Greetings.

Well, seeing as my first thread here got swayed into Heisig Method Holywar, I guess there's no point asking there, so I'm making a new one. For all means, please regard this as a QUESTION and nothing else, I'm not bashing anything, not advocating anything, okay? If I state something in this thread, first of all, it is MY OPINION (disclaimer, lol) and second of all, I'm stating it for the reason of asking for you to either confirm it, or prove it being false. Either way is good for me.

Also, I'm not asking about radicals. I know about radicals, and radicals are no good, because they dissect the kanji too much - like, http://jisho.org/kanji/details/%E6%A0%AA - the "stock" kanji is said to contain "tree" and "cow" radical while it is instead simply a "tree" radical + "red/cinnamon" kanji, and there are lots of other examples. It is not so productive, at least the way I see it, to remember "stock" kanji as tree, cow and 2 extra strokes, when it's really a tree and red/cinnamon.

So.

I am right now in process of learning Japanese, and before I had a long story of failure to really get into it, mostly because of the way japanese writing system works. Heisig method gave me an insight into how it actually works and how kanji actually get formed, are written, and so on and so forth. After learning about 250 kanji heisig-way, I am now kinda understanding the stroke order and direction, the overall flow of the writing, and so on and so forth. Before, kanji were a hurdle, now they are fun and interesting.

That said, I do not think I can continue learning the kanji RTK way, because I feel as it is leading me nowhere.

Here is why:

1) I am russian, and just using english keywords is not very good for me, because even though I think I can "think" in english language, I still mostly "think" in russian. So, a lot of keywords are confusing to me or just mean the same. What's worse, in translation from japanese to english to russian meaning may get so much distorted that I will remember a completely wrong definition of a kanji.

But that's not the main problem, main problem is: the whole keyword idea is not working with the way japanese language works! There is very little one-to-one direct translations - where one "meaning" is directly linked to one kanji.

Simple examples - from what I understand, wherever I'm speaking about the sun in japanese, I won't be using 日　- I'll be using 太陽. Same, for span, I won't be using 亘, I will be using 全長. And so on. Maybe not the best examples, but just using the jisho and google translate, I saw that this happense a lot! There is a lot of simple meanings in japanese that are written with multiple kanji, and trying to attach a kanji to a word (that is actually usually written with different kanji or a set of them) seems detrimental to me.

Going on forward with Heisig, I'll learn more and more stuff that's actually false - meaning, I'll learn that "this kanji is X" and be able to answer "X is written this way" while in fact every time I see or want to mention X, I need to use a completely different kanji (or set of kanji)! The further I'll go, the more I'll stick my head with stuff I will have to actually re-learn later. I'd rather remember the kanji linked to the real way I'll be using it, to a meaning that it most often means, not a keyword!

2) Obviously, I need to know how to read and write the simple stuff. Like, eat -　食,　たべる - in Heisig I'll learn it #1472... but I NEED it now, there's no point not to, I'll meet it like anywhere I go, so telling myself "I won't know how to write this until several months later" makes no sense. I get Heisig's idea that there's no point knowing only small number of kanji, because you need to know all in order to be able to read as an adult, but at the same time, the absoultely most used meanings I need to know now in order to be able to practice japanese (outside of kanji practice).

So, I guess, I'm kinda lost. I don't want to learn kanji the "normal" way - meaning, learn most used first and less used later, without any explanation of how they are combined from other kanji - just told to "write them down until I remember", but at the same time, I don't want to learn them in Heisig way - associating each kanji with a single keyword which most likely does not mean that "this kanji, when met, means this keyword", or "when I want to write this keyword, I write this kanji".

What I feel like the best way to go right now, is to learn kanji as I meet them, but dissect every kanji into the kanji and primitives it consists of, so that I don't have to remember all the 20 strokes, but can instead remember it the Heisig way (like, strange = a dog with nails for the teeth, or younger sister being a not-yet-ready woman). Thing is, I tried to look and didn't find any way to actually dissect kanji into sub-kanji, when I don't know what those sub-kanji are.

Like, take 食 for example - being on Heisig ~250 now, I don't know anything besides the top element of it. I'd like to learn it by combining the umbrella, but how do I find what is under the umbrella? Is the only way to look it up on jisho, find heisig's number, find it in heisig's book, find what primitieves it consists of, look up every primitive in the index, find every primitive number?

I mean, surely there is a better way of doing so, or is it?

Thanks in advance!

Download http://namakajiri.net/data/kanji/components.tsv , ctrl-f the kanji you're interested in, see what it's made of.

http://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html?kanji=%E9%A3%9F , check "Colour groups instead of individual strokes".

Hmm, what is the charset to use to open the tsv file provided?

I tried to feed "亘" to the site you provided, and it worked, but for "食" it colored everything differently - it didn't seem to recognize the silver, for example.

Istrebitel Wrote:Hmm, what is the charset to use to open the tsv file provided?

UTF-8.

Quote:I tried to feed "亘" to the site you provided, and it worked, but for "食" it colored everything differently - it didn't seem to recognize the silver, for example.

And it's not broken down in the TSV, either (the TSV is generated from the same data). Maybe because it's a radical in its own right.

Edit: Oh, and there's also KanjiDamage for a... different take on a Heisig-like method.

You might find these useful:
http://zkanji.sourceforge.net/
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid121590

Here's how I thought of it. Maybe it will help you.

First of all, Heisig's keywords aren't definitions of the kanji. They're just placeholders for your brain. You can use any word, actually. For a certain percent of the kanji, the idea is to get you to recognize the kanji--that's all. Like being able to distinguish a "b" from a "d."

For some kanji, there is no one good word (or even series of words) that will adequately capture how it is used in real life. So don't worry too much about the keywords. Just learn to distinguish one shape from another, so you're not constantly confusing 料 with 科. What they actually "mean" is rather unimportant at this stage, since will mean different things in different words.

That being said, I went through and changed virtually every Heisig keyword into what I considered a "better" keyword or definition. I looked up every one in an online dictionary. (I then made an Anki deck with the "improved" keywords.) This was time-consuming, but since I already knew a lot of Japanese, I could see his keywords weren't great. I also changed most of the primitives too.

Finally, I would encourage you to stick with the Heisig order. (It's not perfect but, eh, it'll do.) Wait to study 食, even though you know it and need it now. Go through all the kanji and you'll see that pretty much everything's related, so you need it all. You just gotta start somewhere and go through the whole lot of them. It's not a perfect system, but you will make progress with it. Don't get too hung up on the details.

I think 90% of the kanji use the first definition of the kanji in a dictionary as their keyword. I have the "Aedict" app on my phone, which is based on the famous EDICT website, and every time I've thought maybe the meaning is not quite right, I've looked it up and there it is. The times when it's not the first reading are usually either a) there was more than one kanji that has that meaning listed first, and there was a need to differentiate them (eg there are about 5 kanji that all mean to "jump/dance"), b) the kanji pretty much almost never means that when you encounter it in real life and everyone complained about that so he changed it (eg 参, the first meaning listed really is "nonplussed", but people complained that the most common meaning when you encounter it in Japanese is "visit" so he changed it). And yes, there are a small number of kanji that have a different keyword for some strange reason. So when you are worried that the keywords won't match the kanjis meaning, that won't really be the case.

Now with your example for "sun", that's the traditional meaning of the kanji in terms of the pictograph from which it developed, so I think that's why it's keyword is "sun". But of course you can change keyword to whatever suits you. Just make sure you do a search on this site in the study page to make sure they don't clash with another kanji.

As for the order... Do you really need to "study" 食 now? Or can you just passively note in your textbooks that that's its meaning? Heisig, if done consistently every day, need not take so long. 70-100 kanji a day would not be too taxing for most learners, and so Heisig should take less than a month to finish. Having a month's worth of vocab in kana only doesn't seem too bad to me, but of course, you might feel differently.

In terms of translating between Russian, English, and Japanese, there are a lot of similar keywords for us native English speakers too, that we have trouble differentiating. Most people will put a hint on their cards about which sense of the word they're thinking of when they make their story. You can do that on this site by editing the key word. Actually, you could probably add Russian keywords alongside the English ones on this site too.

Oh, and one thing that's been bothering me for years... Cyrillic, is the first C pronounced hard like a "k" or soft like an "s"??????

ktcgx Wrote:I think 90% of the kanji use the first definition of the kanji in a dictionary as their keyword.

I doubt it's as high as 90%. Even if it is, there's a bigger problem.

The dictionary definitions often don't lead you to how word is used in real life. So even if the definition is technically accurate, it won't help you when you see that word used in a book.

拶 and 幌 are examples (but there are hundreds more). Now you can choose to remember those common kanji as "be imminent" and "awning," but I can't see how that'll help you when reading them.

Maybe I'm simple, but I think it makes more sense to associate them with "greeting" and "Sapproro."

It may help you to find out how the kanji actually work (Heisig is dead wrong, but that's not the point of his book). Kanji will generally have an original meaning and one or several extended meanings. For instance, 日 originally meant "sun," and it's not to hard to imagine how it came to mean "day." Many kanji will also have borrowed meanings. For instance, 其 originally meant "basket," but was later borrowed to write a possessive pronoun whose pronunciation was similar, and 竹 was added to the top to write "basket" (箕).

食 does not have "silver" in it. It's composed of a mouth 亼 (originally an upside-down 口) eating grain 皀 (written slightly differently now, which is very common). That's easier to remember, right? 亼 probably also functions as the phonetic component, because it was pronounced similar to 食. The 艮 you're calling "silver" was graphically distinct from the 艮 in 銀 originally, and never meant silver (銀) to begin with, but was used for its phonetic value in 銀.

Istrebitel Wrote:If I state something in this thread, first of all, it is MY OPINION (disclaimer, lol)

This hackneyed line is a pet peeve of mind. Can't we assume that anything you say is your opinion? How is this different than proclaiming that what you're about to say is what you're about to say?

People--usually teenagers--generally use this to say that they don't want to be criticized for what they're about to say. But, no, you don't get to decide whether or not people will crticize your opinions.

Tzadeck Wrote:

Istrebitel Wrote:If I state something in this thread, first of all, it is MY OPINION (disclaimer, lol)

This hackneyed line is a pet peeve of mind. Can't we assume that anything you say is your opinion? How is this different than proclaiming that what you're about to say is what you're about to say?

People--usually teenagers--generally use this to say that they don't want to be criticized for what they're about to say. But, no, you don't get to decide whether or not people will crticize your opinions.

Pretty sure this is just a reaction to what happened on the other thread, and the OP is not generally someone who thinks they have to say this everytime...

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:

ktcgx Wrote:I think 90% of the kanji use the first definition of the kanji in a dictionary as their keyword.

I doubt it's as high as 90%. Even if it is, there's a bigger problem.

The dictionary definitions often don't lead you to how word is used in real life. So even if the definition is technically accurate, it won't help you when you see that word used in a book.

拶 and 幌 are examples (but there are hundreds more). Now you can choose to remember those common kanji as "be imminent" and "awning," but I can't see how that'll help you when reading them.

Maybe I'm simple, but I think it makes more sense to associate them with "greeting" and "Sapproro."

Sorry, I should clarify, it's just a figure as an example. But I'm pretty sure the large majority of Kanji are ok.

But the kanji used in vocab are kinda like metaphors. Their "real" meanings (just a term I'm using to help differentiate things!) in the dictionaries are usually only related to the meanings of words they appear in very tentatively, or though some metaphorical twist.
EDIT: eg the "to be imminent" of greeting, you can see how that comes about, as aisatsus in Japanese tends to be used at the start of meetings etc, thus "something is imminent".
But even worse than that, most kanji were borrowed initially for their pronunciations, so their "real" meaning has almost nothing to do with what they are used to mean.

On top of all that, kanji have been extensively simplified over the years. While not as bad as simplified Chinese (which has been simplified even further), take a look at Taiwanese if you want to see something a bit closer to their unsimplified forms.

I think that due to the simplification of kanji over the years, a lot of separate forms have merged, but I think that Heisig does a decent job of breaking them down into meaningful packages for people to learn. If you want to go through the radicals etc, you're probably going to have to find something that will show you their historical forms, so you can see how those work with the radicals.

[Katsuo]

Istrebitel Wrote:1) I am russian, and just using english keywords is not very good for me, because even though I think I can "think" in english language, I still mostly "think" in russian. So, a lot of keywords are confusing to me or just mean the same. What's worse, in translation from japanese to english to russian meaning may get so much distorted that I will remember a completely wrong definition of a kanji.

Are you familiar with the kanji dictionary called Yarxi? It's made by a Russian guy and has an English version called Jishop. It gives keywords for each kanji and breaks them into components.

Jishop is available for Windows, Android and Apple iOS devices (I'm not sure about Yarxi, but I guess it's the same).

I think you're missing the point OP.
RTK1 does not teach you Japanese, and should(in my opinion) be done separately before you proceed. That said, if you need 食　now, then there's no problem, just memorize it as　食べる and be done with it. Before I started RTK I knew about 20 or so Kanji in their compound form, and found that I didn't have to write a good story to make them or their meanings stick. You don't need to know what a kanji is made of or how to write it to recognize it.

Like others here said, Heisig's keywords are simple placeholders and when you get to vocabulary you'll see how little they matter. RTK1 is not for everyone, and definitely not for the impatient. I encourage you to experiment and find what's best, just make sure you see the bigger picture before you attempt to rush things to get immediate gratification.

ktcgx Wrote:Pretty sure this is just a reaction to what happened on the other thread, and the OP is not generally someone who thinks they have to say this everytime...

Yeah, he explained that. That has nothing to do with my post.

Tzadeck Wrote:This hackneyed line is a pet peeve of mind. Can't we assume that anything you say is your opinion? How is this different than proclaiming that what you're about to say is what you're about to say?

People--usually teenagers--generally use this to say that they don't want to be criticized for what they're about to say. But, no, you don't get to decide whether or not people will crticize your opinions.
...
Yeah, he explained that. That has nothing to do with my post.

No I don't want to silence your criticism. You're welcome to criticize my opinion. I just wanted to save you, me, and everybody a lot of time, because people (mistakenly) take my opinion as fact statement and react to it as such, creating long (and unfounded) dicsussions. In other words, you are welcome to criticise my opinion, but you are not welcome to first think of my post as if I'm trying to imply I'm the voice of truth of some sort, and then arguing about that kind of stuff.

Finally on topic - thank you everybody for suggestions, but I think I'll settle with http://kanjidamage.com/ for now. I discovered it yesterday (now I see, someone also suggested it in this thread) and it's a godsent. Why? Because instead of using a keyword from-a-dictionary, it uses a keyword from real life. Want an example? Here!

旦

Heisig calls this "nightbreak" explaining it to be a take on daybreak. If you look up your dictionary, you will see it is indeed nightbreak or dawn or morning.

HOWEVER

Will you ever use it in this way? No! Never ever! Because when you say "nightbreak" "daybreak" "morning" or "dawn" in japanese, you use completely different words / kanji. Therefore, even being correct keyword, it is useless for a person who wants to understand and speak japanese - it may have usage for language expert, but that's far ahead, right now the goal of anyone using Heisig's method is to learn to read and write japanese, to augment their ability to speak it... at beginner/intermediate level.

Kanjidamage calls this kanji in a way you will most probably only use it ever - husband. Does this kanji mean husband? No, never. But if you will only use it in a compound word 旦那 meaning husband, may as well learn it that way.

Another example.

召

Heisig calls this "seduce" and he's right, this kanji does have a meaning of "seduce". Will you ever use it that way? NOPE! If you speak of seduction, temptation, lust, forcing someone to do something via these ways, you use different words/kanji!

Kanjidamage calls it "summon" because of the "召し上げる" usage (polite way to call someone to eat). And well, I can't argue if this is the most common use of the kanji, but at least it's a meaning you will hear or encounter, while you will never encounter this as "seduce".

And there's a lot of them.

It may look like a stupid idea not to learn dictionary definition of the kanji but some unrelated (to the kanji) meaning, but then again, what good is that dictionary definition if it's never used that way? What good is to know that 召 is seduce and 旦 is morning, if writing "I was seduced by my girlfriend in the morning" using these two kanji means noone will understand you?

Again, this is my opinion.

I guess I'll try using Kanjidamage from now on.

I admit though, I don't agree with the author that stroke order is irrelevant. Learning stroke order makes you understand kanji so much more, it essentially helps you remember easier because the flow of the brush occurs to you naturally. At least, for me, after following stroke order for like 250 kanji Heisig-way, I started grasping the way they're written, and now even if I look at a big one, I can kinda guess how do I write it, and I'm mostly correct. So, I'll keep using that, and also, Heisig's method of memorizing through stories I also find sometimes better than raw mnemonics like "measure satan!" (measure = say + ten, for kanji 計), so I guess I'll be using my custom stories too. I like the fact that Heisig teaches you that - gives you example of how you can construct stories and then tells you to go on your own and construct your own stories.

I guess benefits of kanjidamage just outweight benefits of Heisig method for me, so I'd rather modify kanjidamage method with Heisig's parts than other way around. I just like the way kanjidamage gives you keywords based on how you use the kanji, as opposed to heisig's dictionary definitions, the way it incorporates On-yomi into the mnemonics (this is so much more useful than Heisig's way when you don't know it). I know Heisig's idea is not to overwhelm you, but one ON-yomi is not much added to the story (just add another keyword that is always the same, like Genghis Khan for "KAN" or Car for "KA"), and knowing ON-yomi gives you so much power (like, you can guess how to write words you hear, but most importantly, you can actually type it on your pc if you know the On-yomi, while if you don't, you have to copypaste it from a dictionary).

[ファブリス]

Just a hint Istrebitel, if you want some effective/useful help, it's going to work that much better if you can summarize your first post. It will probably answer half of your questions too, as you seem to be caught into a lot of sideways thinking.

A thread will "derail" from your intended question if you yourself can't put this question down clearly. If you pepper your post with many sideways comments/thoughts that are not very important to your main question, then don't be surprised if people also going to comment in random directions that frustratingly don't seem to address the crux of your post.

TLDR ("too long didn't read" expression) summarize, it helps both yourself and people answering.

PS: Having said that I'm sure there are people far more patient than me here, so YMMV.

I too, think you're missing the point a bit. Heisig explains in the intro that the choice of keyword is largely arbitrary. They are placeholders that allow you to differentiate between a large number of similar shapes. Ideally, they approximate the meaning, but its not a necessity. Kanji take on a lot of different meanings, so the task to find the perfect keyword is misguided anyways. Its not like you can just smash together a bunch of keywords to make a sentence, and then translate that to kanji, and expect it to make any sense. Kanji are the most abstracted unit of meaning in the language. They do have a meaning, but its almost not worthwhile to even care about in the beginning. You need to care about the meaning of vocab. Learning the meaning of kanji is just something that will eventually help you when you pick up new vocab associated with the same kanji. Its more of a big-picture thing. You can't expect to master it right away.

Learning on-yomi at the same time increases the burden of learning individual kanji. Another benefit to heisig was that it compartmentalized the task of learning kanji, rather than adopting the most time consuming "everything at once" strategy. It's a good general SRS technique for speeding things along and making them easier. But, with a SRS you do whatever you can. If learning on-yomi seems easy, go for it. If it drags down your correct % to <80 and dilates response time, drop it.

Istrebitel Wrote:"measure satan!" (measure = say + ten, for kanji 計)

I'd really advise against using lots of non-sequitur mneumonics like that.

Overall, though, the difference of RTK1 to kanjidamage isn't that big of a deal. You have a plan. That's fine. The most important thing is not arguing which is the most effective, but getting things moving.

Istrebitel Wrote:Finally on topic - thank you everybody for suggestions, but I think I'll settle with http://kanjidamage.com/ for now. I discovered it yesterday (now I see, someone also suggested it in this thread) and it's a godsent. Why? Because instead of using a keyword from-a-dictionary, it uses a keyword from real life. Want an example? Here!

旦

Heisig calls this "nightbreak" explaining it to be a take on daybreak. If you look up your dictionary, you will see it is indeed nightbreak or dawn or morning.

HOWEVER

Will you ever use it in this way? No! Never ever! Because when you say "nightbreak" "daybreak" "morning" or "dawn" in japanese, you use completely different words / kanji. Therefore, even being correct keyword, it is useless for a person who wants to understand and speak japanese - it may have usage for language expert, but that's far ahead, right now the goal of anyone using Heisig's method is to learn to read and write japanese, to augment their ability to speak it... at beginner/intermediate level.

Kanjidamage calls this kanji in a way you will most probably only use it ever - husband. Does this kanji mean husband? No, never. But if you will only use it in a compound word 旦那 meaning husband, may as well learn it that way.

And then what happens when you get to 夫? Which means husband, too. It means husband even when it's not in a compound with another kanji.

At the beginning, it's difficult to see the bigger picture. It's hard to tell why a kanji has a particular keyword, instead of another one you might think is more useful. You really only know which ones clash at the end of RTK1... and even then, I'd be wary, because there's RTK3 as well...

ktcgx Wrote:And then what happens when you get to 夫? Which means husband, too. It means husband even when it's not in a compound with another kanji.

Both are phonetic radicals, for different readings. Not a problem.

I don't know why you think you'll only use 旦 in 旦那 anyway. It also shows up in 一旦 ('once' as in 'once you have started, you better finish', 'once you make a promise, you must keep it', not as in 'one time'). Which is my keyword for it now. I forget what my English keyword for it was, but it wasn't 'nightbreak' which I consider a travesty. I think I changed it to a short phrase like 'dawn of day' or something.

('nightbreak' should be the start of night if it's a new coinage derived from 'daybreak' but instead we're supposed to take it as a synonym because the word daybreak was taken? .... give me a break! *cough* Worst keyword in the book, hands down.
/rant)

旦 also appears in 元旦 where it's clearly related to its original meaning as this word for 'New Year's Day' suggests specifically the morning of the first day of the year. (as opposed to other words for New Year's that might suggest the whole day or the whole week or more at the beginning of the new year.)

旦 also appears in a whole bunch of other words that are in the dictionary (including 今旦 (こんたん) meaning 今朝) but how many of them are actually used in modern language is another question. Since こんたん isn't even in EDICT or my IME's conversion, I think it's a safe bet nobody's going to see -that- one unless they have an interest in old literature... but some few of the other dozens of words might actually show up.


That said, there's nothing -really- wrong with calling it husband either (except that おっと will need a new nickname) --- kanji keywords are not the meaning of the kanji. Kanji don't even *have* a meaning. They are used to write words and those *words* have a meaning.

A kanji keyword is just a mnemonic, preferably but not necessarily related to some of the words that kanji is used to write. The most important thing about the keyword for 旦, in any case, is that it's good for stories because it'll show up as a component a fair few times. (Of course you can make a component keyword different from the kanji keyword, if you like.)

[Katsuo]

I don't know if it will be useful, but I made a table comparing the keywords of Kanji Damage, Heisig and others.

2 Katsuo
Oh wow, thanks!

2 ktcgx
Yeah, sorry, mentioned only part of the keyword, here's the page for it http://kanjidamage.com/kanji/30-danna-husband-%E6%97%A6

2 ファブリス
I must apologise.. I admit my posts are probably... well, a mess. But then again, learning new language, this is what happens. Your thoughts are in a mess because you try to comprehend.... a whole new way of expressing... everything!

2 Haych
Well, I guess I missed it then. It makes sense now. I've read numerous articles on how learning new language should be taken not as way to translate your language, but to express "meanings" and feelings, the reality. However, it still takes time to wrap your head around it. And you still rever to the way your language works, or rather, you work as a human being/

I mean, it is just simple logic to consider a kanji to mean something. It's a picture! A picture of a sun means sun. A picture of a target reticule (in computer game) means "accuracy". Etc. We don't consider a letter in our language meaning something because a letter NEVER means something by itself, or rather, number of single letters meanint something by itself is insignificantly small - A, I, anything else? But in japanese a lot of kanji mean something by themselves. So it's hard to grasp the fact that they do.... aaaaand they don't at the same time! Like, 召 is seduce, but seduce is 誘惑.... 旦 is daybreak, but daybreak is 夜明け / 黎明.

I guess, I'll follow the advice, and since my OP question has been answered (kanjidamage and yarxi are good ways to find out how to dissect kanji into other kanji) I'll post another thread on the new question that appeared during this topic.