How I learned 4,000+ characters or Tuttle/Matthews “Learning Chinese Characters – Part 2”

[China_Fanboi]

Has anyone gotten any updates from HSKPro?? This product sounds incredible!

[mac n cheese]

Yearly check-in, I still so want this. Using the Matthews character learning method was some if the most fun I've ever had language learning. Any update appreciated.

[TheWayfarer]

@HSK Pro Looking back over the thread, I wonder that no one suggested you contact Tuttle about publishing your work (at least, I didn't see the suggestion). Have you tried getting Tuttle to publish it?

[Andrew1267]

@HSK Pro Hi, is it possible to publish the full list of mnemonics (soundwords) for Chinese pronunciations?  Similar to what is listed on pages 362-365 of the Tuttle's book by Matthews (in my edition), but it's incomplete and it's often difficult to find the right soundwords for missing pronunciations.  Since you've done 5000 characters, you must have a complete list of soundwords.  Is it possible to publish such a list / table for everyone?  Thank you!

[williamwu123]

Did anyone hear an update on this?

 

I would pay through the roof for something like this. 

[Matthias]

Since some people have been asking for updates but @HSK Pro has vanished, I hope it's okay if I hijack this thread.

 

I've been working on a very similar thing: writing mnemonics including the pronunciation for Chinese characters. The method for including the pronunciation is a bit different though. I use the Marilyn method instead of the Tuttle method. I don't have an exact number right now but I think I created mnemonics for around 3400 (simplified) characters. The mnemonics for the first few hundred characters are a bit wacky though and probably need to be rewritten; writing mnemonics is a skill which improves with every created mnemonic.

 

For some mnemonics I've also created comics. Mostly by mashing together SVG images, but some are AI generated. The advantage of SVG images is that components can be reused in comics for other characters.

 

All mnemonics are freely available on my website www.mandarinbanana.com. There's no download button yet, because no one uses that site except for me; but if there's enough interest, I'll implement a download feature. For now though if you'd want to use Anki for example, you could embed an iframe with the url www.mandarinbanana.com/hanzis/将 to get the page for 将 on the back side of your card (haven't tested it but it should work). Replace 将 with {{hanzi}} (or whatever your keyword is).

 

There's the possibility for anyone to add their own mnemonics and comics on the website, but in that case I kindly ask to subscribe to the paid level to share the server cost. I currently pay almost USD 200 monthly, and that is virtually without any load on the site. Fortunately my day job allows me to sustain this rather expensive hobby.

 

Most Chinese learners think this method stinks. For me it worked extremely well. If I can only help a  handful of people to learn Chinese characters, and be it only two or three, I would be extremely humbled.

 

By the way, although I invested thousands of hours into this project, all content will be freely available for anyone, forever. I wouldn't have been able to do this without the content freely shared by others, so I think it's only fair if I make this available in return as well. Instead, I would be extremely humbled if other learners find this helpful or even join creating more mnemonics and comics.

[dawidpacha]

Hi there HSK Pro! The method of learning characters through stories really resonates with me. Even though your last post was in 2021, I wanted to let you know that this resource of yours is still incredibly valuable for Chinese learners today.

The systematic way you expanded beyond Tuttle's 800 characters to create 4,000+ unique stories is amazing. I think there's a great opportunity here to bring this project back to life, especially since we now have AI tools that could help create simple visuals for these mnemonic stories, making them even more memorable.

If you're still around and willing to share some of your stories, I'd love to help make this a collaborative community effort where we could build visual aids together. Let's make Chinese character learning even more engaging for everyone! Reach me here or directly using my username on social media.

[mac n cheese]

Yearly check-in. What a great travesty that HSK Pro is still disappeared :(, and when the world needed him most. His near vanquishing of the Chinese Character Problem once and for all shall be told in legends and lamented by future generations. 
@Matthias That sounds cool. Ya the way I learned the Matthews characters was by reading the book then using this simple Anki deck here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/128251318 it just has the character, pinyin, definition/keyword, number, and chapter for each entry in Matthews. I'm not super familiar with the Marilyn Method, but I'll check it out. I think Mandarin Blueprint's Hanzi Movie Method is based on it.

 

@dawidpacha Honestly, ya I'd be interested in working on a community project like that. Do you have discord? my handle is @pannakooko

PS: @Matthias I went ahead and checked out your website and wrote out my lengthy thoughts and rambles below:
   On the Home page it's got the paragraph about 'shao2' as spoon, and it seems like one of the buttons 'find out how' or 'visit the first comic' would take me to learning that character, but that's not what happens. When I click on 'visit the first comic' it takes me to a page that doesn't seem connected to learning 'shao'. It happens to have 'shao' as one of the many words listed at the bottom, but there's a break in the narrative from 'you too can learn shao!' to it really just being a side note on the next page. An idea to help this is to have a dedicated page for that first button that says something like 'in order to learn shao, we need to learn the components of the character first' (might even put the demonstration right on the homepage). As for introducing the system, I think you did good to jump right into it instead of explaining the whole system before hand. When you give the characters for 'Julian' though, it looks like the 1st character has the 'zhu' dot in it, right? If so, it would be helpful to mention that, that the pronounciation of 'zhu' is important in the name, otherwise the fact feels like it's just extra information.
   For reviewing, it's not clear to me how to review; I couldn't find that feature on the website. I created an account, but it wasn't clear to me how characters or sentences get added to my reviews. For the review system, I know you said it uses SRS, but are you familiar with Anki's newer FSRS system that uses machine learning for scheduling? The old system still works great, don't get me wrong, I used it to learn thousands of words, but the new system is worth at least looking into.
   The fact that you have integrated the Manga and movie into the website is awesome. I agree seeing things in context is essential learning. Having a visual novel like that is a great way to facilitate that. Whenever viewing the individual panels for the manga pages, it would be handy to have a button to take you back to the whole page. I would want to go back and see it after seeing each sentence to quiz myself. It's not strictly necessary, but would be handy. Overall this looks like a super useful site. It seems the two major ingredients are 1) you already created 3,400 stories, a lot of them with pictures too, and 2) you've integrated them into a website that helps you learn through exposure. It seems to me what mandarinbanana is accomplishing is to have an 'exposure' resource with the stories already integrated, which is great.
   The reason why I liked the Matthews method was because they had a pretty simple story system, and they already did the leg work to make up all the stories. The Marilyn method is more complicated, but probably not any less effective. Since you already created all the stories, it now seems like a plausible alternative for people like me who liked Matthews method but struggle to come up with their own stories (though my preference is for the Matthews system). I know that it's a skill so you get better at with practice, but part of the problem is that creating a story is another effort barrier for learning (even if you learn your own stories better). Personally, I really appreciated the list of words with their stories that Matthews has, where they put them in a logical order and split the list into groups (the chapters). If the comics could be browsed in the order you put them in, but with the format for the "Characters with _ as component", where it does show all the information, and not just the picture, that would be helpful, especially with a basic accompanying anki deck like for the Matthews book.

Feature wishlist - I understand it's easy for me to ask, while these requests would probably mean tons of hard work for you to actually implement, so no pressure:
- ordered word list, with chapters???
- simple anki deck?
- audio for each word
- subtitles on screen for movie
- review manga page
I don't think any of those are necessary, but they would be nice tidbits some day.
There may be other features you could take 'inspiration' (>.>) from in similar reading exposure apps, like DuShu or Du Chinese, though I'd imagine you've already seen them and done that.
Obviously, this is all just one internet strangers opinion, so don't give it tooo much weight. Ich hoffe, dass meine Meinung dir hilfreich wird. Danke fuer deine Arbeit!