http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130315-a-better-way-to-learn-chinese

Good stuff. If you get the original paper (from http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1599), they show the chart of decompositions where you can see each of the 3500 characters if you zoom in enough on the PDF.

I'm in the UK, and it won't let me see the link :(

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com."

no problem to access it from beijing :)

Thanks, Ximeng. I would be interested in seeing their list in another form. The graphic chart mentioned by nomadwolf needs to be enlarged by 6400% to see the individual characters.
There is a link to www.learnm.org/data, but that site is timing out.

CC, here's a link to a PDF of the website Xenming linked to: http://www.filedropper.com/bbc-futureabetterwaytolearnchinese

in the 8 pages pdf document

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.1599v1.pdf

there are no characters. where would you find them?

learninglife j.h. - top-left of page three there are some bubbles with big characters in them, if you zoom in 6400% in Adobe Reader you can see they're surrounded by little characters. As Zeppa says it's not a very convenient format to visualise the lift.

thanks ximeng!

That's pretty cool, but I just cant see the use of it when you need to zoom in so much.

I like this one. I would be very interested to have these learning structure in some form of skritter vocab lists.

As far as I understood the character tree will be provided at http://www.learnm.org/data/ The website is however currently not available.


If it is it might be possible to write a smal script to convert the list into something that can be imported by Skritter.

List 1 : Tree Root
List 2 : First Tree Level
List 3 : Second Tree Level
T.b.c

This is quite interesting; it seems so obvious that both frequency of usage and re-use of components are important, but this often seems ignored.

It shouldn't be too difficult to reconstruct their character tree, or even other ones that use different vocab lists. It would be much better to view a graph like this in a program such as Gephi, where subsets can be highlighted, filtered out, zoomed in etc. I might try construction something like this when I attack the higher HSK levels.

I think there other dimensions that they are missing out on though, such the usefulness of the characters and the relationships between them. It could be quite frustrating as a language learner to perfect 了，的，的, 本 and other very high frequency characters before you can say something as simple as hello. Also when you learn words in a subject area, it is useful to learn other related words to allow you to practice them; there's no point knowing how to only ask for directions, you should probably learn the possible responses at the same time.

Also this paper just talks about characters, but some characters aren't of much use without combining them into multi-character words too. I don't really like learning any non-word characters without learning at least one word that they can form- it's a bit like learning an English syllable in isolation ("today we will be learning how to spell 'tion' and 'uage'"). The frequency, usefulness, and components of words should be considered as they are introduced.

The Skritter Chinese 101 list does quite a good job of this; introducing a combination of re-used radicals, useful characters, and frequently used characters. It would great to have an algorithmic way of re-ordering other lists in this way though...

This frequency and relationship chart = WHAT to remember in what order
Heisig et al = HOW to remember it

Thanks for the help guys!

The word lists are now available.

http://www.learnm.org/data/
http://www.learnm.org/data/DNWorder.txt

The DNW oder list as scritter list.

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=284655513

And here's the DNW for traditional characters as a scritter list.

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=284692080

The full chart is also available as a separate PDF at http://www.learnm.org/images/fullmap.pdf

Sounds like a fun one to make a poster of...
However, most of their end-nodes are much too small... even if you print A3 size, you'll only be able to see 30 characters or so...
Still, more fun than you can shake a stick at.

Thanks to russell & monte to making the lists so fast!

It would be great to have the graphic broken down into A4 pages. I am not convinced that learning the characters in the form of Skritter lists makes sense. It bypasses the visual similarities, or am I misunderstanding it?

From America I get "Your requested host 'www.learnm.org' could not be resolved by DNS." I there another site?

Their site seems to be up and down, this week it is down. I downloaded a few but not all files from there- email me if you want them.

Hey, I am happy to know our work is useful to some of you. Please try www.learningm.org when www.learnm.org. Our website as well as our research work is still under development. One thing we are working on now is to find a method to test which characters you know but without testing you the whole set of 3500.

One day you will be able to generate your own learning materials according to your own optimal learning order. We are working towoards that and we intend to provide all these online free.