Notices by Erik Westra (erik@mastodon.nz)

@liztai it went well, thanks -- I made good progress on a big work project, which is great. Even better, I was able to understand about 2/3 of the sentence you wrote in Mandarin before I cheated and asked Google to translate it...I'm slowly getting better at recognising and understanding Chinese...

@liztai how do you mean it’s the opposite of your approach? The Heisig book does cover the 1,000 most common characters, plus 500 more that are related and easier to learn at the same time. There’s a second volume that covers the next most common 1,500 words.

@liztai wow, so you can hear and understand (some) Mandarin, but not read the characters? That's completely different from a beginner trying to learn Chinese from scratch...I'm impressed. So what you're doing is taking the radicals and stroke order of the written character and associating it with a character you already know from the spoken language. I'm glad you found a deck that works for that...do share your progress as you go along, as I'd love to hear how you get on.

@liztai 1000 characters should be doable, depending on how good the flashcard system is in Tofu. I've been working through James Heisig's book "Remembering the Traditional Hanzi", and am up to 740 characters after 3 months. That's a lot more time-consuming than what you're doing, as the book requires you to work out mnemonics to help remember each character, but I'm steadily doing 10 characters a day. With your experience, you'll definitely get to 1000 characters by the end of the year.

@liztai James Heisig has produced books for both traditional and simplified Hanzi. For example: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=sr_1_3?crid=ZPI2DFTTAXVF&keywords=heisig&qid=1704344515&sprefix=heisig%2Caps%2C278&sr=8-3 and https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters-ebook/dp/B09WTSP8XK/ref=sr_1_6?crid=ZPI2DFTTAXVF&keywords=heisig&qid=1704344515&sprefix=heisig%2Caps%2C278&sr=8-6. The decks you download usually say "traditional" or "simplified" as both are available.