
I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month - _hao
https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-characters-in-a-month-heisig-method-review/
======
godelski
I'm also going through these books, but I am suspicious of the author's claim.
That's about 50 characters a day. I use Anki and it is clear that the
shuffling of cards makes a big difference. RTH is really about creating
mnemonics and presenting characters together building from roots (that's why I
like it). But you NEED to shuffle them.

I'm also finding that my biggest barrier is pronunciation. I'll see the
character and immediately know the meaning because I created a good mnemonic.
But getting the pinyin right is harder (shuffling matters here too!).

Lastly, as dak pointed out, this book doesn't teach you how to read -- or
speak -- but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. It is helping me to read, but
that's because this isn't the only tool I use. In Chinese, words are really
compound words. For example, 熊猫 means panda. But 熊 means bear and 猫 means cat.
This makes these unbounded morphemes, which is different than what we do in
the Indo-European languages. And Chinese is composed of radicals that make
things harder. 果汁 is juice, but 汁 is juice. The three ticks on the left are
the symbol for water but 十 means 10. The book focuses on the latter cases but
you'd be very confused if you read about the bear cats of China. And these are
just the simple examples. I'm sure others will write some more fun ones below
(I'm a real novice at Chinese).

~~~
timr
_" In Chinese, words are really compound words. For example, 熊猫 means panda.
But 熊 means bear and 猫 means cat. This makes these unbounded morphemes, which
is different than what we do in the Indo-European languages. And Chinese is
composed of radicals that make things harder."_

I'm intermediate in Japanese (conversational + able to read at an N2 level,
albeit slowly), and my first response to anyone who says they "learned X
kanji" is _" how many words do you know?"_

There's probably some value to learning the meaning of individual kanji in
isolation, but it's _very_ limited (especially in Japanese). Most words have
only tenuous relation to the meanings of their individual kanji, and "learning
kanji" is kind of a crutch for beginners to pretend that they're making rapid
progress.

I suppose from that perspective, "learning X kanji in Y days" is a useful
meme, because it pushes people to quickly move on from the approach. But that
said, for most learners, it's much better to simply start learning words.

~~~
imtringued
You have to learn kanji the same way you have to learn the alphabet. If you
don't knoe the symbol you're going to have an extrenely hard time when you are
learning writte. Word because suddenly you need to learn 3 kanji at once to
understand a single word. Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't
a big deal. At roughly 15 Kanji per day you can finish the first 2000 in 5
months but your vocabulary deck meanwhile is far away from being finished. I
don't know why you are saying "move on" because as I said, it is one more
thing you have in your toolbox. Your toolbox should consist of multiple anki
decks(one of which could be a hiragana, katakana and a kanji deck, a listen
only vocab deck, a reading only vocab deck for example), listening exercises,
speaking exercises, grammar exercises and so on.

~~~
timr
_" You have to learn kanji the same way you have to learn the alphabet."_

The RTK/RTH method is nothing like learning an alphabet: at no point in my
education did we sit down for weeks and "learn the meaning" of A, B, C...etc.
For phonetic alphabets like hiragana and katakana and roman and hangul, it's
absolutely worthwhile to memorize the shapes of the characters, because
there's a small set of them, and once you know them, you can convert written
words to sounds. With RTK, that's not true at all.

An adult of average intelligence can learn to read kana in a week. That's time
well-spent. Spending _months_ memorizing the "meanings" of kanji is a whole
other process, of dubious value.

 _" Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't a big deal."_

This is true, and is the way that Japanese children learn the language: you
learn a character, along with some words that contain the character. To the
extent that individual kanji have meanings, you learn them in context.

 _" I don't know why you are saying "move on" because as I said, it is one
more thing you have in your toolbox."_

Most people who do RTK don't do it this way -- they do things like the OP, and
try to _" memorize X kanji in Y days"_. I think that's largely a waste of
time.

------
nneonneo
Learning Chinese characters by trying to break them down and understand the
parts is pretty much the same idea as trying to learn English by learning the
etymologies of words. Linguistically, it can be useful and help you draw
unexpected connections, but it can also lead you into bad traps that hinder
future learning. To some extent, the same applies to trying to learn
individual characters as opposed to the words they are a part of.

I am ethnically Chinese and grew up listening to the language. Unfortunately,
I didn’t end up learning the written language that well, so these days I’m
working to catch up by learning more advanced vocabulary. The thing that I
needed to realize at the outset is that Chinese is actually not much different
from English, if you view it at the word level and not the character level. If
you stop thinking of words as being a sequence of characters which each have
their own meanings, and more as a single unit, the language is a lot easier to
learn IMHO.

This lesson came a bit late for me. I still have trouble sometimes with words
that are similar and share characters in common. I sometimes incorrectly
substitute characters within words with synonyms when I can’t come up with the
correct one, which renders the whole word meaningless.

Don’t get too hung up on characters when learning Chinese. Learn words. Some
words are one character long - but the majority are two characters. Some
characters have no meaning by themselves; others have so many meanings that
it’s pointless to learn them in isolation. Many characters change their
pronunciations depending on what words they’re contained in.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Yes, learn words not characters! The hardest barrier to that is the lack of
spaces.

I wrote [https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io) to add
spaces, pinyin, literal and parallel translation so I can read interesting
text (song lyrics, Bible) instead of just textbooks.

It also has a keyboard which uses radical decomposition, but usually it's
easier to copy paste the input.

------
dak1
Note that there's a large difference between learning characters and learning
to read.

Simple examples: 可口可樂, 手機, 大哥大

If you just knew the characters, you would understand those as: 1) Can Mouth
Can Happy 2) Hand Machine 3) Big Older Brother Big

Those are actually: 1) Coca-Cola 2) Cell phone 3) Cell phone (slang)

And those are just for simple nouns. There's also grammar patterns and
characters like 把 that can modify sentence structure, to name a couple more
examples.

~~~
saagarjha
I'm guessing the last one is not an Orwellian reference?

~~~
knolax
大哥大 dates back to at least the Sino-Japanese war. It's northern slang
equivalent in meaning and connotation to "da boss" (eg. the term is mostly
used sarcastically). I've never heard anybody use it as a term for cellphones.
So no, the term predates Orwell.

~~~
jack1243star
For example, one Taiwanese cellphone service provider is called 台灣大哥大

------
yorwba
> Let's do some simple math of how long it's going to take you conservatively
> to learn the 8105 characters given in the Table of General Standard Chinese
> Characters if you follow my velocity of 50 characters a day. And I'm going
> to add another 30 minutes, so we have 2 whole hours a day.

...

> 324.2 hours for all characters in the course of ~6 months. This seems very
> possible to me and a very good investment of time at that. After these 6
> months you'll be free to pursue gaining vocabulary in the form of combining
> the characters you know into words, pronunciation and listening/speaking.

That's treating language learning as batch job, even though pipelining it
would probably make more sense. You don't have to first learn all the
characters and then all the words and then how to pronounce all the words and
then finally you can dare to utter your first sentence.

I think it's better to do it the other way around: find a sentence you want to
say or understand. Look up all the words in that single sentence, their
characters and pronunciations, then memorize only those. Then learn another
sentence. That way you always have some context for the new knowledge, instead
of just treating it as a random collection of facts.

If you frontload on characters, it's easy to overlearn things you don't
actually need. I have an Anki deck with 9385 Chinese words and 4174 distinct
characters, so I know only slightly more than half of the 8105 characters the
author intends to learn. But I'm functionally fluent, since the other
characters basically don't appear in modern texts, except for very specific
contexts. I picked a random character I didn't recognize from the list: 笸.
According to Wiktionary, it's only used in the words 笸箩 and 笸篮, each of which
refers to a specific kind of basket.
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8)

~~~
james_s_tayler
I treat language learning as a batch job at the beginning. Works pretty
superbly for me. I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then
grammar, then vocab.

All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native
materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can.

There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work.
But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different
things and really find which path works for you.

~~~
yorwba
> All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into
> native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you
> can.

Then you have already parallelized the process, have you not?

> I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then
> vocab.

How does that ordering work in practice? I can imagine learning to pronounce
each individual sound in isolation, and learning to write and pronounce each
letter in the writing system before you know any words, but how do you learn
about grammar without vocabulary to apply the grammar to?

> There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work.
> But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of
> different things and really find which path works for you.

Agreed.

~~~
james_s_tayler
Mostly works out fine. There isn't a perfectly strict separation between
grammar ant vocab like you imagine. I do it through sentences, so naturally a
little vocab is required for that, and that's ok. The goal in the grammar
phase is to collect and Anki enough sentences to be able to parse sentences
grammatically. I usually need about 3 to 5 sentences for each grammar point.

The vocab phase is purely about vocab. Grammar is done at this point.

I remember first year of Japanese study was Kanji then grammar. At the end of
that first year I knew about 2000 words. The second year was purely vocab. I
managed to acquire 10,000 new vocab by the end of the second year.

After that point I could understand most spoken and written things with
patches here and there. I could hold conversations for hours with a single
person.

In the 3rd year of study I did much the same. I remember my Anki vocab deck
getting up to about 17k words before reviews were at about 300 to 400 a day
and the returns were diminishing, so I just deleted the deck. Stopped cold.

End of that 3rd year I could read novels pretty well. Hold conversations on
any topic for any length of time in group settings.

It worked remarkably well. It was damn hard work though.

------
houshuang
Interesting approach. I learnt Chinese in university 20 years ago, and spent a
long time in China both with traditional text books (self study) and just
living there... Very curious about the approach of learning characters without
the pronunciation - would love to hear about how it goes in the future when
the author moves on to learning words and grammar etc.

This made me think about my own process of learning and improving Chinese,
wrote up a bunch of rough notes here. Might try to experiment with a few
things going forwards. [https://notes.reganmian.net/a--
chinese](https://notes.reganmian.net/a--chinese)

------
olivernyc
Shameless self promotion: I made an app for learning Chinese characters,
Noodle Chinese [0]. It uses handwriting recognition and spaced repetition to
focus on the words you need most help with. If anyone has feedback please feel
free to reach out! hello@noodlechinese.com

[0] [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-
chinese/id1375293467](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodle-
chinese/id1375293467)

~~~
wegs
Aside from Android support, my key suggestion would be to clearly think
through on-boarding. Visiting the page, I see a $13 monthly plan, in an era of
free and $5 iPhone apps. I don't know if it's any better or worse than free,
so I'll pass.

On the app's page, I'd suggest clearly describing what one gets for free
(before paying for a plan), so people can try it. For an app like this, I'd
want to know what I'm getting before I install. Many apps just install and ask
you for a credit card before anything happens. From there, I'd like to know
what I'm paying for before I swipe my credit card. Clearly describing free
versus paid version is key.

But my last iOS device is an iPad 2, so I don't think I can even do the free
version.

~~~
peterburkimsher
I wrote another web app,
[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io) which is free.

However, I have no idea how to do "onboarding". You just copy-paste some text
into the Chinese box at the top, and/or type characters into the decomposition
keyboard in the bottom, or pick a topic from the heading row for some pre-
prepared material.

I haven't got any users though, since 2017, so obviously I'm doing something
wrong.

~~~
geza
I suspect the reason for few users is because it's relatively simple to build
such an app and so you have tons of competitors, such as Pleco. For example,
the visualization you have is pretty similar to a learning tool that annotates
subtitles I built in 2013 - it's no longer online but you can see screenshots
at
[https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/90411/Miller_...](https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/90411/Miller_Smart%20subtitles.pdf)
and a video at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-eXUB3eaA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-eXUB3eaA)

~~~
peterburkimsher
I saw that at the time! I also tried subtitles, for a famous movie (You Are
The Apple Of My Eye)
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhIooD7mFhphhT5nDdhK0...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhIooD7mFhphhT5nDdhK00wZuobGbMtO0)

------
wibr
I've also learned the first 1500 characters using this book, not in one month
though.

The method works but has some problems. Maybe the biggest problem is that it
completely ignores pronunciation. It does not help you remember the
pronunciation and it does not make use of the sound components of the
characters. Most characters are composed of one component which hints at the
meaning and another which hints at the sound, e.g. 青 is the sound component in
情清輕請, all of those are pronounced qing (with different tones). Usually it's
not that obvious, this is just a good example. The left component in those
characters would hint at the meaning.

The Heisig method instead creates a mapping between a keyword, which is
derived from a single meaning of the character or invented for components
which don't have a meaning, to the written form of the character using
mnemonics. This works well in the beginning but once you reach a more advanced
stage where you know how to say something in Chinese but maybe forgot how to
write the characters this doesn't help you much since the pronunciation is not
incorporated into the mnemonics.

When you are just starting out and learning all those characters seems like an
unmanagable task, the Heisig method can provide a good structure to quickly
"learn" many characters (keyword<>writing). It's also fun to come up with
stories and images. But in the end it can only provide a basic scaffold for
learning more meanings, pronunciation, words etc.

I even made a small game once using those character decompositions:
[http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/](http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/)

~~~
prewett
Heisig's method is for kanji, which have different pronunciation depending on
which word they are in, since Japan imported the meaning but not always the
pronunciation. Note that the book is called "A Complete Course in How Not to
Forget the Kanji", not "How to Read". All he's doing is endowing the character
with an image that conveys a commonly used meaning and how it is written, so
that you can remember it. Actually reading or pronouncing a text is out of
scope.

If you're learning hanzi you can take advantage of the pronunciation hints.
Plus the fact that modern hanzi generally have only one pronunciation per
[traditional] character, and only one syllable per, too. The characters made
so much more sense learning Chinese.

------
pixelperfect
I learned Chinese characters using this method and found it very helpful. It's
not very popular among Chinese learners or teachers because it's unintuitive.
In many cases the keywords of the characters you are learning are imprecise or
goofy. But the point of the method is to rapidly form mental chunks at the
character level so that later you can focus on a higher level of abstraction.

------
nicolas_t
I'd be interested in a method similar to hesig but that uses actual etymology
to teach the characters instead of made up mnemonics. Does anyone know good
book doing that? I'm more interested in learning the traditional characters
instead of the simplified ones (mostly because I also speak Japanese and spent
more time in Taiwan and HK than in China)

~~~
wibr
Not a structured method like Heisig but a dictionary for Pleco which uses
actual etymology to explain characters:

[https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/collections/chinese](https://www.outlier-
linguistics.com/collections/chinese)

~~~
nicolas_t
Great, Thanks! I guess I can use hesig and at the same time refer to that as a
complement :)

------
drivers99
I figured this was Heisig method before clicking on it. Very good. It took me
9 months to learn how to write ~2000 Japanese Kanji (3 months is doable
though) on kanji.koohii.com (plus buying the book). 1 month for 1500 is fast,
although it looks like it didn't take too long each day.

~~~
_hao
Thank you! The method really clicked in my head and the way I approach
learning in general is close, so maybe that's why it's working so well for me.

------
morninglight
Many years ago, my brother was booking a lot of large jobs in China. The
equipment he worked on was located in small towns throughout the countryside
and usually required him to be onsite for several days. He had minimal
familiarity with the language, and it was rare to find english speakers in
these remote locations. It was especially a problem in restaurants because the
menu would only be availabe printed in kanji.

Since I could read kanji, he asked for help. In return, I sent him pictographs
for fish, chicken, pork and beef. He wasn't going to become fluent, but at
least he could point at something on a menu with some confidence.

He memorized the four characters before his next visit to a restaurant. As he
skimmed the menu, he found the character for chicken and pointed to it. The
waitress nodded and within a short time she returned with an enormous platter
piled high with chicken's feet. Nothing else, just chicken's feet.

No, they were not intending to prank the foreigner. In China, chicken's feet
are a delicasy....and I will never hear the end of it.

~~~
jack1243star
They are sometimes called 鳳爪 or phoenix's claws :)

------
Hamuko
As someone who has been doing Anki daily ever since the first of January, I
can tell you that the amount of stuff that you forget when it starts asking
items in intervals of several months compared to when it's asking items in
intervals of days.

~~~
imtringued
My advice to Anki beginners: don't trust the default settings. For example
setting a daily review limit will cause a massive backlog over time. Just do
all your reviews for that day. If there are cards that you fail every day then
answer them as hard. This will tell Anki to shedule the card differently.
Annoyingly there is no skip feature so don't feel bad about hitting good on a
card that you failed 3 times in a row. You can adjust the steps from 1 10 to 1
1500 for new cards so that you will not be asked twice for a new card on the
same day. Once I did these changes I was going through twice as many reviews
in roughly 75% of the time.

------
vkaku
Good for you, Author. It is not about speed, but usability. Learning random
characters that are seldom used does not feel like a great way to learn a
language.

~~~
james_s_tayler
I did similar thing to the author about 10 years ago. What I found after
completing that portion of study was that I could recognize any character I
saw. This gave me the ability to quickly perform dictionary lookups on any
text. This gave me incredible access to reading. Through reading I was able to
acquire vocab 5 times faster than just through listening.

It really gave me a significant boost. I got to usable language pretty fast as
a result.

~~~
_hao
That is my goal as well! Good that I have confirmation from someone else
already done something similar!

------
rabboRubble
ok, but can he read handwritten chinese? if you come away from your
memorization process only able to read chinese newspaper fonts, you will have
missed the ability to read handwritten notes on a whiteboard, the artistic
renderings on product packages, the ancient forms of characters in artistic
objects.

~~~
dickjocke
isn't most text you'll see nowadays going to be printed and standardized? I
can't remember the last time I read a handwritten anything, aside from my own
notes.

~~~
rabboRubble
Yes, but do you not have a whiteboard in your workplace? anything an actual
chinese person writes on that will be in a personalized cursive. Normal
cityscapes will be filled with italicized, cursive, traditional, simplified,
archaic forms. Merely learning to read newspaper and computer fonts is great
for reading a newspaper or computer screen. Not so great for a fully
functional life.

I lived in Asia for 15 years, speak, read, and write JP/Ch-Trad/Ch-Simp and I
still struggle with handwriting and cursive. At this point, I've resigned my
self to a lifelong hobby to improve.

------
jmchuster
I've always enjoyed this forum post from YesJapan (japanese learning site),
not exactly Chinese but maybe directionally applicable.

[http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-
on...](http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-one-have-to-
know)

Highlights:

> 100 kanji - basic signs

> 500 kanji - 50% of printed material

> 1000 kanji - 85% of printed material

> 1945 kanji - 97% of printed material

> 8000 kanji - 100% of anything japanese kanji in electronic form (still only
> about 99.99% in printed material as a lot of ancient texts have some pretty
> obscure one time only kanji).

> Learning kanji is uber important in increasing your ability to communicate
> effictively in Japanese. What [YesJapan] does, and does well, is give users
> an excellent base of Japanese from which to work from. With a base of about
> 2000 vocabulary words and enough grammar to get by in most situations, the
> kanji comes secondary as they will then help to start bridge the gaps
> between the beginner/intermediate level and the advanced/fluent level.

> As far as learning speed goes, there is a fast assimilation of the first 100
> kanji. After that, the learning pace levels off to a slow progression until
> around the 800-1000 kanji point when the pattern recognition starts to kick
> in, then past 1200 the pace picks back up again until around 2400-3000 where
> the pace levels off again because at this point the literacy level is of
> that of a graduate student, and only obscure or rarely used kanji are
> available for further study. You can judge your kanji learning speed through
> the first 100 kanji benchmark. It takes one unit of time to learn the first
> 100 kanji, then about 14-30 units of time to learn the 800-1000, and then
> another 7-15 units of time to finish off the joyou list (and name kanji). So
> if it took you 1 month to learn your first 100 kanji it should take you
> another year to 3 years to learn your next 1000, and then another half a
> year to a year and a half to finish the list. Again, faster learners will
> find themselves closer to the earlier stages of the spectrum, while casual
> learners and slower learners towards the further end of the spectrum.

> Another nice benchmark to keep in mind when studying Japanese is that going
> from a western to asian language (meaning no prior fluency in an asian
> language) takes 88 weeks (5 hours a day study) or 2200 hours of study to go
> from 0 to complete fluency. 44 weeks, or about a year of intensive study
> should put you at around the JLPT 3-2 level, and another 44 weeks to put you
> at the JLPT 1 level. Again this is assuming 5 hour a day of dedicated
> language study, so if your study time is less then that, you can plan your
> progression accordingly. One of the benefits of living in country is that
> the 5 hours comes a lot easier and quicker then living outside the target
> country where the material has to be self or externally generated.

> In case you were wondering - western languages to other western languages
> take about 22 weeks (550 hours of intensive study), non-western/non-asian
> languages 44 weeks (1100 hours of intensive study) and asian languages [88
> weeks] (2200 hours of intensive study). The other benefit of learning a
> language in one of the other two language families is that if you decide to
> learn another language in the same language family (region 1 2 or 3 as
> described above) it takes only 22 weeks of study.

> Which brings about another intersting topic. Korean takes about 52 weeks of
> intensive study to master from a western language (because their writing is
> mainly hangul, the necessity to learn a complicated script is lessened, thus
> easier to learn then chinese or Japanese). Thus learning Korean first,
> followed by Japanes will only take 74 weeks of study, vs 110 weeks of study
> going to Japanese first then Korean.

~~~
_hao
It's entirely applicable! Actually Heisig and Richardson make the observation
that after you finish both books (3000 characters) you'll be able to approach
Chinese like a Japanese person would. Meaning that you'll have the knowledge
of the characters, but still no knowledge on their pronunciation. Here's the
section from the introduction of the book -
[https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2013/11/RH-S1-sample.pd...](https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2013/11/RH-S1-sample.pdf)

> Those of us who come to the language as adults can gain a similar advantage
> by tying each of the character forms to a particular unit of pronunciation
> and meaning, a “key word” in English, that we already know. Before you
> dismiss the idea of affixing English words to Chinese characters out of
> hand, consider this: all the Chinese dialects, no matter how mutually
> unintelligible they are when spoken, use the same characters for writing.
> These characters convey the same meaning, no matter how they are pronounced.
> What is more, when the Japanese use Chinese characters, they assign them
> still other pronunciations. In other words, there is nothing in the nature
> of a character dictating that it must be verbalized one way or another.
> Unlike students coming to Chinese from an alphabetically written language,
> the Japanese already know the meaning and writing of a great many of the
> characters. By the time you finish this course, you will be in a position
> similar to theirs. Of course, you will eventually need to learn Chinese
> pronunciations, just as Japanese students do. But adding difficult and
> unfamiliar sounds to a solid knowledge of character forms is a much more
> manageable task than trying to memorize meaning, pronunciation, and writing
> all at the same time.

~~~
astrobe_
We have the exact same situation in Europe: if you some of the many words
English inherited from French, they are written exactly the same, have exactly
the same meaning, but are pronounced in a very different way.

