Looking for chinese equivalent of Kanji.Odyssey.2001

[maaku]

Does anyone know a Chinese (Mandarin) resource similar to the Kanji.Odyssey.2001 (KO2001) product for Japanese? KO2001 is an excellent resource for learning Japanese (sample here), and over on the Reviewing the Kanji forums we've found that doing Heisig's RTK followed by KO2001 is simple and painless, and enough to get an intermediate-advanced ability to understand Japanese media. I would be very interested in finding a similar path to Chinese literacy. I recognize most people here are probably unfamiliar with KO2001 and its structure, so here's a short summary of what I'm looking for:

A listing of the most important characters required for literacy (2001 characters for Japanese, I would assume around 3500 for Chinese). For each character a listing of the most important words (usually 5 or 6) that use it, and 3 example sentences that use those words in context. It'd be great if the example sentences start simple, and get progressively more advanced as you work through the book. Even better if example sentences only use kanji/hanzi you've already seen. Additionally, part of what makes KO2001 a good resource is the selection of what's important is made by an actual human being, not just frequency lists. "important/useful" and "commonly occurring" are distinct, albeit often correlated metrics.

So far the only thing I've found that's close is ZhongWenRed which is similar... but not ideal. Even if I could get just a KO2001-like word list, that would be enough. I could use smart.fm to find example sentences with audio for each word.

[anon6969]

I'd also like to know the answer to this.

[OneEye]

This is a really interesting question. I haven't heard of anything like that for Chinese, but that would be great (I'm familiar with how KO2001 works). Maybe it's something I should look into researching and developing while I'm in grad school.

[maaku]

Looks like the answer to "Does anyone know...?" is no, or no such resource exists. I've started a thread over on RevTK forums to see if anyone is interested in helping me put together such a resource. I'll probably begin work on it towards the end of July or the beginning of August.

[lawrenz]

Am studying Japanese on my own, so I know some kanji/hanzi. But since I don't have any Japanese friends to hang out with, I'm not really learning it in a "conversationable" level. Anyway, that product might help, much more now that I'm gonna be starting with a Japanese course.

Thanks.

[maaku]

I would recommend completing Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, Book 1 before taking on Kanji.Odyssey.2001, if you haven't already. Good luck.

[OneEye]

maaku,

I wonder if just taking an existing wordlist such as the various HSK lists would work, and then you could organize the words in an appropriate order, find the example sentences, etc. You could even take several lists (maybe vocab lists from well-known textbooks, HSK lists, etc.) and compile a "master list" based on those. It would probably take a good amount of time, but I can't think of any way to do this project that won't take a lot of time.

[maaku]

The HSK lists will certainly help. Ideally the finished product would include all vocabulary from the HSK.

This project is on temporary hold until I have time to complete it, but it is going to happen. I'll make announcements here and on the new RevTK chinese forum at the appropriate time.