In case you are interested in seeing some of the results, I have shared them on this site: http://hskhsk.com/graphs

Hi Matthias, thanks for the link. I managed to generate some character decomposition graphs based on the information in there; I added one to the Dropbox album that I posted a link to on Skritter.

I don’t think the generated graphs are too useful with a character list the size of a whole HSK level however, as there are just too many connections and the whole thing becomes very messy. The script could be used to graphically show the composition of hand-built lists of characters however, to highlight the kind of relationships Olle was talking about int the post.

We hope you can appreciate the Sunrise Method. It is basically similar to the approach described above as well as offering sound correlation/relationship rules.

Our goal is solving learners and teachers issues with Chinese characters.

Feel free to ask any question or bring up any problem related to characters and we should have a conceptual or concrete answer and solution.

Best of luck with the process. Just reading this article and thinking about the characters in this way puts you ahead of the curve.

Our app is a free beta and we are improving on it to be more user friendly. Any feedback is welcomed.

Roger

Yes, bun sorting by radical is only one way and the most obvious one. Finding phonetically similar characters is potentially much more powerful, but also harder to achieve. There are of course ways of doing it, but since they are all automated (HanziCraft, Yellow Bridge), they are a bit crued. Still better than nothing, though.

I use the Taiwan Hanzi grades 1 – 8 deck downloadable from Anki and with this deck you can sort the Hanzi by Hanzi which is by radical. This might be one way of achieving partially what you are asking.

I have occasionally sat down with all the tree based characters to make sure I know their differences so as to avoid confusion and it has paid off well. Less failed SRS reps, more time to focus on other learning.

Same same but different is a great Thai expression that helps you think about what is different as being most important.

I find that if you are failing a character multiple times it helps to write down what it is, then when a related confused character comes up keep them side by side .. I use piece of paper to record them and then examine side by side to clarify my mnemonics better. SRS tells you this if you monitor it carefully.

Take the character for ‘sun’, Yang and you will see characters that appear to included it as a phonetic clue, but a rather wide array of other closely related phonetic sounds.

Sure, there may be some that offer a exact phonetic clue, but certainly not with a great deal of clarity. After all, Chinese written language actually represents many different spoken dialects – Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, and a few others.

Yale University created this thesis a long time ago and it is nicely presented in the intro to Reading and Writing Chinese. But after fooling around with the text for 25 years, I have had to scrap the intro as being ivory tower nonsense.

Phonology is very, very important as Chinese has so many homonyms. So when I am looking at phonology relations I look at what has a ‘true sound clue’ and what does not.

I nightly work through reviewing all the characters in one phonological pronunciation (in a Chinese-English dictionary) to see what I do use correctly and what I am confused about.

That little ‘sun’ character (yang2), is part of soup, which is tang3: is part of marsh, which is dang4; is part of saucer which is dang4; is part of intestine, which is chang2; is part of harm, which is shang1.

And yes here are several characters that do just use the yang, but the four tones may vary.

If you are wondering how I did up this kind of info, I use a copy of Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. And this book was also published by Far Eastern Publications, Yale University.

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What I am trying to say here is that characters don’t always work as sound clues. You really have to keep asking yourself what you recognize as having a ‘yang’ sound and which of the 4 tones you know are right.

A student dictionary, like Far East 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary has just 14 listings for ‘yang’ and a few in each of the 4 categories. That is not a lot for bedtime review.

But be warned that while some pronunciations are extremely easy with 2 or 3 characters, others are nightmarish (beware of shi).