I'm going to try "Cracking Chinese Puzzles"

[werewitt]

Will report how it goes, maybe in half a year. Initially I bought the abridged edition, but it's not really useful - all examples are dropped and the index is absent. So I went and ordered a full set. Hilariously it came with some sort of letter from author to the previous owner. A relic 

 

On the photos - the same characters as described in the abridged (a shorter version obviously) and the full editions. I'm thinking of sticking to 10 new chars a day.

[werewitt]

The first minor annoyance - looking specific characters up across the 4 volumes is a bit of a pain - he uses an obsolete variant (version 2 out of three maybe?) of the four-corner method. I've set up Pleco to show the 4-corner number from its Unihan dictionary (UNI), but that number doesn't always match his and I have to try numbers for components or (oh horror ) actually apply his method to figure it out. Then again, looking up single characters is not a major task with that book, one can simply study it page by page.

[Guest realmayo]

10 hours ago, werewitt said:

The first minor annoyance - looking specific characters up across the 4 volumes is a bit of a pain

 

I'd like to put an editable version of that list up somewhere so if people still find TK Ann useful and want to correct some of my mistakes they can. But I don't think enough people are ever going to be that interested in following his books...

[dwq]

So you bought it used in Australia?

 

[werewitt]

On 2017-5-26 at 11:47 PM, dwq said:

So you bought it used in Australia?

Surprisingly yes, the cheapest was from a shop in Canberra. Around AUD300 for the whole 5 volumes. And it is practically new, only spines on dustjackets faded from sitting on the shelf for 30 years  

[OneEye]

That is some relic. Robin Hutcheon was editor of the South China Morning Post from 1967-1986.

 

As for the books, I can't say I recommend them. And I can't fathom spending that much money on the set. We have them in our office, and I'm almost positive we paid well under US$100 for them. I believe they're currently being used as a stand for one of our computer monitors, and probably haven't been cracked (pun fully intended, both on the title and on the quality of the analyses) open in years.

[werewitt]

36 minutes ago, OneEye said:

And I can't fathom spending that much money on the set.

I don't mind, I like books  I'll probably even pay for your dictionary if it ever materialises. Heck, I already bought the demo addon, but in its current state I prefer Pleco's native decomposition plus this radical dictionary https://www.plecoforums.com/threads/radical-dictionary-flashcards-ios-android-tested.1149/

[OneEye]

I'm all for books. That's not what I was getting at. It's the content of Cracking Chinese Puzzles that's lacking, not necessarily the format. But I guess if you keep in mind that the stories are really just mnemonics and don't reflect reality, it's workable. I'd recommend Harbaugh's book over Ann's though, and it's a fraction of the price.

[werewitt]

I looked at a few "mnemonics" books (Heisig and whatnot) and found T.K. Ann's the least bad among them  Re Harbaugh - I cannot push myself to buy his book because it seems to be just a printed copy of his website http://www.zhongwen.com/.

 

Anything in the book's content that's materially better than the website's? If it's like the website, it's a dictionary without any account for character's frequency and I was looking for something I can progress through towards a goal. Not a reference/research tool.

[OneEye]

I don't think there's any material difference between the website and the book, apart from the medium. It's also much easier to look up characters in than TK Ann's book, due to using multiple types of index.

 

You could feasibly use a frequency list to decide on a learning order, and then look up what you need for each character in Harbaugh.

 

Actually, I led a group of people in creating an Anki deck from the info in the Harbaugh book once upon a time, maybe 7 years ago. It was a pretty big project. We essentially went through and typed the book in manually. Unfortunately, as far as I know, the Anki deck has long since disappeared. But just as well; it was a mess. Conceptually it was something of a precursor to the dictionary we're working on at Outlier. Or rather, I eventually wanted to take that core data and add more reliable etymological info to it, eventually expanding it into an authoritative resource on character etymology. But then when I met Ash (co-founder and CTO), he had already independently developed a much more sophisticated framework for a dictionary of character etymology, having done much more research on the subject and gotten a much clearer understanding of the complexity of the problem than I had at the time. So we basically went with his idea over mine.

[werewitt]

2 hours ago, OneEye said:

Actually, I led a group of people in creating an Anki deck from the info in the Harbaugh book once upon a time, maybe 7 years ago. It was a pretty big project. We essentially went through and typed the book in manually.

Heh, creating an Anki deck as a first step to memorising a ton of words/characters/any unlinked facts is a totally obvious first step for an Anki addict  

For example, I've already imported @realmayo's list into Anki and put it through "Chinese Support" plugin. Considering whether it's worth re-typing Ann's book and which parts, but this sounds too boring  Maybe I'll just add his bisyllabic examples or even simply tidy up definitions as I go (raw CC-CEDICT output is not a great material for memorising).