Hello all, this is my first post.

I've been using Heisig's book for about four days.
Along with android app called Obenkyo, I've learned upto chapter 7 so far.

I'm just a bit frustrated with some of the stories Heisig made up for the kanji.
For example, walking stick in a mouth? (中) It's just a line going through the "middle" which is the meaning of the letter anyhow.

As the lessons go on to more complicated kanji, some of the stories seems to be really absurd.
I feel like continued use of RTK will prevent me from learning the real meaning of the words and ultimately lead to confusion later.
I believe the only way to learn kanji properly is to see it from the view point of the creator. These are symbolic letters and the combination of symbols and the meaning should have connection.

Anybody have a suggestion on how to find true etymology of kanji?
I tried to wiktionary pages for kanji, but some of the letters are missing etymology.

Current plan is to learn kanji by etymology in the order of school level.

Any concern about my study plan would be welcome.

This is a wrong assumption. It might work this way, though I doubt it, if you were to study Chinese. The Japanese, however, adopted the Kanji when they'd already been "made". They don't have all that much of a connection to their components.

As for Heisig's ridiculous stories, which most people see here as being a memory aid, you'll probably be happy to know that Heisig's stories go away as you progress through the book.

I think there is a book out there that goes more into the etymology (if you'd call it that for Kanji), but I forgot the name. I'm sure another poster will be able to enlighten you, however.

Try using some of the stories on here instead. I basically stopped using Heisig's stores after the first 100 or so characters.

Yeh, don't give up on Heisig... right now you don't see the whole picture. RtK plays a key role in setting up the ground-work that all of your future Japanese studying will be based upon. Plus, it makes Japanese<->Japanese a heck of a lot easier in the beginning. Make sure to use the stories submitted by users on this website versus the stories in the book. The stories on this site are a lot easier to remember most of the time.

If tracing the components of the characters back to their etymological beginnings would make perfect, logical sense with their actual use in the language today, and if they weren't "absurd" and so easier to remember than made up vivid stories, then that's what Heisig would have used.

Have you looked at the study pages on this site yet? Whenever you hate one of Heisig's first 500 stories (actually the absurd ones are probably most among the first 250, you'll see), see if there are suggestions on here that you prefer. Or just try to make your own story, the aim of the book is that you're supposed to do that entirely after the first 500.
http://kanji.koohii.com/study

Yeah I have seen some stories here and some of them make much more sense than RtK.
For example, I like "riot"

I have always used etymology to learn vocabulary ever since I was young in both Korean and English.
I don't know, I just like the origin/history of each word rather than just memorizing itself.

Hashiriya, will you comment more on "Japanese<->Japanese" bit a little more? I am afraid I do not understand your point.

I think by Japanese <-> Japanese he refers to the format of his flash cards. The ideal is for the flash cards to contain no English, and knowing the Kanji the Heisig way will allow for that, since you're more likely to understand a phrase even if you can't read it perfectly or maybe not sound it out.

Even more conjecture: it's probaly a reference to Khatzumotos (sorry if I misspelled that) MCD cards. I've made some MCD cards myself (not many yet, but I plan on more) and I can attest to the fact that it's a good idea to at least try it out for yourself. The words I learned this way I can now spell like a champ.

(And before anyone calls me out: yes, I know Khatz didn't invent MCDs, now get off my back )

I'm just saying that by knowing at least a keyword of all of the kanji, it is certainly easier to understand a Japanese definition... even if you don't know the English equivalent to the actual word. In other words, some knowledge about a character is better than no knowledge.

Got it.
I found out about kanji book based on etymology (A guide to remembering Japanese characters)
I found few sample pages and it's exactly what I wanted. Origins of each word, interesting history and how it changed over time, etc.
For example, who knew 青 was originally life (plant) growing around a well (changed overtime into moon). Apparently blue/green was interchangeable back then.
Stuff like that just piques my interest and helps me remember.

Some etymology of course have been deformed so much over the years that it's pretty much useless. I think I might use this book and revtk in conjunction.

Thanks for the input.

One thing to keep in mind is that different kanji follow different patterns of formation, and not all components of a character will refer to meaning.

For example, 味 means “flavor” and has two pronunciations, “aji” and “mi”. When I look at the explanation of the formation of the character in my kanji dictionary, I can see that it’s classified as 形声 (keisei, “shape” and “voice”) (meaning one part of the character is related to the meaning and another part of the character refers to the pronunciation). In this case, 口 (mouth) hints at the meaning, while 未 is the pronunciation component for the Chinese derived pronunciation, mi. 未 by itself has the pronunciation “mi” and means “not yet”. The problem with these is that unless you learn the pronunciation simultaneously, a raw explanation of the formation of the character might not help it stick.

Well if you find it very interesting then go for it. Interest and a sense of excitement should help immensely with studying kanji, it's seems to be boredom that gets most people who give up.

Another thought though - RTK is something that can be done with in a matter of months, and it could also be fun to lightly study or read about the etymology for personal interest after you're familiar with the characters. I've only skimmed through a bit in a book about the origins of Chinese characters, but it was really interesting to recognize those I'd 'studied' with RTK and read about the actual history for them later on like that, even though it didn't seem to be of any actual help for remembering them or knowing their function in Japanese.

Heisig's method does seem silly at first, but as I'm sure many other members of this community can attest, there is pretty good reasoning and solid research behind it. The reason the stories are so outrageous is because that's exactly what makes them memorable! I can say with confidence that for at least 70% of the kanji in RTK1 I had to spend less than a minute learning them (not including Anki reviews), because that is the power of the brain to remember information with associated images. It's the way a lot of people who compete in memory competitions learn incredibly long strings of numbers, and it will allow you to familiarize yourself with tons of kanji while expending (relatively) little effort if you stick with it. You do get better at it as you go, too.

I'm pretty sure Heisig actually answers why his method doesn't use the kanji etymology in the intro chapters of the book. All I'll add is that etymology might work for you, but there is plenty of evidence that the techniques Heisig encourages work with your brain to make memory as easy as possible.

Because Heisig has you drill only from English keyword -> kanji, by the time you get the point where you are learning the read the kanji in context, there really isn't any trouble with seeing the kanji and immediately thinking of the Heisig keyword because you learned them the other way around. At least for me, if I see the kanji first I still recognize it, but it takes longer and usually requires conscious effort to reconstruct the keyword. Any readings I've learned to associate with the kanji have plenty of time to surface before that happens. The Heisig stories themselves tend to fall away after awhile anyway.

I've always thought the same way about RTK, and I have never read the actual books. Why is 大 St. Bernard's dog? I wish I would have associated kanji with RTK keywords from the start though. You don't really need stories or even mnemonics as long as you can spell out the components of kanji. Having an injection from kanji to English words enables learning methods like replacing English words with kanji in books, and it helps with studying vocabulary.

Other books that cover the etymology of characters are Read Japanese Today and Kanji Mnemonics. I learned radicals by associating them with the names used in Unicode blocks. An appendix in A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters gives more (etymological) meanings to radicals.



If you don't learn kanji in RTK order, learn kanji that appear as components of other kanji first. I have posted a printable list of them here.

lauri_ranta Wrote:I've always thought the same way about RTK, and I have never read the actual books. Why is 大 St. Bernard's dog?

It's just to make it easier to visualize in your stories compared to the more abstract concept of "something large", it doesn't have to make "sense" in any other way.

lauri_ranta Wrote:You don't really need stories or even mnemonics as long as you can spell out the components of kanji.

Stories makes it easier to remember which components that appear in the kanji though. In many stories you can even remember the placement of the components by leaving hints in it.

AlgoRhythmic Wrote:It's just to make it easier to visualize in your stories compared to the more abstract concept of "something large", it doesn't have to make "sense" in any other way.

I think that pairs of keywords alone are often just as memorable, even if they were abstract or difficult to visualize. Like 臭 = oneself large = stinking or 奈 = large show = Nara or 奇 = large can = strange. They always make some kind of conceptual sense (or non-sense) by themselves.

Thing about me is that if it doesn't make sense, I ignore/deny/reject it.
As a memory tool, I admit the stories are great and I will still use revtk for stories on kanji that is hard to remember with etymology.

Chiming in on lauri_ranta: I super agree with the dog thing.
and RTK's story on 器. That's racist, man. Not cool.

lauri_ranta Wrote:

AlgoRhythmic Wrote:It's just to make it easier to visualize in your stories compared to the more abstract concept of "something large", it doesn't have to make "sense" in any other way.

I think that pairs of keywords alone are often just as memorable, even if they were abstract or difficult to visualize. Like 臭 = oneself large = stinking or 奈 = large show = Nara or 奇 = large can = strange. They always make some kind of conceptual sense (or non-sense) by themselves.

Sure, it can be done like that as well, and if that works for you all is fine. But it doesn't work that well for me, and I would guess for a lot of other people. The point is after all to really visualize the stories in your mind, not just remember the words. And if you have an image of it in your head, how big does something have to be to be considered big enough to include the "large" component? That's really not that obvious all of the time, and especially when you have 2000+ stories in your head. "Hm, was component X a large one or not, shit I can't remember" is more likely to happen than "hm, did this story contain a st bernards dog or not, shit I can't remember".

Basically, if you have a st bernards dog in your visuals you immediately know that the large component is included, it is immediately obvious. The proportions of things are often out of control also once the imagination takes over, so in my stories I often imagine things being very large without the large-component being there.

lhong1987 Wrote:Chiming in on lauri_ranta: I super agree with the dog thing.
and RTK's story on 器. That's racist, man. Not cool.

Lol, you're joking right?

If RTK isn't working for you and you want to go a different route, that's certainly fine, and in fact, great that you're actively adjusting your study to suit your needs.

But keep in mind that if you're on Chapter 7 of RTK, that means that you've only studied about 100 kanji so far. You may be hungry to learn their detailed etymology right now, but will that appetite continue when you're at kanji #500, or #1000, or #2000, or will you feel like your progress is slowing down from trying to learn too much at once?

I like Henshall's Guide to Remembering the Japanese Characters. I love the Obenkyo app. But in my studies, those have been mostly ad-hoc references. RTK was the text with tons of scribbles in it, and falling apart from constant use.

The Japanese school grade order is a great order - for Japanese children. What you don't see is the massive background and support those children have. Going to class five or six days a week. Short story anthologies targeted towards the kanji they're learning each week. You may think that Heisig's story about 中/middle is dumb, but a Japanese schoolchild may be getting flack from his mom about a quiz he has tomorrow on a mini-epic about Middle-kun, a middle school student in the middle kingdom who finds himself in the middle of a conflict with a middle aged middleman in the middle of the mountains. We can't duplicate that kind of immersive inculcation from reading any of these books.

Reference the objection to a story being racist. Well I am afraid quite a few of mine are racist, involve sex with children, with my mother, rape, torture, murder, trees going up people bottoms etc etc. I think the best stories have the most outrageous images as that makes them easy to remember. If you only think 'nice' images you are denying yourself a powerful memory tool. (And it really shouldn't need saying, but I will anyway, that using horrible stories as memory aids doesn't mean you approve of what is happening in the story - I mean, we are none of us that literal are we?)
I must admit though if I have a story I think might offend other people I don't post it to the site - sometimes stuff is best kept inside one's own head!

Calen Wrote:

lhong1987 Wrote:Chiming in on lauri_ranta: I super agree with the dog thing.
and RTK's story on 器. That's racist, man. Not cool.

Lol, you're joking right?

That might be a joke, but a story concerning Heisig's "Magnet" on this site (see below) isn't. Sadly, it's ranked #2 on the popularity list.
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arrogantapeLast edited: 17-7-2012

STONE + BAND OF NIGGERS: Band of niggers throwing rocks. Now that's a police magnet.
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Norman Wrote:That might be a joke, but a story concerning Heisig's "Magnet" on this site (see below) isn't. Sadly, it's ranked #2 on the popularity list.
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arrogantapeLast edited: 17-7-2012

STONE + BAND OF NIGGERS: Band of niggers throwing rocks. Now that's a police magnet.
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OK, so it's racist. Now what? Sure, the troll who wrote that is a moron. But anyone who allows themselves to be bothered by some random moron acting like himself: not that far behind.

And someone who thinks it should be censored: even worse.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

Norman Wrote:That might be a joke, but a story concerning Heisig's "Magnet" on this site (see below) isn't. Sadly, it's ranked #2 on the popularity list.
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arrogantapeLast edited: 17-7-2012

STONE + BAND OF NIGGERS: Band of niggers throwing rocks. Now that's a police magnet.
------------------------

OK, so it's racist. Now what? Sure, the troll who wrote that is a moron. But anyone who allows themselves to be bothered by some random moron acting like himself: not that far behind.

And someone who thinks it should be censored: even worse.

Actually, I strongly disagree with your position. An educationally based website should have some censorship regarding language that is blantant racism.

Didn't Heisig explicitly state in the beginning that sometimes, using stories which actually offends you might help you remember the kanji?

I'm surprised it isn't sensored though, because here a certain someone will mangle your post if you include the word "stupid".

Norman Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:

Norman Wrote:That might be a joke, but a story concerning Heisig's "Magnet" on this site (see below) isn't. Sadly, it's ranked #2 on the popularity list.
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arrogantapeLast edited: 17-7-2012

STONE + BAND OF NIGGERS: Band of niggers throwing rocks. Now that's a police magnet.
------------------------

OK, so it's racist. Now what? Sure, the troll who wrote that is a moron. But anyone who allows themselves to be bothered by some random moron acting like himself: not that far behind.

And someone who thinks it should be censored: even worse.

Actually, I strongly disagree with your position. An educationally based website should have some censorship regarding language that is blantant racism.

Agreed. I also have to shake my head at someone who thinks wanting to remove an offensive and racist story from the site is "even worse" than someone who would submit such a story.