+- kanji koohii FORUM (http://forum.koohii.com)
+-- Forum: Learning Japanese (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-4.html)
+--- Forum: Remembering the Kanji (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-7.html)
+--- Thread: Writing the kanji only once (/thread-474.html)
Writing the kanji only once - kyotokanji - 2007-04-16
It says in the book that after you've done the mental work on the kanji, you should write the kanji only once. I understand the reason for this, writing many times to remember with your hand simly doesn't work. But don't you think it's a good idea to write it a few times until the form and balance becomes attractive?
Writing the kanji only once - suffah - 2007-04-16
Yep, you'll definitely need to write the kanji more than once if you want it to look presentable. I think a lot of people don't care too much about "neatness", so in that case repeatedly writing it as a memory aid probably won't help as much as just remembering your stories (mnemonics).
Writing the kanji only once - kyotokanji - 2007-04-16
Looking presentable is very important for me. When I write a kanji and it looks attractive, I feel so good. My hand made this!!! etc. If the balance is all wrong, some people may not be able to read it.
Writing the kanji only once - dingomick - 2007-04-16
Absolutely. What Heisig is eschewing is writing a kanji multiple times to try to drill it into your head (i.e. ta-be-ru, ta-be-ru, ta-be-ru, ta-be-ru...). So when you write it multiple times, don't think of the meaning, instead think: beautiful, straight, balanced, graceful, etc.
Writing the kanji only once - Mighty_Matt - 2007-04-16
I tend to write a new primative a couple of times, especially if it's not similar to ones already known. After that I only write the new kanji once. I find that gives enough practice for the new primative to become comfortable.
Then when you do your reviews you get the opportunity to write them several times over the next few days. I find that's enough for me.
I know they're just being polite, but the teachers at my school always say my writing is good. But then it's an elementary school so compared to the children's, it is!!
Writing the kanji only once - Istvan - 2007-06-11
Hi guys, new here and this is my first post.
I agree that writing more than once helps, especially for drilling stroke order and form. When I learn the new Kanji, I will write it once. If it is presentable I keep it, if not I put an X through it and write it again. While I am writing it, I am envisioning my story. When I review the flashcards, I again write the Kanji from the keyword. I find this helps me reinforce the story and practice the stroke order again.
What I have found is that while I sometimes remember the proper components for a Kanji, I also sometimes forget the placement of the components. For example Apricot 杏. I could remember a tree and a mouth, but when I wrote it during review, I ended up writing it with the tree beside the mouth instead of over top. In this case, with a failed Kanji, I then rewrite it again during a self review, and revise my story to give the image of an Apricot falling down into a mouth. On subsequent reviews, using this site, I then write the Kanji again during each review.
I find this very effective for me in terms of story develpment, Kanji writing practise (my regular writing is terrible even in English!), and perhaps also it does trigger a bit of the repititon memory (which is not a bad thing in my opinion).
For me, all Kanji get written at least 5 times. The first time I learn it, and then during the review tests. If I make a mistake, then this number increases. Since most of the Kanji are made up of elements that are repeated often, the individual elements get written many times and for me this also helps, and especially helps improve my form.
Cheers!
Writing the kanji only once - suffah - 2007-06-12
Let me ask those of you with "neater" writing this:
Do you guys use graph paper or plain paper? I typically use plain pieces of paper, but the balance in my characters is pretty terrible. I never gave it much thought, but when a Chinese co-worker saw my Kanji, she laughed and said it looked worse than a gradeschooler's.
Writing the kanji only once - uberstuber - 2007-06-12
I use graph paper (from http://www.incompetech.com/graphpaper/)for characters that I'm not too familiar with. After forcing yourself to use the squares for awhile your kanji start to look a lot more proportional when you use regular paper.
I started with 1 cm squares but quickly moved to .71cm (same size as college rule lined paper)
Writing the kanji only once - amthomas - 2007-06-12
I tend to use graph-paper, because I'm anal-retentive like that, and because any Japanese essays I've had to write for school photo albums and whatever have always had to be submitted on these square-block sort of peices of paper. I figure if it works for them, it might be worth a try.
I tend to use failry small-scaled graph paper and then make sure that 4 small squares makes one big kanji square, so that I can try to properly scale all the components with respect to each other.
I can't say I have nice writing, but it's at least generally legible. We'll find out just how legible it is this week, as I'm writing the Kanji Kentei... *nervous twitch*
But yeah, if you've got graph paper around and you don't mind looking nerdy, go nuts! *grin*
Writing the kanji only once - vosmiura - 2007-06-12
Hi guys. I used to write the kanji in reviews, but it can really take ages.
Then I started just tracing them in my hand (counting the strokes) which is much quicker, but still takes quite a while going through each stroke each review.
Now I really just try to remember the story, the keywords and the position of the keywords in the kanji, like: "footstep spoon turkey", "turkey in a tree", "Data at the butcher's orgy" (don't ask). So I just clarify those keywords and positions in my head, and a quick glimpse at the kanji is enough to tell if its right or wrong. It's cut my review times in half.
Possibly it may also strengthen your memory of the stories as opposed to memory of how to write the kanji, which I think is a good thing. With the exception of elementary primitives, don't let your hand do the memorising in place of your story.
I write down or trace in my hand only to test myself when I'm not certain I remembered how to draw one or more primitives, or for kanji that have some exceptions in the way you write their primitives e.g. "surpass". Usually its quite clear although looking ahead in the book a bit there are some more tangled looking kanji that probably need careful testing.
Writing the kanji only once - decamer0n - 2007-06-12
vosimura,
be careful in your reviews to consider your ultimate goal in studying the kanji. if your goal is to learn a bunch of stories about the kanji, then proceed in your current fashion.
however, if your goal is to learn to read or write the kanji, then your focus in reviews should be to write the kanji (pen/paper or finger/hand) first, remember your visual images from the stories if you can't do that, and perhaps remember some of the keywords from your story if you can't do that.
the stories are primarily a way to organize the study, lodge them firmly in your brain using the power of imaginative memory, and give you a bread-crumb trail to follow as a backup. but the stories should really, eventually, like a bread-crumb trail, vanish from the conscious recall.
Writing the kanji only once - akrodha - 2007-06-12
I get very neurotic about the little tiny details of my hanwriting. It must be PERFECT. I like to write words over and over, experimenting with different curvatures, angles, speeds, descenders, ascenders, ligatures, etc.
I've filled out several pages by practicing lowercase gammas, kappas, deltas, phis, psis, xis, and zetas. I've slaved over the integral sign and the partial derivative sign. I differentiate lowercase epsilon from the element of sign, alpha from the proportional to sign, and capital delta from the laplace operator. I'll erase a fraction if the numerator and denominator aren't balanced. I pad all formulas with the right amount of whitespace. My equals signs MUST be well aligned, and subcalculations are clearly indented. I NEVER, EVER forget a vector sign. Same goes for operator hats. I cringe whenever I see a tilde on top of a variable, and squeal with glee whenever I get to write time-derivative dots.
I'm still not satisfied with my German esszets, even after all these years. Writing pleasing, flowing Arabic has been an impossible challenge. I still can't get the right curvature on that downward stroke of my katakana fus---bollocks to everyone who simply writes them like angular sevens.
Now can you imagine how long this post could get if I start talking about the many tiny aesthetic details I focus on when writing the kanji?
So yeah, don't worry about writing them a few times, as long as you're focusing on aesthetics.
Writing the kanji only once - ファブリス - 2007-06-12
kyotokanji Of course you can write each character several times when you learn them. Like Istvan I wrote them down three to four times while recalling the primitives and the story. You could probably get away with writing the character just once during the initial learning and once for each successive review. But like you say yourself, if you repeat the character a few times, it's for balance and form, and not for "drilling" the character into memory which is what Heisig advises against.
Istvan welcome! Looks like you've got the routine pretty well setup... so keep it up till the last page
Writing the kanji only once - Istvan - 2007-06-12
Thanks ファブリス.
I have been in living in Tokyo for 7 years, and am tired of being functionally illiterate. Though I can read basics, like menus and street signs, and am fine to speak in Japanese casually or even at business meetings (its far from perfect - but it gets the job done) studying Kanji has been something I have started, and stopped and started and stopped for quite some time without really making any progress. Essentially it came down to the time factor. I could use kanji to read signs and to order from menus, but that was about it. I started this method in Saturday, and already I am through 350 kanji with over an 80% recall rate on initial review. For me, this is unbelievable!
For me, the Heisig method absolutely works. What is really interesting is that I now look at Kanji differently, both in a metaphoric sense, and in a real sense. For example the Kanji for petition. I learned it from Heisig, without realizing it was the Kanji for お願い. Ten minutes later I was on a break and saw the kanji on a sign in the breakroom and was shocked. What really got me was that had I seen the Kanji on the sign previously, I would have been able to read it, but I never really knew it well enough to recognise it when I wrote it during studying the Heisig method. Now I see all Kanji differently.
My wife is Japanese. Last night I asked her if she wanted a coffee, as it was late I wanted to make it "dilute". As I didn't know the Japanese word for "dilute" (previously I would have said "weak"), I drew her the Kanji 薄い. She was shocked that I could do that. She knew that since Saturday I started studying Kanji, but she couldn't believe the progress I had made (heck, I can't even draw her name
)I now know that kanji is something that I not only can learn, but can have fun doing it! I will worry about tying the Kanji to vocabulary later and am keeping this learning separate for now, even though I do learn new words (like usui) while I am using the kanji.
This site is awesome, not only as a review tool, but also as a motivational tool.
I apologise for this long, off-topic post, but as you can probably tell, I am as excited as a kid at Christmas about this! To all the people working through this at the various levels, I can't speak for your experience, but I can certainly say that for me this method is a gift! I am now doing something that I knew needed to be done to take my Japanese to the next level, but something I'd always wondered where I'd find the time for, and something I always viewed as drudge work! Now I am having fun learning Kanji, and even if I don't keep up the breakneck pace I have started with, I know that I will finish. After 7 years here, an extra 2 months, 6 months, or even over a year spent enjoyably learning kanji doesn't matter. I now know I will do it!
Cheers!