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

Description

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. Cover Contents 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) Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3 Lesson 4 Lesson 5 Lesson 6 Lesson 7 Lesson 8 Lesson 9 Lesson 10 Lesson 11 Lesson 12 Plots (Lessons 13-19) Lesson 13 Lesson 14 Lesson 15 Lesson 16 Lesson 17 Lesson 18 Lesson 19 Elements (Lessons 20-55) Lesson 20 Lesson 21 Lesson 22 Lesson 23 Lesson 24 Lesson 25 Lesson 26 Lesson 27 Lesson 28 Lesson 29 Lesson 30 Lesson 31 Lesson 32 Lesson 33 Lesson 34 Lesson 35 Lesson 36 Lesson 37 Lesson 38 Lesson 39 Lesson 40 Lesson 41 Lesson 42 Lesson 43 Lesson 44 Lesson 45 Lesson 46 Lesson 47 Lesson 48 Lesson 49 Lesson 50 Lesson 51 Lesson 52 Lesson 53 Lesson 54 Lesson 55 Indexes I. Hand-Drawn Characters II. Primitive Elements III. Characters by Number of Strokes IV. Character Pronunciations V. Key Words and Primitive Meanings