I hit character 951, 人, and it baffles me. Heisig really surprised me with this:

"The primitive meaning is another matter. The abstract notion of person so often has a relation to the meaning of the kanji that confusion readily sets in. So many of the previous stories have included people in them that simply to use person for a primitive meaning would be risky. We need to be more specific, to focus on one particular person. Try to choose someone who has not figured in the stories so far, perhaps a colorful member of the family or a friend whom you have known for a long time. That individual will appear again and again, so be sure to choose someone who excites your imagination."

The first thing I thought was, Why now?

Throughout the book so far Heisig assigns some primative meanings that are completely random, for example Brain as 田. I do not understand why throughout the book he choses a lot of primative meanings that have some relevence to the character. Sure, it's easier to learn the alternative primative meaning if it has some resemblence to the kanji you are using, such as 兆 Portent which looks "kind of like a turtle", but you only have to learn that once, whereas stories that contain turtle are numerous. It results in a brute memorisation method to learn these, which it that is the opposite of what the book is trying to achieve. Why not make a story to assign the alternative primative meaning to a keyword? I do not know. Some of the primatives are shocking, I am sure everyone has struggled with some that just don't fit, I think the fact I changed well over 20 of them is a testament to that fact.

But the above passage just shocks me. Why only bother to create a colourful primative of your own imagination now? What he says is a great idea and makes perfect sense, to choose someone or something colourful and image invoking as a primative, but why now? The only reason is because the keyword is Person.

We already established you can link anything to anything via a story, the whole book is made upon that, but it seems so shallow to then choose primatives based on a direct visual link to the kanji they come from, to force them in via memorisation. It seriously limits your choice of alternate primative meaning if you can only choose something that looks a bit like what's there.

To help break the programming of people picking up this book that brute memorisation is not the key, I think Heisig should have printed what I pasted above after about the first 30 kanji. It would reinforce that you don't need to use his primatives, and you don't need to force memorise the primatives either. I guess this was the final part in breaking the hold on my mind. I realise I can use my own stories with this site, and I even realised creating my own alternative primatives out of people was great, but it's only after reading that passage that I realise I can ignore primatives that I think would suck for stories and replace them entirely.
Take for example Claw, he gives it a related alternate primative meaning of "Vulture". I gave it the alternate meaning of "Kitten", because kittens have claws too. Only after the realisation of this post would I have thought of giving it something completely arbitrary such as "Hair dryer".

His finger primative gave me so many problems, but it didn't really occur to me to give it a completely different meaning like "Lunch Box" for example. It doesn't look like a lunch box so Heisig would never have assigned it himself, but I can make a story for fingers>lunch box if I wanted to, admit to brute memorisation anyway rather than trying to see a pattern in the kanji that makes it look like what it is (does fingers really look like fingers?) in an attempt to deny it, or even try to make Fingers look like a lunch box handle or something.
A lot of people gave it fingers the thief, to tie it in with fingers. But why bother tying it in with fingers? The only reason is if you want to use fingers in some stories instead of your thief persona. But then you could tie as many alternate meanings as you want in, so that doesn't make a lot of sense either. Think outside the box and you could call it something completely different, change fingers too if you like.

Bottom line, anyone else surprised by this? Why does it have to be the Person 人 kanji that gets its own colourful person primative? Something like 10 of my primatives so far have been colourful people (Jack the Ripper, Captain Hook, Richard the Lionheart, Iron Chef, Austin Powers, Gladiator, a Cleric, a Paladin... plus more I forget).


From now on I will completely choose my own primatives, completely ignoring what the primative looks like.
In fact, the book might be better if it had a list of 200 memorable ideas for primatives that people on this website were able to make great stories with. My cleric stories worked great for me, and so did Medusa, Cyclops and some others. Some didn't work as well. You could just scan the list and assign those that stand out to you completely randomly to primatives inside the book.

This site would be less about sharing stories and more community based requests for help, although the system of storing your stories and memorisation could remain the same.

Anyway, the point is to make you think! Realise sooner that keywords are just tools, it doesn't matter what they say, just that they are memorable. Everyone doing the book knows this, but they don't know they know it.

x3? I don't think we quite got your point, maybe you should post it a couple more times.

Serious: Whatever. There's an alternative primitives thread out there, you know. I learned all the basic primitives before learning kanji, replacing probably half of them. No trouble remembering.

I think two fingers is awesome, because I can use the dance move with the fingers in front of the eyes...

Fingers is just an example, but in a lot of stories it became dangerously interchangable with "hand" or "two hands" or whatever. That's just me though. Everyone has their tricky primative. Just remember you can change it completely to something unrelated, that is perhaps the key point in my post. Change it to snorkel. change it to grand piano. Change it to whipped cream.
Heisig progressed up the body with fingers, hand, arms, elbow for primatives, but why? Those are all very similar and I guess he himself didn't realise that they are not all as memorable as more random things to create a richer variety of stories, or at least, that's my theory.
I notice a lot of stories people tend to create unmemorable things. Imagine if there was a character "Acid" and it contained Spill, Finger. If they said "you spill some on your finger", it's not memorable. Later on you remember the spill part but was it finger? Or hand? Or elbow? I think only with great distinction will you get great stories. Still, this is really splitting hairs about personal preference and what works, the main point is to free your mind a bit more.
If you look at the "What alternative primatives did you use?" thread, you will notice most people including myself picked alternative primatives that had some resemblence with heisigs or the keyword. I picked skeleton for bones, but now I realise I could have chosen anything at all.

Fingers = dance thing
Two hands = groping like you would tits
Heisig has ones for arms and elbows? Weird. I just break them all down to the primitives I memorized in the beginning, got to know them REALLY well, and bam.

The trick is to have tangible actions associated with the dry objects. Like bone? I played pokemon a lot, so I think of cubone throwing his bone, so I think of "throwing a bone".

Using primitives other people used is useful to build your story, as you'll have plenty of sujestions.

First off, remember that is the LARGEST chapter (even a thread got made about it). The person primitive will be used so much that he understood through either his own and/or other people's problems that person had to be one and only one specific person. The only time that person came to mind was with a kanji with person primitive.

Perhaps the rest were not as common place to necessitate a specific warning. He does mention that coming upon a new primitive that "may" have been used in a previous story will require you to rework the previous story. The person primitive was just too large to ignore. In fact, he saved it long enough to make the chapter big enough for it to sink in. Consider that Mr. T, or Batman, or Sentry will never again appear in any other story to make the point.

At the midpoint, we get the real message about visual imagery. That it's not just mnemonics, but visual stories that form in our head forcing us to see the kanji. We finally break through or suffer. Who really knows. I do understand it's important to keep it to one (or two in my case Batman) visuals. We forget an original after 3 months and still rework the story to something much, much stronger. Such is our indoctrination into a proven by fire method.

Sorry, got away with myself. Perhaps the "why now" is that you have enough under your belt to realize you do have problem areas. It would not have been obvious even with a warning before then.

Wherever his primitives 'worked' i actually searched for every single other kanji that used that primitive (other than the few he introduces AFTER he teaches the primitve) and if the primitive works for them and me, then i accept it, otherwise I make my own.

So in that sense as you've mentioned I'm not really 'listening' to heisig anyway. I'm merely using his organised structure and (most of) his primitives. The only primitves i've changed so far was the seaweed one introduced by peoplee on this forum, and the arrow-->fiesta set of primitives.

I'm not a fan of this bright colourful primitive character business, 'logical' stories for me have worked, and continue to work. I feel for me that having TOO MUCH 'medusa' cyclops jacktheripper whatever the hell you pick will be too much for my brain to cope up with. They're my 'trump' cards if i must call them that. I only use them when the kanji is at such a difficulty that i have no hope in creating a logical story for it.

I think I am confusing two issues. The first issue is as Heisig states, if you simply use Person in your stories you will confuse earlier stories, such as "A man does ____".

The second issue is, why use a person at all? Just because the kanji is Person doesn't mean you should use it to mean Person in every story. Why not assign it Coffee Cup, Aeroplane or Laser Beam?

Perhaps the issues are completely seperate, it was just that story, that frame, that made me realise how hard heisig goes to keep primatives linked either visually or verbally, when it's entirely pointless. Also, using people is so visually strong that he should introduce it earlier.
The result blurs the line between primatives, we have Fiesta, March and Parade, all very similar. Finger, hand, two hands, elbow, again very similar.

I think this kind of thinking should be broken. The Person frame made me realise how silly it is to follow this progression. A parade is a fiesta with an extra line right? Confusing! I learned it as parade but I do occasionally have trouble. Why not remember it as Parade + Line = Manhole? A Parade of Line dancers falls into a manhole. Bam. Manhole. Never gonna get it confused with Fiesta or March. It's completely arbitrary.


I find the only way to remember them is with vivid primatives. Learning In + Heart = "Loyalty comes from within the heart" is boring and not particularly memorable. Any number of things could come from within the heart, and, loyalty could come from somewhere else too. It's gotta trick and tantalise the eye.

Firstly, I think having a primitive that is related to the meaning of the radical is helpful. A large proportion of kanji have primitives whose meaning is related to the radical and often even the phonetic. Therefore, thinking of the person radical as a person often helps.

Secondly, I agree with Heisig. I have found it important to make the significant elements of a mnemonic to correspond to the primitives and the insignificant elements act as fillers. Now people appear willy nilly in many stories, so to make the person radical just mean person will make it lose its significance. Hence, I simply followed Heisig's suggestion and used our prime minister and I got a lot of mileage out of it.

Thirdly, you're quite right, you can substitute other meanings for certain primitives, as Heisig himself has done on occasion (like with fiesta). Now sometimes I can't relate to Heisig's primitives or they just don't inspire me. The approach I've sometimes taken to deal with such situations is to write down "equations", calling the primitive X. E.g.,

intimate 睦 = eye + X
land 陸 = bikini top + X
forces 勢 = X + round + strength
heat 熱 = X + round + fire

Then I solve for X. In other words, I find some meaning that completes that it makes a useful mnemonic.


(BTW the word is primitive, not primative. It might help you to get yourself a browser like Firefox that has an inbuilt spell checker.)

Raichu Wrote:Firstly, I think having a primitive that is related to the meaning of the radical is helpful. A large proportion of kanji have primitives whose meaning is related to the radical and often even the phonetic. Therefore, thinking of the person radical as a person often helps.

This is the reason you're looking for right here.

You're forgetting that Heisig isn't actually some kind of god or guru. You're working off the assumption that he KNEW this the whole time, and just chose to keep it from you out of a sense of maliciousness. The method is fairly old at this point and hasn't really been revised. Meanwhile, we've launched this community that has been feeding off of itself for some while, and we as a community have built off of his method. We have, as a community, advanced the method, and one of the means we've done this by is freely altering primitives as we choose, particularly in embodying them as characters of myth (modern or otherwise). This is not something he necessarily thought of, or at least thought of detailing for your use, but we HAVE detailed it for you, and so of course it's old hat by the time you get to person, even if it was NEW hat for Heisig himself.

As it happens, the generic and meaning-specific radicals aren't difficult for everyone. I personally find fingers to be an exceptionally easy radical to remember, particularly as it's on the left (where meaning is often embodied) and every kanji that contains it in some way relates to your hands/fingers/touch, usually pretty directly. Similarly, loyalty = in the heart is just about the single easiest kanji for me to remember. You don't have to go batshit crazy on this stuff just because it doesn't work for you.

Of course what's important is what works for you, and it's great that you've found what that is. But you can get off the soap box.

Lastly: Changing primitives is great, but many of them (in particularly grounding ones on the left as mentioned above) DO have meaning (consider every kanji with woman on the left), and it can be helpful to know that. But more importantly than that, this site is more than anything else about story sharing, and if we were all using off the wall primitives no one could help each other. 'Fingers the Thief' may be artificially tied into 'fingers', but it makes it easier for someone else to pick up even if they don't use this Thief for all of their finger kanji. In contrast, complete changes to the meaning of a radical (thread to spiderman, person to Mr. T) have to be accepted by a large number of people and consistently have stories for EVERY kanji that contains those primitives to be useful, which is why you only really see that one popular alternate for any given primitive, typically. For instance, I use Batman for person, and as a result have had to come up with every story involving him from scratch, because the Mr. T stories and the generic Person stories just don't apply - the community is rendered almost entirely useless to me there. That isn't a problem, because for me, stories with Batman are very easy to come up with - that's why I chose him. But do I really want to do that for every primitive?

Edit: "I picked skeleton for bones, but now I realise I could have chosen anything at all."
This is actually another reason not to alter them carelessly in general. Skeleton is both kanji and primitive later on :\ 骨 Of course, you can change the primitive, but you may become somewhat confused as to why the 'skeleton' primitive isn't in the 'skeleton' kanji...

I'm sorry, I don't think it's a genius revolutionary new concept, I mean I figured it out around 1,000 and im sure heisig read his own book.
Anyway, I just wanted people to think with an open mind, I am afraid I suck really badly at arguing/discussing on forums so please excuse me for that. We can carry on now.

I chose batman too, can you make your stories public? I struggle with some, namely those with weak primatives for the other part of the kanji.

Well, I get your point. I'm likely overreacting, I think I just get tired of the heisig-bash in general around here.

I actually almost never write my stories down in here, unless I intend to share them in the first place, so there's actually nothing to make public. But now that you mention it I might go back and try to enter and make a few public. Most of my stories tend to be pretty stupid and only self-benefiting though, so I'm not sure how useful they'll be in general.

I like "generic" logical stories :) In fact, I hate the idea of using weird primitive meanings like batman, fiesta, ice cream, etc. I freely change the primitives to make more sense to me. I don't use long or elaborate stories either.

But I don't get this animosity towards rote memory. It's not good for large amounts of info, or as the only method of learning, but it's not that bad, and it's not that hard.
How do you remember that 人　is Jack the Ripper, or whatever? That seems like completely random and arbitrary info that would be learned by rote and use. Meanwhile "person" can be seen in this kanji without any effort. As for kanji that don't look like anything, I just use a simple(often wordless) mnemonic to make sense of it.

Overall, use whatever method you like as long as it works well for you.

Mr. T always worked the best for me because the primitive looks sort of like a stylized "T". But it also helps being a child of the '80s because I remember how flamboyant his looks and personality were.

For the most part, I don't really understand the criticisms in this thread.

I also agree that rote is not as hard or ridiculous as many people make it out to be. Its simply a part of a well-balanced breakfast. I wouldn't have wanted to learn the kanji completely by rote, but it seems fine for learning things like on-readings groups.

QuackingShoe Wrote:But more importantly than that, this site is more than anything else about story sharing, and if we were all using off the wall primitives no one could help each other.

Yes that's a fair point. I will counter it though and say that it's a question of extremes. If you go and change all primitives arbitrarily, then it makes this site less useful. However, if a particular primitive doesn't work for me and I change it to something that does, then I think that's fair enough. Our goal, after all, is to learn the kanji for ourselves and if changing a particular primitive helps, then I say go for it.

Anyway, some people are in the habit of saying "I'm using XYZ for this primitive", and sharing that gives other people a useful suggestion in case their having problems with the same primitive--just as much as sharing a story gives other people a useful suggestion if their having problems with the same kanji.

In any case, you make a valid point as far as being arbitrary about it, which I think was the original issue.

[ファブリス]

Wizard, I think it's clear that you like to use your variants and "personifications" for many of Heisig's primitives. If it works well for you that's great. But personally, I think you are overdoing it.

It's not necessary to change all primitives into characters. It can make remembering easier, but for how long ? In fact I would not recommend to use this strategy so much as you do. The reason for that is that the emotional appeal of a character can change over time. I have already experienced that with some of my own stories. A political figure today may be a great character for your stories, in a year from now it will not inspire you and won't work as well. Generic images such as "dog", "car", "elbow" or even actions that can be easily picture such as "meeting" work just as well. If you have difficulties with those, I suggest looking at how you are assembling your stories, or how much of a mental image you make when you make a story.

Heisig used images which are for the most part closely related to the historical meaning of the character components (the radicals), and that is useful. If you change all his primitives into random characters that mean something to you, it may help you remember for now, but you loose part of the meaning of the characters.

Every primitive that Heisig has named should already be your own in that you probably have an image of "dog" which is different than the one I use, likewise your "pinnacle" is different, your "car", etc. In fact many of those more generic images have a blury aspect that makes them more flexible. They're just codes. A dog in a story is a code, because it's not such a specific character, it can be any sort of dog and still work.

Characters can be very specific, and are best used when you have difficulty with some primitives. This varies from person to person. But to systematically turn primitives into characters or other random elements in my opinion is taking a step backwards. Heisig didn't pick whatever fancied his imagination, he picked primitive names and keywords that best fit the need for the characters to be learned, and also fit the historical meanings of the elements. A few primitives do seem to be random but he acknowledges them I believe, these are exceptions.

And yes, it has to be said again, if everyone uses their own variants for primitives this reduces the usefulness of the stories sharing. Not only that, but if you pick something that appeals emotionally to you, it may not be as useful to others as you may think.

For character based primitives, only those that are based on well known figures, real or fictional, will be potentially useful to other members. Sharing characters you've made up like "the king of the troll village" or "the elf queen", are of very limited usefulness. In fact the latter are probably more annoying than helpful due to the need for a common ground, and the "standard" set from the book.

Wizard Wrote:I gave it the alternate meaning of "Kitten", because kittens have claws too.

"Kitten" is very similar to "cat" and while you may differentiate them easily now, you may find in a few months down the line, when yo utry to recall a kanji that you seldom use, you will hesitate between cat and kitten. I can tell you that because I've bumped into the problem quite a few times already.

On a sort-of/kind-of/not-really related thought that came to me while reading Faburisu's post, even though I personify a lot of the primitives I use, I always try to leave a connection to Heisig's original meaning. For example, when Socrates shows up in one of my stories, the focus is always on how he's giving a speech, or trying to talk his way out of trouble, or generally anything involving words and talking. Likewise, Shrek always shows up with fingers somehow, the Flash is always going somewhere, and Spiderman is always using his webs (or thread, if you will). So, I end up with images that are very easy for me to imagine, but which also stay connected to Heisig's intent.

The added benefit of this is that I have no trouble just using the original primitive meaning in stories, which is good, since sometimes trying to work a wacky ensemble cast into a story is more work than it's worth, especially when the simple approach to a character is just painfully elegant.

yukamina Wrote:How do you remember that 人　is Jack the Ripper, or whatever? That seems like completely random and arbitrary info that would be learned by rote and use.

The same way you learn almost every single kanji in the book. The "Valley" set of Kanji were giving me incredible grief because they were completely unmemorable, my stories were too boring and plain, so last night I gave Valley the alternative meaning of Plutonium.
"Plutonium is buried in the Valley" is how I remember it.

Plutonium fits well with bathe, contain (its unstable), melt (if not contained properly), longing (countries lacking power longing for it), abundant (in the future, abundant and used to power cloaking devices), etc.
They work cos the first thing I think of when I read the keyword is what I use to make a story, and it's impossible to have plain stories for the majority of Kanji.



I might be overdoing it but it's worked so far and I'm half way through the book. All the people I have chosen are stereotypes so nothing will change, and I don't think I am any more likely to confuse Kitten with Cat than I am to confuse Child with Person, Guy, Male, or Female.

You only have to look at some of the existing stories for Finger to see which people are going to have a problem. The top image for "Clap" is "(Image: the most snooty prim and proper English Lord with white gloves clapping only with his fingers. "Oh bravo old chap. Bravo...")."
That could easily be confused with Hand in my opinion... or two hands...

I agree with the decreased usefulness of sharing characters which is why I have shared only one or two that I thought people might be able to make use of. I've adopted other peoples characters in some stories though and find them to work great. I also have a large number of non-character alternative primatives..

.. I guess the bottom line is with heisig, there is no one correct method for everyone. Namely since we have people that use imaginative memory to create an image (like the fellow who posted a picture of a piece of paper with his stories drawn out for each word), we have people that use a more logical approach without such vivid imagary (the person above who uses more logical stories), we have me who uses a more connective approach (I try to make my stories elements all connect together so if you can remember one, you can remember them all, and whatever I think of first when reading the keyword is what I use).... etc.

You can't mine for Plutonium. It's all man-made... <_< But, I guess that's besides the point, since it's got nothing to do with kanji.

A lot of my stories don't make full logical sense, actually my image was that someone put it in the valley under the ground, and i have an image of all the plants dying... but after that single kanji the meaning of "valley" is no longer used.

Wizard, I think you aren't quite following his process fully. He explains it at the start of lesson 11 in my version of the book.

Wizard Wrote:I notice a lot of stories people tend to create unmemorable things. Imagine if there was a character "Acid" and it contained Spill, Finger. If they said "you spill some on your finger", it's not memorable. Later on you remember the spill part but was it finger? Or hand? Or elbow?

This is because you see the incredibly powerful acid eat through your finger, severing it entirely, as you scream, holding the bloody stump of a finger high in the air. You need to really visualise it and imprint this image in your brain. If they are just stories, then yes all these are interchangable, but if it is a visceral mental story/image it is harder to get confused.

I know this from experience, as I got lazy at about 1200 in and wanted to finish quickly, so I did minimial effort on the original learning and it seemed to work. But after the kanji were spaced out a bit I was forgetting a large amount of them. After this I properly focused on learning each kanji with the full process, which for me involves really straining my brain and I started to remember them properly again.

I also seem to tap into my existing imagiation. For example, think of a valley now. Do you see one? I do. This is where my stories with valley take place.

Wizard Wrote:The second issue is, why use a person at all? Just because the kanji is Person doesn't mean you should use it to mean Person in every story. Why not assign it Coffee Cup, Aeroplane or Laser Beam?

I don't think you need to use person in every story, but generally I think it is a good call. I found the person stories to be some of the easiest to remember, due to my person being quite memorable for me (Mario). However, you can't make everything a person otherwise I think you will also get really confused. Sometimes you just can't specifically tie keywords to a person specifically so like your finger, hand example the actual person becomes irrelevant and you are more or less into the same problem. Plus primitives like Coffee Cup, just aren't very versatile.

I think given we are learning something that is in no way designed to be easy to learn, it is inevitable that there are inefficiencies. I think you have to realise that Heisig did think a lot about this and whilst you may think changing all the primitives would make the process easier, you can't forsee how these will come back to bite you, yet Heisig has already done this for you with his primitives. I would advise changing the meanings minimally.

Thanks I learned a lot from this thread.

Actually, the biggest problem for me is linking the keyword to my vivid story. Creating vivid stories to link the kanji in them together is (by now) quite easy, but after seeing a keyword when I haven't revised it in a while, I find it hard to jump to the story unless I make my story contain an element that matches the first thing that comes into my head when reading it, or, i brute force memorise the story, which I fear a lot of people (including myself) have done for many stories.
In fact, what we imagine when we look at a keyword is going to be different for everyone that if it were purely an imaginative thing, the stories section of this site wouldn't work for anyone but the original author.

Wizard Wrote:You only have to look at some of the existing stories for Finger to see which people are going to have a problem. The top image for "Clap" is "(Image: the most snooty prim and proper English Lord with white gloves clapping only with his fingers. "Oh bravo old chap. Bravo...")."
That could easily be confused with Hand in my opinion... or two hands...

Not to belabor the point, but my entire story for that consists of 'clapping until your fingers turn white,' which probably has the single greatest chance of being confused with other primitives of any story ever. I've never had any issues with it whatsoever, though. But while I admit that's not a good story for everyone (I'm very good at remembering primitives if I can simply connect keyword to story), the story you listed is outright clever, with an image that clearly only works with fingers. I'm not sure why you would deride it...
But, different strokes.

I wonder what your image of a valley is, though, that it can be considered mundane. Valleys are beautiful places where many people have lived and many bloody battles have been fought, particularly in Japan. A beautiful woman bathing(keyword) in waters cascading into a valley is one of the few kanji I remember through a pure visual with no words.

wizard Wrote:In fact, what we imagine when we look at a keyword is going to be different for everyone that if it were purely an imaginative thing, the stories section of this site wouldn't work for anyone but the original author.

Not necessarily. When I read a new story on the site, if the story works for me I do see it in own imagination. The elements are the ones I have in my head, the story just assists building the picture.

One thing to remember is that failing is a good thing as it means your story is insufficient or something. Sometimes I pass a story until it is way spaced out, then make a mistake with positioning or something. I refine and continue. I often add to my stories in slight ways to stop this happening again.

As a fairly silly example, benevolence has been one of the hardest kanjis for me to learn. I eventually overcame this by noticing that B is the letter before C and my story has a Cyclops in it. I make this link first up and then can easily get the rest of the story.