I have named the lists
RSL1
RSL2
RSL3
RSL4
RSL5

so that students of the five levels of study may find and use them.

I was able to extract text containing Hanxgi Pinyin and English and place it into Microsoft Word 2007. I used the REPLACE function to strip away all of the English alphabet, numerals, punctuation, etc. Then I wrote a simple macro to press space bar and right arrow a few hundred times (to the max that a macro can be) and used that to separate the Chinese characters with spaces so that I could paste the entire level into http://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp and generated a vocabulary sorted by frequency of occurrence. That vocabulary table is easily pasted into a Google Document Spreadsheet. Once I had my five spreadsheets, it was easy to use the Skritter word list tool to create my lists. At first I tried to create a simple list but realized the 200 limit. So I deleted that list and created LARGE lists with sections. As I saved each section I told Skritter to delete the duplicates.

A new Skritter user does not immediately see all the many powerful features.

For example, I like to watch stroke order animations so I went to the SETTINGS section and set animation speed to its slowest. Then all I need do is click and hold on the ? and watch the stroke animation until I have memorized it. THEN I go to http://nciku.com and practice the strokes. I also have MS Word 2007 open and I can paste the character, the pinyin with tone number, and take notes.

Just tonight I happened to notice mention of the mnemonic system for characters so I am going to hunt that down.

I had one interesting idea. I am age 62. I thought perhaps Chinese character study might me recommended to retired people as a better way than crossword puzzles to exercise the memory and avoid or stave off problems like Alzheimers. One woman in my building studied Chinese for a few years and commented that drawing the characters has a calming, meditative effect. I have only been studying for two months and I notice what seem like slight improvements in cognitive and emotive functions. I think part of it is that I feel like my school days were I had to memorize many things. At first it seems like an impossibly slow task but then suddenly the mind adapts and things become easier somehow. We are very adaptive creatures if we push ourselves. Of course, the desire must be there, at least a desire or motive of some kind, whether it is the practical need to communicate with Chinese speakers or whether it is an intellectual goal to broaden ones horizons.

Impressive! I hope I shall still be learning new languages at the age of 62!

Thanks, aharlekyn, for your kind words. I remember how in 7th grade We were required to take either Spanish or French so I chose Spanish thinking it is easier in pronunciation. I enthusiastically rode my bike about in the fall evenings counting aloud from 1 to 10 in Spanish, but suddenly I was struck with the horror of the realization that I must commit thousands of words to memory. I felt this would be a super-human task. I did not do well that year. For the remaining four years of High School I tool Latin. I cheated basically because the teacher would test us on a given 200 lines of Virgil's Aenead and make us translate 50 on the test. The night before I took an interlinear "trot" or "pony" (called such names because you could easily RIDE through the course). I could memorize 200 lines and get an A on the test but of course that memorization gained me no lasting skills. In St. John's College, Annapolis Md. I was required to take 2 years of ancient Greek. The Spring, when I was accepted, a professor gave me "House and Haarmon's Descriptive English Grammar" and told me to study it during the summer. It was a 400 page hard cover college text on DIAGRAMMING participles, gerunds, subjects, predicates.... and I diagrammed each and ever example in 400 pages. The foundation in my own languages grammar help a lot to master Greek. The fully inflected ancient Greek verb is one of the most complex of any languages having over 600 parts in singular , DUAL (a pair of oxen or runners), plural, active, middle, passive voice, reflexive (doing something to oneself), transitive and intransitive, 1st and second aorist (simply past, and ON-GOING in the past), pluperfect, optative (might, ought, should), imperative, etc. By the way Greek has the LONGEST continuous spoken and written history of any language EXCEPT Chinese, so Greek is the longest in the West. Hebrew was a dead language, used only liturgically, with Yiddish (a German Ashkanazi dialect) and Ladino (a Spanish Sephardic dialect) being used for ever day and Hebrew used only for worship... UNTIL the founding of the sovereign state of Israel in 1948, and they had to RESSURECT words to stand for pencil, camera, and yet be composed in a style that fits in with the ancient.

What a nice surprise! Like you, I studied Greek and Hebrew (including some Ivrit and Aramaic) for 3 years. In that time I also studied German, Spanish, Latin and Chinese. I am bilingual Afikaans and English.

Your "pony" story sound to familiar. Did the same a couple of times with some of the classic Greek literature such as the Didache, Polikarpus, Homer etc. I my second year I decided I am just fooling myself. I learned great memorizing skills, why not use it to master the language.

Once calculated that you can conjugate a Greek verb over 2000 times if you include the Participium.

After I received my degree, I decided to focus on modern languages more and combine it with trade and law. Now I am taking the modern languages previously studied, one at a time. The goal is to move to the next one as soon as I am relative fluent in Mandarin.

5 years seems to be good goal, thanks to Skritter!

What did you study?

My high school English teacher suggested that I read Lawrence Durrell's tetrology "The Alexandrian Quartet - Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea" (the names of four characters and their lives) set in Alexandria Egypt in around the 1920s. There were many brief descriptions of Islamic life, including a scene where some businessmen hire a blind muezzin to recite (chant) from memory passages (Surahs) from the Qur'an and they wept from the beauty. That scene made me very curious what this Koran business was all about, so I ran out and purchased the Penguin edition of Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall's "The MEANING of the Glorious Koran" and I read it from cover to cover one summer (VERY boring) and looked up each word I did not know (I was only age 18). That led me to purchase books on Arabic, but I only got as far as the alphabet. Then in St. John's College Annapolis, where there are NO ELECTIVES and everyone takes exactly the same courses for four years, everyone studied ancient Greek for two years. One clever fellow, Edward M. Macierowski, got permission from the dean to start a "Greek Floor" in one dormatory and I joined. Professor Macierowski is now an expert in Greek and Latin and has published a number of books. I was raised with NO religion (not brought to a house of worship even once), raised by nominal Protestants. St. John's was not a religious school but many of the readings touched upon Western Judaeo-Christianity; Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Augustine, Milton, Dante, Spinoza, Pascal, Dostoevsky (Russian Orthodoxy), Old Testament, New Testament, even in music several months on Bach's "St. Mattew's Passion" - so I became fascinated with religion and with role of Greek and Hebrew. I tried to get into Hebrew but again got only as far as the alphabet. But after I graduated I translated and memorized the first book (chapter) of Homer's Odyssey and learned how to scan the dactylic hexameter. Then I stumbled upon the one and only Greek Orthodox church in New Haven and began to attend. I spent two years learning to speak modern Greek and memorizing the Greek liturgy (Mass). One Greek friend had married a Russian girl educated in Athens who spoke only Russian and Greek. I began to learn Russian because her best friend was an old woman from St. Petersberg who had memories from before the Revolution, Maria Haralapovna von Tiesenhausen (a family of minor nobility). Finally, I married a woman from Manila, Philippines and learned some Tagalog although she seemed annoyed whenever I asked her for lessons, which discouraged me from getting deeper. I did enter a Russian monastery in Jordanville, NY for three months and then a Greek monastery in Brookline Mass for 13 months when I was in my mid 20s but I was not suited to the extreme asceticism of sleeping only several hours a day on many days, and eating only once a day for long periods prior to Christmas and Easter. After 20 years of Orthodoxy, I drifted away and spent two years studying Korean Zen Buddhism at Chogye Zen center (one day a week) in Manhattan. Then I spent almost two years attending a Guyanese Hindu Mandir (Bhuvaneshwar) in Brookline where I learned to sing various Bhajans (hymns) in Hindi and some Sanskrit.

It would be a privilege to continue the discussion with you. Please send me your e-mail address to aharlekyn at gmail.com

It seems you have sampled many religions. Did you finally found peace in one of them?

On a side note; I am interested in your views on Dostoevsky and the Russian Orthodoxy. I have read some of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche the trinity of existentialism, you might say. The Religion of Suffering as de Vogüé said. It seems this line of theology is prominent in the Russian (and Greek for that matter) Orthodoxy? Were the monasteries you enter Catholic or Orthodox? Is that why you drifted to Buddhism and Hinduism? Especially the freedom of Hinduism as contrast to the rules in the monasteries?

But wait, I'll e-mail you, if you want to. :)