Istrebitel Wrote:I want to understand how it's "supposed" to work - I mean, as with every system, it must have some sense of logic to it, right?

I wanted to comment on this part -- kanji are actually not as logical as you might think. Most of them were invented in China over 5000 years ago, and used in all kinds of ways since then, sometimes borrowed multiple times to Japan. The original "meanings" of the characters changed over time as they were used in different ways, mistaken, intentionally changed, or just took on associated meanings.

For instance, 丁 is used as a counter for tofu, a city block, strength, a hard worker, servant, meet, and other totally unrelated meanings. 丁 was originally a picture of a nail, but because the character is so simple, it was used to represent other words that were pronounced the same. Later they had to add the metal radical on to this to get 釘 for the original "nail" meaning.

I was showing my Japanese tutor my kanji in context textbook which is really just a bunch of vocabulary to go with certain kanji and she was telling me that this is far better than learning the meaning of a kanji and it's how they do it in Japan. Another student who was a year ahead of me got a reputation for know the meaning of all the kanji (from RTK). I told her I thought learning the English meaning of a kanji made more sense for an English learner like myself because I can learn the kanji far faster. Or I could wait until I learned to speak Japanese before tackling the writing system. I don't think anyone does that. When you think how it takes Japanese students 8+ years to learn kanji you shouldn't feel too bad about it taking you about that much time also. It's like a whole other language in itself. It's that complex.

And I would argue that they do learn the meanings of the kanji. If they learn to write a word using a kanji they associate the meaning of the kanji with the meaning of a word. Same thing.

Btw this was a good thread with a lot of good posts. I really liked the discussion generated.

NightSky Wrote:I didn't think Japanese kids ever learnt any Kanji's with "meanings" separate from the words they are written in. Are those Kanji dictionaries used so much as part of the standard curriculum though?

Here's a page from a Japanese 4th year school textbook:



You'll notice that kanji
• are provided individually as a concept
• have a picture to visualize the concept
• are provided with keywords that convey the conceptual meaning (いみ section)
• are provided with mnemonics when the kanji can be broken into primitives where deemed appropriate (e.g. 材 "raw material" is explained "tree" + "useful")

Japanese people find mnemonics helpful and learn some kanji exactly the same way as Heisig suggests. For example, a Japanese teacher may suggest that 親 is learned as a "parent" that "stands" on top of a "tree" and "watches" the kids. They don't teach all kanji this way because not all of kanji are made of primitives that make logical sense like that (at least not any more after thousands of years).

To teach all kanji with mnemonics would require a creative, loose and playful approach that would allow one to assign new meanings to elements. You can easily guess how well that idea would go over at the Ministry of Education.

It is important not to confuse how kanji are learned and how they are used by literate people. A literate person will do an instant optical recognition of 携帯 from its visual shape to the word "keitai", bypassing the meaning of individual kanji. That's how fluent reading is done by a trained brain in the end, regardless of your learning method. This is exactly why many Japanese will tell you that "just a bunch of vocabulary to go with certain kanji" is how they quote-unquote "do it" in Japan. In reality, it's a mistake to ask how adult literate Japanese people perceive kanji and blindly attempt to mimic that because the neural network in their brain has already grown shortcuts and they just go directly from kanji compounds to words unconsciously. Which learning path is actually most effective in order to eventually arrive at this skill is another matter entirely.

Like shinsen and other members say, I think mnemonics aren't bad by themselves, if you pay attention to remember they are only a device to help you recognize the kanji and discern it from the other. Of course a keyword similar to the meaning of the kanji is useful to avoid confusion, but it's not about the meaning.

Like for hiragana, some of us have studied them associating their shape with a keyword, which by the way has nothing to do with the meaning of the character:

き　= chitarra (kitarra, guitar in italian... you can see the guitar's parts)

but also in our alphabeth, I remember when I was in elementary school they teach it the same way:

A = Arrow (it resembles an arrow)
B = Boobs (maybe they use another keyword ahaha)
etc..

it means A has the meaning of "arrow"? Or the words that contain it have something to do with arrows? No, it's only here to help children to associate a shape with a sound in this case

I'm only to 250 kanji from RtK and after a tormented beginning, now I appreciate the method for what it is and when I learn some japanese words I associate the kanji or kanji compound with that word. RtK's keywords make the process only more simple thank especially to the order they are teached. You see a japanese word with a complicate kanji in it, and you don't think "what the hell are all those arbitrary lines?".

You cannot negate the usefulness of this method IMHO!