Is there a way to get the flashcards application to display the traditional character set instead of simplified ??

Would it be possible to devise a vocabulary activity whereby students could match up all three words (Hanzi/PinYin/English)?

I find that I'm fine matching pinyin to English, but it's difficult to make the Hanzi symbols stick.

I've just discovered something that has never crossed my mind about learning Chinese.

Last week, my friend bought me a Chinese book for my birthday - it's all written with characters and no pinyin.  Initially I thought "awesome - it's about time I paid some attention to hanzi".  After all the excitment of opening presents, I turned my attention to understanding what the characters on the front cover said, so I grabbed my Chinese dictionary and was immediately shocked to realise something I've never considered before about learning Chinese - how do you look up characters in a dictionary if you don't even know the pinyin to begin with?

I am actually quite shocked that I've not considered this before.

How do I even begin to look words up in a Chinese dictionary when I've only got the characters and have no idea what the pinyin is?  Is there any simple way of doing this?  How do Chinese people do this?

Not sure i this is the place to do this but in the interests of lovers of Hanzi......I found a nice little program (Hanzi Master) that really rips into Hanzi and has lots of useful related words.

Best of all, it seems to work on many computer OS flavours.

http://hanzim.com/download.php

I also use WenLin, which I find helpful

Hello Everyone,

I'm hoping we can have a discussion on the difference and advantages between the two learning methods presented in:

James W. Heisig's, "Remembering Simplified Hanzi Book 1: How not to forget the meaning of Chinese Characters"

vs.

Matthews & Matthews, "Tuttle:  Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1"

Other than the obvious, which is that Heisig's book covers 1,000 characters while the Tuttle book covers 800, what are the advantages and disadvantages to both?  Which book is better in regards to being effective in remembering the Chinese characters?

I am currently using the Tuttle book, but have never used Heisig's book.  I'm looking to get peoples opinion about the difference between the two methods (are they the same method or are they different)?

Also looking for opinions on which is better.

Thanks,

欧阳骏

A friend just told me there is a character that if you learn how to write i, you can write any other charater. But she does not know what it is. Has anyone else heard this? More importantly, does anyone know what it is?