I stumbled upon James W. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji as a teenager and really loved the imaginative method it described for memorizing Chinese characters (in their Japanese incarnation). Heisig has since collaboratively written simplified and traditional Chinese versions of this book.
Someone on Ankiweb has shared two decks (here and here that are based on Remembering Traditional Hanzi. My deck has combined, improved, and expanded those. I’ve fixed broken reference links. I’ve made it bi-directional so you need to both recall and recognize the character. There’s a little bit of Javascript that will hide blank fields. I’ve added Wade-Giles romanization which I am a fan of, though pinyin and zhuyin are also both included. I’ve added some Japanese kokuji. I’ve preferred Mainland standard pronunciations where these differ from Taiwanese Mandarin. The Story field has been left blank for your own stories. The deck currently stands at 3779 characters and counting (last updated 2025-02-14).
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Recognizing 黃, the character for “yellow”. |
Recalling 曉, the character for “dawn”. |
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Displaying all three transliterations of 鉗, “pliers”, zhuyin, Wade-Giles, and pinyin. Just edit the card template to display any or all of these as you prefer. |
峠, the Japanese kokuji for “mountain pass”. |
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