Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)
On the topic of learning to remember characters - Japanese students attempting to learn kanji (very close to traditional chinese characters) often use a book called &quot;Remembering the Kanji&quot; by James Heisig. The method devised by the author for learning the characters is truly ingenious.<p>He developed this method after moving to japan in the early 80s for a position at a research institute. In a few months, he developed and applied his method to learn english meanings (but not japanese readings) for all ~2000 standard-use kanji. When his colleagues asked him what he&#x27;d been spending all his time on, and he told them that he&#x27;d finished learning all the kanji, they didn&#x27;t believe him. Not because they didn&#x27;t believe he&#x27;d done it so quickly, but because they had never seen any foreigner ever learn more than a few hundred. After demonstrating to their satisfaction that he&#x27;d really managed to do it, he was told &quot;go write a book about how you did it&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve been working my way through RTK (with the help of anki) for several months now. The method really does work. I&#x27;m at about 1500 out of 2200. It&#x27;s getting harder the further I get, but all told I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve spent more than a hundred hours or so over the course of 4 months.<p>For chinese learners, he&#x27;s produced books on remembering Hanzi, simplified and traditional. I think if Moser had had access to these books, he might have been a bit less despondent about the task of learning the characters.