Remembering Traditional Hanzi 2: 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

I have received the vol 1 as a gift from my son and loved it, I was anxiously waiting for the 2nd to appear !For those who, like me, has the vol 1 I would say just to buy it quickly: it is the vol 1 improved! How? For example, at the end you will have an index with the words of the vol 1 ...and the vol 2! What is really comfortable, for you do not have to go back and forth - the 3,000 characters are there. Meaning you can easily navigate all characters without going to the Indexes from vol 1! And in the way it is written, one that has the vol 1 knows how helpful it is: chinese characters are not easy to memorize and one has to 'create' a mnemonic way of remembering. That's the Eureka's way of these 2 intelligent books! Do not wait until it finishs: I know how bad it is to look for the number 2 vol. Thanks to Amazon, today I have both.

Heisig does not believe in placing the Mandarin Anglicization of a character near the character. He places it in its own index. In my opinion that's the only flaw in his books. Otherwise the book is easy to read (big characters) and otherwise well organized.

Brilliant! If you want to learn how to understand Chinese characters this is the best.

very good book and fast shipment thank you

Auch wenn im Gegensatz zum ersten Buch hier kaum mehr Geschichten zu den Zeichen stehen, helfen die vorgeschlagenen Keywords sehr dabei, sich die Zeichen zu merken. Spielerisch und spannend lernt man die chinesischen Zeichen