This is amazing! Thank you for putting it together.
The show is called Office Girls. Friend in my Mandarin class recommended it as being fairly simple once you get past some office-related vocabulary. “Rich kid has to pose as poor kid and work his way up from the ground floor of dads business” story.
Thanks! I've actually watched that one a while ago but it's not available on Netflix in my region so couldn't get the subtitles to add it to the list. The version on youtube only has hardsubs, unfortunately.
Fantastic! Thank you for sharing. Do you actually practice them? Or what's your approach to using them? I add vocabulary to Pleco faster than the space repetition shows them so it doesn't seem like an effective way to use them.
Also searches don't seem to access stored vocab first so it doesn't actually make searching that much faster either.
It depends. Sometimes I really learn all the words before watching, sometimes I just watch something without any preparation.
Adding too many words to Pleco SRS over a short time doesn't work well, you will get overwhelmed with reviews quickly. So if I decide to study the words for a tv show I take some time between the episodes to prepare for the next ones, depending on how many words I have to learn it could be days or weeks.
I'm also guilty of this. Related to this thread, some years ago I made a puzzle game with Chinese characters where you get a bunch of components and try to combine them to as many characters as possible: http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/
It's not just yak shaving though, some programming skills can be really useful when dealing with vocab lists etc..
I've also learned the first 1500 characters using this book, not in one month though.
The method works but has some problems. Maybe the biggest problem is that it completely ignores pronunciation. It does not help you remember the pronunciation and it does not make use of the sound components of the characters. Most characters are composed of one component which hints at the meaning and another which hints at the sound, e.g. 青 is the sound component in 情清輕請, all of those are pronounced qing (with different tones). Usually it's not that obvious, this is just a good example. The left component in those characters would hint at the meaning.
The Heisig method instead creates a mapping between a keyword, which is derived from a single meaning of the character or invented for components which don't have a meaning, to the written form of the character using mnemonics. This works well in the beginning but once you reach a more advanced stage where you know how to say something in Chinese but maybe forgot how to write the characters this doesn't help you much since the pronunciation is not incorporated into the mnemonics.
When you are just starting out and learning all those characters seems like an unmanagable task, the Heisig method can provide a good structure to quickly "learn" many characters (keyword<>writing). It's also fun to come up with stories and images. But in the end it can only provide a basic scaffold for learning more meanings, pronunciation, words etc.
Heisig's method is for kanji, which have different pronunciation depending on which word they are in, since Japan imported the meaning but not always the pronunciation. Note that the book is called "A Complete Course in How Not to Forget the Kanji", not "How to Read". All he's doing is endowing the character with an image that conveys a commonly used meaning and how it is written, so that you can remember it. Actually reading or pronouncing a text is out of scope.
If you're learning hanzi you can take advantage of the pronunciation hints. Plus the fact that modern hanzi generally have only one pronunciation per [traditional] character, and only one syllable per, too. The characters made so much more sense learning Chinese.
The big advantage of flashcards in Pleco is the integration with the whole app. If you use the Pleco Reader, you can add new cards directly from the Reader. You can also create cards from dictionary entries and during studying check other dictionaries for each card, play the audio etc.. Some people prefer Anki, but personally I would recommend the Pleco Flashcards for learning Chinese.
I'm doing something similar but instead of reading native books I'm still sticking to readers with increasing difficulty so that I don't have to look too many words up while reading. Since the readers also include word lists I can learn almost all of the words beforehand.
Thanks for the links! Really interesting to see other projects working in this direction. I'll try picking up some of those readers too :) I'm trying to learn both simplified and traditional (but my simplified is pulling ahead right now because of all the work I'm putting in on The Three Body Problem).
I already read this page. It does not address my question. My interrogation is around the fact that mixing several dictionaries in the same page is considered a derivate product or not. Intuitively it is, so I don’t understand how this does not break the ND clause of some source material. So they must be some non obvious legal loophole I want to know about, or this website is breaching some licences.
It's a fair question. The Ministry of Education's interpretation for its use of ND clause scopes specifically to the individual items, not the compilation:
"The use of words, radicals, strokes, glyphs, phonetic readings and interpretations of the individual items in the Revised Mandarin Dictionary may not be modified or converted into simplified forms.
However, the change of the code according to the contents of the reference table provided by the Ministry of Education, as well as modifications unrelated to the specific items in the Revised Mandarin Dictionary specified above, are deemed as outside the scope of prohibition of modification."
Thank you very much for your reply and for the source link. This is indeed different from my previous understanding, which was based mostly on English/French CC explanations website.
I'm surprised but pleased by the clause concerning the transformation in simplified characters, and all in all this is less restrictive than what I thought.
