Remembering Traditional Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

First, thanks a lot to Aphasiac, Vorpal, Swilkins, Haraksha and everyone else whose stories helped me make it to the end of these two books.I thought it would be helpful to the RTH community if I gave my reflections on the Hanzi learning process after entering the '3036' club and learning each of the characters in these two books.[Note: to find over 2,000 of my stories for the 3,035 Hanzi you'll find in Books 1 (1500 Hanzi) and 2 (1536 Hanzi), go to reviewingthehanzi.com , where you can also enter your own stories, track your progress and review your keywords. This site has been a big study aid for myself and others.][Second note: this review covers Remembering Traditional Hanzi I and II at the same time, because they're essentially two volumes of the same work.]To begin, I'm definitely happy that I spent so much time and effort in learning these characters. Yes, I said 'time and effort', because as people warned me before I started, while these books may be the best way to learn Hanzi, they don't take the effort out of learning the characters. My Remembering the Hanzi word document, in which I've placed all of the character stories I've used to remember the Hanzi, is now about 120,000 words. I needed to write at least 2,000 stories to get from #1 to #3036, which takes a lot of time out of your day. I don't say any of this to brag, only to make it clear that while these books are amazing in the way they teach, you still have to put in lots of work.I am also happy to defend the Heisig/Richardson method against the criticism it sometimes encounters. It's true that you won't learn to write these characters fast except by rewriting them and rewriting them. It's also true that I've forgotten about half of the ones I've learnt. And yes, it's also true that writing out the stories takes a long time and can seem ridiculous to others. And yet, the Heisig method is so brilliant in how it shows that each character is made up of similar component parts. Learning those parts and making stories that explain how they come together to form characters is, in my opinion, far more intellectually rewarding (and ultimately more efficient) than writing the same character 30 times in hopes you'll remember each stroke.Now just a little on my Hanzi learning process. I got Book 1 in June 2012, bought Book 2 in January 2013 after a month-long break or so, and finished going through the characters in March 2013. At first my progress was a little slow, but ironically, the further I got into the books (and the more complex the characters got, at least by their appearance), the faster the process went. That's probably because you learn the bulk of the 'primitive elements' in Book 1, and by the time you get deep into Book 2, you're learning very few completely new things, and those characters and elements that once were alien are now very familiar to you. (Except for 2976 . . . but you'll get there!)Second, the way I used my time to learn the Hanzi became more efficient, and it eventually went something like this. First, I would go through the 20, or 30, or 50 new characters I was going to learn that day and write down all of the stories in a row in a Word document (which might become the largest document you have on your computer, in terms of word count). I often went through the characters over lunch, or on the bus, since I would generally remember my stories by memory if I couldn't write them down then. Then I would go back and review any primitive elements that I had forgotten (and inevitably there were a couple). After that I would turn to the index and look through the handwritten forms in order to make sure I knew what the character positioning was, and if there were any alterations in the writing style.After a break, I would take a blank sheet of paper with nothing but the keywords on it and write down the characters to the best of my ability. Once I finished writing, I would then go back and check my work. Any wrongly written or forgotten characters would then be rewritten, again after a short break. Once I had gotten all of them done I would make a note of this on the word document and upload them to RTH. While a lot of this may be self-explanatory, I found that my work went much faster when I did each step for all the characters in a row, rather than all the steps for one character, then all the steps for another, and so on. By the time I got familiar with the process, doing 20 characters in 2 hours was doable, and if I was smart with how I spent my free time, I could get 50 done in a day if there wasn't anything else I had to do. (Life as a college student is great for studying the Hanzi!)I also made an important change in my study habits that helped me get Book 2 done in about 2 months, whereas Book 1 took about 6: I figured out how many Hanzi I would study each day of the week, and stuck to that schedule, taking no days off. It's not a bad idea to take a break on Saturday or Sunday, but I knew that for me, one day off could turn into one week off, and I wanted to get these done as soon as possible. My general strategy was 20 Hanzi on M T W Th and 30 on F, S and Sunday, but some days I would do more. The main point here is that doing a little study each day, for long enough, will get you through these books sooner than you thought. Do the math: even 10 Hanzi a day will let you learn these 3,036 characters in about 10 months, just a little longer than it took me -- because I had taken some big breaks along the way.So just to summarize: find the most efficient way to write your stories and review the characters, and take as few breaks as possible, ideally none, if you'd like to get these books done as fast as possible.Now, I didn't do much serious review until finishing Book 1, and then Book 2. This was possibly a mistake. On one hand, the great thing about Book 2 is that in the process of learning the characters, you're forced to review the Book 1 characters and primitives, since they show up in so many of the Book 2 Hanzi. In other words, in learning new characters, you naturally learn old ones. On the other hand, I've definitely forgotten a lot of what I learned because I didn't go back and review it. So far, of the 164 characters I reviewed on reviewingthehanzi.com, I've remembered 85 and forgotten 79, which comes out to about 51.8%. (Taking a Chinese class in which many of these characters are used probably has helped me remember ~500 characters that I would have otherwise forgotten, so if it weren't for Beginning Chinese class, I might have remembered only 30 or 40% of those.) For all I know, with more periodic review, that number might have been 90 or 95% for me. But I don't necessarily regret that I put all my concentration into learning new characters rather than reviewing old ones. Now that I'm finished with the characters, the review process can begin in earnest.Finally, I'll give a word of realism about these books. Learning the characters is essential for learning Chinese words, but it's not sufficient for understanding Chinese by itself. That's because most Chinese words are two-character 'bigrams', and just like in chemistry, adding two characters together often gives an unexpected result. The word we use in beginning Chinese for 'like' is made up of 'joyful' and 'joyous' -- hence, without this book, you wouldn't know how to say 'to like.' You also wouldn't know that 'be like' + 'fruit' makes up the 'if' in one way of saying "if . . . then," or that 'tight' plus 'stretch' makes 'nervous,' or that 'high quick public path' is how you say 'highway'. (All of the words in single quotes are Heisig keywords.) I believe that Heisig and Richardson were right to give one memorable keyword for each word, but to even begin to speak, write and read Chinese, you have to learn actual words, not just the characters, only some of which are full-fledged words in themselves. So while this book is an extremely important 'Step 1' in your Chinese learning process, you'll also need to undertake further steps to learn words and the sounds that put them together. (By the way, with some creativity, you can make stories to help remember character's sounds and tones).I'm lucky enough to be taking a Chinese class this year, and as you could expect, my study of the RTH characters has been a massive help, since most of the characters are already familiar to me. At the same time, the Chines class is a massive help for my RTH vocab because (A) it lets me use those characters in real words, (B) teaches me the sounds for these characters, obviously necessary for using them in speech and typing with the pinyin method, and (C) makes me remember how to write the characters when quizzes and tests come up. So if you want to really put these characters to use, take a Chinese class somewhere. I'm the only senior in my beginning Chinese class but I'm having a blast. If it's impossible for you to take a class, you could at least pick up the Routledge Mandarin Chinese frequency dictionary, which gives you the top 5,000 words in their order.OK, I think I've written for long enough. As you can see, I'm extremely happy I put in the effort to learn these characters. Even though my retention appears to be only about 50%, reviewing forgotten characters is so easy once you have a story in place to remember them. And it's definitely more fun than writing the same character over and over again, only to forget it later. I hope this helps you in your own study of Remembering the Hanzi. Good luck to you! --Kenneth

Becoming literate is uniquely different in Chinese because it is easy to forget how to read or write a word that you can confidently speak. One hears of even native speakers forgetting a character they can say but cannot write anymore. That being said, Heisig offers a system that recognizes this difference and focuses exclusively on reading Chinese Characters. This is not the end all, be all book for Chinese. It is a valuable supplement to supercharge your character reading ability. Therefore, I don't think the neglect of this system to include pronunciation is a fatal flaw. As a supplement, I use this book when I run on the treadmill and find that I still easily learn 5-6 characters in 30 minutes of jogging. And when I say 'learn' I mean it sticks with me. No more boring, repetitious handwriting of the same character for 50 times.However, if it included pronunciation of the characters it would enhance the book's method. This other book by Matthews does include not only the pronunciation but it integrates it into the memory stories. [...] The jury is still out though if it is a superior approach to this attempt by Heisig. I read the reviews to figure out if I wanted this book or the alternative by James Heisig. One student who finished both books recommended the Heisig book as having better stories and much more characters. For a good discussion of this see [...] A summary of my thoughts are below.As one learning Traditional not Simplified characters the Matthew's book is not as fitting in my opinion. Though I have only looked at Matthew's book online briefly it is enough to tell me that the stories fit the structure of the simplified and not the traditional. This would likely mean that I couldn't link the story directly to the structure of the traditional version of the character. That's a serious problem because most stories are based on making 'pictures' out of the character structure.As for pronunciation, this is an advantage with the Mathew's book and almost enough for me to buy it if I was studying simplified characters. However, you have to consider also the long term foundations of your memory system. Heisig has a 2nd book in the works totaling 3000 characters, whereas Tuttle appears to be done at this point with only 800 characters. That being said, I'm about 70 characters into the Heisig book and have not struggled with learning the pronunciation despite the lack of mnemonics for it. But it is a drawback and I have compensated by handwriting the pinyin into it the book's entries. I hope you consider it as weigh your purchase options carefully.

This book on the whole is solid, but I'm only at Hanzi #20 and there have already been two strange Christian mnemonics, like "When God created Eve, Adam said 'Flesh of my flesh!' Such it is with these two moons who are companions" - this is the mnemonic for remembering the Hanzi that means "Companion", which is literally writing the Hanzi for "moon" twice in a row. Flesh of what now? What does that creepy phrase even mean? Like literally what does "flesh of my flesh" even mean, that Adam was cloned in a test tube and turned into a female to become Eve? I simply wrote beneath it, "Moon has a friend."The mnemonic for "Beginning" says: "In the beginning..." starts that marvelous shelf of books we call the Bible. It talks about how all things were made, and tells us that when it came to humanity the Creator made *two* (emphasis his) of them, man and woman. While we presume *two* (emphasis his) were made of every other creature as well, we are not told as much. Hence we need only *two* and a pair of *human* legs to come to the character that means *beginning*."What!? Like literally what? I don't understand the logic of that mnemonic even when I take the premises of it to be true... Never mind the gender bias involved...I've thumbed through the rest of the book and luckily the amount of Hanzi based on Christianity dies down quite a bit, but it's still unprofessional and just, well, BOOMER-EY, it's just kind of entitled and pushy and weird, to see such outlandish Christian bias in the mnemonics I listed up above.

This book is a real gem. Even though Heisig stirred a heated debate whether one should really separate learning meanings of Chinese characters and learning their pronunciation, for me it's a question clearly answered.The book is well done, recall of characters is amazing thanks to mnemonic stories. Learning the characters is a breeze. Comparing to university studies, this book teaches the characters much, much faster. Just for comparison - 4 semesters of Chinese characters lessons get you to 1500 characters. This book can take you halfway there in less time (with full time commitment, the writers promise 4-5 weeks, with just a couple hours of free time daily and more relaxed tempo it's 10-12 weeks).The title of this book summarizes the whole thing pretty clearly - this course will teach you, how not to forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters. Pronunciation, on the other hand, is untouched. You will have to find some other course of action for that.I plan on buying the second part of this book as soon as I'm finished with this one, because knowing 3000 Chinese characters (even if it's just their meaning) is really something you can build on. The choice of selected vocabulary and characters is well explained in the preface of this book, citing good sources and providing the assurance you really learn the most relevant words.The core of the book is pairing Chinese character with English meaning. The book, however, also provides 5 indexes:1. hand-drawn characters in their order of appearance paired with Chinese pinyin pronunciation,2. list of primitive elements used in the book3. characters by their number of strokes4. characters listed alphabetically by pronunciations in pinyin5. characters listed alphabetically by English meaning keywords.In conclusion, I'm glad I paid the price for this book. It's incredibly useful and practical.

Absolutely fantastic. With this method I managed to learn, and indeed memorise, hundreds of characters! It is a massive help when studying vocabulary later.

The best way of remembering Chinese characters.

The system really works. You will remember more and more quickly. But it is probably most useful if you already have basic knowledge of mandarin.

I kept hearing recommendations from various polyglot YouTubers. It's as good as they say, I'm at 160 characters in a month with minimal effort. Use with Anki, download the deck that someone made.