Five resources to use (together) when learning to read and write Chinese
whizzlearning.comAre there any other resources I am missing? It feels like a combination of them is important.
We are building an app that will be another tool in that toolbox soon.
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I'm surprised by the lack of mention of Remember the Hanzi and Anki. They were both originally developed for Japanese (the original book Remember the Kanji), but it seems like they would be just as useful. Chinese characters always seemed a little easier to me since most only have one pronunciation. A RtH deck plus a vocab deck for pronunciation seems like a fairly straight forward way to tackle all the characters within a year.
You are correct that both of those are additional resources. I didn't mention Anki since I am on the fence about regular people using it.
For example, I think the fact that the person has to take two thoughtful actions per flashcard review: 1) answer the flashcard and 2) grade themselves.
Also, the way that things can get backlogged and the particular SR algorithm seems cumbersome.
Anyways, these aren't issues that other people haven't brought up already. I just feel like it more of a 'hardcore' tool rather than a beginner tool.
I have tried to read Remember the Hanzi a bit, but it feels like I am reading a dictionary. Maybe it is closer to the Chineasy method but with less story?
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We are trying to address some of these issues with what we are working on at http://whizzlearning.com. It is very much focused on how to get beginners started. We plan on going live in the app store soon. Sign up for our announcement on the home page.
I agree the biggest barrier to entry with Anki is initially setting it up for the beginner user but once you get over that really big hurdle its extremely useful and my results in college were very real when I finally started using it. The main thing with Anki is that it has to be used with the material you're studying and is pretty bad if you try to use it as your own.
RtK/RtH is similar in that way that if you simply try to read it without atleast making paper flash cards you won't get any use out of it.
It seems your app is actually pretty similar in that it breaks down the characters into simpler parts and then builds on those parts.
Agreed, there seem to be good decks for Anki that follow different books or courses (Skritter does this too).
With regards to Whizz Learning, we definitely looked at Anki, Skritter, SuperMemo, etc. to see how they help people remember things. I felt like the the management of their own deck (or copying a bad one) can turn someone off from the beginning. We tried to make it simpler in how we grow the deck.
The system itself does try to break characters down into simpler components or symbols. It came from a neurolinguist that created the system to help stroke victims to relearn Chinese. There is some interesting science behind it that we are going to post about soon.
We just submitted to the Apple store for our first version. I would love to get your thoughts on it when we are approved.
Any other thoughts you have on Anki or other learning products are very interesting to us.
Also, one thing I forgot to mention: in Chinese there are a lot of different pronunciations per character if you are talking about all of the different dialects. Most people are learning Mandarin now, but there are still native dialects in different parts of China and Chinese speaking countries...
I have heard that if you get a hundred miles outside of Beijing pronunciation can be different enough in Mandarin that it is difficult to communicate.
But once you are 100 miles out, everyone speaks mandarin in a similar way. (i.e. the problem is Beijinghua != Putonghua ;-)
Makes sense. Thanks for the clarification! :-)
I haven't seen or used any of the mentioned tools, but I have found http://nciku.com to be useful on many occasions.