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Peg System for readings - aizeya - 2006-06-21
Disclaimer: I'm only about a third through RTK I, and haven't yet started studying readings.
I've become pretty interested in various mnemonic techniques lately. In studying Japanese, Heisig's method is obviously awesome, and works pretty well. Kanji-town (http://kanjitown.blogspot.com) seems like an interesting way to keep the meanings together, and seems much better than a lot of methods I've seen. But there's one commonly used mnemonic that I've yet to see used in studying Japanese: Pegging.
Take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_lists
Basically, in its original usage, you come up with a word, or idea for every number between 1-10 (or 1-100), and memorize it. This is a one-time cost. Then, when you need to remember a long number, or a sequence of numbers, you make up a story using those words. This is called pegging. As in, pegging a word to a number.
I'm curious if there's any way to use this to help remember readings of kanji. You associate a word or concept with each kana, then make up a story to relate those words to the kanji. You could even do weird stuff like have a word that represents a comma, so that you could associate one longer story to get all of the readings.
Advantages:
* It could work for On as well as Kun readings.
* It's not dependent on any specific feature of the Kanji, just the name we assigned during RTK.
* It could be used for more than just kanji readings. Like vocabulary that doesn't have a kanji representation, or that isn't in common use.
* Multiple readings wouldn't be too difficult, whereas they're kind of confusing in the Kanji town method
Disadvantages:
* Too many stories? That'd be a lot, and you'd have to make sure to pick meanings for the kana that don't correspond to common primitives, so that you don't get confused which of the stories is the kanji story and which is the reading. Plus it may take a while to come up with that many stories.
* Getting started would take a while, since you'd have to remember a word for each kana. I wonder if it's possible to remember a word for the column and a word for the row. Like, having a word for K, followed by a word for A to mean 'ka'.
Anyway, it was just an idea. Have any thoughts?
Peg System for readings - Pauline - 2006-06-21
aizeya Wrote:* Getting started would take a while, since you'd have to remember a word for each kana.I've actually done that. I missed the deadline for applying to the Japanese class last year (start January) and decided to work with RTK1 until I could apply for this year's class. Therefore I had no reason to learn the kana until last winter. By then Heisig's method gave me the idea to use a word for each kana that not only reminded me about the shape, but also started with the reading.
I happened to have a subscription to the online version of the Swedish National Encyclopedia. They have a crossword search feature that I used to find words for each kana. It went like this: か; hm, no good word with two letters. How about three? Four? etc. until I found a proper word.
I had big problem with words starting on shi-, w- and y- which in Swedish is mostly for imported words, but oddly enough also with ha-.