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

by James W. Heisig, Timothy W. Richardson

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 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.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, Language

440 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good but very difficult to learn regardless if you're a native speaker or learning it as a second language. Not a fault of the book but a fault of the language. Although geared towards non-natives, I found it very easy to use even though I spoke Mandarin first before learning English.
As entertaining as the book is, the book by itself is not going to get you there. I would suggest that you pair the reviews & learning with ankiweb.net for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. Especially since they have mobile device platform.
The only drawback to this method in general is that even when you finish the book you are by no means literate in Chinese - you can recognize the individual characters, but will not know what a sentence in Chinese means (considering that the literal translation for a rocket is "fire arrow").
That said, I will most definitely purchase book 2 because this is by far the most effective way I have ever learned to read than the repeat 6000x that I went to school for.

[Missy J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful for those who have absolutely no experience with writing Chinese characters. Also it's quite suitable for self-study.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

As effective as this mnemonic method is, it does not teach you Chinese. You will forget the characters unless you have SUBSTANTIAL practice reading and speaking. Use the stories in Pleco app or the Mandarin Companion series and use Tandem for speaking.

[Bruno · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's great with the initial sets of hanzi. But it felt like the author grew progressively impatient, putting aside the creative hanzi descriptions that make them stick into memory.

[Arj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Especially if supplemented by SRS software (there are good shared decks on Anki, which helpfully include pronunciation), this book is an invaluable method for learning traditional characters. Unfortunately, since the book is not itself ordered in terms of frequency of character appearance, you'll often only be learning very common characters (e.g. 很) towards the end of the book. However, this volume contains higher-frequency characters than does the second, so if you can set aside one or two months of intensive study of this book, you will have made an extremely good start on Chinese character acquisition.

[Aaren Twedt]

I'm about halfway through, and the content is still quite relevant today as far as Hanzi characters.

However, there is a weirdly Christian thread through many of the mnemonics. I understand that this is geared towards a western, non-native audience, almost exclusively English speaking peoples. But every few pages you get hit with a a reference to the Bible and it's just so out of place.

[Brett]

Just got it yesterday.