Learn to Read Hanzi-Software or Book Courses?

[Diesel]

Hi,

I spent 6mths Teaching English in China about 4 years ago.

While I was there I spent a fair bit of time trying to learn to read chinese characters - I am not interested in speaking the language. I just want to learn to read traditional/simplified hanzi..I want to begin at the bottom and progress..

I have seen a couple of software packages out there - Wenlin and Learn Chinese 2008 any others? - but no reviews that indicate to me that these are worth buying for my purpose.

Could anyone offer advice with regards to these or other software?

Alternatively - is there a written course that starts off very basic and get's harder as one progresses?

thanks!

[skritterdoug]

I am biased but you could check out Skritter (http://www.skritter.com and http://www.skritter.com/demo - our tagline is "The Write way to learn Chinese." as it's based on writing the characters (which is a very good way to learn them) but it also has a definition mode that just quizzes definitions and lists like the HSK lists (of most common words).

It's a free trial and a reasonably priced monthly subscription so if you don't like it you aren't stuck with a piece of expensive software.

[Diesel]

I'll definitely check it out. Thanks for taking the time to reply!

[renzhe]

There are many courses for learning characters specifically. Look for threads on Heisig, Mathews&Mathews, Hoenig, among others. All of these start with building blocks and progress towards more complex characters. All of them have advantages and disadvantages.

Getting a list of the most common characters, such as the one here and brute-forcing your way through it is also a tried-and-tested method.

Furthermore, many people find SRS flashcard software (freely available) to help with memorising the huge number of characters. Look up threads on Anki and Mnemosyne or SuperMemo (the last one is not free). There are decks already available for these programs that you can download and get busy straight away.

Do keep in mind that being able to recognise the characters is not even half of the work. To put it bluntly, knowing even 10,000 characters won't help you read anything, other than the odd tattoo or a motif on a baseball cap. Assuming that you want to be able to actually read Chinese, you will need grammar and vocabulary (multi-character words). For this, you'll need a good textbook. NPCR, Integrated Chinese and DeFrancis Reader are all popular books. Look up the numerous threads on those.

[skritterdoug]

renzhe is totally correct, find a good course that uses the words and read them in context and you will do a lot better (well, it works for me). SRS is a very good system to use (Skritter uses it for both writing practice and flashcards - aka definition practice along with wordlists from some of the books he mentioned).

The idea of SRS is to repeat what you (just) learn before you forget it. If you don't spend a good portion of your time using what you learned before you're almost certainly not doing a good job learning (in my experience, you just forget it unless you review). The goal in life for SRS is to keep what you learned in your head and it does a good job of it.

Doug

[Hofmann]

If you ever want to learn to read a Chinese language, please consider Classical Chinese. It's so much easier on the eyes.

[Daan]

Yes, especially with such wonderful characters as these, which are impossible not to love:

槬 鬻 繭 韉 葌

Can I ask, Diesel, why you only want to learn how to read Chinese? Most people would argue spoken Chinese is easier to learn and it seems to me it might be more useful when living in China, too.

[roddy]

I suspect your best course of action might be to just pick a decent comprehensive course, and ignore the bits you don't want - perhaps read transcripts rather than listen to the CD, etc. Even if you only want to be able to read, you're still going to need words and grammar - just learning a bunch of characters is a recipe for if not disaster, disappointment.

But what do you want to actually be able to do at the end of the day? Read Confucius in the original? Academic journals? Trashy novels?

[Shi Tong]

Personally, I think like just being able to speak and listen to Mandarin and not be able to read and write is just as bad the other way around.

I cant read and write as well as I can speak and hear, but I think you need both to get an overall understanding of the language.

Maybe you should do some basics and then, if you really still want to drop the speaking, ignore improving it and just learn characters.

Renzhe.. that list of characters is really useful, I'm going to have to work on that!!

Thanks!!

[renzhe]

Do look for one of many flashcard decks with the most common XXX characters.

The link I posted is the basis for most of them, but it is formatted in a way that makes it impossible to use for studying.

This deck for Mnemosyne has the most common 2000 + all the HSK vocab. Unfortunately, the most common characters are in simplified only. But the HSK vocab is in both simplified and traditional versions.

[chrix]

What's wrong with 繭?