I find it really confusing that certain primitives can have multiple names, for example 月, which can be moon, flesh, or part of the body. I want to just pick a single name for each primitive, and then stick with it, but I'm worried that I might pick wrong, and then have to go back and adjust everything, for example if I pick moon, and then all the best stories use flesh, or I don't pick the primitive name that relates to the meaning of most kanji that contain it.

Is there a good way to know which of the given names I should pick for a primitive? Are there any pitfalls that I should be aware of? Is there a list somewhere of the most popular primitive names, or "best" primitive names?

Hi, I finished RTK1 a little while back and what I did for example for the particular primitive you mention is I used all three meanings in my stories depending on what the kanji was. I think most of the time I used "part of the body" because there are many kanji denoting a certain body part, e.g., "stomach is part of the body to feed the brain."

On the other hand, for "inflation" my story was "horsemeat has gone up 25% due to inflation."

In another story I used "month".

It didn't cause me any confusion.

I think I might also have a hunch on why it's causing me problems. I'm not bothering learning how to write, so I only study by looking at the kanji and trying to remember the keyword.

Since I go kanji -> primitives -> keyword, if I have a lot of choices when I'm trying to figure out which keywords to use, it's very confusion.

I'm assuming that you usually practiced by looking at the keyword, remembering the primitives, and then writing the kanji? If so, it would make a lot of sense that you wouldn't get confused if a primitive had multiple names.

Always go keyword to Kanji. This will enable you to use the kanji actively and you will learn it much better this way. If you don't want to learn how to write the kanji then don't, but you should go from keyword to kanji anyway.

On the topic: this did bother me too, but you get used to primitve with multiple meanings. Just keep going, after some time this will not be an issue to you anymore.

Are you sure that I should bother with going from keyword to kanji? I'm all for doing it right, but I don't plan on learning how to hand-write japanese, so I can't personally see how it will be useful. All the things that I want to be able to do will involve seeing a kanji first (signs, menus, manga, etc) and then coming up with the meaning, so that seems like what I should practice.

Do you happen to know if other people who haven't needed to learn how to write have had strong feelings about it either way?

Also, if I do start practicing keyword -> kanji, should I not bother at all with kanji -> keyword, or just do both?

Have a look at this forum post, basicly everything important about the topic is in there. You can see a small minority is for going from kanji-keyword and most are for keyword-kanji, even if you just want to be able to recognize it.

Sweet, thanks for the background!