Alarmed look on a cyclops' face

Another tendency in RTH that I'm not such a big fan of, is that Heisig does not like to introduce auxiliary characters/graphemes. Matthews, on the other hand, does it all the time, even when the auxiliary character will be used only once, not to mention more frequent graphic elements. While doing Matthews' "Learning Chinese Characters" it seemed funny, maybe even slightly irritating, but now, after I've been able to compare the different approaches, Matthews' seems better. It's usually easier to create a good story that combines only two elements, whereas RTH is chock-full of three- and four-element combinations. Also with Matthews' approach I've learned some rare characters "for free". (Also Matthews usually gives more etymologically correct keywords, but that's another story).

So... characters 環 and 還 (luckily I learned Canjie and can type them without knowing how they are pronounced!). Five elements each! Both of them (frames 677 and 678, ring and give back) contain the same combination (睘) that is also a part of some other characters, in addition to being a character itself. (Pretty rare character, of course, sorting characters by frequency will place it somewhere in 9000+ place). zhongwen.com lists it as "alarmed look" and it seems more or less consistent with other dictionaries. Still, it's a tad too abstract to use as is, I should find something more visual. Another look at the character: eye ... a line, could be a nose ... a mouth ... remains of a "long robe" character... Could be a lot of things, but that large eye on top makes me think of a cyclops. All right, that's pretty memorable, so that's what I'm going to use for 睘: surprised cyclops! Now I just need a good story that involves a king and a surprised cyclops to use for ring.

Still with RTH

RTH1

Day 17

On character 681.
About 300 cards per day in Anki (including reviewing older, non-RTH cards).
When divided by the number of days, 680 characters gives about 40 characters per day. Of course this number does not actually mean anything. I already know (from Matthews) a noticeable chunk of characters, so what I'm doing is setting myself a target number of characters to learn per day (sometimes it's ten, sometimes it's thirty) but count only the characters that are new to me. So when I study 30 (new) characters it results in a total of 65-70 characters to learn. Even when I decide that I "know" a character, it still might have a different keyword and it all means that "30 new per day" is unsustainable. I'm trying to do "20 new" but it's still a lot, especially with a growing number of reviews. On the other hand the ratio is getting lower, as characters grow more complicated it seems I know less of them.

Unexpected hiatus

1000s

Day 11

The last several days were full of repetitions, with Day 8 getting as high as 460 cards per day. Other days were more manageable with about 250 cards. In any case, today I was going to do sentences numbered 550-600. And on sentence number 586 the first group of sentences keyed to HSK Basic level came to an end. I started the next group and started to meet unfamiliar characters right away. At first I thought I'd continue despite the unknown characters, after all this way I'd be able to learn them in context, in real words. But after giving it a try I've decided to can it. It does not feel right — trying to learn a sentence without having a firm knowledge of all the characters. Finally I've understood why Heisig method requires you not to work with characters while you are learning them: it's because of what happens when you meet an unfamiliar character. Either you already know all graphemes it is built of, or you don't. If you don't, you'll have to invent them, or learn the character by brute force: neither is very good. If you know the components, then the character will be in the book somewhere, so you just have to be careful not to learn it with a different "keyword" — less problematic, but still not optimal.
So I'd be pausing the "1000 sentences" project to do the Heisig book, Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1". The 1500 characters in it would probably more or less correspond to the next HSK level, and that'll give me 1000 more sentences in this database.

Could not keep my hands off Heisig

Day 7

So I could not wait and started studying RTH. I have no idea how many characters I can learn per day without drowning in reps, especially while doing 50 new sentences every day. At the moment I do the following: since I already know about 800 HSK-1 characters from Matthews^*), I just keep adding Heisig characters at the same time keeping track of how many are new to me. When I hit a "10 new" mark, I stop for a day. Usually it means about 25 characters per day for now (the characters are probably simpler at the beginning of the book, so I probably know a larger percentage of them).
Still I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep it up at the same time as the sentences. The day is still young and I already have a queue of  125 reps to do — not including the new 50 sentences!

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^*) Actually it's more than 800. Because of his numbering system (only the characters present in HSK-1 get the numbers, others get the letters like 600a, b etc.) it difficult to find the exact number, but I'd guess it's about 1000-1100.

Next project?

Some strange idea, maybe for the next project: get a movie with subtitles in Chinese. The so-called "soft subtitles", the ones that live in a separate text file. Now, read the subtitles without watching the movie. Read them with a dictionary, enter the sentences in the SRS, get to the point where it's possible to read them without a dictionary and understand what's being said...

And then watch the movie with subtitles! Should be interesting to say the least, to be able to connect the dialog to the situations at last!

The only problem is that the regular-sized movie's subtitles would probably take too long to study at my current level. So it has to be some sort of a short.An episode of TV series would be ideal, but I don't think I'll find them with soft subtitles, usually the subtitles a "burnt" into the picture.

At this point I wondered, how many lines of dialog a regular movie has, so I've looked it up. Some sources suggest an average 56 lines per page in a 110 page script, which computes to more than 6000 lines per script. Wow, that's a lot! Realistically I should be looking for a ten-minute cartoon... But fat chance finding subtitles for that...

Learning to learn

Day 6

This is the end of day six and about 300 sentences studied. It seems to go a little easier lately, which came as a surprise, as I expected it to grow harder. There could be lots of different explanations for that, but I'm thinking that maybe it has something to do with that I'm not only learning the sentences themselves, my brain also adjusts to the whole process and actually "learns to learn", and so starts to spend less effort on it.
How does it feel, to have 300 more sentences under my belt? Well, first of all it feels like the idea to start the sentences was just what the doctor ordered. Also I'm usually very skeptical myself when people start to learn using a new method and after a couple of days they blog "wow, I've learned so much!" (I've heard it a lot about Heisig's method.) Nothing against it, it is a good feeling, keeps up motivation, so those people should not be discouraged even though it sounds a bit ridiculous. But now I have some sort of that "learning a lot" feeling myself. No, I realize that the tiny number of words and grammar constructs I've picked in these six days is small enough not to make any real difference, but I also feel that the direction is right and this might actually bear fruit! The problem is that I'm not sure how many sentences I need to notice a real improvement: a thousand? Two? Five?

Count 'em

This is weird. When I started using an SRS for hanzi studies I've picked a bit of advice somewhere that explained how to do reps correctly: you get your SRS to show you the English keyword, you draw the character on your palm or in the air (or in your mind if you can) and count the strokes. Then you press a key and see the answer in your SRS that should include the stroke count for the character. That way you immediately know if you've missed a stroke, confused some graphemes that are easy to confuse (like 又, 夊, or 攵) etc. Well, I've found this advice to be very useful and up until now I was sure that it comes from Heisig books. I've had a small suspicion when having downloaded an RTH deck for Anki I didn't find a field for stroke count in it. But now that I'm reading an actual book I can't seem to find it, so probably it was somebody else.
Anyway, this was a great advice, thanks to whoever thought of that!

RTH arrived

My “Remembering Traditional Hanzi” by Heisig arrived today. It's faster than I expected and now there's a difficult decision. On one hand I'd like to start studying the RTH as soon as possible, but on the other hand I want to finish the sentences-project without too many distractions. At the moment I'm not sure I can handle the amount of studying required for sentences alone, leave alone the additional Hanzi cards.

100 and 150

Day 3

Day three was pretty tough, mostly because of mistakes made on day one and fixing them on day two. I made a mess when importing the sentences in Anki, tried to reimport them, could not determine which ones I've already done, was almost ready to delete all the sentences and start over but didn't want to lose the hundred already processed. Most of the available time on day 2 was spent fixing and ordering the sentences... and that meant that there were a lot cards left over for the next day. So on day 3 I had to do a pretty scary 411 cards. Took me 3 hours according to Anki's clock. On the plus side, now that the sentences are ordered correctly, they go from very simple to slightly more complex and are easier to study.

What's the point?

The idea of studying language from sentences is mostly popularized by the author of the alljapaneseallthetime.com, who claims that learning 10000 sentences would get you fluency. Of course I'm nowhere near fluency right now. I've studied the 800 characters for the "basic" level (actually a little more than that). I was using Matthews book Learning Chinese Characters that is like Heisig's “Remembering the ...” books: a mnemonic method to study Chinese characters.
But knowing those characters does not help me very much since I don't know the compound words built of them. And since those compounds are the majority in the modern language, most of the time I cannot read a sentence even if it uses only the familiar characters. Hence the experiment: learn 1000 sentences and see what (if anything) it'll do to my ability to read.
Now for the fun part: cram all these sentences in what's left of December...

Start of the 1000 sentences journey

Day 1

Today the project starts. I've already done 30 sentences today. I want to finish it before the New Year, so I have to do 50 sentences per day (leaving me a couple of days spare). If that does not seem like much, maybe I should mention that my SRS (Anki) already has a lot of stuff. Yesterday, for example, there were 195 cards that took me 1.9 hours to finish. (That by itself seems to be a problem: other people have databases of tens of thousands cards, but they don't spend two hours per day doing the reps...). Anyway, while doing the sentences I'll probably go easy on the other stuff, like characters, adding only a small number of them per day.
Alright, I have 20 more sentences to do!