Recently, I have seen a few post were people are quoting Heisig as saying that you must understand the exact connotation of a keyword when you make your stories. I wish to suggest that this is not necessarily the case.

When I went though the book I remember thinking that Heisig was not saying to understand his exact meaning for the keyword as much as understand an exact meaning for the keyword. This could indeed be a misunderstanding on my part, I am sure someone could find a quote from the book to dispute my impression. It really doesn't matter, for what I am about to discuss.

Let me give a couple of examples:
pupil
This is a classic example for me. I took it to mean student rather than a part of the eye. Then I found out that it didn't mean that. It actually didn't matter that my story and image were wrong because the connection between the two meanings of pupil in my brain was already strong. So when I came across 瞳を輝かす, it was pretty obvious to me that I had the wrong connotation for the word. However, I didn't have to change my image/story because a connection already existed.

moreover
By the time I came to this word, I had no reservations about bending the "rules". I deliberately chose an incorrect meaning (more over [than in]) in order to develop an image that worked for me. Again, I have no trouble understand or remembering that my image is not the "real" meaning. (To be fair I have yet to encounter this kanji in use though)

To further my argument I point out that Heisig also used semantic games to arrive at images that worked for him. My advice to people is to just pick a meaning, any meaning, of the keyword that allows for a strong image to be created and go with it.

I am curious to see what others might have to say about my opinion.

If it really makes your story easier to remember than using a story with the exact connotation, and it doesn't create confussion between kanjis with simmilar keywords, then it's good. The only problem is that while writing or talking, you'll be prone to use the wrong term, for example, 古い for persons, when it's meant for objects (the correct term as I've been told is 年寄り　としより).

For me, I tried to figure out what he meant when a word could have widely different meanings in English (such as pupil or wound [i.e. it could either be an injury or the past participle of wind]). But as long as I had that level of understanding for the keyword, it was really just up to whatever the word's connotations were to me. I don't think it's all that helpful to go through lists of compounds in an attempt to figure out the exact "flavor" of the word. Mr. Heisig has already gone through the trouble of carefully selecting these keywords to reflect just that flavor.


I did accidentally learn at least one character completely wrong. I assummed that bulrush (蒲) was a verb similar to bumrush, but it turns out it's a type of plant. Who knew? Nevertheless, I didn't change my story after I found that out. I'd already learned the character so now I just needed to remember what bulrush actually means.

I think it matters a lot less than some people fell, especially after you finish RTK and start to learn the Japanese meanings, nuances, and compounds.

When I made the story for "Fluid" 液

Ninja's are fluid like *water* and they come out at *night*

But later, I saw the kanji in japan, I think somewhere around a public toilet, and it was an easy jump from "fluid movement" to "fluid" as in the liquid.

It seems to me that once you lock that english word in your head to the kanji, the word can take on the various possible meanings later in the second language of Japnese.

You really don't need an exact connotation of a keyword, because there is no such thing. Like DrJone's said, there's 'old' and then there's 'old' for people. And in turn, words have lots of varied meaning in different contexts. And in turn each kanji can be part of lots of words. Can one little keyword capture that 'exactly'? Nope.

What is preferencial ofcourse is that the keywords at least approximate the kanji's meaning, but I found too cases like "pupil" where I learned the wrong connotation but it wasn't really much of a problem. It is easy to add extra information after you've learned the kanji.

I think that what you need is a clear image in your mind for the story and it doesn't matter what you hook it on. So I don't think the exact connotation matters, in fact, like Jimmy pointed out above, I think you can get the meaning utterly wrong and it can still work.

Rather than different nuances of keywords, I found that if my story depended on some English peculiarity then it would be a big problem when I wrote in Japanese. For example, kyldyyr came up with a clever story for 昨, but it involves a play on words:

"The day I *saw* before today was yesterday"

Stories like these work when I'm reviewing from English keywords but cause big problems when I'm writing in Japanese. If I wanted to write 昨日 and had to recall the shape of the characters, then remembering a play on words would be very difficult for me. I got rid of stories like these and concentrated on creating some sort of visual memory rather than an aural one.

Some of my stories depended on set English phrases, songs, or quotes from movies and these all had to be changed if there wasn't some strong imagery that backed them up.

Just my experience of trying to apply RTK to my other Japanese learning.

In the long run: no. Ideally, as Heisig states in the introduction, you will forget the keyword (or rather it will no longer consciously register) much like you will eventually no longer consciously use your mnemonics to remember kanji once visual memory takes over. It's a similar process: you'll eventually stop using keywords and use the actual nuances of the kanji that one word in English cannot hope to convey.

To this effect, I use [English] puns a good deal (well, not really, but almost exclusively with the tree and fish sections of RTKIII): they help me out a lot, especially if they make me groan, but they almost always involve dissecting a word such that the actual meaning of the keyword is diluted.

Megaqwerty Wrote:To this effect, I use [English] puns a good deal (well, not really, but almost exclusively with the tree and fish sections of RTKIII): they help me out a lot, especially if they make me groan, but they almost always involve dissecting a word such that the actual meaning of the keyword is diluted.

Interesting that this works for you. You don't encounter any problems when writing sentences?

[ファブリス]

"pupil" and "bulrush" : the main primitive, the one that carries the meaning of the character gives it off, respectively "eye" and "flower"

I'm sure I am one of the more vocal on this forum behind the idea of using the proper "flavor" of the keyword.

Perhaps more important would be to look at the main primitive, if it is not related to the english keyword at all, it is probably related to what the kanji meant a long time ago, as I understand some characters have become used in different contexts in the modern language, but either way I think it's useful to at least get an idea of the proper meaning.

When questioning Heisig's choice of similar keywords, you have to look at the characters, as far as I understand, the similarities between english keywords is a direct consequence of there being many kanji with similar meanings.

The question could be, do we really need unique keywords? But we need them for review, and they come in handy for remembering compounds as the keyword-combinations make for interesting mnemonic puzzles (ie. 急逝
"hurry departed" -> "sudden death").

Having the story hint at the proper meaning helps with guessing new compounds. Is it really necessary? Difficult to say, since at one point or another you need to clear up new words and really get what they mean. That said when I learned english with tons of input, even today there are often times when I speak in french when I want to use an english word for something that I don't have a translation for. So I guess I never looked up the word or when I did, never remembered the translation, I just inferred the proper meaning through context. When doing that, I think having the proper meaning for the characters can be helpful.

But for all this transition period until you can directly visually connect the word with the japanese meaning, personally I would use english puns only when I am really stuck, as the puns seem to take my memory down extra lanes and pathways during recall.

vosmiura Wrote:It is easy to add extra information after you've learned the kanji.

Yep that's what I did. When revising stories over time I used some tricks where I would keep the pun but add the correct meaning, the story for pupil for example could now focus on the "pupil's pupil", the annoying "spring" which made me think of "jump" could become "to spring on a (water)spring" etc.