Customer Reviews

Remembering Traditional Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

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Speak Mandarin Chinese For BeginnersThe Michel Thomas Method (8-CD Beginner's Program)Michel Thomas Method Speak Mandarin Chinese Advanced

I am the author of the Michel Thomas CD courses to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese. I was taught by Mr. Thomas how to insure success for learners without memorization, homework, anxiety and testing. I am interested in innovative ways to teach; innovative ways that have proven track records.

Dr. Heisig is justly famous for his previous books on how to learn to write the Japanese kan ji ( Chinese-derived characters). Writing the kan ji and original Chinese han zi ( characters) has been a major stumbling block for most students. Without knowing the characters one cannot be literate in either of these languages.

The genius of Heisig's method is in devising an approach whereby he breaks the characters down into component parts and then systematically teaches the student to build them up again in a skillful way that results in the learner knowing the characters.

The first volume presents the most commonly used 1,500 Chinese characters. This will get you through 90% of any common Chinese text which is a nice place to start. The second volume, which is in the works, takes us through an additional 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000. With 3,000 characters the reader can tackle 99.5% of written Chinese.

One thing which is important to understand ahead of time is that this book does not encourage repetitive writing of the character being learned. Indeed, with Dr. Heisig's approach one need only write the character one time. What we are doing here is learning English-language keywords that are related to each character. These are attached to mnemonics or little stories which help fix the necessary keyword(s) and primitive elements ( smaller particles necessary to write the characters). Thus, the concentration here is on learning material in English which will automatically produce a perfectly written character. There is also an emphasis on stroke order which pays off richly later on in one's studies.

By concentrating on teaching and learning in English, the anxiety level is kept quite low.

In order to get the most out of this book I recommend reading the following pages first: Introduction, 105-107 (the best and clearest explanation of the method) as well as 260-261 ( the fruit of the method is finally revealed). Also, make the flash cards described ( p.47-48) and use them as suggested; from Keyword to mnemonic story to actual character and NOT the other way around. This approach will get you the desired result.

There are also two lists in the back of the book providing pin yin pronunciation for each character. However, Heisig does not recommend attempting to learn these the first go around.

This is the most extreme deviation from traditional teaching of Chinese characters ( han zi) that I know of. However, if faithfully followed you will learn 3,000 characters in record time and, more importantly, remember them.

At some point the mnemonic stories and keywords just drop away and you are left with the characters. You just have to understand this when you begin.

Don't go too fast. Find your own pace and be gentle with yourself. Some days you will do more, others less. The important thing is to keep at it.

Until something better comes along this is the only book I would recommend for anyone desiring to learn Han zi.

The teaching method used in this book has already been covered so I will not include it here. What I would like to say is that as a native English speaker who began learning Chinese characters with Heisig's book, I have already learned hundreds of "elements" and more complex characters. Because of the logical way it explains the Chinese writing system, if I see a character I do not know, I can at least guess the gist of it. I feel sorry for the Chinese students who are forced to learn long lists of complex characters with no rhyme or reason, there are too many of them.

The writer introduces well the concept of using "stories" to memorise each of the 1,500 characters from their component parts, and starts off by providing effective stories for the first few hundred characters.

However, after the first few hundred characters, the writer reduces the work on his part and increases the work on the part of the reader. That is, for each character, the story "plots" become more basic - i.e. without the vivid imaginary embelishments that the writer insists are required for effective recall. Eventually (by character #476), this gets worse with the reader having to do 90% of the time-consuming work in thinking up an effective story from only a few key words ("elements") for most of the remaining characters. The number of really useful characters is finite (1,500 in each of the two volumes), so the skill and effort of creating memorable stories should not be seen as necessarily useful for the normal learner.

Here's an analogy to decribe my disappointment: On your journey to a popular beach resort, you start out driving for 15 kilometers on a freeway (effectively learning characters - many of which BTW you've likely already learnt from having studied some Chinese), then (by character #268) you are directed to leave the freeway and drive along a winding country road for another 10 kilometers, then after character #476 you're told to drive over sand dunes and to keep driving over them for another 50 kilometers (until #1500, or until you blow a gasket). I guess it beats walking! I prefer a longer freeway (and I wouldn't mind paying the toll for it). At least that's what I thought I was buying. I should have read the fine print! (it's buried in the Introduction on page 13).

I began taking Chinese courses at my university almost two years ago. I loved the language, but I had difficulty memorizing characters. I could remember them for the exam, but hardly a month beyond that it'd fade away (mainly the writing!). Eventually most of my effort in Chinese was committed to keeping old characters fresh, greatly dulling the experience.

Because of all the progress I'd already made, I was originally hesitant about purchasing this book. I worried it would require new ways to remember old characters, and wouldn't really put my existing knowledge of the verbal Chinese language to use (after all, it doesn't focus on pronunciation of characters--just meaning).

However, after a couple weeks with this book my only regret is not having purchased it earlier. Characters that I'd previously had problems with just stuck. The stories make the experience fun, and I find that my existing knowledge of character pronunciation is an asset to my learning from this book, but one that the book is not dependent on--something that will suit all learners from the most basic levels to the more advanced.

This book, in conjunction with spaced repetition software (computer flashcard software, such as Anki and Mnemosyne), makes studying Chinese characters a joy and allow me to really focus on the language once again.

My suggested course of study, an extension of the author's suggestion, is this: download either Mnemosyne or Anki. Create a flashcard with a "Question:" side consisting of the key word (in uppercase and on its own line, to make it obvious), with the story just underneath it (the "primitives" should be italicized just as they are in the stories he presents, and the key word itself bolded). The "Answer:" should only have the character. Look up the pronunciation in the back of the book or draw it on a site like [...]. That's all. Simply review your flash cards daily (this will only take between 5-15 minutes). The software will make sure you're presented the card just before you forget it. If you pace yourself well, you can finish the book within a couple months and never forget the characters again!

In short, I can't wait for the second volume! This is a must-buy for anyone learning Chinese!

This is a fantastic book, and I've been amazed at the ease with which I recall characters based on the mnemonics as listed in the book. Generally speaking, the authors do a good job of introducing characters in an order that build on one another. This creates a tradeoff, since you're learning some fairly uncommon characters early on (' - which is more or less obselete, for example, is in chapter 2) rather than starting with the most frequent characters and moving down the list.

The authors stress the importance of studying by writing. This cannot be understated. A great supplement for this book is a website called Skritter ([...]) which can be used to practice writing. The stroke orders are included in each entry, along with a primer on basic stroke order rules.

I do enthusiastically recommend this book, but I'd give it four-and-a-half stars if I were able to - not because of the book itself, but because with a list of radicals and common characters (both of which are easy to come by) and a little imagination, the effects of the book could be duplicated. I think on balance, learners of Chinese are better off with this book (or its Simplified cousin).

Becoming literate is uniquely different in Chinese because it is easy to forget how to read or write a word that you can confidently speak. One hears of even native speakers forgetting a character they can say but cannot write anymore. That being said, Heisig offers a system that recognizes this difference and focuses exclusively on reading Chinese Characters. This is not the end all, be all book for Chinese. It is a valuable supplement to supercharge your character reading ability. Therefore, I don't think the neglect of this system to include pronunciation is a fatal flaw. As a supplement, I use this book when I run on the treadmill and find that I still easily learn 5-6 characters in 30 minutes of jogging. And when I say 'learn' I mean it sticks with me. No more boring, repetitious handwriting of the same character for 50 times.

However, if it included pronunciation of the characters it would enhance the book's method. This other book by Matthews does include not only the pronunciation but it integrates it into the memory stories. [...] The jury is still out though if it is a superior approach to this attempt by Heisig. I read the reviews to figure out if I wanted this book or the alternative by James Heisig. One student who finished both books recommended the Heisig book as having better stories and much more characters. For a good discussion of this see [...] A summary of my thoughts are below.

As one learning Traditional not Simplified characters the Matthew's book is not as fitting in my opinion. Though I have only looked at Matthew's book online briefly it is enough to tell me that the stories fit the structure of the simplified and not the traditional. This would likely mean that I couldn't link the story directly to the structure of the traditional version of the character. That's a serious problem because most stories are based on making 'pictures' out of the character structure.

As for pronunciation, this is an advantage with the Mathew's book and almost enough for me to buy it if I was studying simplified characters. However, you have to consider also the long term foundations of your memory system. Heisig has a 2nd book in the works totaling 3000 characters, whereas Tuttle appears to be done at this point with only 800 characters. That being said, I'm about 70 characters into the Heisig book and have not struggled with learning the pronunciation despite the lack of mnemonics for it. But it is a drawback and I have compensated by handwriting the pinyin into it the book's entries. I hope you consider it as weigh your purchase options carefully.

I feel as if Heisig took a good idea from his experience with the Japanese language and tried to superimpose it onto Chinese without much thought. The results are mixed. Many of his visual mnemonics (a charred computer on fire for the character for 'black') are as clever and effective as they were in his books on Japanese kanji, but this book offers very little support for spoken Chinese. I realize this issue is addressed in the beginning of the book, but why wouldn't the authors at least include the pinyin next to the each entry (the reader is instead expected to flip to the phonetic index in the back of the book)? I would think that the fact that in Chinese (as in Japanese) many radicals/primitives in the characters encode phonetic information so that hanzi with the same radical are often pronounced similarly would only help Heisig's mnemonic system. Instead, we are told in the book's introduction that by the end of the book, we will be in a similar position to Japanese students of Chinese. That is, we will be able to recognize the meaning of 3,000 odd characters without being able to pronounce them or communicate verbally. This seems to be extremely inefficient to me: if my goal is to speak Spanish, I don't want to have to master Latin first just so the words will be "familiar" to me.

The pronunciation and tones of Mandarin Chinese are frequently cited as two of the most difficult aspects for foreign learners of the language. Heisig's neglect of these areas makes his book well-intentioned and usable, but certainly short of its potential.

Nathan Dummitt
author of Chinese Through Tone & Color (Chinese Edition)