig teaches the characters. You don't learn a character until you've already learned all of its components. This is an ingenious idea. Rather than learning 的 as your first character (because it is the most common character), you learn it after you've learned 白 and 勺. Now you can remember 的 as a combination of those two characters rather than just a collection of strokes. This makes the learning process much more efficient and effective.

Some people feel that it's "silly" to use stories to remember characters. I say they need to unclench their butt cheeks a little bit. If it helps you remember thousands of characters better than what you're currently doing, then I'm sure you can tolerate a little silliness. The silliness is what will help the characters stick in your head even more. The sillier, the more graphic, the more outrageous, offensive, or grotesque a story is, the better you will remember it. On that note, throw Heisig's stories out and use your own. His stories are not what the book is about, and I'm sure he cleaned up his own stories quite a bit for publication.

Part 2 Wrap-up

So there's Part 2. In Part 3 I'm going to present "The Unified Theory of 漢字." I'll lay out plans for people who want to take their facility with characters to the next level, and I'll post what work I have done in creating the "One Heisig List To Rule Them All," as well as the "Master 漢字 List" for the ultra-ambitious. Stay tuned. In the meantime, here are some other great blog posts posts about Heisig's method:

Discovering Mandarin - Preparing for Heisig: Remembering Simplified Hanzi
Mandarin Segments - Tips & Tricks for Heisig Visualisations
Global Maverick - Heisig, SRS, and my experience with learning Chinese characters
Sinosplice - Ode to Heisig and RTK

The Heisig Files, Part I: History and Criticism

2009-10-12T06:34:00.002-05:00

This is the first part of a series I'm writing on Dr. James Heisig's (and later Dr. Tim Richardson's) method of learning Chinese characters. The series will hopefully end with a list of all the kanji/hanzi that have been included so far in the series, along with their equivalents across all three major sets of characters in use today (traditional hanzi, simplified hanzi, and Japanese kanji), thus creating a “must-learn” list of Chinese characters if one is to study both Chinese and Japanese. That last bit will be a work in progress until Book 2 of RTH is published so the list can be complete.

History of the Books

Joe Kester / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

In 1977, Dr. James Heisig released a book, in a very limited printing, called Adventures in Kanji-Land. Later, in the '80s, he had it re-printed as what we now know as Remembering the Kanji. In it, he teaches a method for remembering the meaning and writing of the 常用漢字, or Jōyō kanji (frequently used kanji). These are the 1945 (the book has a few more than this at 2042) kanji (漢字, or Chinese characters) that the Japanese government considers necessary for fluency in Japanese. According to wikipedia, Japanese law requires newspapers to append the pronunciation (using ふりがな, furigana) to any character not on the Jōyō list. Schoolchildren are taught these kanji in elementary and secondary school.

Since there is a decent number of kanji that are in common use but not on the Jōyō list, Heisig later released Remembering the Kanji III, teaching an additional 965 characters. RTK2 was released, but it didn't teach any characters, just the pronunciations for the 2042 in RTK1. This brings the total number of characters to 3007, which is around the number I've seen mentioned as "how many kanji a university-educated Japanese person might know." Figures vary somewhere between 3000 and 4000.

In 2008, Heisig and Dr. Tim Richardson released the long-anticipated Chinese adaptations of RTK, Remembering Traditional Hanzi and Remembering Simplified Hanzi. Each version contains 1500 characters, and part 2 of each version will contain an additional 1500 (whenever they release it), for a total of 3000. Like the Japanese-focused originals, Remembering Traditional/Simplified Hanzi has met much opposition and derision. Many of the arguments against the book are somewhat like the following:

The Arguments

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1. It may work for Japanese because the characters lack phonetic information, but in Chinese the characters have phonetic components so it seems a waste of time not to learn the pronunciations along with the meaning and writing.

Well, first of all let's not forget that nobody is forcing you not to learn pronunciation. If that helps (and I think it can for some), then do it. However, the first part of the statement is not completely true. Japanese kanji do contain some phonetic info, when you're talking about on-readings (音読み, on'yomi), and this can be seen by looking at some similarites between the 音読み and the Mandarin pronunciation. There may be even more similarities between the 音読み and the readings in some more conservative Chinese languages/dialects such as Teochew, but I'm not sure.

天気 is read てんき (tenki) in Japanese, and its Mandarin equivalent (天氣/天气) is read tiānqì.
万 is read まん (man) in Japanese and wàn in Mandarin (traditional is 萬).
人 is read じん (jin) in Japanese and rén in Mandarin.
門 is read もん (mon) in Japanese and mén in Mandarin (simplified is 门).
新 is read しん (shin) in Japanese and xín in Mandarin.
地球 is read ちきゅう ( chikyuu) in Japanese and dì qiú in Mandarin.

So I don't really see argument #1 as a valid argument. There are exceptions to the phonetics in both languages, so it's just as helpful, or unhelpful, depending on how you see it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/decafinata/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

2. You don't learn how to read the characters, just how to write them. You also don't learn the definitions, just a keyword that doesn't always have much to do with the meaning of the character as it is actually used.

Well, the full title of the book is Remembering the Kanji: a complete course on how not to forget the meaning and writing of Japanese characters. Notice what isn't in the title. There's nothing about reading there, and nothing about definitions.

The point of the book is to teach you how to learn the characters. Along the way, you'll learn 2042 (for RTK1) of them, and afterwards you'll be able to remember pretty much any new character you come across with little trouble. So why no readings? "Divide and conquer" is Dr. Heisig's answer. It's easier to learn less information, and when you compound that added ease over 2042 characters, that adds up to a lot of savings. You'll learn the readings in context when you start learning real Chinese/Japanese.

This puts you in the very enviable position of being like a Chinese person learning Japanese (or vice-versa). They know how to write the character, and they know what it means in their own language (which may or not be related to its usage in the other language). This, as many people who have taken classes in Japanese with along with Chinese students have noticed and complained about, allows them to learn the language very quickly because the single biggest hurdle to Westerners (learning the characters) is a complete non-issue for them. Wouldn't you like to have that advantage?

On to the second half of this objection: it does say "meaning" in the title, and many people argue that some characters don't really mean what the keyword suggests they do. Well I say that this isn't too awfully important. Why, you ask? Becase you will learn the meaning as it is actually used in context. Again, I'll point to the native speakers of one language learning the other. Some characters are used the same way in both languages, and some aren't, but the person will have a general idea of what they mean, which is exactly what you learn with the keywords. You're just learning that "general idea" in English since your native language is not Japanese or Chinese.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sugu/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

3. Learning individual characters is a waste of time since most words in Chinese are composed of two or more characters.

This one is easy. See objection #2 above. You, like a native speaker of Japanese learning Chinese, will already know the characters but not how they're use, thus putting you in the aforementioned "enviable position" that will make other people whine about how quickly you're able to pick up the language. Plus, already knowing the meanings of the individual characters of the vocab words you're learning makes it easier in many cases to remember the word. As Bill Glover recently pointed out, Chinese is often very logical in how words are formed. For instance, 電腦 (computer) is "electric brain" and 黃油 (butter) is yellow oil.

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4a. Many of Heisig's mnemonic stories are not etymologically correct.
4b. Some of Heisig's mnemonic stories are ridiculous and too complicated to even be helpful.

4a is easy, too. The stories aren't meant to be legitimate etymologies! You can learn those later if you're interested in them (I personally plan to study this as part of my research in grad school), but learning etymology is not necessary when trying to learn the characters in this way. That said, if you find that learning the real etymologies is helpful, then by all means incorporate them into your story! There's nothing that says you must use Heisig's stories when learning the characters.

This brings me to 4b. Again, let's look at the title of the book. Take special notice of what the real aim of the course is. It isn't to teach you the characters themselves. It teaches you "how not to forget the meaning and writing" of the characters! Heisig urges you throughout the book to create your own stories, and after the first few hundred frames, you're expected to do just that. So if his stories don't work for you, make your own! If you'd prefer etymology over "silly" stories, then use etymology. The real point of the book is how to use your imaginitive memory to remember the characters, so use it!

In the thread I linked to earlier on Chinese-forums.com, the original poster presents his suggested method of learning the characters: Just learn it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wmjas/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Just learn it? So I'm supposed to "just" cram several thousand characters into my head by "just learn[ing] it?" His next step is to actually pay attention to it. Very helpful. Finally he recommends to use a mnemonic, but preferably an etymology. That's perfectly fine, as I said. But why put yourself through all the extraneous effort before finally "giving in" and using something that actually works? I'm sure the poster agrees that it will work if "all else fails," or he would have put it that way, so why not just get really efficient at what will always work?

So much for 4a and 4b.

Part 1 Wrap-up

So there's a bit about the history of Heisig's method and books, and some of the most common arguments against the method with my replies. Surely I don't expect that to convince everyone, but hopefully it will serve to inform people of what the goals of the books actually are and why this method so helpful. Part 2 will deal with the time you'll invest on the method and the returns you can expect on that investment. I'm still planning out the series, so any suggestions on topics are welcome (but I'm making no promises)!