Remembering the Hanzi: Take it to the Next Level

I’m fired up!  I wish that I had started Remembering the Hanzi when I first started this challenge.  I was going to learn 30 characters per day, but I’m getting through 30 in just 10 minutes.  I’m well aware that characters by themselves may not necessarily reflect the same meaning in a compound word.  Still, I love the ability to recognize so many individual characters in such short period of time.

When I first heard about this book, I wondered how could a book that teaches you to learn 1500 characters could be useful if it doesn’t teach you how to pronounce them.  I can now see, that that’s not the point.  Introducing pronunciation would just slow down the process.  The book itself is a memory training manual using Chinese characters as its subject.

I’ve reviewed the characters I already learned, and was able to recall 99% of them.  Not bad.  I’m upping the ante by learning 50 characters a day instead of 30 characters.