I'm currently going through RTK but I find some of Heisig's stories to get to the point in such a round about way that my brain gets filled up with useless transitions to the final meaning. I like the way he presents primitives but I would prefer everything to be in point form of the Kanji then just the primitves as he does later in the book.

This leads me to ponder if anyone has a digital list of the kanji in order with their primitives in the form of Kanji, English meaning, primitive elements.

I'd also find such a list very useful, because you could cross reference it or do a reverse lookup to find out where/how often a kanji was used as a primitive in later ones. It could help your stories to plan ahead a little.

I suppose it might be a bit of a copyright issue...

Regardless, I think I'll make one for myself if I can't find one online. I'm sure the process of making the list will drill the kanji into my head even more

AngryMidgetMonkeyPimp Wrote:I suppose it might be a bit of a copyright issue...

Regardless, I think I'll make one for myself if I can't find one online. I'm sure the process of making the list will drill the kanji into my head even more

I thought there was one on the Yahoo RTK users group, but no. There's a pretty good list with everything you need, even a column for primitive names, but that column is nearly empty.

I also preferred part 3. I liked making up my own stories, and not being influenced by the stories and notes he wrote. But that's just me; I think lots, maybe even most, prefer pre-made stories. Hmm, what if everyone started learning/teaching a standard set of stories, in every Japanese language class? That could potentially reduce a lot of kanji difficulty.....

I have a text file for Mnemosyne with the keywords & kanji pairs that I sent to other members in the past. PM me with your email if you want a copy.

vosmiura, is your list solely of kanji, or does it also have digital forms of RTK Primitives? Some of the latter are not kanji radicals, so they might be uniquely RTK. In which case I doubt if a digital list can be found.

Here's a list of kanji, keywords and frame numbers, but not primitives: http://www.ziggr.com/heisig/

I plan on adding primitives myself at some point, so if anyone beats me to it and wants to share...

As well as the uses mentioned previously, I was thinking of using it to re-order the kanji based on frequency of use while including the constituent primitives as dependencies (although that wouldn't work so well with this site...).

Our very own Pangolin recently posted to this website his newly created font of RTK primitives. Please enjoy!

KANJI Wrote:Our very own Pangolin recently posted to this website his newly created font of RTK primitives. Please enjoy!

That's an interesting thread, but we are actually looking for a list of the primitive elements that make up each kanji, not a list of only primitives that aren't also kanji. In that thread one of your posts mentions a file in the yahoo group. It has the story for each kanji which includes the primitives. It's not quite in a suitable form for our purposes, but it could be used as a starting point to save a bit of typing in making a more usable list...

cangy Wrote:we are actually looking for a list of the primitive elements that make up each kanji, not a list of only primitives that aren't also kanji.

Hey, buddy, ya got me there. I'm unclear what you're saying there. Primitives include both radicals and others created for RTK. Those are the building blocks for kanji. A grapheme that is a primitive but also a kanji has already been digitalized by virtue of it being a kanji. Thus what could you be searching for but those primitives that are not radicals. (Radicals have also been digitalized.) Although this thread began about the topic of kanji, you in a later message seemed to be seeking primitives. That is why I noted the Pangolin font.

Cheers.

I thought the AMMP (hey - are you a beastie boys fan?) just wanted a list of names of the primitives, as in part 3 of RTK1. I suppose I'm wrong....

KANJI Wrote:Hey, buddy, ya got me there. I'm unclear what you're saying there.

Yeah it's a bit confusing but I think what went astray was that the original poster mentioned "primitives" meaning all the kanji that are used as primitives as well as the primitives that aren't also kanji, and "digital" just meaning an electronic machine-readable (e.g. text) file, whereas you already had a thread talking about "digitalised" images of the glyphs that are "primitives" but not kanji...

So what we are after is a list of kanji and primitives such as the one I linked to earlier, but which also includes for each kanji or primitive a list of the primitives that are used to construct that kanji or primitive. That is, just the names of the kanji and the names of the primitives, actual displayable fonts etc being a separate issue which you seem to have already got sorted. This would be useful for various purposes mentioned previously.

As an example, I just went and made such a list for the first 50. There's various ways of doing it, but the format I've used is, for kanji:

number:kanji name:primitives:primitive names

and for primitives that aren't also kanji:

*:primitive names:primitives

where "primitives" is the names of the primitives that make up the kanji or primitive (if any), and "primitive names" are the names of the primitive which isn't a kanji or the kanji when used as a primitive (if any).

1:one::floor,ceiling
2:two::
3:three::
4:four:mouth,human legs:
5:five::
6ix:top hat,animal legs:
7even::diced
8:eight::
9:nine::baseball team,baseball
10:ten::ten,needle
11:mouth::
12:day:un,day,tongue wagging in mouth
13:month::moon,flesh,part of the body
14:rice field::rice field,brains
15:eye::eye,eyeball
16:old:ten,mouth:
17:I:five,mouth:
18:riskun,eye:
19:companion:flesh:
20:brightun,moon:
21:chant:mouth,tongue wagging in mouth:
22parkleun:
23:goods:mouth:
24pine::
25:prosperousun:
26:earlyun,needleunflower
27:rising sunun,baseball:
28:generation:ten:
39tomach:flesh,brains:
30:nightbreak:floor,sun:
31:gall bladder:part of the body,nightbreak:
32panun,floor,celing:
33:concave::
34:convex::
*:walking stick:
*:a drop of,eyedropper:
35:olden times:walking stick,day:
36:oneself:a drop of,eye:oneself,nose,nostrils
37:whiteun,a drop of:white,white bird,dove
38:hundred:white,one:
39:in:walking stick,mouth:
40:thousand:a drop of,ten:
41:tongue:mouth,thousand:
42:measuring box:thousand,needle:
43:rise upun,measuring box:
44:round:a drop of,nine:fat man
45:measurement:a drop of,ten:glue,glued:
46pecialty:ten,rice field,glue:
47r.:needle,specialty,a drop of:acupuncturist
*:divining rod:a drop of,walking stick
48:fortune-telling:divining rod,mouth:
49:above:magic wand,floor:
50:below:magic wand,ceiling:

So I plan on completing such a list sometime, but if there's already such a list, or if anyone else wants to contribute, then please let me know!

Thanks for the clarification. I take it you're not interested in related fonts; just a listing of keywords and the related kanji components, being primitives. A bare bones list! A bonus comes along with such a list but I'll leave unnamed.

Hi,
I've been making this list while I go through the book, however I've only done around 1300, but as I complete each chapter, I add to the list each kanji from that chapter, the keyword, and all the primitive elements as given in the book. When I'm done, I'm going to make a list of all the variants for each primitive as there are sometimes lots eg. for 日: sun, day, tongue wagging in mouth. I'm also going to make a list for each primitive element, which primitives it itself is composed of. eg. Mandala would be sun/day/tongue wagging in mouth, eye and crotch. I also think it would be really cool to be able to break down a kanji into its primitives, but then each of those primitives into primitives in a sort of hierarchical order. Eg. for number 633 "pining", you would get graveyard and valentine, but then each of those could be followed down to flower, sun, St. Bernard dog and heart. I don't think my measly programming skills would be up to this, especially as I mostly use Microsoft Excel, but if anyone was interested in creating a program I'd be happy to share the list once I've completed it, hopefully soon as exams finish tomorrow so I'm hoping to go straight through the rest of the book in a matter of weeks.

anki and mnemosyne decks might be half of what you are looking for.
Rikai-chan dictionary splits the primitives and displays Heisig Number. It has all you want.

mentat_kgs Wrote:anki and mnemosyne decks might be half of what you are looking for.
Rikai-chan dictionary splits the primitives and displays Heisig Number. It has all you want.

Rikai-chan uses the primitives list that gets floated around with EDICT a lot. This list is based on the "official" breakdowns of kanji and not the Heisig invented system (he invents a lot of primitives, and frequently incorrectly breaksdown a kanji into the wrong primitives). So while it is indeed useful, it might cause confusion when used in combination with RTK.

szreter Wrote:Hi,
I've been making this list while I go through the book, however I've only done around 1300, but as I complete each chapter, I add to the list each kanji from that chapter, the keyword, and all the primitive elements as given in the book.

Nice. I was doing it too for a while until another thread appeared here where someone had a doc file with the same contents, so I imported that in to my file and then into my Anki deck, and have been correcting it as I go...

I have a list, no idea where I got it, I used it to write a kanji program for self study (it just randomises the keywords between two numbers I choose and you can view the keyword and check the kanji one by one).

It contains 2042 kanji and contains:

heisignumber:kanji:keyword[/3rd-edition-keyword]trokecount:indexordinal:lessonnumber

for each kanji. the date in the file is 31st of august 2005.

http://www.direrealms.com/kanji.txt (dont link to it please)

[ファブリス]

The list probably comes from Ziggr's Heisig Kanji Index. You will find a more up to date version there (see history at bottom of page).

This is the thread I mentioned earlier: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...2#pid14582

Wizard Wrote:I have a list, no idea where I got it, I used it to write a kanji program for self study (it just randomises the keywords between two numbers I choose and you can view the keyword and check the kanji one by one).

It contains 2042 kanji and contains:

heisignumber:kanji:keyword[/3rd-edition-keyword]trokecount:indexordinal:lessonnumber

for each kanji. the date in the file is 31st of august 2005.

http://xxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx/xxxxx.xxx (dont link to it please)

Thanks, but that's not what this thread is about, see the earlier posts. Also, links here are automatic...