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

At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" and "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ 'imaginative memory' to associate each character's component parts, or 'primitive elements', with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a 'story' that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory. At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of Remembering Traditional Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the traditional Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ "imaginative memory" to associate each characters component parts, or "primitive elements," with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a "story" that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory. "The approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Remembering Traditional Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the traditional Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage." Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memory. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Book 1 Introduction Uprooting Biases about Character Learning A Short History of the Course The Basics of the Method The Design of this Book Concluding Comments Acknowledgments Stories (Lessons 1-12) Plots (Lessons 13-19) Elements (Lessons 20-55) Indexes I. Hand-Drawn Characters II. Primitive Elements III. Characters by Number of Strokes IV. Character Pronunciations V. Key Words and Primitive Meanings Book 2 Introduction How to use this work Compounds, postscripts, indexes On characters and their key words Acknowledgments Lessons Postscripts 1 2 Indexes Hand-drawn characters Primitive elements Characters by number of strokes Characters pronunciations Key words and primitive meanings Covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system. This book presents systematic arranging of characters in an order that is best suited to memorization.