hi everyone,
i've just reached the kanji for self, and Heisig's says it is a pictography of a snake. However 6 kanjis before, we have snake 蛇。Wouldn't it be confusing?

I saw someone here using it as a pictography of an inverted "s" and i'm doing the same but I see that in the next cards many of you are using it as snake too. So how do you avoid confusing the two of them?

蛇 only shows up once, 己 shows up quite often.

It's probably because it resembles 巳, which is often replaced with 己 as a primitive, for instance: 砲 vs 鞄 (on this site, they're the same [at least on my browser], but copy them into word or something, and you see that the "snake" primitive is different.)

[Katsuo]

蛇 is never part of another kanji, so if you see "snake" as a primitive it's sure to be 己 (己 is only called "snake" when it's used as part of another character).

There are some other cases where a kanji keyword and primitive name are the same, but it's usually easy to keep them separate in your mind.

Thank you guys!!

I didn't pay attention to the frequency of each one. Much better now.

[Zgarbas]

Maybe think of 蛇 as snake and 己 as sssnake (to reinforce the difference, the S-ness of sssnake, and to give it a more memorable story because sillyness enhances story value for some)?