Character Insanity @ 88Groups

John, that's an interesting point that you brought up regarding overloading on a primitive to the point of confusion. I have done very little character study, so I certainly can't say which method would work better for me. Regardless of which approach is used, I'm sure I'm going to have fun and learn a ton.

Bazza, actually I had thought about it, but too busy with my studies. I really like doing Character Breakdowns and such, and never really had a good way to do it on here, but when I heard about 88Groups I thought I should do something with Characters. JohnB beat me to it, but I am sure there is room for other ideas, yet I don't want there to be too many lists and such. Will just have to see how much I can contribute without stealing the show... ha ha.

Thanks John, count me in. Well see what happens. As for automation - one way would be this - if you click on the 5 hypertext characters that you post, it takes you to the dictionary. From the dictionary you can add these characters to your personal vocab list and tag them 88 or something to keep them separate. Then you can use the electronic flash card feature in vocab to study them. The only problem is, the "add to vocab" function of the dictionary has not worked since it got hit by the "iceberg" and nobody seems in any hurry to fix it. Does this make sense? I believe it does. Im sure this will be one of the more useful and most popular groups.

Another thought: how about theme days? Here's what I was thinking:

Easy Monday: characters in the top 500 most common.

Terrible Tuesday: characters between 2500 and 3000.

Humpday Wednesday: characters between 1000 and 2000 -- hard enough that you might now know all of them even as an higher level student, but common enough that you need to know them.

Low Stroke Thursday: Characters with 8 or less strokes.

High Stroke Friday: Characters with 16 or more strokes (these stroke numbers can be adjusted once I see how many would fall into each group).

Primitive Saturday: I'll pick a primitive character (like 也) and then five characters that contain that primitive.

Free-for-All Sunday: Random characters, picking up some that don't fall in the other groups, perhaps.

If anyone has any other ideas, I'd be happy to hear them. If this sounds good, I'll start it with Monday's post. :)

Wow, I go to sleep and come back to find such great responses. Thanks, everyone, for your enthusiasm! Now for the individual responses:

RJBerki, the percentages are in raw character count -- it would be somewhat equivalent to saying that if you know the letter "c", you can read 1/26 of the English language :). However, since the characters do tend to bring their meanings into the compounds they're part of (though not always), and many words are use individually, being able to simply recognize all of the characters in a newspaper is a pretty big step. The compounds are what's important, though.

Goulniky, 不用谢，同舟共济吧！That's one of the cool things about 88Groups -- I'm very much "scratching my own itch" and working on learning to actually write the darn things as I go through them, and I can make it public and we can grow a community around it and others can benefit and learn. That's pretty neat, I think. As for the expanding circle of related words, I think its a great idea. I'm going to figure out a way to automate it (otherwise it would be unmanageable as the list got longer), then I'm going to do it.

Bryan, I actually followed that method myself (using the McNaughton book) when I learned characters initially, but I found that I very often tripped myself up having some many similar looking characters thrown at me all at one. Other people love it, though. Perhaps I could do a "Primitive Day" where I pick a primitive and choose five characters that contain it, or something like that. I'm open to suggestions like these! This is very much an experiment!

jimkahl, mrdtait, and LadyLuck, it's great to have you onboard. The first mix of characters was a little tough (and the second one isn't that easy either!), but we'll cover some easier characters too! Regardless, though, I hope you get something out of the posts, and if you have any questions about anything, post in the comments :).

RonInDC, great idea about the beginners group. I hope someone takes that up. Also, regarding group length, you're absolutely right the groups don't have to be long-term. In fact, we envision lots of special purpose groups that flare up, serve their needs, and then are put to bed. But since that content will always be there for people to access, it will continue to serve an education role long into the future.

Great idea regarding the beginning group, Ron. Maybe it could start with the 250 characters in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Chinese-Characters-Everyday-Vol/dp/0804833591/ref=sip_rech_dp_10

LadyLuck, jimkahl & mrdtait- maybe someone can start a beginner character group. Also, there's nothing that says these have to be long-term groups. I'm thinking of opening one up for street sign characters, for example. Would only administer it for a week or so.

goulnicky, 我也觉得是这样。 天天学习，好好向上。

i just joined the group too. i would love to learn along with you all but i'm a little scared by the first 5 characters... i'll probably just lurk (not post much) but hopefully i can learn something! jimkahl & mrdtait, i'm with you two! ;-)

I think these characters are too advanced for myself but I will try and follow as best as I can and time permits

想起一个好主意。。。

起一个好主意毕竟简单，挑战就是每天编报道! 谢谢你的努力

great idea. while this really is stuff for someone that is more advanced than I am, I will be there daily, but I won't be able to contribute much at this point. I'm sure it will still be useful for me. At this point, I consider myself to be a baby whose curiosity just can't get enough information and this will be another great source of stimulation.

The group is so going to rock, I wish I'd thought of it. ;)

Lunetta- That's what I had in mind. I have some thoughts on how I'll approach each lesson then share with the group, and see what happens.

Cool! Count me in! I've seen plenty of frequency lists out there such as Jun Da's, but can't help but wonder if we would be better off progressing in a non-random, somewhat systematic fashion (even if only within that list of 3000) based on radical or other character components. For example, if we lumped:

#15: 也

#30: 他

#118: 地

#846: 施

#1124: 池

#1330: 她 - [yikes what does that say about Chinese society if this is number 1330 versus number 30)

#1382: 驰

#2341: 拖

Or we could follow some progressions mapped out by people such as McNaughton or T.K. Ann in their fine books.

What do you think?

Hey JohnB, I'm there too. I luvs Chinese characters, and actually for the individual learning of them too... as you can find meaning in just the character, usually multiple meanings you didn't realize from only studying words. Cool. Already posted there. :)

RJ, maybe that's something the members of the group can explore in the comments to each lesson. In the beginning it's going to be difficult with only a few characters but soon it'll be possible to find many interesting combinations between the characters learned. I think it would be a good way to engage all members of the group and to help us learn the characters more efficiently.

I'm all for it too, never mind what it really covers, when we're done with the first 3000 let's move on to the next 2000, and make sure we pickup as many compounds along the way as possible.

what I always wanted to do was grow the circle of compounds exponentially from the characters already studies, I once suggested that Wenlin develop that feature - they already have 'all words containing that char', I would add -all words made up of chars I already know.

Johnb,

when they make statements like these 3000 comprise 99.2% I assume that includes all of the multiple character words that can also be formed with those 3000? That would mean tha you cant read 99.2% of what is written unless you also know the combinations. Many, if not most words, do involve more than one character and are completely different from the individual meanings of the characters. If I learn the first 500 cards in the tuttle set for example - each comes with 4 combos or a total of 5 words which gives me a vocab of 2500 words. When they say you can read the paper with 2000 word vocab do they mean characters or words? I shudder to think how many possible combinations are in those 3000. It is still a valid thing to do but I am just wondering if it wouldnt be more valuable to learn 500 - then the combos - then the next 500 etc. Or do we pick up the combos in our lessons and they stick well because we know the individuals? Just some thoughts.

Great idea. I'm all over it.

Goulniky, my selection methods are totally 科学! :) What I did was take the "Character frequency list of Modern Chinese" from Professor Jun Da's website (he's a professor of linguistics at Middle Tennessee State University), and took the first 3000. Then I grabbed a random number sequence from random.org to shuffle the list. I'm now going to proceed down the shuffled list, five at a time. All of the characters will come from that original list of 3000, and the difficulty should be fairly random, with some common and some uncommon characters in each lesson. According to Jun Da, the first 3000 comprise ~99.2% of all modern written Chinese. I figure most of what falls outside of that is such low frequency that learning it without an explicit need is a waste of time.

I just joined too. Let's learn and relearn characters together. Your collective character knowledge easily puts a Chinese (me for instance) in shame. Computer dependence has caused many of us to lose our grip of character knowledge and writing.

I'm there too. can you let us know how you go about selecting the first 3000? Are you going by some accepted frequency list, HSK or otherwise? uh, 廖 is maybe not the most obvious, has 广 (guǎng) as radical which is high frequency but 翏 (liào) as phonetic which isn't, and 廖 itself... well you probably know s.o. by that name

Cool, I'm there. :)

Man2Toe, cheers!

Goulniky, where I can I'll provide example words (though some characters just don't have words, like 廖 in the first lesson), and I'm going to continue pointing to the ChinesePod dictionary so that I can take advantage of the dictation and examples that are there. Point taken regarding organizing the groups -- it's something we'll have to take a look at.

Henning, that's true, it's not really for beginners. It's actually something of a selfish thing for me -- I need to learn to write all these characters, most of which I already can read, but I don't want to overwhelm myself so five per day seems like a good rate. The 3000 character limit is artificial (though after we get through it I'd be happy to keep going), but the time is just a function of doing five per day, five days per week -- it'll take just a little more than two years at that pace.

Indeed, very good idea!

However. it seems to be directed at an Intermediate lesson, which is fine with me. It is certainly not a starter for newbies.

Suggestion: Maybe you even proivde sample audio sentences for dictation?

BTW: Why is it artificially limited to 3000 and two years?

I always have an issue with studying individual characters since they hardly ever appear alone, but if you approach them in context it's fine, i.e. always make sure to list a few words containing that character; and spend more time space on compounds than single hanzi.

on the topic of 88groups now, I notice that the list of groups is fast growing, so I guess you should start organizing them in categories, use tags to describe and search them etc., otherwise the list will soon become unusable (which in a sense would show success but still)

Great Idea Mr JohnB.