Just curious, since I read so many people post about them having reached a milestone. That made me wonder, what do you take it to mean when you're "at #500" or "at #1,000"? Did you just make stories for them all? Or also passed all the chapters in Koohi up to that point once without a mistake, or twice (or a certain number of times in the space of a week, or whatever)?

Personally, I recently "passed" #1,000 in the sense that I burrowed my way through every Kanji before (and by now a little past) that number, even though some (perhaps 1 in 20) have defied my attempts to formulate a story that has a reasonable link to at least part of the Kanji in question. Since random stories that only come to mind when you're already seeing the Kanji, but not when only looking at the key meaning simply aren't good enough. So I only count stories as (probably) finished if there is at least a reasonable logical link.

And that brings me to another question that may or not belong in a separate thread: do all of you heed Heisig's advice that you should always learn "from the key meaning to the Kanji, since the opposite way will take care of itself"? I always strive for this, since what I referred to as the 'minimal logical link' is where I have put the bar. Then again, I'm still not really convinced that this bit of advice by Heisig is really that solid, while it's costing me a lot of extra effort. What do the rest of you think?

There is no exact or consistent measure for when you reach a milestone. I think a lot of people have seen that adding the card to your stories doesn't mean you've learned it so they wait until the card for that kanji is mature or something.

I did keyword -> kanji, it makes sense to me and I think it worked out okay. It's kind of taking you from the watered down/simplified meaning in English to recognizing the kanji character as having a certain meaning or being capable of having that meaning and/or others (remember, the meaning of a written word in English is not necessarily the same as the word in Japanese*). You don't really want to go the other way because you don't want to get used to looking at a kanji and thinking of an English word, unless you're really planning to learn the kanji writings and not the readings for some reason.


*More on this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Eminem2 Wrote:And that brings me to another question that may or not belong in a separate thread: do all of you heed Heisig's advice that you should always learn "from the key meaning to the Kanji, since the opposite way will take care of itself"?

Doing it kanji->keyword makes it much faster to get done with English-only RTK and get on to Japanese. After a while you'll find the English keywords are almost impossible to recall and you can either ditch your RTK deck completely or start adding Japanese keywords to the backs of your cards.

tashippy Wrote:You don't really want to go the other way because you don't want to get used to looking at a kanji and thinking of an English word.

After you've learned vocabulary with that kanji you'll find that's its actually hard to remember the English word even when you try. At best you'll hit an English synonym that jives with your Japanese understanding.

Also you are forgetting the whole flying pig theory; the brain doesn't think in language and words.

Thanks for the replies and the link! That makes for some interesting reading.

For now, I suppose I will go on 'the hard way' with RTK1 (Meaning --> Kanji), since I have almost made it halfway doing so and I don't like the idea of giving up just because it's tough.

But I'm not sure I'd recommend doing it this way to people just starting with RTK1. And from the many stories I read on the other half of this site, I get the impression a large number of people aren't really bothering to try and work from the meaning to the Kanji.

There's a reason that kanji→keyword got the nickname "Lazy Kanji".

Studying Kanji vocabulary for class is now ridiculously easy - see the Kanji once = remember them forever for 9 out of 10. So far the keywords went really well with vocab meaning.

@ Seyruun

That sounds great, but I'm not sure what part you are responding to?

The connection is not really clear.. it was a statement to add to tokyostyles longer post. I'm sorry if I was confusing..

No problem. I was just curious!