I've been studying Cantonese and Mandarin for awhile but I've never tried to learn to read and write. I've bought countless books but just couldn't get started.

I downloaded the sample of this book, ordered a copy and subscribed to this site. "Remembering the Hanzi" along with Skritter are a very good match and I've finally found a way to get started.

Anyone else here using this book?

Hey hkboy, Remembering the Hanzi was actually slated to be uploaded much later, but so many people requested it that we accelerated it's release. My guess (without querying the backend) is that it's a very popular textbook.

I personally haven't tried studying from it, but we have the two books sitting on the couch behind me, so I don't have any excuse except laziness. :) My laoshi use A New China, which is more than enough Chinese for a day!

Thanks George,

It seems to be a good book. I've "studied" the first 2 lessons and I'm practicing them on Skritter. I'm going to keep at it.

RTH is pretty good, partly because the mnemonics are structured very carefully rather than having a more scattergun approach. And I think that this kind of careful structure is why it works. (Jonathan Spence's book "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci" has some nice stuff in it about mnemonic methods of learning Chinese, by the way).

Having said this, I'm not 100% convinced by the purist approach that Heisig advocates in the introduction - that is, his insistence that you should only use RTH and nothing else, whilst you are working through it - even if I can see the rationale for it. I worked through RTH last year, and it's been useful, and I'll probably get hold of book 2 when it comes out. But I'm glad to have Skritter to use as my primary study tool.

All the best,
Will