Heisig Method ("Remembering the Hanzi") - the full collection

The so-called "Heisig Method" for learning to read, write & remember the meaning of Chinese characters is a fantastic method, and one that I have blogged about extensively. I used it to learn the first 1500 characters in about 3 months, after many other methods have failed me.

Given how much I have written on the subject over an extended period of time, it made sense to create just one source which puts all the material in one place.  And that place is here.

All links are placed in three sections:

• What is the Heisig method?
• My personal story of success
• Instructions, Hints, Tips, Suggestions

What is the Heisig method?

• Learning to read Chinese (here I give a brief introduction to the method)
• Interview with James Heisig (external link, with interesting anecdotes - including how he came up with the method in the first place)
• Homepage of Heisig's books (look at the bottom of the page, under the "works on the chinese hanzi" section)
• Free (and legal :-) PDF chapters from his books to give you a flavour of how it works, including Simplified Characters (book 1) and Traditional Characters (book 1)
• Amazon affiliated links to Simplified (book1), Simplified (book2), Traditional (book1), Traditional (book2)
• With thanks to Timothy Richardson (Although Heisig developed this method many years ago, his co-author must have done a huge amount of work in getting this from Japanese to Chinese)
• A message to my little brother (for those who want an overview by seeing a few simple examples)
• Meet the man who brought the Heisig method to Chinese characters (this is the interview teaser, with the full interview appearing below)
• Full interview with Timothy Richardson - the man who brought the Heisig method to Chinese characters (I was lucky to get time speaking with Timothy, and understanding more about him, and the work it took to write the above books)

My personal story of using the Heisig Method

Book1

• Learning to read Chinese (day zero of a personal experiment)
• Learning to read Chinese (day 2) (already I'm looking at Chinese characters differently!)
• Learning to read Chinese (day 6) (236 characters with 97% recall; and you see from my notes already I'm spotting ways of doing it more efficiently)
• Learning to read Chinese (day 11) - great progress (336 characters, with the realisation how much you can do with just a few hundred)
• Reading (day 18) - 500 characters! (less than 3 weeks - I even impressed myself! note the little things that were slowing me down)
• 500 - 'Little step' or 'Giant leap'? (I printed out two Chinese websites, and highlighted the characters I knew - wow, 500 is a lot)
• Reading (day 32) - bad week & bad mistakes (things didn't always go well)
• Learning to Read (day 46) - 1000 characters! (A major milestone in less than 1.5 months, with 90% retention)
• (Not) learning to read Chinese - 'Black October' (you can still come right, even after losing an entire month)
• Learning to Read Chinese (3 months!) [pant pant] (even with a month 'off', I'm approaching 1300 characters in three months)
• Learn to Read & Write Chinese (done!) (106 days to finish the entire book, including basically a month off; in this post I give lots of statistics on the journey)
• Heisig - wherefore art thou now? (I discuss my feelings and realisations about 3 months after finishing the book)
• Heisig: my just desserts (I discovered in a small dessert shop in HK that there is still a huge gap between knowing characters and knowing words :-)

Book2

• Heisig 2 ("Please sir, I want some more") (my initial impressions after holding Book 2 in my hands for the first time)
• I have begun Heisig Book 2. Kinda. (4 months after buying the book, I begin; and I get off to a bad start because ...)
• Total failure (A month later, I just give up on Book 2)
• Under the blankets, with a torch (I begin the book again as part of a new year's resolution - but I do some clever things to make sure I don't give up this time)
• Heisig 2 - past 2000 characters (So my little tricks worked, and 500 characters later I'm still going)
• Heisig Book 2 - now finished! (this is how) (After 11.5 months - at my planned 5 characters a day - I finished the second book of the Heisig & Richardson 'Remembering Simplified Hanzi' series)

Instructions, Hints, Tips, Suggestions - for the Heisig Method

• Tips & Tricks for Heisig Visualisations (This is my most important post on the topic - people are bad a visualising in general, but Heisig needs you to get good at. If you read this post and follow the advice, your Heisig journey will be more fun, quicker, and longer-lasting. Seriously.)
• Early traps not to fall into (although the post was an update post, I made some important points that people starting out should be careful with)
• Pinyin proves that Heisig is right (You don't need to learn pronunciation while you're learning the book, it can come quite naturally too)
• Using Modern Art to Learn Chinese (Many characters that you're trying to create images for are very abstract (like peace, great, grand, deliberate) - and this post is filled with tricks to make abstract words easy to get concrete images)
• Bad Heisig images & great Dali paintings (In order to revise after 2.5 years, I pick up book 1 again, and I look at Heisig stories/images on the Net; Here I give detailed examples on why so many of them are terrible, and will be impossible to remember for long)
• Just stick to one image, OK? (Consistency in image-making is part of why I did book 1 so fast, and I highlight how book 2 is itself failing to teach this consistency)
• How to revise, once you've finished the book (this is part of an update post, but I give some detail about how my revision process is shaped)
• Stoned Horses (examples of how easy it is to think of many possible visualisations for a single character)

If you find this collection of articles helpful, please share them.  And as always, your comments below are welcome and appreciated.