Firstly im sorry if this has appeared in another thread but i have not been able to find it so here it goes:

I've seen over and over again that the keywords are not always a direct translation for RTK, but i'm curious to know if its the same situation for remembering the hanzi. I've gotten about 500 kanji into RTK but have felt slightly discouraged about learning a language that is barely spoken in my area(Toronto). Meanwhile i have lots of chinese friends, speakers of both Mandarin and Cantonese, both languages i find very beautiful both written and spoken. So I have decided to throw Japanese on the back burner and take on chinese as my primary focus. I've also heard its easier to finish RTK and then move on to RTH to fill in some of the blanks. Any advice on how to approach this situation would be greatly appreciated! and sorry if this post is steaming with noob problems!
Thanks in advance!

haveheart Wrote:this post is steaming with noob problems!

Somewhat funny, but it seems that the only actual problem (as opposed to rumors you've heard and decisions you've made) mentioned in your post is that Japanese isn't spoken a lot in Toronto area. And it's doubtful that this forum will be able to fix that...

Apart from that ... the title of your post makes me suspect (sorry if it's incorrect) that you see the "keywords are not always a direct translation" as a problem. Well, it is not a problem. They are not actually supposed to be translations, direct or otherwise, which would not actually be possible. Their function is mostly to be "memory hooks".

Heisig and Richardson advise against using RTK for Chinese and they are probably right. People used to study RTK because there was no Chinese equivalent. Now that RTH and RSH are out, you should start with one of them.

The situation is in fact 'worse' with RTH traditional (can't speak for simplified), as there are more characters in Chinese that have identical or near-identical meaning. By the Heisig method though, they need to be assigned different keywords.

But as zonius says. that is by design and shouldn't be something that concerns you. It is easier to do RTK then RTH, but that's because of this site.

Actually, the keywords are often a lot better than a casual reader may think!
To be fair, it's not easy for a beginner to fully appreciate the real effort that went into the keyword selection (I know I didn't). Obviously there's the need to avoid keyword duplication for characters with similar meanings, but also with time you start to see how, for example, a somewhat awkward archaic word is able to capture more than one meaning of the character.
But the best discovery for me happened when I got my hands on a book about Classical Chinese poetry (Literary Chinese, 文言文). That's where I've seen the reason for the most weird keywords. One of the first poems actually had, for example, the endlessly ridiculed 原 - yes, in its "flatlands" meaning!
Still, this probably is of no concern for a beginner, who should just trust the authors and learn the characters, knowing that there's a reason behind every choice.

About flatlands. there's always the Chinese word 草原:
cǎoyuán 草原 grassland / prairie = 草原 ㄘㄠˇ　ㄩㄢˊ

Of course! There's also 平原 and other compounds, it's just that I've seen 原 used a lot in the newbies' postings as an example of "what the hell were they thinking, it does not mean that".