The Mnemosyne Project

The Hanzi learned by Chinese pupils; divided according to school years 1-6

Categories (examples)
SY1aH: school year 1 part 1 Hanzi (for learning to read)
SY1bPY: school year 1 part 2 PinYin (for learning to write)

In the zip file you find the hanziSY1-3.mem and hanziSY4-6.mem files which you can directly add to your .mnemosyne directory.

These flashcards contain the shapes used in Cangjie IME (input method editor) and the corresponding letters that they correspond to.

To install, you should move the directory cangjie_shapes to your .mnemosyne directory.

Cangjie is an IME that could have several advantages of pinyin input if you can learn the system. One of the advantages, for English speakers, is that you don't need to know how to pronounce a character to input it. Another is that you will not generally have to select characters from an alternatives list as you type, making typing faster.

There are several resources on the web for learning the actual rules and principles of Cangjie, but this set of cards may be helpful in remembering the auxilliary forms in the beginning.

All of the images were taken from http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Howto_learn_to_type_in_Chinese_with_Cangjie_input_method. There was also a set of images all of the auxilliary forms together there that might be useful.

These flashcards come from the lessons in the Practical Chinese Reader. They include simplified and traditional characters. I'm very interested in your input, including errors/typos you may find. Textbooks 1-3 are here.

These flashcards come from the lessons in the New Practical Chinese Reader. They include simplified and traditional characters. I'm very interested in your input, including errors/typos you may find. Textbooks 1-4 are here, textbook 5 will be ready soon.

This database is for helping people who can read Traditional Chinese
characters learn to read Simplified Chinese characters and vice versa.

It contains the characters from the Jianhuazi zong biao (last revision
published in 1986) split into several categories:

Part 1 - includes 350 characters which are simplified in a unique way
Part 2 - includes 132 simplifications which can be applied to other characters
Part 2b - includes 14 radicals and components (also applicable to
other characters
Appendix - includes the cases where a simpler variant of the character
should be used instead of a more complex variant

The Part 3 (characters which are simplified according to the rules set in
Part 2) are not included here to keep the database relatively small. They
can all be inferred from the simplifications already contained here.

The tradsimp.xml file is for people who want to LEARN traditional forms,
the simptrad.xml file is for people who want to LEARN simplified forms.

These flashcards contain Chinese/English sentence and pinyin.

It's been said that it's best to study a language using sentence flashcards,
instead of individual words, but it can be difficult to find good sets of
entire sentences with tranlsations and pronunciations... so I built this set.

The pinyin may have some errors. It was generated programatically by searching
the CEDICT dictioanry.

These sample sentences are broken up into two files:
zh-en_sentences.xml:
I find this one more useful. The questions in this file are Chinese
sentences. The answers are pinyin pronunciations and English
translations.

en-zh_sentences.xml:
This is more for practicing writing. The questions contain English and
pinyin, and the answer is the Chinese expression.

Each file is broken up into a number of categories labeled as described here:

HSK level:
All of the sentences came from sample sentences intended to describe a
particular word. HSK level (in the category name) signifies the HSK
level of the word this sentence describes. Note that "HSK level" is
1-4, ... I have no idea how that corelates to actual HSK scores, but
since HSK scores range from 1-11, I know they are not equivalent.

Source of words and HSK "level":
http://www.chinese-forums.com/vocabulary/

Limited to:

Sentences are then broken up further into 5 categories based on the HSK
level of the words those sentences contain.

This is a search of all characters in each level, including the
characters that loner words are composed of. This is why even HSK
level 4 sentences can contain sentences in "limited 1."

For example, 作主 (zuo4zhu3) is an HSK level 4 word. It contains 2
characters which both appear in other HSK level 1 words, and so the
sample sentence for 作主 (assuming that sentence contains no other
difficult words) might appear in the category "HSK 4; limited 1;"

Since some characters are not found in any of the HSK level sets, there
are categories containing "limited 5."

Part number:
Within each HSK level there are many sentences. I've divided them up
into parts so that the maximum size would be somewhere around 500
sentences.

Before doing so, I sorted by length of the sentence. This means that
sentences in categories labeled "part 1" will be shorter (and
presumably gramatically simpler) then sentences in categories labeled
"part 4."

The sentences in this collection are the example sentences on dict.cn. I
couldn't find specific licensing information associated with the example
sentences, so, if there's a problem, someone let me know and I'll gladly take
it down. I'm under the impression that dict.cn was built with a free
share-and-share-alike corpus... it being web-based and all anyways.

The sentences are freely available on the internet anyways, so, if I do have to
take this down, I'll gladly share the code I used to generate the lists.

contributed by:
Brian Vaughan
http://brianvaughan.net/
nairbv AT yahoo DOT com

I've added a Mnemosyne export feature to my Chinese vocabulary and flashcards site: http://shengci.wojas.nl/mnemosyne

The system uses simple templates to generate the cards, so you get to choose what gets displayed on which side! The default templates show traditional and simplified characters on the front and pinyin, definition and per character definitions on the back.

It currently contains the following vocabularies:

• Integrated Chinese level 1
• Shifting Tides
• Crossing Paths
• A New Text for a Modern China (definitions are in Dutch)
• Language through Culture (reader at Leiden University, The Netherlands)
• HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi 汉语水平考试)
• and a few others

(TODO: add proper references here)

Go to: http://shengci.wojas.nl/mnemosyne

Includes a few sounds and pictures.

You will need simplified Chinese fonts, though a unicode font is recommended because of the pinyin tone marks, which are not properly implemented in all GB fonts.

hsk-chinese.xml -- Characters and words from the HSK set
top-chinese-characters -- Most frequent 2000 Chinese characters

hsk-chinese-(traditional).xml -- The traditional character version of the HSK database

The HSK is the standardised Chinese proficiency test and the characters in the HSK tables are both needed to pass the test and considered important by the Chinese government. It is a common way to gauge progress. Learning the most frequent characters first is obviously also a good supplemental strategy.

NOTE:
Mnemosyne currently doesn't support items belonging to multiple categories. Since there is considerable overlap between the two sets, they are separated. You can import both of them into your database, but the order in which you import them determines which categories in your database will be incomplete. For example, if you load the hsk database first, then your most frequent character categories will only contain the characters which are not contained in any of the other categories.