There is a list on the web of 20,000 sentences in Chinese. The list contains hanzi, pinyin, and the English translations. Could this be the Holy Grail of Chinese practice? The supercool thing is it would give you twice as many sentences as Khatzu reckons you need to be good, but you avoid the extremely time consuming process of sentence mining! All the sentences have already been mined!
www.mnemosyne-proj.org/node/115
www.mnemosyne-proj.org/files/chinese_sentences.zip
I am terrible with software and what not, but does anybody know how to take this extremely long list and put it into a digestible Anki file? I tried doing it myself by copying the hanzi sentence and pasting it into one side of an Anki card. On the ‘reverse’ side of the Anki card, I copied and pasted the pinyin, and then below that, the English translation. My brain went mushy doing all that copying and pasting. Surely there is a faster way of making an Anki file out of this bad boy?

I was wondering if I should learn Chinese in high school along with Japanese on my own.
I heard that some Chinese characters and kanji look the same, but have different meanings. Is this something I shouldn’t worry about?

Thanks again!

There are various sources of character splits around, eg TKAnn, Matthews, and of course Harbaugh and Heisig.

Great stuff! Will link to this page as soon as I write my next post over at the HUB.

Question: Would it be too much trouble to add the simplified versions too? like 腦(S脑) I know the mnemonics will get screwed up here and there, but people will 1) be able to enter a simplified character, look at the traditional version and hopefully try to learn THAT TOO (which I actually think is a pretty good idea).

taeglich.chinesisch-trainer.de/index.php?alle=2

Until now, 1067 characters are decomposed and explained (sorry, in German).<<<

I *think* I landed there from something on ChinesePod.com, but I am not entirely sure. Nevertheless it is a great project, but I can’t possibly understand the German language. Ohhhhh, I DO understand a bit of German: I mean using German instead of the slightly more common English?? (My impression is that Germans are VERY good at English.)

I’m posting all over the shop cos I can’t quite navigate my way around your site as effectively as I should be.
I dunno if this is the right place to post this, but if you’re into Hanzi mnemonics, you could do a lot worse than try Tuttle’s ‘Learning Chinese Characters volume 1’. It’s by Allison and Laurence Matthews and it rocks. They have lots of strange stories to get characters in your head and they even have mnemonics for remembering the tones. Thus if a character is first tone, you imagine a giant in the silly story, but if the character is a falling tone (4th tone) you imagine a dwarf doing the actions.
Eventually, your whole dang head is like a crowded fairy tale of dwarves, giants, fairies and teddy bears doing everything from fending off pirates to delivering medicine to kings and queens. It’s like a G-rated version of the Woodland Critters South park, but damnit it sticks in your head really well. The first volume is about 800 characters, and I emailed the publishers and they say they are coming out with volume two in 2009. I await it with great excitement!

taeglich.chinesisch-trainer.de/index.php?alle=2

Until now, 1067 characters are decomposed and explained (sorry, in German).

So, are you implying that “eternity” would be considered to use “one” as a component? The only relationship that I could perceive to “one” is “one drop”, but I suppose there might be some geneological relationship that is not intuitively obvious to the casual observer. Is that the case?

Fluent Japanese natives who can’t do simple arithmetic. (if idiots can do it, hey, you can do it too!)

Least Motivating (kanji wise):

Top female announcer COULDN’T WRITE THE KANJI FOR お風呂.. no kidding. In fact she was stumped. Boy that must have been embarrasing for her.