I'm slowly adding hand-drawn images of the primitives from the index into Anki. Does anyone have images of the primitive elements from the index? This would really save me a lot of time.

Too bad you cant review primitives on the site.

If you use the "Search" option, and search for "primitive list" you will find this topic

I agree that it would a great idea including primitives here. In the meanwhile, I'm planning to make such a deck too, using Pangolin font (thanks again Pangolin).

meolox Wrote:Too bad you can't review primitives on the site.

The SRS system for the actual kanji should ensure you review every primitive strictly at least as often as you would if it was its own separate flashcard, surely? The most extreme case would be if you had a primitive that only appeared in one kanji, and where you never failed that kanji for any reason other than failing that particular primitive. And in that case you'd see the card (and thus the primitive) on exactly the same schedule as if it was a card dedicated to the primitive. In practice, of course, each primitive appears in multiple kanji, so you see it more often than that, and you may well fail a card for other reasons than that primitive, which again makes it turn up more often.

So you already see each primitive on a much more frequent schedule than strict SRS of the primitive alone would require. Adding an extra card purely for the primitive would just make it turn up even more often. And we're trying to reduce effort here, not increase it, right? :-)

As is mentioned in the thread Transtic points out, you might want to share stories about the primitives, but you're not going to get that from Anki either...

What I mean is there is no way to record your stories for the primitives on the site, you often see people sharing stories with extra mnemonics attached for the primitives.

Seeing that we work off a pre-designed Kanji database (this is true, right?), some of the primitives are already designed so no need to draw them. The only way I see that working (for now) is the list of the Heisig primitives that are in themselves Kanji also. This is the case for ones like Barracks and Moreover which Heisig points out in his book. I also believe the traditional radicals are in that database.

That leaves only the primitives that Heisig (and other users) just made up. For me, I can recall Birdnest (goods over tree).

meolox Wrote:What I mean is there is no way to record your stories for the primitives on the site, you often see people sharing stories with extra mnemonics attached for the primitives.

Yeah, that would be useful. I'm planning on adding primitives to Anki too (with an extra field for Pangolin's font), just so I can give them their own stories and notes, but I'd suspend them as they don't need to be reviewed separately.

Generally they don't seem to really need their own stories though, as they get used so frequently and aren't usually very complex, but I'd like to give them their own notes as they often change form depending on how they are used in the kanji.

Hmm, thinking on this a bit more, isn't in keeping with the RTK mindset to include ALL the kanji that make up the kanji you're actually learning? You find out in RTK3 that alot of the "primitives" are kanji in and of themselves. So definately those primitives should be added with the actual meaning used as the keyword.

The problem is including these primitives without messing up the Heisig number order (which seems to be an important order for a number of reasons). That being the case, RevTK could incorparate primitives in the study via a method that KanjiCan uses. In that program, he lists primitives with decimal points. So the "drop" would be 21.1 for example if it it shown right before frame 21. I'm guessing there's a way to then to use pre-existing primitives and insert them into the RevTK list. All one has to do is list the non-frame primitives with the database locator (easier said than done, I know).

That leaves only the primitives that Heisig invented. Eh.