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do you cover all hsk vocab? either hsk 2.0 or hsk 3.0?

Chinese characters are intertwining. Eg 人 structure link to 大, 火(丷人)，灭，灾，大 link to 天，头，买，卖。using 丿丶link to 人，儿，几，八。vertical rectangle link to 日(day)，時，目，且，直，盯，眼睛。scribble on handphone screen by using Google translate or Sogou keyboard use voice to text。after learn about 500 ，1000 can guess other word meaning.

已经不用写了，口中念念有词字己出来了。写→冖ㄅ一。ㄅ(L亅)。马，与你，弓(コㄅ)

Great material, but I wanted to clarify a few points. Firstly, many people starting their journey with a language, such as Chinese, can feel lost. They often don't know how to begin, and when searching on TH-cam, they frequently see titles like: "I made many mistakes learning Chinese, you don't have to" "I wasted a year learning, watch my video to avoid my mistakes" And so on. The method you talk about is much more effective and better. However, learning through listening to dialogues is not a "big mistake," just less effective. This means that people learning this way may not fully utilize their potential, but they are still making progress. In fact, sometimes such an approach is much better than advice suggesting that you must listen to Chinese news/radio to make progress. Often, people might not understand anything from such advanced material, which can quickly discourage them. In these book dialogues, the main goal is to better remember a few new words in a given chapter, where they are placed in a dialogue, helping to understand the broader context and better retain them. Sometimes, a person can gain more from such a short dialogue than from listening to Chinese television for an hour. In language learning, the most important thing is not to give up. Sooner or later, you will achieve your desired result, faster with more recommended methods, but even learning through Duolingo will make you progress. In summary, there are many great materials on TH-cam, and it's worth using the tips provided to optimize your learning. However, never trust people who say you've wasted months of learning, for example, by learning only characters or using only Duolingo. Every effort to learn is valuable and brings you closer to your goal. It's just worth maximizing your valuable time through effective learning, like that in this material :)

I believe know 200 Words is enough. Because Chinese character are intertwined，recognize them just like recognize road flower people face Eg 氵→ related to water so海洋.河，江，汇款，江，污染。if can write radical 50% resemble AI can predicted. Another 虫 related to insect so 鸡蛋，蚯蚓，虾，蟋蟀

Such a great video! I am a proud user of Wanikani for Japanese learning but recently I also got interested in mnemonics as a structured method of memorization. This is really impressive. Please keep up the good work, I will definitely try HanziHero once I want to put aside for a bit my Japanese and move to Chinese. Cheers! :) P.S. Does HanziHero focus on traditional or simplified characters? And how did you choose one over the other? Thanks!

bro you can do that...

Dinstinguish the sounds and tones of Chinese is very challenging and takes a lot of time. Memorizing Chinese vocabulary is probably the hardest part because there are many homophones. Practice and patience!

Very useful. I speak 3 foreign languages on B1 level and now learning chinese. Can only approve that listening part while learning chinese is even more important than in case of learning other languages.

I'd consider getting your product only for 2 things 1. You create an app 2. Lifetime option.

Sending gratitude from a Daoist monastery near Seattle (USA)! We study the Chinese in a different order, but with similar logic. Rather than aiming for acquisition of the characters in level of simplicity, reusability, and test taking. We focus on learning them in order of the building up of a foundation in philosophy and understanding of their cosmological Basis. It’s all so interesting and fun!

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Some good points, but I just like writing. I actually write hundreds of words every day in English, and I'm starting to journal in Chinese, which is a lot more fun when I actually write on paper.

Indeed, if u do not know the chinese character, u will never know the pronuciation. One way is to, of course, carry a dict whereever u go. Another idea I have is to invent an app in the handphone. So let's say u see a character, then u just write it in the app. The app will then show u the pinyin. Just a small suggestion of mine, something for Steve Jobs to thnik abt

I think pinyin is a mess. Bopomofo is superior in explaining the structure of the syllable. It breaks the syllable into initial, middle, ending and tone. Even if you stick with pinyin, get a grasp of Bopomofo. By the way, I have done a small chart of Chinese words I know, who have the same tones. For 2 Hanzi words there are 20 groups, (4x4 tones plus the 4 toneless). I find easier to memorize tones of words this way.

Thanks for sharing

Chinese is not a universal language and will always be just a language spoken by a group. Because it is tonal. You can't sing in it across the world, compared to other languages where the words holds its meaning no matter however tone it is being said. For this reason it will only remain a language for business purposes.

Chinese characters are GREAT! It is a pleasure to study them!

The grind never ends

If a person already knows at least 1000 characters, I would argue that they would be able to approximately guess the pronunciation of the majority of unfamiliar characters. Sure, you could get the tone wrong, but that's no different from getting the stress wrong in an unknown English word. But on the other hand, the semantic part of the character actually gives you some information about the meaning which facilitates guessing. Moreover, in most cases it'll be a two-character word where you already know one of the characters, which makes it much easier to guess the meaning too, whereas when you see a completely new English word you have absolutely no clue what it could mean. So to conclude, no, it's not a disaster and I'd even argue it's easier to read a text with some amount of unknown characters in Chinese than doing the same in, say, German.

Very informative ! I can write with the latin and devanagari scripts. Both their advantages and inconveniences Devanagari is phonetic, so you can read and write it without even knowing the meaning of the word but it lacks two features I like about the latin script, capital letters and the possibility of using initials

I've also done computerized analyses of characters in Chinese texts, and I find that among 5000 or so characters, even 1000 will be rare characters that occur once, often in place names or personal names. I don't think the English & Chinese examples are actually so different as you say. If you know 3000 characters, then you know enough of the radicals to take an educated guess at the meaning & pronunciation of a word without context. For example, reading the Zhuangzi you might encounter the word 鵷 鶵. Pretty clear from the radicals that this is a bird of some kind, and the pronunciation yuānchú is implied by the phonetic radicals; if you take a wild stab and produce 'yuanqu', you won't be too far off, honestly. Not correct, sure, but reading unfamiliar words in English gives you the same problem. Your pronunciation will be close but not quite correct. Funnily, just the other day I watched a streamer (native English speaker) encounter the word 'defenestrated', and they did not infer either meaning or pronunciation from context, but had to look it up. The same is true for any Hanzi, look up by stroke order.

Not sure if I agree with you entirely. The proficiency vs mastery gap is approx the same in every language I think. The fact that Chinese is not phonetic also ignores the fact that phonetic-semantic words (形聲字) consists of ~80% of the language, most of them are also on the difficult end of the spectrum. Esp in foreign literature in Chinese, some words are nearly always only exists in names, such as 萊 and 琳, where they are used only for transliteration of foreign words into Chinese. Their meaning is entirely disregarded in most of the cases, and you can read off the sound by reading the phonetic part (i.e. 來 (to come) and 林(forest)), which a person who knows 3000 characters surely would know. Even for Chinese, we will use this trick of 有邊讀邊 (read the part you know how to pronounce), which will work 95% of the time. the other 5% of the time is forgivable, because even native speakers will make such a mistake.

How do you count unique characters in a text?

In Taiwan (Republic of China ) around 4000 is the lowest level of literacy

I love the fact that 抛窗 has waaaay more obvious meaning than "defenestrate' =)

2:27 my attempt of completeting the blwck squares comprehend shifts group

Nice channel 👍 When you say HSK maxes out at 3000 are you talking about HSK 9?

I second this method! It’s the single best thing I’ve come across in my Chinese learning journey. If you combine this with comprehensible input, and stick with it, progress will be unbelievable!

I've been studying Chinese for 6 years, and I know about 7500 characters. I think this number is perfect (for me) because when I read 文言文 or more challenging pieces of literary works, I almost never come across characters I don't know. But I'm a 文字學 freak and I know hundreds upon hundreds of characters none of my Taiwanese or Chinese friends know, eg. 纛，圕，魌，瞾，炰烋，慁，褦襶，蹩躠，欻，氎，髝髞，矍鑠，裒 etc.

I know about 3000 characters and I too "believe that knowing 3,000 characters is enough to read aloud and fully understand most Chinese texts", mostly because I do it basically every day. Students should prioritize other things (e.g., reading speed and fluency) over learning obscure characters. (According to Jun Da's data, the 4,000-th most common character 坂 occurs 3.0 times per 1 million characters [it occurred 576 times among 193504018 characters]. So you'd have to have an enormous amount of input to make it worthwhile learning 4,000+ characters.)

are you talking about Mandarin or Cantonese? Do you have character learning for both?

Assuming someone would like to go to China or Taiwan, let's say for a longer period of time. When it comes to learning a language, what do you think is the best option? Going without any background, hoping that I will immerse myself in the language and learn it on the spot with the locals? or learning at homel for 1 year or 2-3 years and then go there with a solid foundation/intermediate level? Just wondering, cuz I have been learning for almost 9 months, and sometimes I think that I would go there in a first place, because I imagine that 1 month of learning in China/Taiwan is like 3 months learning at home...... Another thing is that I dont know why u recommend on ur website Hanzihero to pick traditional hanzi to learn when someone is not decided whether should learn traditional/simplified. I think it is much easier to learn simplifeid because there is much more recourses/content and they are much easier in general with pinyin and so on

Seems pretty obvious. I've been practicing listening to Chinese without subtitles for a pretty long time in all possible ways (slow, fast, clear sound, unclear sound). But even so it's still very hard for me. I don't know how many more years I need to do this, honestly.

How long have you been learning Chinese before moving to Taiwan? Did you start by learning traditional characters or switch to them later? I think it might be more challenging because there aren't as many resources or content available with traditional hanzi.

I have been learning mandarin for 8 months everyday 2-3hours. I saw the hanzi in the thumbnail, but didnt know the meaning. For me it looked maybe not super complicated, but still a bit more complex. I must admit that I was surprised after writing this sign to pleco, that it was simply 读 xD Don't know traditional hanzi, However, I must admit that if I learned to write and also had to write traditional characters, I would probably notice even greater differences between simplified writing.

I'm now using Pleco with Google Translate add-on.... Really nifty for checking phrases and sentences after looking them up.

Excellent advice that actually works for pretty much any language learning experience. After all, most native speakers have mastered the listening aspect of their language before they go to school and start learning to read and write.

Interestingly, when I started studying Chinese casually again about a year ago, one of the first things I did was to explore several videos on the pronunciation of the Chinese phonemes that aren't used in English. I also practiced with a Pinyin beginnings and finals video/chart, listening to and sounding each of the groupings until I associated the sound with the Pinyin spelling. I'm still not perfect at either recognizing or sounding, but I think I accidentally saved myself from a world of hurt.

Works for Chinese dramas / movies too. Watch without the subtitles. Watch with the subtitles. Stop to add new words. Especially once you get past the basic textbook vocabulary, this method can help your ear adjust to typical conversational patterns and enrich your colloquial vocabulary.

Honestly I had no idea that some people would seriously go and try to learn 3000 characters without studying anything else in the language. That idea seems absolutely insane.

Totally agree. I didn't enjoy using this book. I found using it very frustrating because the book doesn't include pinyin. I know you can learn the pinyin later, but if I'm already putting in so many focused hours on remembering characters, I might as well learn everything that's relevant. Especially when the character has a phonetic radical that allows me to link it to other characters that may have different meanings, but sound similar. Sure, you may be able to remember more characters more quickly when you don't need to memorise the specific sound and tone - but I'd rather learn less characters per day and have more information on them rather than only knowing 50% of what they represent. For me, reading simple texts like graded readers and dialogues from the HSK textbooks, combined with general anki character decks (which include the character, meaning, and pinyin), allowed me to organically memorize hundreds of characters without it feeling like a chore. At the end of the day, our brains are always looking for patterns and love to problem-solve, so needing to decipher a character within a given context is a more fun and natural way to understand it. I'm sure some people found this book very helpful so I'm glad it works for them, but I cannot work with it at all.

I only practice writing characters that I struggle to remember despite frequent repetition. That works pretty well. Looking for more words and contexts where a difficult character appears is usually more effective for me though.

I wish this video gave the other side of the story. I learned handwriting. I use it to make notes and write down example sentences virtually every day. If I were giving a speech in Chinese, I might have to handwrite on e.g. a whiteboard. It's also used to input unfamiliar characters into Pleco. The main reason to learn handwriting is to learn handwriting (not some auxiliary goal). The argument that "you seldom need it, and when you do need it you can use an app" applies to the entirety of the Chinese language too---just speak English or use Google Translate. Some people don't want to learn handwriting, and that's a fair decision; it won't interfere too much with their progress in other areas. Nevertheless, I wouldn't recommend having zero handwriting knowledge.

you really like the code report huh? 好看的视频，谢谢你

Heisig's method also teaches you to come up with your own mnemonics with very little effort. I resorted to a particularly graphic one for 瀉 (as in 瀉肚) and I will never forget that character for as long as I live. As to the ordering of the characters, I came to the method after already studying Chinese for a while and knowing well the most common ones, so that negative was, in my case, a positive.