Almost GAVE UP on Chinese! "Remembering the Hanzi" Review
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ค. 2024
- Start learning Chinese characters for free at hanzihero.com
In this video I give an in-depth review of James Heisig's "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" and "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" series of books for learning Chinese characters.
I propose ways to avoid the large issues with Heisig's method and introduce an app that does that for you and more.
0:00 Introduction
0:59 Heisig method overview
2:23 Heisig method issue #1: no pronunciation
3:19 Heisig method issue #2: writing focus
4:31 Heisig method issue #3: inaccurate keywords
5:18 Heisig method issue #4: poor ordering of characters
6:09 A better method: HanziHero
7:49 Conclusion
I used the book remembering the kanji (Japanese) and it worked amazing for me. This one book alone won't be enough (for all the reasons you mentioned) but let's be honest, nobody studies Chinese/Japanese with just this book. I still think it's an amazing method and helps you remember the characters in the long run. I actually started studying Chinese recently and the knowledge about the building components and all those kanji is making my life so much easier now.
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.
While intentionally not learning the pronunciation of each as well! :)
As Chinese, I can confirm that yeah we also have no idea how to write Chinese characters.
Since most of us use Pinyin input methods which means we don't need to remember how each character write.
In fact the problem is so severe, when I need to write something and forget how, I can often "remember" how to write it by imagining typing it...
Like, "how do you write absurd?" -> "huang dan" -> "荒诞" -> ok cool.
I've heard a similar issue is happening with japanese people using romaji and 12key inputs to write kanji
Can I ask something? How often do you choose different options in the popup window as a native speaker? I just began learning Chinese and I basically have to press the numbers all the time, Is it different when writing sentences?
I believe this is a common challenge around the world, literacy is just on the decline due to changing lifestyles. I myself forget how to write words such as ‘diarrhea’ and such.
Remembering the Hanzhi was amazing for me. Did the first 1500 in a month and never had trouble with the characters again. And I can now read and write them.
When I started learning Chinese I bought books "Elementary Chinese Reader " and would write the sentences and make my own flash cards and listen to the tapes and repeat what was being said and just practice as often as possible and just keep on .
I was more interested in reading and writing the language so this method worked for me , but I think learning this language is a personal and different journey for everyone wishing to learn the language .
Oh and I find the radicals so intriguing and really helps when trying to find any Chinese word in the dictionary as the language is not using an alphabetical system .
For most languages, everybody's task it to find what works for them. For a complex writing system like Chinese / Japanese, it is ever more true. The biggest challenge is to find an approach that works for YOU.
I totally agree with you.
Heisig method helped me a lot, but in order to make it useful I added pronunciation and definition for every character.
Heisig works. I spent myself three months going through booth books. After that just learned words learning the pronunciation word by word no problem. I agree doing Heisig the traditional way by having the keyword on the front and write down the kanji is overkill. Nowadays nobody needs to be able to handwrite. That's why I did lazy hanzi that is putting the hanzi on the front of the kard and you have to recall the keyword.
Yeah "lazy Heisig" is a step up for sure. I'm curious to hear if you studied pronunciation at the same time when doing it that way. I tried "lazy Heisig" for a bit, but the exclusion of pronunciation from the system frustrated me, which is why I made a different system (HanziHero) that includes it.
@@HanziHero No i didnt do pronounciation, but once i finished lazy heisig i continued with the 5k HSK deck and learned words and pronounciation from my immersion. Started watching some stuff on netflix with chinese subtitles. Just checked out your app, and if i had to choose between pandanese and yours i would choose yours. By the way, do you have a dayly limit for cards that can be learned in your app? Just curious, i am above the 5k words hsk level and can read fine newspaper and follow tv with eaze.
The default limit is 10, but can be up to 20 a day. We have this in place to prevent users overwhelming themselves and burning out, since reviews compound faster than people realize.
One feature we are working on this month is allowing one to "prioritize" certain characters for more advanced learners such as yourself. Effectively, one would look up a new character they came across that they want to master and add it to a list, allowing one to quickly master what is relevant to them during their lessons/reviews. Currently, one can only go in order which starts from the most basic HSK1 characters. (Though I find starting from the beginning to really master even basic characters to have been useful for me in practice).
I didn't know Fireship was making videos about learning Chinese now! Haha. Your site looks nice :)
Thanks! 😃
Have you heard of Mandarin Blueprint? I think those guys created a very good and robust system for learning characters
I believe the main Mandarin Blueprint method is based on the Marilyn Method, which is what we also use. We also have a video that goes over the HanziHero method which should be similar: th-cam.com/video/miatt5UNq-k/w-d-xo.html
I think the main differences are that HanziHero can be started for free, and is a custom-built web application for learning characters. My understanding is that Mandarin Blueprint requires a very substantial upfront payment, and uses an external third-party spaced repetition system instead of a custom-built one.
I've been wanting to do an in-depth comparison video or article, but the lack of free trial has been a roadblock.
@@HanziHero Yes, you are right. It's definitely not cheap. Luckily, I got into it when they first launched, and they have kept the same price for me. At the beginning, they built their own Anki decks, but I believe they now have a built-in SRS.
Perhaps you can reach out to Luke or Phil about testing their product. They are very responsive and I'm sure they would be willing to hear you out about making a detailed comparison.
Cheers!
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.
Heisig himself didn't have much knowledge of Chinese.
I think the heisig method isn't as much about learning to writing as much as it is about reading. Whenever I learn a new character in Japanese, even if I try to remember the reading and the meaning, I usually forget the reading or even both since as he says, it's usually better to learn them separately.
However, as a caveat, you yourself are proof that the method isn't bulletproof and that some people do reap more benefits from learning the pronunciation first. It really does come down to personal preference.
I think the system is theoretically is better for Japanese because each kanji has so many readings. However, I have never learned Japanese, so I can't comment on that aspect.
However, for Mandarin Chinese >80% of all characters have only a single pronunciation, so there isn't a compelling reason for skipping learning the pronunciation the first time around.
In short, for Japanese some Kanji have up to 10 pronunciations and no "most common" one, so it is more reasonable to focus on meaning alone.
🙏
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 used custom heisig method for japanese Basicly:
1. brute force learn many non-standard components via flashcards with some kanji incorporating them.
I also used the kanji code for phonetic components relevant to japanese.
2. learn words via flashcards of context+word
and add the kanji in the word on the answer side with some component+mnemonics(modified heizig method) and a 1 word translation in Danish or english like 種 seed(plant) old_grain+heavy重
This is probably easier in chinese because each character has a somewhat consistant reading.
3. (optionalif the kanji is refusing to be memorised) , handwrite the kanji around 2 times
Tried doing heizig forgot it as soon as I lost motivation for anki, and many of the words are just sligghtly wrong or english archaiisms
好 should be 好 good(emotionally), because there is 正 good(lawfully) there is 良 good(idk in chinese but in japanese it is nice/good impression) 義 morals(good)
The role and nature of kanji in Japanese is very different from Chinese. They function as a very limited fixed borrowed term instead of a living and dynamic language element.
@NoohCee yes I have noticed that in Japanese. After all Japanese has furigana which is basically hiragana. I kinda think despite all the complex claims people say about Japanese Kanji, they are pretty much just a container for furigana 😅
I think the main reason the book doesn't work is because the method was designed with Japanese Kanji in mind, characters that can have up to 10 different pronunciations so providing "the" pronunciation wouldn't be useful. This obviously doesn't apply to hanzi, where every character has one pronunciation.
Furthermore, the phonetic component being ignored also ties in to Kanji, since in japanese the phonetic component is often unrecognizable and doesn't help much, whereas in Chinese (or at least Mandarin) the use of phonetic components is a lot more consistent.
Great video btw
Great points! I originally wanted to include that point about the multitude of Japanese Kanji pronunciations, but cut it as the video ended up much longer than I originally planned. That always seemed to me the most annoying part about learning Japanese if I were ever to start, so I'm grateful for the relative consistency of Chinese characters in comparison. Even if the trade off is that there are at least a thousand more characters one needs to learn in Chinese... 🥲
I agree. Japanese Kanji characters were borrowed from Chinese - but at 3 or 4 different times long ago, from different Chinese dialects. They still have those old pronunciations PLUS the pronunciation of the Japanese word represented.
small correction but not every chinese character has just one pinyin sound. ~20% of the most common characters have more than one pinyin sound in terms of pronouncing them.
For what it's worth, in Japanese, most characters have a single onyomi, although much like in Chinese, the most common characters are likely to have multiple onyomi. The phonetic components are actually mostly more useful than in Mandarin because you don't have to worry about tone in Japanese. So I'd argue that there are flaws with Heisig's method in Japanese as well.
I tried learning chinese a few years ago. It was that kind of thing which you do daily for a long time, then not do it once and forget to do it ever again.
Back then i had no idea how hard it can get sometimes and now that i know i don't want to learn it anymore.
Yeah, the difficulty is intense for sure. Part of the reason I argue in other videos to completely skip over writing, for instance, since it just adds to a mountain of things one needs to learn.
The important thing for any language, regardless of difficulty, is having a strong motivational purpose to continue onward. And to make it as enjoyable as possible! Which is why we created HanziHero, hopefully making this extremely difficult language a bit more approachable and a bit more enjoyable.
I agree. I tried "Remembering the Hanzi" for a few months. I think it is useless. As the video says, most Chinese characters have more than one meaning. So do English words. Memorizing that 明 means "bright" won't help you read it in a sentence where it means "understand" or "apparent" or "is apparent" or "clear".
明天"Bright sky" also known as "Tomorrow" is a good example too
@@thelusogerman3021 This and the above meanings make perfect sense to me coming from the meaning 'bright'. I mean all the meanings are associated with bright in English too.
You should practice the pinyin by linking English words that have the same pitch as the pinyin as you progress, try to change it with words using the pinyin online and linking the pinyin with the relating English word.
Sooo….They retooled Heisig for traditional Chinese characters!? The method sucked when it was used for Japanese Kanji. He didn’t include any of (the multiple) pronunciations for the Kanji.
Yep! There is also one for hanja (Korean Chinese characters).
I think the method's purpose is to easily recall how to write characters using a mnemonic, not teach their meanings and pronunciations (which are much easier to learn). Focused entirely on that because that is the challenge, even reading is easier. You can put the two together learnt separately and it should be very effective. I don't know if it would be just as effective to include them, but there you go.
@@skyworm8006I struggled with coming up with more stories. Around the 1,200 mark, I found my imagination loosing steam and just got stories mixed up. I was doing the Japanese kanji book of RTK.
Ah yes "domicile, dwelling, and habitation" three words I use on a daily basis in English.
How about 'hootenanny'? =)
For me Heizig worked, but in combination. I learned it in Scritter, with tones and pinyin, and used Pleco Oitlier Dictionary for in depth insights on characters structure / etymology. It's a slow approach, but the only one that works for me, since I have aphantasia (no imagination basically) and most mnemonics usually start with "imagine...".
I also have aphantasia, but haven't found it too limiting on the mnemonic front. I guess because I have no way of comparing it with how things would be if I did not have it haha.
@@HanziHero I do have a problem with things like "Imagine harry potter in a barn" as in a system to remember tones / pinyin. My brain is too logical / analytical for this. So, understanding components and how they relate to each other, the logic behind the character, is the only thing that works for me. But I've seen what you've done with Hanzi Hero, and it's quite impressive, I recommended it to some of my "normal" friends who study Mandarin.
I would add that they key problem with Heizig for me, or rather with the whole idea of studying Hanzi one by one, is that the characters meaning in Mandarin is very contextual, and in reality after learning around 1,500 I can read perfectly fine, but barely can understand the meaning. I wonder if learning the actual words, rather than just characters, is actually a better way of doing this.
Yeah, I agree that is a big problem. That is one of the reasons why we teach vocab alongside the characters in HanziHero. I find that learning the words really helps reinforce the meaning and pronunciation. In fact, we mainly teach vocab just for this reason alone, the fact that users get to learn useful vocab to later use is sort of a secondary happy side-effect. E.g., the pronunciation of 蛋 is much easier to remember if one learns (and regularly reviews) the meaning of 雞蛋 (chicken egg) and 臉蛋 (face) for example, in my experience.
Though if you already know the characters well enough, as you seem to, then just massive amounts of reading should go a long way for progressing on the meaning front. Especially if you focus on quantity instead of quality/difficulty. Even though I can read more difficult texts, I still find I get plenty of useful practice out of reading manga, so will typically read a volume or so a day.
I'm curious why do you need to live in Taiwan and learn Chinese
I'm interested in teaching Chinese but I don't know whether there are foreign people that needs to learn Chinese or not, maybe super rare
I think it's interesting that almost every pedestrian in China or Taiwan can be a Chinese teacher to foreign people but knowing Chinese in Taiwan or China is useless skill
I don't think many foreigners NEED to learn in the sense of it being required by their job or the circumstances of their life, but there are many who WANT to learn. Especially if they are living in a Chinese speaking area long term.
That's an interesting point about the usefulness of Chinese. I've thought about it a lot, and hope to make a video about it soon.
比如說雖然我會中文，我這邊認識的台灣人似乎都要跟我講英文。我覺得很多住在台灣的外國人不太會認真學習中文因為他們的生活根本不需要很高的中文水平。的確，我有認識很多住在台灣蠻久但還沒學會中文的的外國人！
@@HanziHero 聽起來很奇怪，住在中文生活圈的人應該是最容易學習的？？已經整天在接觸了，而且所有的廣告、招牌、菜單、商品介紹都是中文，如果想要都徹底看得懂每個出現的字，也是很有難度的
學生的話、應該學校都會特別開設中文課程給外籍學生，如果是工作的話我是不知道公司會不會安排中文課程
至於不是住在中文生活圈的外國人為什麼會"想要"學中文呢？是喜歡看後宮鬥爭戲劇，還是喜歡三國、西遊記這種東西嗎哈哈？？
台灣人跟你講英文大概是想練習英文能力吧，論實際使用情況的話，英文還是比中文有用，大學的 mc grawhill, wiley, cengage, prentice hall....的課本，廠商提供的技術文件，網路的教學文章...等等，英文的資料比中文多很多
This Heizig method is terrible. What I need is to recognize the word in CONTEXT... Not to remember a little story that has little to do with the actual word usage... SMH Breaking into radicals / components may be useful for writing, but as a reading tool it seems ineffective.
Hanzihero seems very Wanikani inspired.
It is a bit! Though we have some important differences to improve upon the format and make it more suitable for Chinese:
1. Removing levels and replacing them with item-level "unlocking" to have a steady stream of lessons each day and to discourage lesson cramming.
2. Having pronunciation mnemonics be more precise instead of relying on English-derived phonetic approximations.
3. Teaching/incorporating pinyin sounds into the system as well. In the same sense one needs to learn components before characters, so too do the sounds within the character (and their mnemonic association) need to be learned before the character as well.
I hope to make a video at some point detailing the differences and why we made them at some point. And of course, the last one being that we are working towards having ~4k+ simplified and 4k+ traditional characters by the end of next year, so it will be two to four times as large in total depending on how one counts the fact we support two different scripts/dialects. Currently at ~3.8k traditional and ~2.5k simplified which increases each day.
So you mean to say that for every character I am supposed to remember a whole story???... Not for me!
I could have used this 3 MONTHS AGO...
Learning chinese was in interest of mine but with how bad the country is right now i see little practical use to learning it.
Yeah I think the most important part of learning a language, especially one as difficult as Mandarin, is motivation! I've always wanted to improve my elementary Spanish, but I cannot muster up the motivation to do it for whatever reason, so I totally get where you are coming from.
For me my main motivation for Mandarin has mainly been around an interest in the language itself (especially the characters, hence HanziHero), its literature, and in Taiwan (where I now live).
The nice benefit is that if I ever go to a place that does have a large amount of Chinese spoken, whether it is the PRC or a random Chinatown, I can use it. But those were not my main motivations.