.

Never did yet. I usually only use the book to identify the new primitives and count how many Kanji it uses to then learn them via ANKI with stories taken from here.

The whole thing seemed a bit ridiculous to me. As long as you keep in mind it's all just one giant mnemonic and you're not actually learning anything except a tool you can use later on actual Japanese, the ridiculousness doesn't become too overbearing.

The ridiculous stories were actually what turned me off for a long time, and only when I got over that, I seriously started RTK. There's nothing really surprisingly bad happening really, when you're aware that it's been an intentional mess from the beginning.

That one was pretty silly, although I think there were some others that were also fairly strange. I stopped seeing the big benefits of RTK sometime after 1500 or so, as I felt that I had "got the point". At that point I was more of the mindset of I just want to finish things. Things picked up a bit after I encountered some of my favorite and most anticipated kanji that I had learned a while back or knew the vocabulary for it well

I've come to realise that the point is that the stories should be memorable, so sometimes they're far out so they stick.

To be honest, browsing through Henshall, the truth is that kanji often have very strange stories behind them, which most of the time refer to bone script radicals that have been simplified (for example 月 "moon" and 月 "meat" come from two different bone script kanji; 黒 is an ideogram of a soot stained window over a fire, but the "stained window" radical has been simplified into 田), or even to previous meanings which have since been lost. So yeah, I guess I can excuse some weird stories.

What I don't like is how for the sake of simplicity he sometimes brings together different radicals under the same keyword, especially at the beginning of the book.

Has anyone every checked how accurately Henshall's mnemonics actually match the current academic opinion of the characters' origins? For that matter, there's still disagreement on some of the older history.

bertoni Wrote:Has anyone every checked how accurately Henshall's mnemonics actually match the current academic opinion of the characters' origins? For that matter, there's still disagreement on some of the older history.

Sure, Henshall himself does cite conflicting versions often, although he usually favours one.
What's a good resource on the current academic opinion on kanji etymology?

ps. I love your avatar! A beautiful and funny hanzi.