amazon.com/Remembering-Tradi … gy_b_img_b
Hi there,
Just checking if anybody knows if this book is available in any Taiwan stores? I am beginning to learn some characters and this has some nice reviews. I tried the demo out and the system seems to work pretty good.
It sounds interesting, but from the reviews I’ve read, it also sounds like it unfortunately neglects the following:
The importance of the phonetic linkage between spoken words and written characters. From what I’ve read, the book doesn’t even bother to print the pinyin next to the character, and the author even discourages you from trying to learn the pronunciation at first, so you’re just memorizing the meaning, which is bad IMO. The characters are, fundamentally, a way to represent spoken words, rather than isolated entities, and in the future you will need to be able to produce the characters when you are presented with or think of the spoken word and its sound. That link is all-important.
The importance of the phonetic role of the components, which accounts for at least half of the Chinese script’s content.
The value of learning etymological information alongside (or instead of) disposable, fake mnemonic tricks. For instance, a reviewer describes the author’s use of a blackened computer on fire for 黑. Cute, but learning the following phrase, with the components written in the proper order while you speak it might be better: ‘hei1, ‘black’, is a pot (write the top box) blackened (internal dots) with soot (土) from a fire (灬 = 火)’. This is likely to be closer to the real etymology (at least it approaches one etymological interpretation, although the truth is obscure due to the passing of millennia). The 土, btw, is corrupted from a bronze 火, but serves well as a dirt-like ‘soot’ in this mnemonic anyway. Note also the intentional pronunciation of the pinyin, and the meaning, at the beginning of the phrase, to help recall. [As an aside, check out the phonetically similar character, 會 hui4, which contains the same blackened cooking pot, and which might be the original character for 燴 hui4, to braise, cook.]
The point is not that one should burden oneself with etymological study if one’s goal is merely character memorization. The point is that there are etymologically accurate and easy to use mnemonics available in some cases, and it makes no sense to me to neglect them in favor of fanciful disposable ones.
The value of at least some rote repetition in the process.
I don’t want to discourage you from trying the book, but if I were you, as step one I’d write the pinyin next to each character (the book hides the pinyin in a rear index). I’d also accompany it with a nice, easy book on etymology such as Xie Guanghui’s (not that I agree with his analysis of this particular character – I’m sure he’s wrong – but it’s still better than ‘computer on fire’, and works just as well mnemonically). And I’d recommend writing each character ten times as you study each page.
Thanks mate.
I was going to use it along side fullrecall or anki and add the pinyin in there. But i guess writing the pinyin by the character would have a similar result. Probably do both!
Cheers 
As for where, I’ve not seen it, but one way to find books locally (for future reference) is to try Googling it, and add the Chinese for bookstore, 書店. In page one of my results, I see THIS STORE, which is in Taibei; the phone and address are at the bottom.
客戶服務專線：02-26535588 服務時間：週一～六 8:00~19:00，週日、例假日 9:00~18:00，365天全年無休
傳真：02-27885008 地址：115 台北市南港區八德路四段768巷1弄20號10樓
That’s Taibei, Nangang District, Ba1de2 Rd., Sec 4 Lane 768, Alley 1, #20, 10F. I’d call 1st.
[quote=“Dragonbones”]It sounds interesting, but from the reviews I’ve read, it also sounds like it unfortunately neglects the following:
The importance of the phonetic linkage between spoken words and written characters. From what I’ve read, the book doesn’t even bother to print the Pinyin next to the character, and the author even discourages you from trying to learn the pronunciation at first, so you’re just memorizing the meaning, which is bad IMO. The characters are, fundamentally, a way to represent spoken words, rather than isolated entities, and in the future you will need to be able to produce the characters when you are presented with or think of the spoken word and its sound. That link is all-important.
The importance of the phonetic role of the components, which accounts for at least half of the Chinese script’s content.
The value of learning etymological information alongside (or instead of) disposable, fake mnemonic tricks. For instance, a reviewer describes the author’s use of a blackened computer on fire for 黑. Cute, but learning the following phrase, with the components written in the proper order while you speak it might be better: ‘hei1, ‘black’, is a pot (write the top box) blackened (internal dots) with soot (土) from a fire (灬 = 火)’. This is likely to be closer to the real etymology (at least it approaches one etymological interpretation, although the truth is obscure due to the passing of millennia). The 土, btw, is corrupted from a bronze 火, but serves well as a dirt-like ‘soot’ in this mnemonic anyway. Note also the intentional pronunciation of the Pinyin, and the meaning, at the beginning of the phrase, to help recall. [As an aside, check out the phonetically similar character, 會 hui4, which contains the same blackened cooking pot, and which might be the original character for 燴 hui4, to braise, cook.]
The point is not that one should burden oneself with etymological study if one’s goal is merely character memorization. The point is that there are etymologically accurate and easy to use mnemonics available in some cases, and it makes no sense to me to neglect them in favor of fanciful disposable ones.
The value of at least some rote repetition in the process.
I don’t want to discourage you from trying the book, but if I were you, as step one I’d write the Pinyin next to each character (the book hides the Pinyin in a rear index). I’d also accompany it with a nice, easy book on etymology such as Xie Guanghui’s (not that I agree with his analysis of this particular character – I’m sure he’s wrong – but it’s still better than ‘computer on fire’, and works just as well mnemonically). And I’d recommend writing each character ten times as you study each page.[/quote]
Which books would you recommend for this? I remember a short discussion on the topic of etymology with you at 101 and you mentioned most of the books, such as the far eastern character books, used a folk etymology to explain the meaning of characters. From a pure learning point of view do you think these are useful?
Later of course we should all purchase the masterful work on true etymology you are busy completing. 
Edit: oops, I see you answered the above (but with a tiny link).
Sure. If your interest is purely mnemonic and it doesn’t bother you that explanations (often presented as etymological fact) are pure bullshit, I recommend Peng’s Fun With Chinese Characters series. I also enjoyed Wieger, and some use books based on that, like Wilder and Ingram’s Analysis of Chinese Characters. Harbaugh’s Chinese Characters: a Genealogy and Dictionary 中文字譜 is also very useful for pure mnemonics and for finding characters regardless of bushou. From a pure character memorization point of view, any of these would be useful, yes. But I’d recommend Xie’s book first, followed by some of the others to fill in the gaps, with De Francis and then Qiu Xigui being read alongside them.
Unfortunately, my recommendations are mainly negative, and Xie’s book is the only passable (not even great) work widely available which has an easy, character-by-character layout. There are better but OP and unavailable ones or works entirely in Chinese, like a 15-volume work all in literary Chinese, and handwritten in an illegible script, then poorly reprinted. 
There are also some other VERY good books out there from which one can learn a tremendous amount about the origins of the language, a portion of which will be interesting etymologically, but which are nothing like a mnemonically useful character-by-character book for beginner to intermediate students. I list some information about such books at the bottom here.
There’s a young scholar working on some materials at the Academica Sinica now under the supervision of an etymologist friend of mine there, and hopefully before long I’ll get some input into that, and then will likely be translating it. If that project goes through, we should have something good available in a few years which shows the derivation from around 165 oracle bone characters to about 3000 modern graphs. I’ll have a minor role in it, I expect. I was working on something similar chiefly by myself, but ran into too many brick walls with it and have stalled – it’s just too hard when primary sources are all in difficult and inaccessible scholarly journals, symposia proceedings etc., so I think it will work out better with one or two specialist scholars doing most of the leg work, and me providing ideas for them to laugh at, plus some translation work. I may resume my own book later, who knows?
==============================================
LIST of very worthwhile reading, although not similar in either layout or purpose to the book the OP cited:
#1 (a must-read for every serious student of Chinese IMO)
Qiu Xigui, CHINESE WRITING:
裘錫圭 Qiú Xīguī (2000). Chinese Writing. Translation of 文字學概論 by the late Gilbert L. Mattos (Chairman, Dept. of Asian Studies, Seton Hall University) and Jerry Norman (Professor Emeritus, Asian Languages & Literature Dept., Univ. of Washington). Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7. Translated based on the 1988 Beijing original, then updated based on the revised Taipei edition, but retaining Prof. Qiú’s discussions of simplified mainland forms. Thus, this translation is the best of both editions. Adds new indices by characters and topics. HIGHLY recommended for intermediate students.
Woon, Wee Lee (1987). Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution. Explores in depth the early pottery inscriptions, from the Neolithic Banpo to the excavations at the last Shāng Dyn. capital at Xiaotun (Anyang, Henan Province) in light of OB (oracle bone) and bronze forms. Discusses at length the processes involved in the formation and evolution of characters, with copious oracle bone and bronze examples, some obsolete. A bit too scholarly for beginning students, but certainly worthwhile reading for more advanced students and “hardcore” amateur sinologists. Bibliography is mainly Chinese sources, unfortunately in pinyin without characters, and thus of limited value. Also unfortunately not indexed by character, limiting its value as a reference source. Originally publ. by the Univ. of East Asia, Macau (no ISBN); now available through Joint Publishing, fax: 852-28104201; email: jpchk@jointpublishing.com (attn: Edith Ho kit-sheung). Note: the Joint Publishing staff can’t seem to handle English titles well; be sure to send the author and title in Chinese by fax to get the right book: 作者: 雲惟利， 書名: 漢字的原始和演變. Recommended for advanced students with a particular interest in paleography.
Boltz, William G. (1994). The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. American Oriental Series, vol. 78. American Oriental Society, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. ISBN 0-940490-78-1. A fascinating scholarly treatise on the theory behind title subject, with a grammatonomic approach, emphasizing the internal, or linguistic processes, rather than the external, or material aspect (graphic structures). Boltz rejects the notion of the ideograph (graphs which represent meaning without resorting to sound), and emphasizes the graph as representation of the spoken word.
He explains the motivations for and problems resulting from the borrowing of characters for other, spoken words, in a four-step model of the development of writing systems, from 1) logographs, to 2) two kinds of loans, semantic loans resulting in po4yin1zi4 (polyphony) and the resultant phonetic ambiguity; and phonetic (rebus) loans resulting in semantic ambiguity; 3) determinatives added to resolve ambiguity; and finally (in other languages but not Chinese) 4) desemanticization of the logographs, resulting in a purely phonetic system of writing.
Boltz patiently guides the reader through the kinds of reasoning needed to infer etymological processes. Particularly interesting is the reasoning on how to infer that some currently monophonic characters must have once been polyphonic, inferring polyphony for the components of a number of supposed hui4yi4 (logical aggregate, compound indicative, or associative compound) characters such as an1 ‘tranquility’ and hao3 ‘good’, thus dispelling mythical etymologies like “woman under roof represents tranquility”. Boltz explains how to determine whether the role of a particular component is as an original semantic or phonetic one (or both), or instead as a determinative resolving phonetic ambiguity of a polyphonic character or semantic ambiguity of a parasemantic or polyphonic graph.
Perhaps too scholarly for the average beginning student of Mandarin, and not arranged or indexed to be an etymological reference works, but certainly worthwhile reading for the “hardcore” amateur sinologist and intermediate to advanced Chinese major. Recommended for advanced students with a particular interest in paleography.
Of course, everyone should have already read DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6. A delightful and very readable book debunking many popular misconceptions. Highly recommended for beginning students. Not much etymology, but probably the first book students of Chinese should pick up, aside from their actual textbooks.
Now, if you’re interested in seeing better series of old graphs (e.g., more than one example of oracle bone and bronze forms), you could turn to several sources. One problem with the commercial or ‘coffee-table’ books with their cute little cartoons, aside from mixing bullshit folk etymology willy-nilly with plausible explanations based on Shuowen, is that they often pick just one OB, one bronze, small seal, and one clerical form in an overly neat series of five large graphs, but this leads to all kinds of misunderstandings, such as the erroneous impression that there was one standard form during each period, the misconception that there were five clearly distinct scripts, in that order, with no overlap, with each leading neatly to the next in a moment of invention or reform. Qiu Xigui is pretty good at putting the lie to these misconceptions, although he doesn’t really summarize the complexity of the actual situation in an easily comprehensible form. Anyway, one source which is not reliable etymologically because the author is a hobbyist, not a specialist scholar, but which does present quite a lot of the forms, thus avoiding some of the above misconceptions, is Wang:
Wáng Hóngyuán (1993). 漢字字源入門 The Origins of Chinese Characters, Sinolingua, Beijing, ISBN 7-80052-243-1. Bilingual, in English, plus abbreviated Mandarin explanations in simplified characters. Reproduces a refreshingly broad range of historical forms in facsimile for each of 500 characters, elucidating the variety of forms at each stage of development, with very little accompanying explanation. Wáng, a layman, avoids dealing with competing explanations, choosing his own favorites instead, and avoiding etymologically difficult characters. His descriptions are often terse and unsatisfactory, stating what a character represents but with no further explanation. The pinyin and English indices are a welcome step forward which all authors should emulate, but unfortunately, his suffer from omissions, such as most of the numbers. The index has simplified characters only, but the etymologies in the text are usually for the traditional version, so the two are poorly matched: one must look up 几 in the index to find 幾 in the text. Despite its clear flaws, Wang’s book is a worthwhile and convenient source for perusing the variety of historical structures, especially due to the lack of similar books with English and a pinyin index. However, it is not an entirely reliable source of etymology, and is utterly lacking in depth.
王宏源 Wáng Hóngyuán 漢字形體源流, The Origins of Chinese Characters (1997). A more carefully written version of the above, in Chinese, with more complete and satisfactory explanations. However, it is still a summary by a non-linguist, and does not adequately treat many important etymological theories.
Another source of multiple examples from each period is the Hanyu Da Zidian:
漢語大字典. Húbĕi Cishu Chūbǎnshè and Sìchuān Cishu Chūbǎnshè, 1992. This massive tome is the most comprehensive dictionary for classical Chinese and obsolete graphs, and as a bonus, contains partial graphic histories of many characters. A Taiwanese edition (converted from simplified to traditional characters) is available from 建宏出版社 Jiànhóng Publ., ISBN 957-813-478-9. All in Chinese, suitable for advanced students. Difficult to use.
HERE is some more info on the Xie book which I linked to earlier:
謝光輝 Xìe Guānghuī Ed., (1997). The Composition of Common Chinese Characters: An Illustrated Account, Peking (sic) University Press. ISBN 7-301-03329-x. A large softcover book with 652 pp., each showing the evolution of one character, with single, representative OB, bronze, and seal forms, accompanied by a brief paragraph of explanation in English and Mandarin (simplified characters), with illustrations and cartoons.
Despite the cartoons, this is rather more accurate than the books by Tan Huay Peng (as well as Wieger; Wilder, & Ingram; and Harbaugh) and the English explanations are somewhat better written, more accurate and more informative than Wáng’s. This can therefore actually be recommended as an introduction to the topic for the casual reader. However, it still does not have the scholarly rigor to make it a suitable text for the beginning university student or serious amateur sinophile.
The layout is tremendously wasteful of space, and it is only a partial translation of the larger, Chinese original. With only 651 characters (although more than most sources), its usefulness as a reference book is still limited, especially because many extremely basic characters are missing, such as 的, 是, 三, 五, 七, 切, 八, 巴, 把, 爸, 白, 百, 拜, 包, 九, 千 and so on, while a few uncommon (albeit etymologically interesting) ones such as 囂 xiāo, 攀 pān, 陟 zhì and 刖 yuè are included. Use of frequency information to guide character selection is recommended for future books. Finally, as with most currently available mass-market books, Xiè does not adequately address competing etymological theories when appropriate.
For each main character entry in the main lessons and the indices, traditional characters are given parenthetically. The book is organized logically into topical categories (man, utensils, architecture, etc.) and indexed by topic, pinyin head letter, and stroke number. A true pinyin index (with the whole syllable, not just by initial letter) would also be much easier to use. Available at Schoenhof’s online; or in Australia, chinabooks.com.au.
Dragon Bones, I think you may be missing part of the idea of the book. Learning to write characters is a pretty big task for most people. There’s reason that Chinese speakers outperform English speakers in Japanese language schools, and it’s grammatical similarities. Learning to write characters AND what they mean AND how to pronounce them all at one time is more than most learners, including myself, can handle.
Remembering the Kanji was so influential because it allowed learners to learn how to write the entire set of 2000 Joyou Kanji within a couple of months. After that point, learning how to read them is a much less daunting task. Heisig has a fairly deep knowledge of character etymology and does use “correct” stories when expedient. More importantly for low-level students, Heisig understands how to harness the human memory.
Mindlessly writing the characters over and over again not the only way. If your mnemonic images are sufficiently well constructed, you only have to write each character one time during a given review session. It’s a triumph of creativity over rote learning. Many successful language learners have used it with great results.
sinosplice.com/life/archives … ig-and-rtk
alljapaneseallthetime.com/bl … n-now-dawg
kanjiclinic.com/reviewheisigwiig.htm
Hi,
I, too, was interested in this book when was first being discussed as ‘coming soon’ several years back. However, it took so long to arrive that I got on with learning characters by myself.
Now that I know more about the subject, I agree with Dragonbones that RTH is probably not the best way for learning chinese characters for use in mandarin.
Many people do rave about the Japanese version ‘Remembering the Kanji’, but Japanese is a very different language, and the chinese characters in Japanese are used in a very different way to how they are used in mandarin.
My feeling is that you could end up wasting a lot of time learning with the RTH method, as you would have to repeatedly go back over the same characters to learn them properly. Once to learn the ‘easy-to-remember mnemonic’ associated with each character, then to the learn the actual meaning, and once again to learn the pronunciation.
Also, it is worth bearing in mind that recalling the mnemonic when you see a character isn’t necessarily useful as far as understanding what is written, because for many characters, their appearance in a word (of 2 or 3 characters) may have nothing whatsoever to do with the meaning of the character by itself. For example the character 月 in the RTH book has the mnemonic of Month (and also has the sense of moon, part of the body, flesh), however the word 月台 (railway platform) has nothing to do with any of these. Knowing that 月=Month doesn’t help you here at all. If you’d used the RTH method to learn this, you would not only be in the position of having no clue what 月台 means, but you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it either, so all that effort you’ve expended takes you precisely nowhere.
Looking back, I am now quite relieved that RTH was so late in coming, because I realise that, in my ignorance, I could have spent much time and effort on it, but with little reward.
In the end, I figured out my own “system” for learning chinese characters. Roughly, it went as follows…
I chose some ‘my first 50 characters’ type books, to get a basic grounding in the simplest characters, and spent time learning these (both their real meanings & pronunciation)
Once I had started to get a feel for the characters from the starter books, I then built up a list of the 150 or so most common radicals. These, I learnt fairly religiously using a spaced-repetition flashcard program on my computer.
At this point I started going to a language school, so I then began to build up word and character lists from the lessons in the text books and putting them into my flashcard program.
I then started adding new words to my flashcards as I came across them in my daily life and conversations.
Early on (during stage 1 and 2), I also used the first 10-15 Pimsleur lessons to help me learn the pronunciation principles.
The thing I found is that once I had learned some 50-100 characters and radicals, I started to be able to easily spot the components of new characters that I came across, and could often use these components to get a hint of the pronunciation. Sure, it doesn’t work every time, but it is a pattern which occurs often enough to save you a lot of effort in learning new characters.
Something I haven’t done is learn how to write characters with a pen. This is because it’s not a skill I particularly need (I barely even write any English these days). All my writing is done on computer, so being able to type (using pinyin) is fine for me.
One other tip is that after the first 50-100 characters, I found it much more useful to concentrate on learning words, rather than just characters. Learning 3000 individual characters is next to useless, as most words in chinese are made up of two characters (which together might have little or nothing to do with their individual meanings). Again, this is an area that RTH doesn’t address.
Anyway, this is just my 2NTD…hope it’s of some use.
Ben
Xiaoma, I agree that “learning to write characters AND what they mean AND how to pronounce them all at one time is more than most learners… can handle.” I’m a believer in the natural sequence of language learning: listening, then speaking, then reading and writing. Once one has learned how to say a phrase, it’s then time to go back and learn how to read and write it. So the burden of connecting the sound to meaning is already gone, making it easier to focus on how to represent the speech in writing. At that point, I think the characters should be learned with the link to the speech made explicit, since characters are, fundamentally, ways to write spoken words. Learning their meanings, disconnected from speech, completely misses the point of what writing is intended to be: speech on paper. The myth that characters have meaning independent of speech has been much discussed, and I’ll not go into it further here, but I will say that the above book heads in the wrong direction in this regard.
I doubt that many students would be able to perform that task if I tested them.
The one example I saw would appear to contradict this, but I’m perfectly willing to allow that it may have been an exception to his normal approach. If you have a copy on hand, feel free to show some more examples.
[quote] More importantly for low-level students, Heisig understands how to harness the human memory.
Mindlessly writing the characters over and over again not the only way.[/quote]
I’m definitely in favor of moving away from mindlessly writing characters like that in order to learn them, without any understanding of their pronunciation, meaning, phonetic and semantic components, their origins, or how to find them in a dictionary. I wholeheartedly approve of the author’s use of mnemonics. I just think he goes too far, neglecting the spoken word – written word link, neglecting the need for at least a little writing practice in the process, and (in the example I saw) neglecting mnemonically useful etymology, where it exists. I’m perfectly willing to concede that non-etymological mnemonics will be more useful most of the time, especially at first.
But much of what prompts the memory when writing characters is the presence of phonetic elements. When I say hui4hua4, to draw, and you need to write the first graph, being able to call up characters which have the sound hui4 is going to be your easiest path to recall. Thinking of what semantic element to add to it is the remainder of the battle. I don’t think parlor-trick mnemonics will be as helpful in such an instance as knowing your phonetic and semantic components backwards and forwards, combined with having drilled yourself on that character twenty times. Again, that’s not to say I believe in the primacy of rote learning.
Most of all, remember, in the future students will think of a spoken word, or hear it, and need to write it down. That’s the context in which the characters will need to be produced. They won’t have someone saying ‘now please write characters literally meaning first and born’. They’ll be hearing or thinking ‘xian1sheng1’. The sound to character link needs to be strong, not an afterthought.
[quote=“ben_gb”]Hi,
Many people do rave about the Japanese version ‘Remembering the Kanji’, but Japanese is a very different language, and the Chinese characters in Japanese are used in a very different way to how they are used in Mandarin.
[/quote]
I agree with you completely here. In Japanese, the semantic component of characters is often more consistent than the phonetic component. For example, 人 means just about the same thing regardless of the context in which it appears. However, it can be pronounced as hito, bito, nin, jin, tari, to and who knows what else. Perhaps tona, as in 大人?
Mandarin readings aren’t nearly so numerous. However, reading and writing are clearly a weak point for a lot of non-Japanese foreigners here, even some who can speak reasonably well.
[quote=“ben_gb”]
Also, it is worth bearing in mind that recalling the mnemonic when you see a character isn’t necessarily useful as far as understanding what is written, because for many characters, their appearance in a word (of 2 or 3 characters) may have nothing whatsoever to do with the meaning of the character by itself. For example the character 月 in the RTH book has the mnemonic of Month (and also has the sense of moon, part of the body, flesh), however the word 月台 (railway platform) has nothing to do with any of these. Knowing that 月=Month doesn’t help you here at all. If you’d used the RTH method to learn this, you would not only be in the position of having no clue what 月台 means, but you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it either, so all that effort you’ve expended takes you precisely nowhere.
Ben[/quote]
Uh… the primary meaning given for 台 was “platform”.
Yes, you’d have to learn the compound, just as Japanese tourists in Taiwan do, but like them, you’d probably learn the term 月台 much more quickly and easily than Kanji-illiterate westerners would. You’d also have a much easier time remembering it once you did. CFL researchers are beginning to take more and more interest in these kinds of methods.
fask.uni-mainz.de/inst/chine … ardson.htm
It was because Richardson’s later doctoral work using such methods was so promising that he decided to undertake most of the work in creating a Chinese version of RTK.
Yes, this perhaps wasn’t the best example, though there is still nothing in the characters that indicate the railway part.
But the thing is, you still won’t know how to say it, so have to go back and learn the pronunciation as a separate step.
That is not to say the RTH method is all bad. There are certainly situations where it could be a useful starting point - maybe for someone outside a chinese-speaking country who wants a headstart in being able to ‘get’ the characters, and where they aren’t yet learning how to speak the language. I also think that the way it teaches you to look at characters as being built up from other characters/components is useful (though most people will figure this out by themselves, whatever their learning method).
However, for people already learning chinese, or in a chinese-speaking environment (immersion method), I feel it can lead to frustration, as the benefits of learning each character are so much delayed because you can’t immediately start to use what you are learning in your everyday speech. For me, I find that if I don’t quickly begin using new characters or words, they are soon forgotten. Also, I feel that reading aloud is an important ‘helper’ for me to learn characters and words so I will able to remember them for use in conversations, and in particular for learning how they should be said with the correct tones.
(I just skimmed through that link you sent, and similar points about the Heisig method are also mentioned in that paper.)
My concern is that the Heisig method is really untested when applied to learning Chinese (as opposed to Japanese), and it doesn’t address some of the ‘difficult aspects’ which are present in Chinese (especially for western language learners), but not in Japanese (e.g. tones, lack of an alphabet to fall back on). Chinese and Japanese are quite different languages, and I question whether the method for learning one can be simply duplicated for learning the other.
But in the end, people are different, and what works for one person may not work for another. The key is motivation, and if using RTH keeps someone motivated enough to learn, then maybe it doesn’t matter so much that it may not be the most efficient way to learn in every situation.
Now that RTH has been published, in the coming months we will hopefully see people trying the Heisig method for Chinese, and start getting some real-world feedback of how effective/useful it is.
Ben
Yes, this perhaps wasn’t the best example, though there is still nothing in the characters that indicate the railway part.[/quote]
The word “gate” doesn’t indicate airplanes or airport either. Yuètái was originally used to describe a platform built by the bourgeoisie so they can have a higher unobstructed location to watch the moon. Thus, 月台 is quite literal. The term has since been extended into meaning the front raised portion of a traditional Chinese temple and extended further into meaning a train platform in modern times.
Better examples would be transliterated terms such as 麥克風 or 德先生.
[quote=“sjcma”]
Better examples would be transliterated terms such as 麥克風 or 德先生.[/quote]
Very, true. Of course, for those terms, a Japanese student would struggle just as much as an English-speaking one. The book can help put a western beginner on more equal footing with character-reading beginners, but it can’t work miracles.
J. Marshall Unger, an expert on Japanese and a professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, has a useful discussion of Heisig’s method in his book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning.
I like this brief summary:
Much of this section can be read through extended excerpts on Google Books.
Heisig’s methods aren’t too popular amongst the hard-core “character reforming” clique for obvious reasons. Focusing on the semantic component of characters first obviously isn’t something that J. Marshall Unger (or Victor Mair or any of them) would take to kindly to. That doesn’t negate the effectiveness of Heisig’s methods, though. I’d take Heisig’s Japanese speaking skills over Unger’s in a heartbeat. It’s probably not a fair comparison, though, since Heisig does his religion and philosophy studies out of Japan.
Heisig learned to write a couple thousand Kanji in a month extremely intense study before even starting his Japanese classes and went on to dominate them. His abilities outpaced his classmates by so much that his teachers accused him of having a photographic memory. It’s not a phenomenon restricted to Heisig, either. Many, many Japanese students have benefited from the semantic and orthographic foundation RTK provides and gone on to gain true literacy and impressive speaking abilities.
After years of stagnating Chinese reading skills and declining writing skills, I started working through RTK myself during the second half of this CNY break. The results have been amazing. It’s difficult to put into words how much I wish I’d picked up a copy of Remembering the Kanji back when I was a student. I’ll definitely be posting a longer piece at some point on my experiences with the book.
Ideogram, on the other hand, didn’t really help me at all. It may even have been what deterred me from giving Heisig’s methods a fair chance back in the day.
There’s this method developed by some Taiwanese dude. His sons were born and raised in the US. They grew up not knowing any Chinese as the parents were divorced and the kids were raised by their American mother. When the kids finished college, they used the method their dad developed and apparently set a world record on reading and writing Chinese characters from zero to contemporary newspapers in 89 days. Apparently, the method uses a word-root method.
The inventor of this method claims that any motivated student can do the same without being immersed in the language.
Here’s the link: chinese-etymology.com/homepage.html
Hell if I know if it’s real. The web site is a bit over the top in self-congratulations. He also charges a pretty penny for his method.
[quote=“cranky laowai”]J. Marshall Unger, an expert on Japanese and a professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, has a useful discussion of Heisig’s method in his book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning.
I like this brief summary:
Much of this section can be read through extended excerpts on Google Books.[/quote]
Unfortunately, it seems Unger didn’t realize that mnemonic pegs and stories are exactly the trick used by successful orators and storytellers for thousands of years. And using the techniques absolutely did help Greeks speak Greek as Greek, Navajo speak Navajo as Navajo, etc…
I really, really disliked Ideogram. Here’s why:
It’s a book long attack on a straw-man. It’s an exposé of myths that weren’t really myths to begin with. Nobody has claimed aliens from another star system could understand Chinese characters without study. With a few exceptions, people from other countries can’t even do that. Nobody has claimed that Chinese characters can somehow convey meaning to people who haven’t been taught to understand them.
It fails to admit some of the very real differences between primarily phonetic characters, such as English letters or Japanese kana and semantic characters, such as Arabic numerals and Japanese kanji. Arabic numerals offer few clues in regards to pronunciation, and as such a sound and meaning must be memorized for each. However, in written form, they are portable across many languages. It’s also faster to process than reading each syllable separately.
It’s a very ideological book. Conflicting research is mostly left unmentioned. It completely misses the boat in the part titled “how we really read”. Even in languages such as English, reading can occur in multiple ways. Slower readers do regularly “subvocalize”, i.e., convert symbols on the page into sounds and then those sounds to meaning. However, the faster a person reads, the less they subvocalize. Instead they take in entire words or even phrases semantically, bypassing phonetic conversion entirely. This process has been documented by studies involving speed reading, early education and hearing impaired learners and most likely other disciplines as well. It’s been several years since I read Ideograph, but I don’t remember seeing a single mention of this fact. I suppose the idea that even English reading can involve such oh so loathsome IDEOGRAPHIC 
processes was just too much to bear.
On the good side, Ideogram doesn’t stoop to the same level of offensiveness towards the Japanese “irrationality” about computing showed in The Fifth Generation Fallacy or apologize for the MacArthur occupation’s attempts to eliminate kanji as in Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan . Ugh. I am never going to Ohio State to take that guy’s classes.
I posted this a while ago, but I’ll repeat it here. Correct phonetic information doesn’t matter in the paragraph below. Reading is done at a very “symbolic” level. Reading speeds is only slightly affected by the misspellings.
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Xiaoma, I’m not sure what it is that leads you to such misimpressions. But such is your attachment to them that I don’t think it would be useful for me to go through everything. So perhaps we’ll just have to agree to disagree on such points.
[quote=“sjcma”]I posted this a while ago, but I’ll repeat it here. Correct phonetic information doesn’t matter in the paragraph below. Reading is done at a very “symbolic” level. Reading speeds is only slightly affected by the misspellings.
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.[/quote]
That’s an urban legend.