Most Common Chinese Characters course suggestion

Community-Created Courses Chinese
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The Most Common Chinese Characters courses are very popular. Unfortunately, they are all in Simplified Chinese. Is it possible to create the same courses using Traditional Chinese? All of us in Taiwan and Hong Kong would greatly appreciate it.

All the characters are probably on some Excel spreadsheet or Word document. I believe Word has a function in which you can highlight all the Characters and convert them all from Simplified to Traditional characters with just one click.

Please consider it. Thank you.

Phil

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@phil2017, it’s a good idea. How extensive should the course be? 100 characters, 250, 500, or more?

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I’ve found frequency lists of Chinese characters (in simplified) here:
http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/

Using the "character frequency list of Modern Chinese " and adjusting it to Traditional writing, I’ve created a sample course with the top 20 most used characters.

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@oli2904 ~ I hope all is well with you. Thanks for this small course. I only had time for the first 5 characters tonight, but will finish the rest tomorrow. Thanks for yet another good course. (Seems like “old times” studying again with you.) Welcome back to Memrise ! :smile:

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@oli2904 ~ I couldn’t sleep knowing I still had characters to translate, so I continued on with this short course. It looks like you have the Simplified character for “lai” instead of the Traditional one. It is coming up as 来 instead of 來. Maybe I will go to sleep after all. Blessings.

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Hi @pdao, all’s well here, hope the same counts for you! The course for now is still quite raw, looking for ways to make it more interesting/easier to learn, any ideas are welcome :slight_smile:

Ah the first mistake :stuck_out_tongue: I’ve corrected the hanzi.

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I suggest looking at this source: http://www.learnm.org/indexE.php

Learning order:
http://www.learnm.org/data/DNWorderT.txt
人,1
一,2
口,3
的,4
日,5
白,6
土,7
又,8
言,9

Decomposition:
http://www.learnm.org/data/decompT.txt
行 彳丁
土 土
圓 口員
痿 疒委
旁 立方
瓣 辛瓜
簸 箕皮
誡 言戒

I especially like this. It shows you related characters. I often confuse characters and this is very helpful with this.
http://www.learnm.org/data/AdjListT.txt
虎 , 彪 , 遞 , 處 , 唬 , 號
公 , 松 , 翁 , 訟 , 蚣 , 頌
蜀 , 燭 , 獨 , 屬 , 觸 , 濁
兼 , 賺 , 嫌 , 謙 , 廉 , 歉
免 , 晚 , 挽 , 冕 , 勉 , 娩
兆 , 挑 , 逃 , 姚 , 跳 , 桃
元 , 冠 , 完 , 玩 , 寇 , 頑
咸 , 堿 , 喊 , 鹹 , 減 , 感
寧 , 擰 , 濘 , 檸 , 嚀 , 獰

You can combine all three lists to make a very good character course.

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@oli2904 ~ 謝謝您 ! Glad to hear all is well. I’m always game for any of your offerings as they are always very well constructed and a joy to learn from.

There are way too many Simplified courses on Memrise. We need some good, quality Traditional ones, so I hope this one can expand in whatever way you (or anyone else) thinks it should to be beneficial.

Personally speaking, I’m always game for anything beyond basic vocabulary drills or frequency lists (but I know that was not the intent of the OP).

Once people learn to make sentences (even basic ones) the real fun (and challenges) with Mandarin begins ! :wink:

But I guess one needs to learn to walk before one can attempt to run, so frequency lists are helpful (as long as they are Traditional-based, not Simplified).

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Hi @Arete_Hime, thanks for the resources! The learning order includes radicals, which are very helpful to learn but I don’t know of an easy way to type them (ex. 辶 chuò/to walk). Decomposition and related characters can be added to the new word/character review page, though most will glance over this quite quickly.

Hi @pdao , you’re quite right regarding the abundance of simplified courses. I’ve come across confused learners not knowing there was a choice. The emblem for Traditional and Cantonese courses is kinda ill-chosen (the PRC flag which assumes Simplified), a Taiwanese/HK flag respectively would be a better match.

I’ve made a few attempts to create sentence based courses but the platform doesn’t give you much room to work in. For one, the multiple choice boxes are limited in size and will break up a sentence in 2 or more lines making it quite difficult to read and answer in time.

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Really ? I never found this to be an issue. I have a couple of dialogue-based courses with rather lengthy sentences, and they seem to display properly, on both the web and iOS versions (I don’t know about Android since I don’t use that platform).

Since I try not to promote my own courses in public, I will shoot you a PM with some info on what I am referring to.

And yes, I think the flag should be changed on non-Simplified courses, since that is sort of equivalent to the situation with English (UK) and (US) courses which display different flags.

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I’ve checked your course “Conversational Mandarin Lessons” to see if there’d be a difference. An example sentence is: 你們都學中文, 那麼你們都是學生. For me, this sentence is divided over 3 lines in a multiple-choice question (showing answers in 2 columns). It might be due to the browser version I’m using (Firefox for Ubuntu 51.0.1 [64-bit]). You’ve made some excellent courses btw! (and plenty of them!)

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Yeah, that was one of the courses I was going to mention. (Guess I don’t need to PM you now).

If you go to some of the lesons further on in the course (say from about lesson 15 or higher) you will see that the dialogues become longer. Sometimes ridiculously long (but I enjoy them). They display properly for me using Firefox and Chrome on the web version and also fine on the iOS version. The only real issue seems to be that the attribute box has a finite number of characters it can hold, and often times the sentences exceed that length. Fortunately I only store pinyin in the attribute box, so it’s truncation is irrelevant to learning how to read or write the characters (which is the main focus of the course).

I had to Google “Ubuntu”, since I had never heard of it before. That might be your issue (or at least how Memrise interfaces with it).

While your dabbling with the “Most Common Chinese Characters” may never include sentences (just frequency list words) I hope some day (if you ever feel so inclined) you can try to create a sentence-based course with Traditional characters. I think there is a very great need for good quality courses like this on Memrise (since there is more to Chinese language learning than just HSK or TOCFL vocab drills).

And you, dear friend, are the most gifted course creator I have ever come across. If anyone can do something like this, it would be you !

Good luck with whatever you are working on, be it learning or teaching; and whether it be Mandarin, Japanese, or anything else that you are involved with. :smiley:

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Hi oli2904,

Sorry for the late response. Flu. I think Ben has a course for the most common 500 and then there’s one for 501 to 1000, and another up to 1500. Since he has all those characters already on spreadsheets, it would be great to convert all his courses from simplified to traditional characters.

So what’s the next step? Contact Ben to see if he’s interested?

Thanks,
Phil
(in Taiwan, trying to improve Chinese, so can provide therapy in Chinese for children with Autism)

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Hi oli2904,

Thanks for setting this up. Please keep adding more. Maybe 250 or 500 characters per course? People will really appreciate it!

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Hi @pdao, you’re giving me way too much praise :slight_smile: Sorry for the late reply, I just got back to Taiwan and am settling in a bit. I’ve installed Windows on my otherwise linux laptop and will give the sentence courses another try.

Hi @phil2017, I’ll continue to add to the course. At the moment I’m still thinking about the best way to structure it, the different fields/attributes, perhaps also add words that make use of the new characters learned? The best way to learn characters is to write them, the MOE website has a great tool for this, perhaps could add a multimedia page explaining how to use it. I’m not familiar with Ben’s course, so I looked up most used character lists and added a decomposition field as @Arete_Hime suggested.

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Finished the second set of 20 characters. Added a compound example and classifier field. The structure now is:

  1. The actual character
  2. key description
  3. Description (for each common form)
  4. Pinyin (with tone marks and numerals)
  5. Decomposition of the character
  6. Compound example
  7. Classifier (for nouns)
  8. Audio file
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@oli2904 ~ very impressive, thank you ! Working my way thru the new set of characters now. Once again, you created something of true value for all learners on Memrise. 謝謝您 !

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@pdao, 不客氣! The hardest part is finding the simplest (preferably a single word) explanation/association of the character (Hanzi). Any input in this regard would be most welcome. If you see an entry that becomes confusing because of this (or any other part for that matter), do let me know。 Added another set of 20, I think my daily visits to coffee shops creates a boost :grin:

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@oli2904 ~ I hope all is well with you, and wow, thank you again for your efforts with this course !

I think we both know that there is really no such thing as a “simplest explanation/association of the character (Hanzi)”. It is a daunting task at best, and more than likely, a fruitless quest quite often. The language is rich with symbolism, meanings (archaic and modern), geographical nuances, etc. A word or definition that might seem good to one person, often may not to another. That is to be expected, and is why teaching/learning methods are so diversified when it comes to tackling Chinese.

Over the past year or so I have asked my wife for some additional information on several words/characters from your various courses and her input basically agrees with what you have generously shared. I will continue to pursue that mindset with this and any other course(s) you might offer. For what it is worth, I think you are an excellent teacher (and I don’t praise people or their efforts either lightly, or insincerely).

I will jump on the 20 new characters after I finish downloading a ton of audio files today. I am so backlogged on that task… :weary:

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@pdao, you’re quite right about that, yet associating a meaning with a character that traverses compounds should be ideal. But as you said, often these associations get lost over time and no longer make sense.

Today I started wondering about the decomposition field in the course, is actual decomposition, or Changjie, easiest (@Arete_Hime )? For example:
要 (yāo/yào):

  • Decomposition: 覀女
  • Changjie: 一田女

(Cangjie is a keyboard input method, based on the graphological aspect of the characters)