Cordylus' study log

Study Logs
1

As I reached HSK1 it is time to post my study log.

I am Polish, English is my second language so sorry in advance for mistakes.
I have started my interest about Chinese language, because of the purchase I made from a Chinese person in august 2024. They sent me a letter written both in English and Chinese. This Chinese letter intrigued me. I really wished i could read it and due to the fact I love all kinds of symbols and characters (I already also know cyryllic, greek alphabets and also hiragana and katakana) I decided that I will learn Chinese characters. Just for fun.
I had an attempt to learn Kanji before, but due to the fact that it is tightly connected to Japanese language it is impossible to learn it without learning the whole language along it.

I started to learn characters from some other websites, apps and Heisig’s book, but it was not efficient, finally I found Hanzi Hero via youtube video criticizing Heisig’s learning method (now I agree with all these statements).

I have decided to give HH a try and here I am. It works perfectly for me. I make 10 elements per day, sometimes 15, with retention rate around 95%. In the past I was attending the mnemotechnics course so all the mnemonics systems was something I already knew well and I knew how to use it naturally.

I need to say that the main reason I have stayed here was solid and honest program of learning 90 characters for free. It ensured me that it really works and it is worth of paying the subscription (unlike the other apps that barely show anything and want money).

Due to the fact that English is my second language I need to use AI a lot to properly translate the meaning of characters. Translations Chinese>English>Polish often improperly shows the true meaning of characters. AI finds the best meanings Chinese>Polish and this is what I use. Therefore currently I am “abusing” the “your synonym” system at all the words and characters, because I put there Polish translations. Therefore I am using HH to directly learn me the Polish meanings and I mostly bypass all the English ones.
Fortunately the vast majority of mnemonics works the same way in Polish and English. For some I had to make my own (the ones that are English puns).

Thank you for making this awesome app because it really helps. For me it is a perfect way of learning hanzi.

5 Likes
2

Glad the synonyms are working out for you! I vaguely recall some other users mentioning how they do the same, inputting their native language to make things easier.

Thanks for the kind words :slight_smile: It’s interesting that the mnemonics can work roughly the same in Polish (not familiar with the language at all) :thinking: