Some Hanzi questions

[Lumbering Ox]

I am switching to Chinese having done the first 1950 Kanji of remembering the Kanji.

 

I intend to start with and finish Hellochinese app to start and if that works out well lay out for the RTH books and the first of some text book series to be decided later.

 

Feel free to tell me where I am going wrong in the below thought process.

 

As I understand it, RTH isn't nearly as popular in the Chinese learners world as RTK is in the Japanese learners world. OTOH I love RTK so much, I really can't see doing Hanzi without it. OTOOH I've become rather good at learning Kanji which will carry over to Hanzi. OTOOOH Having an integrated system seems easier and worth the extra time. Now in Latin... wait a moment, I don't know Latin.

Part of me thinks I should move quicker to RTH, part of me thinks I should wait and make sure Chinese is for me and part of me wants cake.

 

I am also considering finding an Anki deck for the radicals. That should help a bit in learning new Hanzi. Am I wrong on that. How do they get the names for the radicals, are they standard?

 

 

[stapler]

It seems from this post (and the others if I remember correctly) that you're always talking about 漢字, whether it be Japanese or Chinese. In fact it seems that you almost exclusively talk about characters. This raises some red flags for me (again, whether you are learning Japanese or Chinese). On one hand it's good that you really enjoy studying what is for many people the most off-putting part of these languages: their complicated written scripts. But on the other hand it seems like you're only concerned with the script, and not the language itself. This temptation is understandable because as far as learning thousands of characters is concerned, it's a very easy task from a mental perspective. That might sound controversial so let me clarify. It's easy in the sense that it's just endless repetition. It's rote memorisation. Yes this can be tiring, but it's not mentally challenging in the same way having to string together coherent sentence sentences on the fly is, or listening to the language actually being spoken (at least for beginners). Learning characters can even become a kind of unrealised procrastination. It's also trap to spend so much energy learning characters because you'll get sucked into the black hole that is "measuring progress by numbers" rather than "measuring progress by ability to communicate". You may think you're getting somewhere in learning a language because you have lots of numbers. But when it's crunch time and you have to speak to someone, you fail spectacularly.

 

If you're looking for advice related to learning characters AND the language my advice is this: stop learning new characters for now. Especially from the "remembering 漢字" series which contains many almost completely useless (for the beginner) characters. It's cool that you know 晶 means crystal or shiny. But you'll never use or read this character for many, many, years until you're largely fluent. If you want to learn characters, learn the characters from the lists in the textbook: the characters that make up the core of the Chinese and Japanese language, the "every day" stuff.

 

If you're set on learning characters and the radicals (which you should remember are just some character components that were selected arbitrarily to make a dictionary index) the list is here (including their pronunciation in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical If by "standard" you mean "is this how they're pronounced in Mandarin" the answer is yes. I can't speak for the other languages but I don't know why they'd be wrong.

[Shelley]

The HelloChinese app is great, but I think you need to start using a textbook, I use New Practical Chinese Reader. I describe how I use in my blog here http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/blog/108/entry-602-learning-schedule-for-npcr/

 

It might be useful to read the other entry in my blog about my learning materials and how they fit in to my learning schedule.

 

May I suggest Pleco instead of Anki, not only is it flashcards, it is a dictionary with handwriting lookup and lots of good things, too many to do justice to here quickly so have a look at the website http://www.pleco.com/. You can try the free version, but I strongly recommend paying for the full version, it really is very good value for money. I bought the basic bundle and it is just what I need.

 

Unlike Anki, Pleco is designed for and only for Chinese so it does it all very well.

 

Hope this helps.

 

[Lumbering Ox]

1: From what I've read Hesieg's method seems best done beforehand. The order of the characters is more from ease of learning characters as opposed to how useful the characters are. This is why it comes up so often in what I discuss. It seems pointless to do RT* after you have learned much of the language. A lot of people who learn characters have a lot of problem making them stick, the RT* method makes them stick. Why go through repetition and force feeding into the brain when you can learn to build characters first with a better method.

I do find it is a brutally hard and demoralizing way to go. I see it akin to hitting the weights and running miles in the off season of a sport. You might not be hitting people or skating or throwing a ball but it sets up a good base.

 

Also, for Chinese I did say I was going with the HelloChinese app first, mostly because I don't want to buy the books only to find out the language isn't doable because of tones, or pinyin or zombies.

 

2: I am starting with HelloChinese because it is free and it provides for feedback in that I speak into my phone and it grades me on how well I am doing.

After that I am going the more standard route, even though it will involve some repetition.

 

3: Does Pleco have a radical deck? For that matter does it have a pinyin deck. If it does I may just download it. In the longer term it is also part of my plan. I suppose I should download it anyways but for some odd reason I have an aversion to downloading something unless I know I will use it.

[Shelley]

Download Pleco, once you have it you will use it.

 

One of the beauties of Pleco is it doesn't have any ready made "decks", you can have any thing you want as a deck. I make a new deck for each NPCR lesson so they don't get too big and out of hand.

 

I can always review/test any deck at any time.

 

You can tailor it to your needs in many ways.

 

It is said free Pleco is not real Pleco but it is a very good way to see how powerful an app it is.

 

There is lots of help for Pleco on these forums and the Pleco forum which is good for technical stuff and more.

 

Try it, if you hate uninstall it, but I think you will like it.

[Xiao Kui]

in the past users have uploaded their decks to the pleco forum and downloaded them there. I somehow have some frequent character and HSK decks tho no idea where I got them from. 

 

If you are really keen on character structure, radicals and such, the upcoming Outlier dictionary by forum user OneEye might interest you (in addition to Pleco, of course www.outlier-linguistics.com

[Shelley]

Yes, in fact the Outlier dictionary is going to be a Pleco addon. Another very good reason to get Pleco.

 

Have a look here for some details http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/45912-outlier-linguistic-solutions/