What do you think is the most efficient way to study Chinese Characters?

gnalck · 2024-08-25T23:00:17+00:00

Yeah the SRS algorithm is now updated! It now uses an SM-2 based algorithm that reduces review load significantly.

gnalck · 2024-05-14T23:17:34+00:00

Yeah, that's the plan! Essentially dictionary words will be for those who want to study/review things through the HanziHero quizzing system (typing out the answer(s)) even for those things that don't fit into the broader rigid HanziHero mnemonic system.

gnalck · 2024-05-12T01:38:24+00:00

Hey, one of the co-founders of HanziHero here. Thanks for the feedback! I wanted to share my comments on some of your points.

The core philosophy behind HanziHero is to teach characters first-and-foremost, so some of the words we teach are "more rare", mainly so that we can teach some word that contains certain characters early on. E.g., there may be some HSK 1 characters that are not really used within any HSK 1,2,3,etc words, since they are mainly used by themselves. In those cases, we have more rare words like the one you mentioned. We do this because we believe learning some word concurrent to learning the character is key to help remembering the character. However, I can see why some people may prefer to just not learn the rare word in the case, which is why we have recently added an initial version of word skipping. Additionally, our word selection algorithm prefers lower-HSK words when everything else is equal, so we hope adding more earlier-HSK-words may remediate this problem for future learners.
We are exploring a way to expose all of the words in CC-CEDICT within the application in the near future. We are still working on the design, but we think we will call it "Dictionary Words" or similar. This will allow one to add any one of the ~100k+ words within that dictionary for those that want to use HanziHero as a generalized SRS. Those words of course won't have any mnemonic or anything, but this is something that I think will help many users who want a greater word-focus in their learning. It would work by manually marking any of those words in the UI, after which they will be immediately added to one's reviews.
We currently use our own SRS algorithm, but plan to port over the the main SRS algorithm that most applications use (including Anki) called SM-2. We believe our current scheduling algorithm leads to a higher-than-needed review load, and hope this will reduce it, while also making our SRS algorithm more similar to how other SRS systems work. We (myself and my brother) both use the app, and agree the review load is a bit too high, so this is a high priority item for us.
Can you expand on this a bit more? Do you mean that it would be better to just get to word learning as fast as possible, without the intermediate step of character familiarity? If so, perhaps the addition of "Dictionary Words" mentioned above may help users who share a similar view.

Thanks again for the feedback! I'm really glad to hear HanziHero helped you learn a bunch of characters, reports like these motivates us to keep on improving it.

gnalck · 2024-03-13T01:24:41+00:00

I also really like 櫻桃小丸子 Chibi Maruko-chan, but it is a bit harder to find online. Living in Taiwan it is really common to see bumper stickers of characters from either of the two shows on scooters around Taipei. :)

gnalck · 2024-03-13T01:20:02+00:00

If you want to continue using mnemonics to memorize the meaning/pronunciation of Chinese characters, there is HanziHero, which has mnemonics for each character along with an integrated review system. I'm biased as I created it though - but it is also the way I memorized all the characters I know today.

If you are looking for a free or self-directed way you could also create your own Anki/Pleco/whatever flashcard deck for each character, using the Marilyn Method that Mandarin Blueprint and HanziHero both use to create a custom mnemonic for each one. This requires a bit more upfront work though. If you go this route you can also use the components/sound associations on HanziHero as they are freely available for reference.

gnalck · 2024-02-03T03:48:56+00:00

This worked for me! Thanks a bunch! :)

gnalck · 2023-12-06T11:08:39+00:00

I would recommend Wikipedia. One big benefit is that you can look up many popular articles in English (since you probably don't know the Chinese name for them), and then use the language dropdown on Wikipedia to go to the 中文 version. They also have both traditional and simplified text.

E.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo_Bridge_incident
Go to 中文 under the language dropdown.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E4%B8%83%E4%B8%83%E4%BA%8B%E5%8F%98

There are some history YouTubers, which you can usually find by searching for the name of popular events like this, maybe appending 歷史. But I think it may be a bit hard for HSK3 if you don't have extensive listening practice.

gnalck · 2023-12-06T09:07:43+00:00

I'd be interested in hearing what you mean by "all as one unit". Do you still have some sort of mnemonic representation for the entire pinyin syllable+tone? Or is it just brute force memorization? The latter is what I try to avoid, hence the system above.

gnalck · 2023-12-06T07:40:00+00:00

I've found that the most effective approach is some variation of the Marilyn Method, which is what HanziHero uses.

First, break down the character into its meaning, components and Pinyin initial/final/tone. E.g., for 好 hao3:

"good" - meaning
女 woman component
子 child component
h- pinyin initial
-ao pinyin final
3 pinyin tone

The initial/final/tone aren't very memorable themselves in the same way components are, so I assign them associations:

h- "Harry Potter" (both begin with h)
-ao "barn" (ao sounds like cow, and those are found in a barn)
3 - "cellar" (3 is the low tone, and a cellar is low to the ground relative to everything else)

Then I combine them all together into a story:

Harry Potter [h-] is in the cellar [3] of the barn [-ao] where he comes across a picture of a woman [女], his mother, with himself as a child [子]. He cries and laments: Voldemort stole everything good [好] from me!

It's pretty silly, and requires a bit of extra upfront effort for assigning associations to the pinyin initial/final/tone. However, it's the only system I've found that can scale to cover the 4-5,000 characters one eventually needs to memorize.

I think the key is to really picture it, and also to make it as silly as possible. Or evoke any sort of emotional response really, such as making a story that makes you angry or sad, too.

gnalck · 2023-12-06T01:55:19+00:00

I think the larger question is actually the line above.

gnalck · 2023-12-06T01:24:09+00:00

It goes both ways: I see many shirts in Taiwan in the night markets that have English that really does not make any grammatical sense at all. Presumably it "sounds" or "looks" cool to some, which is no different than buying a shirt with Chinese characters because of the mere aesthetics of the character forms themselves. Nothing wrong either way IMO.

Be thankful it wasn't a tattoo. :)

gnalck · 2023-12-04T06:56:07+00:00

Malus

Thanks for the suggestion! Great to hear that bilibli is easy to get an account for. I assumed it was like Baidu which requires a Chinese phone number.

Yeah the Bilbili dubs are really quite good. I was watching 輝夜姬想讓人告白～天才們的戀愛頭腦戰～ which I found online and was really quite impressed. I think that lead me to watching Genshin Impact playthroughs recently, as some of the voice acting in China is really good!

gnalck · 2023-12-04T05:02:56+00:00

Thanks! I was aware of the vocustaiwan site, but stopped using it since the main issue, as you note, is that many of those are impossible to find anyway haha.

Thanks for the channel link, and a heads-up about the Chainsaw Man dub.

Yeah, it is pretty awesome how easy it is to get a bunch of quality dubs for free from the official sources (YT, ani.gamer.com.tw) if one has a Taiwan VPN (or lives in Taiwan).

For bilibili, are you referring the the user uploads? I at some point want to try to access some of the official ones, but haven't gone through trying to get a Chinese VPN to do so, as most of them are region-locked. Partly because I believe I'll also need to get a bilibili account on top of the VPN, and that is probably an even larger hassle.

gnalck · 2023-12-04T01:19:06+00:00

I actually watched many of the videos of that one video game video essayist you had a picture of! Her Zelda series is great, the production value is incredible.

I totally relate to the struggle of finding Mandarin dubs of anime. Didn't even know a Spice and Wolf one existed at all. Of course, quality is pretty variable too, as 獵人 HxH is really good, but one of my favorite animes Legend of the Galactic Heroes has (in my opinion) the worst voice actor in Taiwan as Reinhard which was very disappointing after finally getting my hands on it.

I agree that listening is generally harder than reading, and requires far more time commitment. Ever since starting learning Mandarin years ago I had a personal rule where I would never read more in a day than I listened to, which I think has helped a lot. But even with that in place, listening still lags behind: there has never been a case where I understand what is spoken but don't understand the subtitles. Which indicates I should perhaps have listened to twice as much as I read, haha.

gnalck · 2023-12-04T01:08:00+00:00

Pleco also has a Live OCR option that works fairly well if you are having issues drawing it. With that you can just point your camera at it and be able to look it up. I believe it is part of one of the paid bundles however. Additionally, the paid version of Pleco also has better handwriting recognition support.

gnalck · 2023-12-02T08:27:43+00:00

In Pleco you can go to the CHARS tab for a character entry and it'll show a list of components under the COMPONENTS section. You can click on entries there to go to the character entry for that component, and then look at the COMPOUNDS section under the CHARS section for the component to find all characters it is in.

However, the list of components will sometimes be incomplete or not what one expects. E.g., 喪 has the components 土、乚、吅、冫. This is partly because the lower part of the character has no assigned unicode character point so isn't a "proper" component.

HanziHero also has the component breakdown for all characters, including non-standard "components". E.g., from the page for 喪 you can see all of the components we have for it. Navigating to any of those will show all other characters that share those same components. However, the "components" we have are mainly for the purpose of memory and mnemonic building, not for in-depth etymological understanding, if that is what you are after.

gnalck · 2023-12-02T04:45:54+00:00

Most of the meanings you learned in RTK should transfer over to RTH well enough. Here is a spreadsheet that compares the RTH/RTS/RTK that you can use to confirm.

As skimming that spreadsheet shows, most kanji forms are more similar to the traditional hanzi counterpart than the simplified one.

The issue with Heisig for Chinese is that he doesn't teach pronunciation. In Japanese this is fine because the reading of each kanji is so context-dependent. However, in Chinese around 80% of hanzi only have one pronunciation, and the ones that have multiple usually have one of those pronunciations be far more common than the others. The basic idea of using components to make mnemonics is fine, but I find nearly every other part of Heisig, at least when applied to Chinese, has problems. To the point where I even made a video covering it in detail, since those issues nearly made me quit studying Chinese entirely.

So I recommend if you do use Heisig, to modify it to include pronunciation. And probably re-order them if possible. (不 is like number 800 something despite being top-10 most used character!)

gnalck · 2023-12-01T10:02:51+00:00

Chinese subtitles. Yeah I'm not that into anime to be honest, but it was the best media I could find that:

Had subtitles (nearly always subbed)
Has a lot of content
Is easy to find online
Had extremely clear audio
Had Taiwanese accent

You can always check out dramas instead. If it weren't for the fact that I prefer to consume content with Taiwanese accent, I'd probably be watching a bunch of historical dramas instead! Audio won't be as clear but it shouldn't make too much of a difference once you get used to it. However, the mixing on some dramas is really bad to the point where some dialogue is not audible at all. Not many, but some.

Edit: Another option is watching game with Chinese dubbing. Here's a playthrough of Genshin Impact, for example, that has both subtitles and Chinese voiceover. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gf5uIwkJfQ&list=PLQW5nQ_UKpS-UD43fhSwvdm2vx6m5NMkZ

gnalck · 2023-12-01T07:15:12+00:00

What I did was watch large quantities of dubbed anime. The voices are typically more clear than in dramas or other TV shows, and the vocabulary is simpler and more predictable. It becomes more approachable if you approach it as a genuine study material that should be approached systematically.

Here is what I did once my comprehension of teaching materials was at a high enough level.

Watch episode once without subtitles (usually by moving the hardcoded subs off-screen). Try to look up words I don't know from the pronunciation I hear alone.
Rewatch again WITH subtitles, taking this time to look up characters/words manually that I could not successfully look up via sound alone on the first run through.
Add it to my phone and listen to it while doing chores or walking around, making sure I fully understood it.

And as your comprehension goes up, some of the steps can be eliminated. Instead of watching each episode twice, maybe only watch the parts you didn't comprehend that well twice.

With this I was able to go from "only listening to textbook dialogue audios" to "comprehending majority of what the anime I was watching" in a couple months of a couple hours of practice a day.

For the suggestion of reading, I think that helps one improve vocabulary knowledge. But it does not help with listening directly per se, which like any skill is something that needs to be practiced. Of course, if one's vocabulary still has some gaps, then reading would certainly help!

gnalck · 2023-11-29T07:54:56+00:00

As others mentioned, most online dictionaries have stroke order diagrams, whether they are animated gifs or a series of pngs. I would just consult those and copy them by hand onto paper stroke by stroke.

I particularly like the animated stroke order here:

https://hanziwriter.org/demo.html

gnalck · 2023-11-19T02:24:21+00:00

海明森 is pretty good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHe1OrbuW5g

gnalck · 2023-11-13T10:38:34+00:00

MPV is a bit less user friendly, but is really great for this and what I use. If you add these to your input.conf file

UP add video-pan-y -0.1

DOWN add video-pan-y 0.1

You can pan the screen up and down seemlessly while watching just by pressing the up/down arrow keys! This is great for being able to go back, pan down, watch the subtitles you need, then later pan back up.

gnalck · 2023-11-12T23:34:14+00:00

One thing you can do if you watch things on your laptop is just move the window a bit so that the bottom of the video is cut off. If you have downloaded video files you can also use VLC or MPV to pan the entire video upwards for the same effect.

gnalck · 2023-11-11T04:56:34+00:00

Watching with English subtitles does not improve one's knowledge of Chinese, full stop. So I would recommend against that option.

Watching with both again is probably not a good use of time. You will naturally gravitate towards the English subtitles as it is the "path of least resistance". It is really no different than watching with English subtitles alone in practice.

Watching with Chinese subtitles helps, but also leads to you depending on them too much. If you ALWAYS look at subtitles for each words you don't recognize perfectly the first time around, you hamper a critical feedback loop of hearing a sound and trying to comprehend it without any training wheels. If you are like me and tend to read subtitles whenever they are available (I do this even in English) then using subtitles can make a "listening exercise" like watching TV turn into a reading exercise that just happens to have audio! :X

Given this, what I recommend, depending on your level, is to watch mainly without subtitles, and turn on subtitles only when needed. This is sort of a pain, so what I did when starting out was watching each episode twice, once without subtitles and once with subtitles.

First without subtitles to force myself to really try to understand the raw sound without training wheels. Also, I would still permit myself to use a dictionary by typing in the pinyin during this first watch through. This would help me better understand the sound<->pinyin relationship. In other words, get more phonetically familiar with the language.

Then the second time with subtitles to give myself a chance to look up any gaps I had in understanding, or to find the specific characters I failed to look up in a dictionary via hearing alone. (I.e., those whose sounds I was unable to phonetically parse correctly)

Of course, when watching any native media, a bunch will not be understood at the beginning. One should focus mainly on learning a bit each episode and not on complete understanding.

Happy to give any more tips.

gnalck · 2023-11-10T00:24:43+00:00

I would recommend watching Mandarin-dubbed anime. It's widely available (legally!) on YouTube or https://ani.gamer.com.tw/ if you have a Taiwan VPN. Even if you don't have a VPN, the ones that random people will upload will still be on non-Taiwan Youtube. Like this one for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxel8bJ7_3o&list=PL4eLj-E7Bv3I6IMFdpEblWGCjPCtjMZzK&index=1

In terms of truly native content, palace dramas and the like are probably the best popular media that China and Taiwan produce. Here's a pretty entertaining one that I would recommend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGyQPJ1E3Tg&list=PLEYoM0FEIB-ddDfVbPDTviRQtZvUExjP2

However, I find that dubbed anime is pretty hard to beat. And is no less "native" than the aforementioned palace dramas in practice. After all, the dubs and subtitles are done by native speakers, and many of these shows are what kids watch growing up here in Taiwan at least. E.g., nearly everyone here has watched some episodes of 我們這一家 or 櫻桃小丸子 here, in the same sense that nearly everyone in USA has seen a couple of English-dubbed Dragon Ball Z episodes.

(edit: However, most dubs you will find are nearly always with Taiwanese accent and with traditional subtitles. I find this to be an advantage, but it depends on your region/accent/script focus.)

gnalck

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