So you see, it IS possible to learn the meanings of the characters without learning their pronunciation, and that is exactly what Heisig’s book empowers you to do – I simply have not started doing this yet because I prefer to spend my time listening to the spoken language intensively in an effort to reach a level where I can understand authentic material as quickly as possible, and I am getting there fast after only three months.
This method is quite effective, but a bit time-consuming. I have since been learning primarily using podcasts from ChinesePOD, as they already come with a transliteration and translation below the phrases and include wordlists, as well as an extracted audio version of just the dialogues to listen to (all of which can be imported into LingQ), and there’s thousands of interesting dialogues.
In my next post I will be talking about my learning methods and schedule and how they’ve changed since I began.