Breakthrough in learning Characters?

[Hofmann]

I might be selfish, but I would like this thread to die. Die and never be resurrected. This is clearly a scam and if I were a mod I'd have deleted it long ago. If you guys want to waste your money, you can pay me $400 and I'll give you a bunch of bullshit.

[renzhe]

How can someone who hasn't learned a thing about gravity and waves understand Einstein's theory of Relativity.

I don't know, but Professor Gong has published a book on Unified Theory, which has solved the biggest problem of theoretical physics in the last 100 years. The same problem that LHC was built to solve, and which troubled Einstein for 30 years.

Here is the book: http://isbn.nu/0916713016, described as "This is a physics theory which unifies all forces, including gravity. The Prequark theory was fully developed in this book."

So it seems that you don't need to understand the Theory of Relativity, because there is a better theory, and it was developed by Professor Gong, just like this linguistic theory.

I might be selfish, but I would like this thread to die.

Personally, I'd like it to be resurrected at regular intervals. Just like the topic comes up at regular intervals.

One of the Professor's claims was that you can use his system to reach a native-level reading comprehension in three months, without learning any vocabulary beyond individual characters. This is a very bold.

waynewalter has had this book for exactly one year. I'd like to hear about his progress. Can he read at the level of a native speaker? What about any other people who have posted about this system over the years? It's odd that there are so many people starting threads about it, yet nobody has come back and read a Book of the Month with us.

[imron]

Yeah, but even those who do learn Chinese with more traditional methods, don't come back and read book of the month with us either

Personally, I'd like it to be resurrected at regular intervals.

Me too

[LiScing]

I don't know, but Professor Gong has published a book on Unified Theory, which has solved the biggest problem of theoretical physics in the last 100 years. The same problem that LHC was built to solve, and which troubled Einstein for 30 years.

Books claiming to have the latest greatest theory that "successfully" unifies the forces or "solves" the problem of unification are all garbage. It is not possible to do so at this time. He is probably a professor at some small no-name school.

Field theory books and papers that do NOT claim to successfully unify the forces are actually the ones most sought after by researchers in the field.

[mwaynewalter]

waynewalter has had this book for exactly one year. I'd like to hear about his progress. Can he read at the level of a native speaker? What about any other people who have posted about this system over the years? It's odd that there are so many people starting threads about it, yet nobody has come back and read a Book of the Month with us.

Well you're right. Here's my assessment of his book after a year.

I have progressed nearly zero at learning to read Chinese. (But have progressed superbly at pronunciation and speaking.)

Why so little progress? Professor Gong's book is a "teacher's guide" and not a student workbook, IMHO.

The only part in English (which is most interesting and informative) is the reference and discussion of the

individual "root words".

That is, it has tons of examples of characters and exercises to demonstrate and teach the method of learning the

"root words" that make up the characters. But it has zero explanation of the example characters or exercise. They're

just pages and pages of Chinese characters. Professor Gong by phone encouraged me to simply work through and look

up each character.

So I worked through several pages of his book by writing the example characters using Pleco dictionary software on

a palm <-- a pre-requisite for Gong's book if there ever was one! It was most enlightening and fascinating but

extremely slow and laborious.

As an aside, I showed it to Chinese coworkers and they all verified that they were convinced after looking at

a number of his examples that it seems a clever way to learn the composition of characters. They were pleasantly

surprised to realize the meanings of some of the "root words" that they never realized before.

Other problems with the book is that the example characters are in normal font size.

For a novice they seem so small it's very challenging to make them out clearly enough to enter them into my

handheld by drawing the strokes. Oh, it also takes some practice to get the hang of the correct order

to write the strokes so it will recognize them. That requires lots of "trial and error" at first.

Finally, his book lacks any useful "cross reference". In other words, on the examples and exercise sections

there are no useful number of each "root word" character so you can quickly find it in the reference and definition

section. The only way is to "scan" the couple hundred "root word" characters looking for a match.

I have already done the work in my book to number all the root words in the margin and then mark the reference

number of each root word in every example. Plus the discussion section has those references in the margin, etc.

I discussed at length with the professor a project to do the following:

Create a new version of the book myself that puts example characters in much larger font, adds brief English meaning

under every example character, has useful shortcuts, etc.

Additionally, the examples should be reorganized to build knowledge progressively so that for example it takes

a specific character that contains 2 or 3 root words, then teaches each root word in succession with excercise

until you can see how those few root words come together to make the original main example.

Then select a character that has uses one of those already known root words and adds on another one, etc.

Oh, one more important thing is to focus on the frequently used character lists. It's relatively easy to acquire

lists that analyze newspapers and books to find the top several thousand most used characters.

Those need to be the ones used in the exercises.

If you are a Chinese Teacher who can read the example characters to your students so they can simply note

the meanings and work through the examples with your assistance....then it seems it will be great!

Oh...wait, I just realized I have a great friend now who is Chinese, the owner of a restaurant. He would

probably love to spend time each week to help me work through Gong's book. I think I'll bring it up

to at least try it out.

Sincerely,

Wayne

[renzhe]

Thank you for coming back and reporting on your experience, many people never do. It's appreciated.

[CrassPip]

Wayne,

I have been trying to approach learning Chinese characters myself from an etymological perspective. I meant to go to Richard Sears's site when I put in .com instead of .org and read about Dr. Gong's work instead.

It has now been close to another year, and I'm wondering if you have made any further progress on your idea. I'm also interested in a possible collaboration if you are still working on this. I have a teaching and computer science background (as well as archaeology).

Hopefully you are still around, as I look forward to hearing from you.

-Dusty

[Daniel Jones]

@waynewalter and @CrassPip Have either of you made any progress in this project?  I'd be VERY interested in collaborating.  I grew up in Taiwan as a missionary kid in the 80's and 90's, and am now a mathematician and linguist.  Thanks. Daniel Jones  djones@csufresno.edu