heisig or hoenig ?

[terryswift]

i know there had been some postings awhile back about people embarking on these methods for remembering characters, but i am curious as to if anyone actually completed either of those books, and if so how useful do you feel it has been to your overall chinese learning progress ?

[AdamD]

They both helped me enormously in my early days. These days I keep them around as a reference.

Edit: I should elaborate. I worked my way methodically through Matthews & Matthews, up until roughly the 75% mark. I had Heisig and Hoenig on hand at the time, mainly to suggest or reinforce mnemonics. Once I hit that 75% mark in Matthews & Matthews, my character learning had evolved to the point that Rick Harbaugh's book was a more suitable primary resource.

[大肚男]

I did heisig volume 1 all the way through, supplemented with anki flashcards, and it was immensely useful

[lechuan]

I'm working through Heisig, and I've taken a look at Hoenig.

I chose Heisig because it has more total characters (3000).

Others prefer Hoenig because it provide mnemonic stories for all 2000+ characters.

I like Matthews a lot, because they also have a system of mnemonics for memorizing pronunciation. Even if you don't use Matthews, it's worth checking out their Introduction for this alone (see google books).

If it wasn't for these Heisig-style books, I probably would have given up learning characters altogether because the writing it over and over method didn't work well for me (Mind you I was too busy/lazy to give that a chance). I review the characters I've learned with SRS every day (Pleco (iOS, Android) for reading, Skritter (iOS, online) for writing). I started slow this year (was learning a couple characters a day), but once I got into the system I settled on 10 characters a day (I study about about 30-40 minutes between learning new characters and reviewing old ones).

It's quite satisfying to look at real Chinese writing and make some sense out of it. It is also making it easier to memorize vocabulary since I know what the individual characters mean.

[FinancialWar]

I am currently using Heisig, I have never used Hoenig, does Hoenig take Pinyin into account?

[li3wei1]

Like Heisig, Hoenig doesn't work the pronunciation of the character into the mnemonic (the way Matthews does), but Hoenig has the pinyin on the page with the character, there's a pinyin index, it's a very easy to use book.