Full interview with Timothy Richardson - the man who brought the Heisig method to Chinese characters

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have been really lucky to get some time with Timothy Richardson, the co-author of the Remembering Hanzi book series. Although it is known as the “Heisig method”, it was through the initiative and effort of Tim that this approach was brought from the original Japanese application, to Chinese characters. Although I gave you a teaser to some really interesting facts about Tim and about the process of writing the books with Heisig, below you will find the full interview. Thanks again to Tim for this time, sharing so much about the books.


Tim, let’s start off with two quick questions, one about you in the big world, and about you in the context of the Heisig method:

• How would you describe yourself now, so that the reader can 'place' you?

I've been interested in language learning for a long time, but I also have broad interests in a number of other fields (philosophy, religion, science, etc.) and spend time reading about all that when I have a chance.

I'm a family man. I'm fortunate to have a capable, talented, dedicated wife and nine irreplaceable children. Each is a treasure.

• How did you first come across the Heisig method?

I was teaching English as a Second Language at Snow College, a community college in central Utah, when a Japanese-speaking colleague showed me a copy of Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1. I had taken three undergraduate courses in Chinese before that time, and this colleague thought I might be interested in Heisig's approach to the characters. He was right. Within minutes, I knew that (for me) this approach to character learning was better than anything I'd ever seen. Within a very short time, I was looking at and writing down correspondences between the Japanese elements and kanji in Heisig's book and what I knew of Chinese characters.

OK, great start. We’ll get back to the book in a moment, but I’d like to know more about you, Timothy Richardson:

• You live in Hawaii, but weren't born there? How did you end up in Hawaii?

You're right that I didn't start out in Hawaii. I was born in Mesa, Arizona, a place that has many wonderful people, but one that's way too hot for me. I have a definite preference for cooler climates. In fact, my biggest complaint about Hawaii is its lack of cold and snow from time to time. I'm aware that anyone who complains about the weather in Hawaii is likely to be seen as a crackpot, and for good reason. It's lovely here year around. I only have a preference for the cold because I absorbed so much heat in Arizona while growing up. I suppose I ended up here in Hawaii mostly because the University (Brigham Young University–Hawaii) needed someone who could teach both Chinese and Spanish.

• When we started chatting last year, you were actually working outside Hawaii - do you do a fair amount of travel like that?

I was on a sabbatical leave in Utah when you contacted me last year. I do travel some in my current position (it's been mostly to Japan to work with Jim Heisig in recent years), but I used to travel more. Before I decided to work full time in the field of language learning, I worked in several administrative positions in which international travel (or residence) was an important part of the job description. The time I've spent in various countries has definitely helped me as a language teacher.

• What are your current areas of activity?

For 13 years now, I've been part of the International Cultural Studies and World Languages Department at Brigham Young University–Hawaii (BYU-Hawaii), where I teach both Chinese and Spanish, and on occasion, Portuguese. I'm also involved in coordinating the teaching of world languages on campus.

In addition to ongoing work on the learning of Chinese characters, there are non-language topics that I hope to get to in the future (philosophy, religion, science, etc., as mentioned above). But I suppose I'll hold off on commenting about them at this point.

• How would you summarise your language skills?

I'm a native American-English speaker from Arizona.

I do speak Chinese. My wife and I lived in Mainland China for two years, where we taught English at the Xi'an International Studies University. I studied Chinese in much of my free time (unfortunately, without knowing anything of Heisig's approach at the time). I later studied Chinese at the graduate level and currently teach BYU-Hawaii's first three Chinese courses. I'm very fluent in some areas of the language and less skilled in areas that I haven't spent much time in.

Spanish was the first foreign language I learned, while serving as a missionary in Chile for two years. I later lived for six months in Spain and a number of months in Mexico while teaching Spanish on study-abroad programs for Brigham Young University (Utah) and finishing up a Masters degree in Spanish linguistics. I also lived in Brazil for over a year while working for a petroleum company headquartered in Texas, and became very interested in and involved with Portuguese. (Before the M.A. in Spanish, I had completed a Masters degree in public administration [MPA]. Then, after working at the Agency for International Development for a short time in Washington, D.C., I decided that I might prefer the private sector, and ended up working in it for several years before going back to school for the M.A. in Spanish.) While completing the Ph.D. at the University of Texas, I taught both Spanish and Portuguese (mostly Portuguese) and mostly studied Chinese and linguistics.

Finally, it’s worth noting that I don't have any expertise in Japanese. Our whole family lived in Japan for four months while Heisig and I were hard at work on the Book 1s, and I have accumulated more time than that there during other trips, but I have not tried to learn Japanese at all (even though I do find it appealing).

• What was the original trigger for becoming interested in the Chinese language?

I was working on the previously-mentioned Masters in Spanish linguistics at the time. I began to feel a strong interest in Chinese right in the middle of that program, so I started taking beginning classes. This meant that I was teaching undergraduate Spanish courses, taking graduate Spanish courses, and studying Chinese, all at the same time. My Spanish professors wondered about this 'irrelevant' interest I had developed, but they were good enough to tolerate it.

Now back to the work on the books you co-authored with James Heisig:

• I read that there was a 10-year period between seeing the method and writing your thesis - what happened during those years?

I don't know if it was 10 years or not. I could reconstruct this if I could spend time with my boxed-up journals from that time period, but right now that's not possible. It may have been about 10 years between my first seeing Heisig's approach and my finishing my thesis. During the intervening time I was teaching at Snow College, and then studying as a doctoral student at The University of Texas, at Austin.

• How did you get in touch with Heisig originally? Did you just drop him an email? You called? You met him at a university event?

I'm not sure if I wrote him a letter, wrote him an email, or phoned him, but I believe it was probably back in 1992 that I first contacted him, at the beginning of my doctoral studies. I might have something on an old floppy disk somewhere, but that will have to wait to be resurrected, if ever.

If I recall correctly, I asked him if anyone had ever done anything for Chinese along the lines of what he had done for Japanese. My recollection is that he responded that a number of people had asked him that question over the years, and that some had actually begun on the Chinese project. He said something to the effect that none of them had any idea about how much work would be involved. But he also gave me the name of a person who, with his native-Chinese-speaking wife, had actually made some progress toward producing materials for Chinese and suggested that I get in touch with him. I did so, and it's true that this person had done quite a bit of work on the project. Still, my feeling was that he had taken it in directions for Chinese that weren't as appealing as what Heisig had done for Japanese, so I was lukewarm about any sort of collaboration with him.

What contact with Jim Heisig and the other fellow did, though, was convince me that little enough had been done that I could focus on the project as part of my doctoral work. I did have to deal with the fact that I was fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese, less fluent in Chinese, and that the sensible, practical thing to do would be to focus on the two Latin American languages. But my persistent inclination wasn't toward the sensible or practical, so I taught Spanish and Portuguese while focusing my studies on Chinese.

• So what happened in the 10 years after your thesis but before publishing the book?

I don't think I had too much contact with Heisig while working on the thesis (a few communications, I suppose, but not a lot). Immediately following completion of the thesis and graduation, I returned to Snow College, where I taught both Chinese and Spanish (and occasionally Portuguese) and served as the Foreign Language Department chair for three years. I remember that I did have occasional email contact with Heisig, and with the fellow who had been working on a Chinese adaptation, during that time.

Then, in 2001, I came to BYU-Hawaii, where I again began to teach Spanish, Chinese, and, on occasion, Portuguese. During the first number of years here, I continued examining a number of Chinese-character frequency lists (four or five) to come up with a unique list of most frequently used characters for Chinese. I also did a bit more of the relevant theoretical research that had been part of the dissertation.

• How much convincing did you have to do before Heisig agreed to 'coauthor' with you? Was it easy or hard?

At some point, I sent a hard copy of my doctoral thesis to Heisig. From what I remember, he took a couple of evenings to read/skim it and seemed pleased. Then, in 2003, I contacted him about making a short trip to Japan to meet him and show him the frequency list I'd been working on. We met and discussed things, and he was very generous in his encouragement for me to go ahead with the project. I told him that my thought, all along, had been that we might work on the project together, and that he would be the lead author.

I don't remember exactly when we decided to actually collaborate on the books, but an outside financial donor who had used Heisig's Japanese books, and who was at that point interested in some similar Chinese books, played an important role early on. I went back to Japan for part of the summer of 2006 to begin work on the books. Heisig, the outside donor, and I took care of a lot of details so that I could return with my family for the first four months of 2007 to continue the process. I returned later that summer and again in subsequent summers.

• What can you share about the time you have shared with Heisig?

I have worked side by side with him on this project for days and days on many, many occasions. He works hard and at a fast pace. He's good humoured and extremely knowledgeable. In his approach to the work of the books, he uniquely combines, it seems to me, 1) a real bent toward systematicity and 2) an impressive ability to find non-systematic solutions when problems require them. I have enjoyed many good meals with him and lots of good conversation. I've even had occasion to have my entire family visit with him. He's remarkably good with children and has a large store of jokes and magic tricks at the ready to keep them entertained. Much, much more could be said.

• Did you co-author the book mainly through emails and document sharing? Would you meet regularly over lunch and Chinese rice wine, arguing about which 1500 characters should be in book 1?

We have exchanged many, many emails and done plenty of document sharing, as well as my spending about nine months in Japan and him spending a few days here in Hawaii working on the project.

When it came to character selection he basically trusted the approach I was taking and left that to me – although we did collaborate on some character decisions with both books. With the Book 1s, we wanted the top 1,000 characters by frequency plus 500 other top-3,000 characters that would allow us to use Heisig's method for ordering them. This is detailed to some degree in the introduction of the Book 1s. We also collaborated on decisions about some of the last characters in the Book 2s when we were having to consider how many frequently-used surnames we should include in the top 3,000.

• Are you still in contact with him?

I am still frequently in contact with him, as the project still has many ongoing aspects to it. Spanish translations of the Book 2s have recently been published in Barcelona, Spain, and German translations are in progress. (Heisig is, by the way, fluent in both Spanish and German. I teach upper-division Spanish courses at BYU-Hawaii, and I can tell you that Heisig's Spanish is excellent.) Our translators, in both cases, are exceptional, but Heisig and I have been quite involved as well. I've helped quite a bit with the Spanish key words, and Heisig oversees the layout and typesetting in both languages. We occasionally have Hanzi-book errata to communicate about. We've also been considering the increasing demand for review apps and a set of books on character pronunciations, but the project that is absorbing our energies at present is an eBook that combines the two simplified books. We hope to have it out soon.

• On a more technical basis, were there any particular challenges that you two faced when doing the hanzi book, that perhaps were not an issue for the kanji ones? (For example, the issue of Simplified/Traditional is one that comes to mind, but maybe you can think of others?)

Yes, the simplified/traditional divide always had to be dealt with, and it had significant impact on almost innumerable details in the books. Initially, Heisig thought we should have just two books, one for the first 1,500 simplified and traditional characters, and another for the last 1,500. In other words, he thought we should introduce the simplified and traditional characters together in the same volumes, and he had figured out a promising way to do this. I was a bit hesitant that going this route would introduce too much complexity, but the deciding voice in the matter came from the outside donor. He expressed a preference for separate simplified and traditional volumes, and that's the direction we ended up taking.

• Can you tell us a bit about the fonts? They match the stories perfectly - but I’ve seen other fonts where the ‘make-up’ of the different characters is actually slightly different.

There were many details that had to be dealt with in terms of the Chinese fonts we used. No one font we looked at, whether simplified or traditional, showed all of the elements we wanted in the way we wanted them. With full-form fonts, especially, there were lots of variants to deal with. We ended up using proprietary fonts, with Heisig doing most of the heavy lifting here. His ability with the software needed to modify characters to suit our purposes was critically important.

• Uhm, Book 2 took a while! (For people like me who had done book 1 and were eagerly awaiting book 2, it seemed to take forever. And given that even official comment from the publishers seemed to use deadlines that were seriously exceeded several times, we all came to the conclusion that book 2 had some interesting challenges in wrapping up.)

You're right about the Book 2 delay. We were very aware of it. I think it's safe to say that one reason for it was that around the time of the publication of the Book 1s my university, BYU-Hawaii, made some significant administrative changes. The School took major steps toward emphasizing the teaching mission of the Institution. That meant significantly increased teaching loads and correspondingly less time for research. Heisig and I both wanted to move quickly on the Book 2s, but my situation at BYU-H made that impossible.

Another thing that probably delayed the books by a year is that we decided, when the Book 2s were well on their way, to change the ordering of the characters. We were both a little dissatisfied with the ordering that we had decided on previously (all too complicated to detail here). I was literally on my way to Japan for several weeks of work when the idea occurred to me that we could perhaps use the same ordering we had used for the Book 1s. That is, we could simply arrange the characters from the second 1,500 in Book 2 lessons corresponding to Book 1 lessons in which we could have logically introduced them. This meant that at least one Book 2 lesson would only have one character in it, and that at least one would have more than 100, but there was a 'cleanness' to this organizational idea that was appealing. I approached Heisig about it shortly after I arrived at the scholars residence in which he lives. He immediately saw some advantages to it, but he also saw some disadvantages, not the least of which was that it would mean redoing days and days worth of work from the previous year and delaying the publication of the Book 2s. After more discussion, we decided to take the new direction, and we're both glad that we did. This Book 2 ordering allows learners to choose between the sequential (Book 1, and then Book 2) path we originally intended and a simultaneous (Book 1 and Book 2) path that we had not. Both have their advantages.

• Are there any funny stories that you remember about the time you were writing the book?

We had a lot of fun with many, many of the character frames. The great majority of the creative work was Heisig's, but we often worked on or modified stories together. I feel that one of the best things I did was express reservations if I didn't think a story worked as well it should. This often led Heisig to add a twist or take a different direction altogether, and the frame involved was very often satisfyingly improved. Heisig has a gift for story creation, to say the least. (I suppose you might be aware that he once received a marriage proposal from a woman in India who had enjoyed his stories and approach to kanji learning so much that she had fallen in love.)

Here’s a major tangent. When my entire family was in Japan for those first four months of 2007, Heisig and I would go down to the gym at Nanzan University and play basketball on Thursday afternoons. We always took three of my boys with us (Nathan, then age 15; Seth, 13; and Jacob, 11), as well as another faculty member or two. I was 56 or so at the time, and Heisig was (and is) a few years my senior. I think my boys would all say that Heisig is a 'crafty' basketball player, and all of us could tell that he knew what he was doing on the court. Once, the previously-mentioned donor brought his two teenage boys and joined us for the day. We had lots of fun, and it was a nice change from writing.

That has been fascinating! Thanks. I’d now like to shift back towards you a little, without straying too hard from the Chinese path ...

• Is there somewhere your original PhD can be downloaded, for interested readers?

The dissertation is rather heavily theoretical in places and heavily referenced. The paper we previously discussed [aside: see link below] is easier for most people to handle. In any case, the dissertation can't be downloaded. The most recent information I have on ordering it (and some people have done so) is this:

If in the U.S.:
          The publication # (or UMI #) is 9838097.
          Call toll-free: 1 (800) 521-0600 (ext. 7044).
          Or write:
                    Dissertations: Customer Service
                    PROQUEST
                    300 North Zeeb Road
                    Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

If outside the U.S.:
          Again, the publication # (or UMI #) is 9838097.
          Write: Dissertations: Customer Service International Department
                    PROQUEST
                    300 North Zeeb Road
                    Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106
                    U.S.A.

• What other published material of yours would I be able to find online?

I wrote a paper that I presented at a conference in Germersheim, Germany, in August of 2005. A draft that I had submitted to the conference committee has somehow found its way onto the Internet at http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/chinesisch/Dateien/hanzirenzhi_papers_richardson.pdf

The paper was later officially published as a chapter in a book that saw the light of day in 2007. Here's the reference:

• Richardson, Timothy W. (2007). Chinese Character Memorization and Literacy: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on a Sophisticated Version of an Old Strategy. In A. Guder, X. Jiang, and Y. X. Wan (Eds.), 对外汉字的认知与教学 [The Cognition, Learning, and Teaching of Chinese Characters] (pp. 315-353). Beijing: Beijing Language and Culture University Press.

There's also the short piece (at the link just below) that has some brief comments about the dissertation. I don't know why the owner of the site announced the books as being by Timothy W. Richardson and James W. Heisig, rather than vice-versa. I'll have to write her about that. http://www.kanjiclinic.com/richardson.htm

• Do you feel left out when - in relation to the Chinese book series - it's called the 'Heisig' method, and not 'Heisig-Richardson' method?

I can honestly say that I don't feel left out at all. You've been very kind in acknowledging my involvement in your blog [aside: see reference to 2009 article below], but I'm content to have Heisig's name most prominently associated with the project. It is, after all, his approach to character learning.

• Your draft paper linked to above spends some time defending the use of mnemonics, and it certainly seems clear that based on research that they are indeed effective tools - yet I see plenty of people who look down on such methods. Does this frustrate you? Defending against such fallacies - is this a strong area of interest for you?

I think it's understandable that people look down on mnemonics. They've frequently been used or peddled by disreputable people for less than noble purposes. Too, as I've said elsewhere, I have personally seen mnemonics that seemed so silly that I have wondered if any advantage in recall could possibly compensate for having to think in the terms they suggested. And there are many other objections, some specific to the use of mnemonics with Chinese. Still, we do now have clear evidence of their potential effectiveness, and they have gained legitimacy as language-learning strategies. I, personally, don't know of a task that seems more appropriate to their use than the memory challenge the Chinese writing system presents for the non-native learner of Chinese.

Defending mnemonics isn't "a strong area of interest for me," except as a justification for the work Heisig and I are doing together. I'm content to leave the general defence of mnemonics in the hands of experts in the field of psychology, and elsewhere.

• And what about other fallacies - such as "you must learn the pronunciation at the same time as you learn the characters”?

We do say something about this in the intro to the Book 1s. Maybe I'll allow that to suffice.

• When I originally approached you about this interview, you told me that you already knew of my MandarinSegments blog - because someone had sent you a copy of the 2009 article I wrote. Is there a story there? Was it a friend who sent you the link, or student, or other?

I wish there were a juicy story here, but I honestly don't remember how it came to my attention anymore. A friend may have sent it to me, or it's possible that I happened onto it myself. I don't remember. What I do remember is that I felt (and feel) appreciative of your kind comments.

You & China, the country:

• Have you ever lived in China?

My wife and I lived in Xi'an, China, for two years, while on a faculty exchange through BYU (Utah). Our first baby was born in Xi'an. We had arranged for everything to take place at the 4th Military Hospital, but when the time came, my wife informed me that there wasn't enough time to get there (maybe 30 minutes away through city traffic). Fortunately, the driver that was going to take us knew where there were a couple of midwives on the university campus. They arrived in the nick of time, helped us welcome our daughter into the world, stayed to help for perhaps 45 minutes, and, when all was under control, left. There had been the two of us in our bedroom, and then, that quickly, there were three. It was a beautiful experience. My wife deserves all the credit, of course.

• What are your favourite Chinese cities?

Xi'an, since that's where we lived for those two years. But I also enjoyed Guilin (for its scenery), Kunming (for its wide-open skies), Sanya (for its wonderful seafood), Urumqi (for its unique combination of Han and non-Han cultures), and Yan'an (for its historical connection to the revolution). There are lots of cities I haven't been to, though, so my selection is limited.

• Do you still return every now and then, if so then where? Do you get opportunities to guest lecture out there?

I was last in China (in Xi'an) in 2004 helping with a study-abroad group. I also took a group in 2002. I haven't been back since I started working with Heisig, but would like to return again in the not-too-distant future.

• Do you ever visit Hong Kong? (this is a selfish question - I'm wondering if I might get a chance to meet you :-)

My wife and I have been to Hong Kong twice and really enjoyed it both times. I don't know when the next opportunity will present itself, but I'll be happy to get to meet you if you're still there when that time comes.

• Do you have any favourite Chinese foods?

Yes, definitely. I really like 酸辣土豆丝 (sour spicy shredded potatoes) and 茄子 (eggplant), in almost any of the ways it's prepared in China.


Here endeth the interview. Thanks again, Tim.



(And as a reminder, the full collection of articles about learning to read & write Chinese using the Heisig system can be found here)

Meet the man who brought the Heisig method to Chinese characters (an interview teaser)

Dark Times

There was a time when the so-called Heisig method was for Japanese only. Those were dark times.

And even though the original version (“Adventures in Kanji-Land”) had been published as far back as 1978, no one had successfully produced a full working version for the Chinese character system. People who were learning Chinese - including me - were still hoping that one day the method would be applied to Chinese characters. (After all, the Japanese kanji come from the Chinese character set in the first place!)

The Age of Enlightenment

And then about five years ago the buzz was that it had been done: a book on Remembering Hanzi would be published. The person who had made it happen, working very closely with James Heisig of course, was Dr Timothy Richardson. And so Book 1 arrived with the first 1500 characters (which I devoured in about 3 months), and then 3 years later Book 2 arrived with the next 1500 characters (which I savoured over a year).

These were good times.

The Interview

Over the last few months, I’ve been in touch with Tim - throwing a barrage of questions at him, including:  When did this all begin? How did he approach James Heisig in the first place? What was the worst part of transferring the Heisig system to Chinese? Why did Book 2 take so long?!

And Tim has been ever-patient, answering my questions in amazing detail, telling a backstory which I found fascinating - and I know you will too!

In the next article, the full interview will be published. But for today I just wanted to share some of the really fascinating things I learned about Tim Richardson along the way …

Did you know … ?

• Tim is married, and has 9 children
• His first child was actually born in the Chinese city of Xian, on the university campus!
• He was born in Mesa, Arizona, and now lives in Hawaii
• There was a time when Tim was a missionary in Chile, and later he worked in Brazil ...
• … so in addition to lecturing on Chinese, he also teaches Spanish & Portuguese at his university
• It was about 20 years ago that Tim originally approached Heisig with the idea of applying the method to Chinese characters
• The amount of effort the two of them put into deciding which font to use for the characters in the book will surprise you!
• His favourite Chinese food (because we are all curious :-) is 酸辣土豆丝 (sour spicy shredded potatoes)

I’ve enjoyed connecting with Tim, and look forward to being able to publish the full interview in the next article.  Stay tuned ...

(For the full collection of articles I have written about the Heisig method - including its history, and hints for its use, click here)

Stoned Horses

When students learn to read & write Chinese characters, there are broadly two ways of doing it. The first is 'brute force' where you practise the strokes over & over again until you have internalised them, and the second is to use some method of visualisation which allows you to decompose the characters into parts - and piece them together again using imagary (which is much easier to remember that just pure strokes).

Although I used the Heisig method to learn 3000 characters (and I've blogged extensively on this - you can find the full collection here), note that what I'm writing below is about visualisation in general, and is not specific to the Heisig approach.

Take for example the character for 'numeral' - which is 码 (mǎ, also written 嗎 in the traditional system). You can see it's made up of 石 (stone) and 马 (horse). When I learned this character, I naturally had to create an image of why stone+horse=numeral. In this case, a flood of images came to mind, and I realised there were so many options.

So many examples!

It got me thinking of times I've spoken to people about visualisation methods, and they say it's so hard to create images. So in addition to the very popular article Tips & Tricks for Heisig Visualisations, I decided to share here a range of images that I could use for this character.

• I picture the Terracotta Army, but instead of rows and rows of soldiers, I picture rows and rows of stone horses. And of course, since this is a very valuable collection, I imagine each horse is numbered - as you often see in museums. I suppose you can use this & this to help you create the image yourself. Ultimately this is my preferred image for remembering that stone+horse=numeral. Your preferred image may be different, and that's OK.
• Or I can see a horse doing maths. You know, with numerals. But horses can't write in books, so this horse has a few stones laid out on the ground before him, and he is moving them around, a little like someone might use an abacus, to do the calculations. 
• I can also visualise a ten-pin bowling alley, but you won't find pins at this place - instead you will find 10 stone horses at the bottom of the bowling lane. Can you see as your ball hits them, they break from the impact - and your score (such a high number!) appears on the board above you.
• Maybe there are horses running a race, but the track has lots of loose stones on the track, and each time a horse stumbles on the stone and falls, someone keeping score of 'lost' horses chalks up a higher numeral on the board.
• How about a large piece of cardboard which is part of a colour-by-numbers approach. But with this one you don't paint according to the number, you place a stone of different colour on that number. And when it's done and you step back, you can see it's a horse!
• Another possibility is to imagine cave paintings of horses scratched into the stone walls, but when you look more closely you notice that between the pictures of horses there are numbers - almost like the person was doing maths with horses as numerals. 
• Alternatively, I can see a gateway with a stone horse head mounted on top (it looks a little like this) - there is someone sitting astride that head, and as people pass through the gateway, she updates the numerals in her notepad, since she's counting people who use this entrance. 

Choosing the best one

Let's be clear, the one that is best for me may not be the best for you - so don't simply choose the one that I have chosen, but recognise which one best matches the way your own thinking works.

(It is possible to come up with really bad images, which I've written about here, but none of the above ones fails the tests in that article.)

After having done 3000 characters this way, I know instinctively how my brain works. And if you repeatedly hypnotised me to forget this character, and kept asking me to (re)create an image, it would probably be the first one, again & again. This is important, because in future when you're facing the character in The Real World © you will indeed need to see 码 then think stone+horse, and if your mind comes up with a different image, then you're never going to be able to work out what character you're looking at!)

So?

Did this help? Is it useful to be reminded that there really are so many (good) ways of creating images, that we shouldn't feel helpless, and we shouldn't forgive ourselves for feeling we can only come up with poor images?

So while you're in a visualisation mood, challenge yourself … Pick one or two of the characters below and create a few images that actually work. For fun.

• 敌: tongue+taskmaster = enemy
• 妄: perish+woman = absurd
• 坏: earth+NO = bad
• 如: woman+mouth = if

Leave a comment if you have any clever thoughts. Or if you have any dumb thoughts, that's OK too.

Heisig Book 2 - now finished! (this is how)

Today I completed the 1500 characters of Heisig & Richardson's Book 2. (Actually there are 1519 characters in this book, including the bonus ones.) This takes me to a total of 3019, which is about as far as I plan to go.

I finished Book 1 about four years ago, and was happy for quite some time not to bother with Book 2. Then about 1.5 years ago, I tried starting Book 2, but failed. By the start of 2013, I had decided I would begin again - but the difference that time was that although I managed Book 1 in just over 100 days, my decision in January was that I would take my time, and focus on finishing the book by the end of the year.

And that's what I did - I stuck with the slow-and-steady approach, and completed the book in 11.5 months. And it feels great! (you should try it one day)

Although there is something to be said for throwing yourself at it - like I did with Book 1 - it does take a bigger time commitment and certainly more focus. My first attempt to begin Book 2 was too intense, and that's why I failed. The second time I was ready to focus on just 5 new characters a day - and that succeeded perfectly.

There is no Book 3 - and to be fair, even if there were, I think I would be focusing on actually reading books now, rather than memorising new characters. So for 2014 my focus will be books and not textbooks.


It's not even noon here in HK right now, so perhaps a little early to go out and drink champagne. But I will do that this afternoon.

A message to my little brother

Hey Bro*

I was sitting in a coffee shop this morning, and realised how often I think about you while I'm learning Chinese.  Here, let me show you …

Take a look at this (poorly-taken) image from the book** that I'm reading at the moment for learning to read ...

I won't bore you with the details, but the method I use basically breaks complex characters into components - then you create an image that uses all those components, which is easy to remember.

• So you can see that #2279 has two halves - the left half means little brother (uhm, that's YOU!) and the right half (those two lines) means sword/sabre/knife. And you can see on the very right of the page, that overall character means shave. So the methods requires me to create an image of those words … so obviously the image I have in my mind is of YOU shaving with a sword!  (Glad you got rid of that beard!)
• Similarly #2280 involves YOU and a road - I picture us standing outside [the home where we grew up], on opposite sides of the ROAD (辶 means, in general, 'road'), and you're HANDING OVER something to me. Doesn't matter what you're giving me - it's the process of handing something over. And that's the image.
• In #2281 I'm stuck in a TREE (that's the 木 character on the left), and YOU are climbing up a LADDER to help me down.

The 'little brother' component is quite common, and you can see it is connected with such different words - but ultimately all those images involve you. So thanks for 'joining me' while I study Chinese. I look forward to your next visit out to Hong Kong.

Greg


* Yes I sometimes call him 'Bro'. Don't judge me :-)
** This is from Heisig Book2. You can read my whole collection of Heisig articles here.

Heisig - book 2 (halfway)

Just a quick note to let you know that last week Thursday (20 June) I reached character 2250, which puts me halfway through Book 2 (1501-3000).

As you know from my post earlier this year, I have set myself the goal of finishing the book by the end of the year, and arguably - since I hit the midway point on 20 June - I am 10 days ahead of schedule.

So, I'm definitely on track!



As a reminder, you can find the full collection of Heisig posts I've written (and some reference pieces) summarised in this popular article here.

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.

Heisig 2 - past 2000 characters

Hi all

The last you heard about my progress studying book two of the Heisig method [of learning to read & write Chinese] was in January, where I admitted that I had started studying the book again, after failing to get off the ground a few months before that.

Back in July 2012 I kinda started the book for the first time, but because I didn't get into a regular habit, the days between picking up the book kept increasing, and after a while I just shelved it. Literally.

So why was this year's attempt more successful? Mainly because I went with the flow more, put less pressure on myself, and took time to enjoy it more. And three months later, I'm still progressing nicely, according to plan.

So this is how it looks:

• I had to accept that although I did Book 1 in three months - that was right for that book at that time. This book is different, and this time is different. So this year's goal suits this year's circumstances.
• Thus I have set myself the goal of completing the book by the end of 2013, which amounts to just over 4 characters a day. That doesn't seem like much, but given that I'm also doing podcasts and other full-sentence flashcards, this is on top of that. It's enough. 
• I completed the first 500 characters of Book 2 (making it a total count of 2000) on 9 April, which is about 5 characters a day - not bad.  I don't do it every day, I'm still not fully into the habit, but it's regular enough.
• I'm much better about revision than I was with Book 1, which is part of the reason I'm taking longer to finish the book. I am OK with that :)
• I use TWO METHODS to revise: (a) I keep going back in the book, sometimes the most recent chapter, sometimes even earlier chapters; (b) I also started using an Anki flashcard pack (downloaded off the site's free collection of packs) - which tests Chinese-to-English. I began that in late Feb, setting it to introduce five 'new' characters a day, so that it will also reach the end of the set by the end of the year. Of course, I will always be slightly further ahead with the book than with the flashcards, so actually it is a pure revision mechanism.
• Although I complained in January that the characters in this book were much more complicated, actually it's not that bad. Of course, on average, they are more complex than Book 1, but they're really not that bad. So far.

So that's where I am.  Is anyone else reading this post also doing Book 2? Or anyone who has already finished Book 2 that has comments or suggestions? Would love to hear from you.

Under the blankets, with a torch

It's a secret, so I'm not telling anyone, but I have started Heisig Book 2 again. Shhhh ...

As you might remember from last July, I wrote a post called I have begun Heisig Book 2. Kinda.  At that stage - just 3 weeks after beginning - I was already behind 'schedule', and that was really disappointing for me because I managed to do the entire Book 1 in about 3 months. By August, just a month later, I was writing a post called Total failure - I simply did not have enough time to study Heisig, and decided that the little spare time I had should rather be spent doing flashcards rather than additional characters.

(To give you a sense of my time shortages, last year I did over 50 flights, which is approximately one business trip every second week. Ouch.)

Well, at the start of January this year, I picked up the book again, and began with character 1501.


What I'm doing differently - lessons from last time

1. No goals
I didn't set myself any goals - last time I actually found that disheartening. Instead I decided I would first get some momentum going, and get a sense of what time I would have available - and only then decide what goals to set myself. I still don't have a solid rhythm going, and I'm still not working through the book each day, but I'm enjoying the pressure-free attitude to Book 2, which means at least I'm enjoying it.

2. More revision
As I had remarked in the July article, Book 2 is more difficult - obviously. This means I really need more time with the revision because these more complex images can fade quite quickly in the beginning. I'm less panicked about finishing within a certain time frame, so revision actually feels like it's contributing to my goal of learning to read, rather than delaying my goal of getting through the book.

3. Character-to-English
When I did Book 1, my focus was on being able to see the character and know it's meaning. This is, after all, my challenge when I'm trying to read.  Learning to write was less important to me, so the need for English-to-Character is less. After focusing on C2E when studying the book, I loaded up an Anki flashcard deck, and my revision of the book was based on E2C.  I found this an extremely enjoyable and efficient approach, and I'm doing the same ... learning C2E mainly while studying the book. Later on I will load up a flashcard pack for Book 2.

4. Enjoy
I was not enjoying learning Book 2 when I picked it up last year. Don't get me wrong ... I wanted to learn the book, and I remember how excited I was when the book was first delivered to me, but it was the wrong time, and the wrong attitude - and it failed.  Now I'm enjoying it - and although I can't guarantee that I won't fail again, I at least feel like I'm on the right track.

5. Don't give up (in the long run)
I gave up in August, it was the wrong time for so many reasons. But I didn't give-up totally. I knew I would pick it up again, at the right time. And I did pick it up again. And this might be the right time :-)

Total failure

I have not even picked up Heisig 2 in about four weeks. Just too much happening at the moment, I really don't have time. I get a few minutes to do Chinese each day, and right now I spend it going through flashcards while travelling to and from work. That's it.

If I can get through August and get work under control again, I'm sure I'll pick it up again in September. I'm sure that I'm sure.

I think.

Just stick to one image, OK?

This post is for people who are using Heisig to learn to read & write Chinese, or for anyone using another image-based system with similar structure.

This is an issue that I came across relatively early on with the first book, but now after reaching a certain page in the second book, I had to roll my eyes a little ...

• If you look at the photo on the right (you can click on it for a larger version), you will see that all three of these consecutive characters use the '王' primitive.

BUT - and this is the crazy part - the first instance of 王 uses the 'ball' keyword, the second uses 'jewels' as the keyword, and the third uses 'king'.  Sure it's nice that the book gives us various options for what we might use to visualise a certain character, but I've found multiple images confusing. And if you happen to be working with the wrong one for that 'scene', the Heisig approach might fail

For example let's say that you're reading Chinese and see the character 汪. - and the image you constructed was based on "water ... jewels" as indicated in the photo. But later, when you try recall the meaning, you discover that "water ... king" doesn't ring any bells, and neither does "water ... ball". And so you fail.

Please try, when you're creating images, to have just one image for each keyword, and stick to it. I wrote an article entitled Tips & Tricks for Heisig Visualisations back while studying Book 1, and even at that time I had a section devoted to "Pick just one meaning for primitives" - because experience showed quite early on that it's a recipe for failure.

Chinese is hard enough when you do it right, so try to avoid the alternative.

I have begun Heisig Book 2. Kinda.

If you've been following my posts, you'll know that I have been preparing for a while to study the second book in the Heisig & Richardson series about learning to read & write Chinese. And I've been re-discovering good things too!

I set myself a goal to begin on 1 July (after fully re-studying Book 1), and to finish by year-end. Although I did the first book in about 3 months, I decided not to get carried away this time.

The bad news: I'm already behind schedule.
I thought I would begin at about 10 characters a day, expecting to slow down as I needed more time to revise. As of last night (21 days in) I had learned just 170 characters. I have also done a lot less revision than I should have done by now. Damn.

The good news: I am 170 characters further than when I started 3 weeks ago. (Even slow progress is progress, right?)


Here are some of the things I've noticed along the way:

• It is definitely going more slowly that Book 1 - but that isn't a surprise, right?
• The average number of strokes in the first couple of hundred characters looks to be about 10, which is quite a bit more than the first book
• My retention in the early weeks of the first book was nearly flawless - it was easy enough to remember the stories because the images were clear & obvious
• I'm not suggesting that there is a massive step up from the first to the second book - it's all about progressing slowly from character 1 to character 3000
• I'm mainly behind schedule because of work-based time constraints, and not because of a lack of interest in completing book 2
• There are some really strange keywords (the preface even explains this was necessary in order to ensure each character has a unique keyword), like: "father's sister" (maybe it would be easier if my father had a sister :-), "smidgen" (OK, I can cope with this), "cinnabar red" (erm ...), "flouds" (you'll get there, don't worry), "paulownia" (uhm ...), "vermilion" (sheesh ...), "succor" (hello dictionary), "brick heated bed" (seriously?)
• I got a little confused by 1559 ("widowed") until I realised that the 'head' primitive is actually written in traditional (not simplified) style
• And I smiled when I saw their copy-and-paste screw-up in character 1663 ("sow" - verb)
• It's so nice to finally get to know characters intimately that I have only come across in sentences in my flashcard pack
• It's clear that the authors have learned from Book 1, and they are improving Book 2 with this. For example, certain sub-primitives are getting different images to what they were allocated in the first book - I like what they've done here with Eiffel Tower and Disneyland
• And finally, I have created a Harry Potter themed image in all my Heisig work ("snitch" - I know it's not the way the authors intended it to be interpreted, but it made the story/character very clear for me)

So I'm really enjoying myself. Time constraints prevent me from doing any more time than I'm doing at the moment, but I'm enjoying the progress - and the fact that I'm already recognising characters from around, shows it's already adding value.

Bad Heisig images & great Dali paintings

Discovering (un)treasure

It was about 2.5 years ago that I finished studying Book 1 of  "Remember the Simplified Hanzi" Heisig & Richardson. And as you might have seen from a relatively recent post, I've got Book 2 staring at me from the shelf ... but first I wanted to completely re-do Book 1, to make sure that I revised all primitive images, and was truly ready for the next installment.

In order to revise the book, I downloaded the Anki database of the book's 1500 characters, set it to 10 new characters a day, and just ran it from there. That happened nearly 150 days ago ... So I'm just a few dozen characters away from finishing the book. Again.

The database is pretty good, with the character number, hanzi, keyword, pinyin ... and it also contains stories (where Heisig & Richardson didn't provide their own stories). These stories appear to have been taken from a community effort to create stories for those characters that didn't get their own in the original book. I guess anyone would have been able to contribute their own story for a character, although I'm not sure how they chose which was the one to get into the Anki database.

Much of the time, I just stuck the the story that I had previously created myself, but every now and then I couldn't remember mine, so I looked at their stories. Some were actually quite good, but so often the stories left me scratching my head.

"The Persistence of Memory"

In this article, I have taken an extract of stories that I found in that Anki pack, and highlighted some of the ones that I don't like.

Of course, for the most common characters, you see them so often that after a while you forget the story and you just know the character. And that's OK. But there are some characters which I have barely seen since completing the book, and when I do see them sometimes, I do have to rely on the stories - and that's when the persistence of memory becomes important.

And this is going to be even more important for Book 2, I'm sure, given the even further reduced frequency of those characters.

This is not about personal preference of whether it's 'nice' - this is based on my being able to work through Book 1 in about 3 months, and seeing what did & didn't work. It's also based on now revising the book after 2.5 years, and noting which of my stories persisted, and which completely failed me after all this time.

No offense intended

It's possible that you were the author of one of the stories I have included below. No offense. But I think it might be useful to consider what makes a good story, and what is likely to give problems. And for anyone that thinks I've got it totally wrong, please leave some comments below ... I promise I won't be offended :)


The Hall of the (in)famous


760: 微: Tiny

The tiny sherpa (taskmaster) is leading this queue of brave ant mountaineers up the wall of the house and towards the ceiling where they can live in peace and security in the attic. Unfortunately, they didn't account for the strong winds that blow through the attic at that altitude, so they are all swept off the mountain (a wall) and back to the ground!

Two thinks go wrong, in my opinion:  Firstly, the story has too many 'equivalents' to be memorable: You have to remember that taskmaster is a sherpa (which may differ from your other taskmaster images), and a wall is a mountain - so when you see the image in your mind, will you remember to use a mountain? Or will the image of 'wall' arise and confuse you?  Secondly, there are too many extra words here, that are likely to confuse: house, ceiling, ground. These all have their own primitives, and this interferes with how the image persists in your memory.


950: 碌: Commonplace

Stones are commonplace - stone snowmen, less so!

Unlike the story for 'tiny', this one is simple with no additional confusing words. Good. But consider these two alternatives ...
 - Metal is commonplace - metal snowmen, less so!
 - Wood is commonplace - wooden snowmen, less so!

As you can see, although going from story to keyword might be possible, if you go from keyword to story, suddenly the requirement that the word is 'stone' fades, and you may not be able to remember what is the primitive on the left. Try to make the 'stone' more integral to the story.


951: 争: Contend

This drunkard has to contend with crossing a booby trapped lawn back to his house. First, he keeps stepping on rakes in the grass (which fly up and hit him in the face) and secondly he has to avoid getting bound up in the tough hedges all around.

Again, lots of extra words in the story to confuse which primitives should appear, like house & grass (which have their own primitives). Secondly, do you think you'll remember the word 'contend' when seeing the character? Or will you see the 'bound' and the 'rake', see the guy sneaking through the garden, and wonder if the keyword is 'careful' or 'dangerous' or 'injury' or ... 'contend'????


991: 乏: Weary

Zorro has become world-weary, having seen one too many drops of cruelty in his adventures.

This feels like a sentence and not an image. How do you visualise this? Will you still have memorised the phrasing of this sentence in two years time?   "drop of cruelty"?  I just believe that stories should be more clear, more explicit, less wordy, for them to persist in memory.


1036: 泻: Diarrhea
Diarrhea flows out like water, writing off the meal that you ate last night.

Yes the primitive on the right is 'writing', and in theory 'writing off' matches that. But as with the previous story, this would only work if you memorise the sentence. It's not an image, and it's unlikely to be remembered for long enough to be useful. I would really recommend your image either includes someone writing, or seeing writing on a page ... something that is visually memorable. And try be consistent: if it's someone writing, then always see someone writing to represent that primitive.

1157: 饭: Meal

At mealtimes you eat your food against the backdrop of a TV episode or some other entertainment. Mealtimes are the only things that will drag you out of contemplation of that idea that has been eating you up!

I don't even know where to begin with the confusion this image creates. Again, it is built on being able to memorise a sentence ("drag you out" - rather than seeing something being dragged;  "against the backdrop" - rather than seeing something against something;  "eating you up" - rather than someone actually eating). You are making it really hard for yourself if your images are based on memorising sentences, rather than picturing images that stick in your mind.

1178: 脑: Brain

The brain is the only part of Fagan's flesh this is worth anything - every other part of his flesh is cruel, despicable and nasty - from his top hat down to the pit of his stomach.

Double-counting! On the left is 'flesh' and on the right is 'Fagan' - thats is enough for a story.  Yet this one also includes the components of 'Fagan' (being 'hat' & 'cruel') - which is confusing.

1212: 请: Invite

You invited a few friends round for some drinks at your house, but the words got out and telescoped out of control! Now you have a full blown house party going on, and none of your words are helping to move the resulting mound of grown-up flesh from the house.

I'm sure by this time you're seeing that certain problems keep arising. Firstly (yet again) we have too many words ... drinks, friends, house, etc. Careful these don't confuse the image when you have to piece it together yourself. And secondly, it feels like trying to memorising a sentence again!  "telescoped out of control"?  "mound of grown-up flesh"?   Even if you see a wild party in your image, how will your mind remember "telescoped out of control"?  Can't you actually put a telescope into the image?

1252: 陈: Exhibit

The museum is showing off the pinnacle of Eastern transportation development. Forget Hyundai and Toyota - the humble rickshaw is the most amazing invention that they are exhibiting!

This takes the use of 'pinnacle' and again makes it wordy, rather than visual. In my mind I always use an image of the top of a certain famous building in London as 'pinnacle' - and any scene that takes place here will be obvious to me to use that primitive on the left, simple. And if you're thinking of this story/image, how will you remember to use the word 'pinnacle', and not 'top' or 'peak' or anything else?

1275: 决: Decide

"You Decide" - at least, since the last king had his head cut off by a guilllotine! Of course, given how effective democracy has been it would have been wise in restrospect to keep the head on ice to make decisions for us when the politicans are caught up in squabbling. Alternatively, this pictures someone who can't decide between two model of guillotine: extra tall or extra sharp? While he waits his feet are getting frozen to the ground in the cold air.

There are actually two version here. The first one has the added confusion of a head (careful not to use it as a primitive), whereas the second has the ground, which also isn't one of the primitives in the image. I'm not sure the link to 'decide' in the first one is obvious enough to be memorable.

1318: 蚊: Mosquito

Mosquitos are principally found in Scotland, where the insects bother the highlanders to their hearts content.

Heart's content? So there is the heart primitive in the image? No, so careful about using the word 'heart' :-)  And how does this story help you differentiate between mosquitos? Flies? Birds? All could work as it appears - but only one is right. Make sure your image involves them sucking blood - so it's clear this is a mosquito and not a fly.

1343: 遗: Bequeath

Bequeathing your possessions to your children can be an expensive road to go down, due to inheritance tax. Much better to spend it all before you die!

I feel I'm repeating myself here, so I'll stop after this one.  You can't visualise "road to go down" - not in the way it has been used in this story. Really try to be more explicit about a road, like having all your expensive possessions lined up along the side of the road, so you are in effect bequeathing it to anyone who wants to help themselves to something.


A Better Way

Ultimately this article is just to get you to think about what makes a bad story, to make sure you don't make these common mistakes. Trust me - you want these stories to last!

Here are some of the other posts I have written on making great images, so that you can succeed in learning to read Chinese ...

• Some early mistakes - try to avoid them
• Tips & Tricks for Heisig Visualisations - one of my most popular posts
• Using Modern Art to Learn Chinese - dealing with abstract imagery

With a clear set-up, images that do the right things (as per the links here), and which don't do the wrong things (as with the examples in this post), you are ready for visuals that will last, that will take advantage of the Persistence of Memory.


Good luck!  And let me know below if you disagree with my assessments - it would be interesting to hear from you. (And yes, you can even comment if you agree with my post!)

All cars are red cars (when learning Chinese)

As you know from my previous post, I'm working through Heisig's 'Book 1'  from cover to cover before embarking on 'Book 2'. It has been really good - I'm glad I did it this way.

Parallel Streams
Along the way, I've had rather interesting "discoveries", making the process even more satisfying for me. You see, my learning Chinese has gone along three distinct streams:
  1. Podcasts (mainly ChinesePod, but also Popup Chinese) - where I learned how words & sentences sounded (based around pinyin);
  2. Flashcards (using Anki) - where I would learn vocab and sentence structure. Initially it was built around pinyin, but over time I learned some characters this way too;
  3. Heisig (here are the articles I have written on the subject) - which was all about learning characters, but focusing on the meaning and not the pronunciation.

Podcasts, for example, aren't great for learning to read; and Heisig wasn't intended for learning how to pronounce the characters. But over time, although I have focused on these streams separately, these various methods have overlapped, and things clicked into place.

So Clever
For example, the first such discovery I remember from years ago was the word for 'clever' - cōngming (聪明). By that stage I had only learned the word through audio podcasts, and actually thought it was cóngming (从明) - I guess because 'clever' and 'from brightness' made sense. Even though it turns out I was very wrong!

Red cars
When you buy a red car, afterwards it seems that every car you see is a red car. And similarly when you learn new characters, it seems that every character you see is that new one.

On my recent re-do of 'Book 1', I learned 落 (luò), which has the Heisig-keyword 'fall'. I vaguely remember learning it the first time, but I was sure that I had NOT seen it in the last couple of years since learning it.

And then another red car came past. Just a few days later, the following sentence popped up on my flashcard revision ...
     We are studying the decline of ancient Rome
     wǒmen​zài​ yánjiū​gǔ​Luómǎ​de shuāiluò​
     我们在研究古罗马的衰落

I actually remembered having done this sentence a few times before, and there it was ... 落.  I had learned this character and I had used this character. But I most certainly did not remember that character!

And a couple of weeks later, another old sentence arrived in the queue for learning ...
     What’s a pretty girl like you doing here all alone?
     xiàng nǐ zhèyàng de měinǚ zěnme huì luòdān?
     像你这样的美女怎么会落单？

That sneaky character again! It's everywhere.

Bringing it all together
I have always used different methods for whatever they each do best. And I have not forced myself to integrate these methods. Somehow with zero additional effort, things just connect themselves - something I've learned one way seems to fill a hole in what I have learned anther way. I don't force anything, which allows me to enjoy every moment of learning - nothing is contrived, nothing is done based purely on obligation. 

And along the way, I just stare at all these nice red cars as they go past ...

Heisig 2 ("Please sir, I want some more")

Well, Heisig (Book 2) is out - both for simplified and traditional characters. I have a copy - it feels great in my hands.

The home of the Heisig & Richardson books is at the Nanzan Institute (and here is a direct link, without having to navigate the menus).

First impressions
Its' funny - people imagine language learning to be such a pain, but I felt like a child at Christmas unwrapping a present. I couldn't wait to page through it.

First I went to character number 50,001 - which I had heard about. That was fun. And what a story! Then I read the introduction, and discovered the book was designed that it could be learned in conjunction with Book 1.

(Aside: For now I think it's better to do Book 1 before doing Book 2. After all, x characters a day is x characters a day, why bother flipping between books? And additionally, Book 1 has the 1000 most common characters - may as well focus on them first. IMHO.)

Not surprisingly, the characters in Book 2 are generally more complex than Book 1 - which really isn't a surprise, but it struck me while paging through the book that it was going to take quite a bit more effort to get through Book 2.

But I am looking forward to beginning with the middle to reach the end.

Preparing to begin in the middle to reach the end by re-beginning the beginning
Many of us have been waiting for a while for this. It has been interesting to watch how different people have coped with the delay before Book 2. Some people started off as huge fans of the Heisig approach, and once finished as time wore on they started picking fault with the approach. Sigh. Others decided they couldn't wait and started using other books that would take them further than 1500 characters - which I would find extremely confusing as stories start over-lapping and contradicting.

So I waited.  (I've got so much other material it was like the lack of Book 2 was holding me back.)

When it finally became clear that the time for publishing was 'soon', I picked up my Book 1, and started working through it from the beginning. I knew I had forgotten a fair share of characters from Book 1, and without doubt although I might know what a character means now, I would certainly have forgotten some of the images & stories. And of course I would need the keywords & stories for Book 2!

I figured I could manage 10 characters a day (including revision time of previously-learned ones), without impacting on all the other things I had to do, so that was my goal. Yes, 150 days to do Book 1 seems a lot, but I really didn't know for certain when Book 2 would arrive, so I was OK with that.

I am now 800 characters in, and enjoying Book 1 properly. Book 2 is waiting patiently but that's OK. It's clear that over the two years since I finished it originally, revision was definitely due!

Anki to the rescue
I've written quite a lot about flashcards, and Anki in particular. Naturally, I used Anki here too. I loaded up the free Heisig (Remembering the Hanzi) deck, and set it to 10 cards a day. As mentioned above, today I finished 800 characters, and I'm on track to finish on exactly the day I targeted.

For those who care about the details, this is my process:

 - read each day's 10 characters from the book, to get the keywords and background (and stories, when they exist)

 - 10 new characters a day, no more no less - plus as many need revising according to Anki's SRS

 - during the day, I will go through the flashcards: the new ones and the others which have come up for revision by that stage

 - if I really struggle with a character when it comes up, I might press the [soon] button to get it back to the front of the queue

 - I normally have a total number of cards of around 40-60 (including new ones) each day to review, which takes 10-15 minutes during the day - very manageable

 - I usually do it while walking to or from the office, or meetings - so in effect this takes zero time in my day :-)

And now ...
So that's it. I've noticed some interesting things about the Heisig approach, and I'll write some more hints articles soon.

Have any of you started Book 2? Or are you revising first, like me? And what about those still on Book 1 - what have you decided? Drop us a note below.