I was moving along through Lessons 28 -29 when I started to bog down and seemed to remember fewer words than usual. When I doubled back to see what might be happening, I noticed that some of the keywords were starting to sound very similar in meaning and had confused me.

A couple of examples:
1) habitation (#824), reside (#826), domicile (#831), place (#857)
2) inspect (#836), scrutinize (#843), examine (#787)

I hope Heizig will get a little more creative with his keywords as I advance. Beware, fellow learners!

PS: I appreciate Aphasiac's renaming of some of the more vague keywords.

K

When this happens, I think a good idea is to come up with a story that couldn't apply to any other of the keywords with similar meaning. A good way to accomplish this is through a bit of mild wordplay.

What I mean is like for example, for "habitation", you could have a story involving someone with some kind of habit. Your "reside" story could involve someone applying for permanent residence in a country. Your "domicile" story could involve a dominatrix. Something along those lines.

An actual example from my study (I used RTK so this particular keyword may not apply to you) was 悼 - lament [state of mind, eminent magician]. I was confusing this with 憾 - remorse, so I came up with this story:

An eminent magician, the great lamentini accidentally kills a volunteer and his state of mind becomes a state of lament.

I recommend using pinyin on the front of the cards. This helps to disambiguate the character. I also have found that this technique allows for passive memorization of the pinyin also.

I made a deck using the RTK/RTH spreadsheet and it works great.

I hear you. This problem compounds and compounds as lessons go on. I finished the first book and got about 1/5 of the way through the second, and I have keyword mixup syndrome, where I often read a keyword and think, "It could be one of three characters." For example, Heisig uses know, knowledge, and knowledgeable all as keywords, which, although I can now tell them apart, is a freaking nightmare, in my mind.

Also, things like "basket", "bamboo basket", and "rectangular basket", or "paper" and "newspaper", or "before" and "beforehand". We should be warned of these at the time the first character is presented so that we can prepare for the problem in advance until after it's too late.

Also, book 2 is extremely difficult, IMO. The characters often no longer break so nicely into often repeated, easily studied primitives, and you get lots of weird stroke combinations that appear only once or twice. Obviously, not Heisig's fault by any means, but it does make the pace slow down considerably (for me at least) and poses a huge challenge.

This is quite right, but it's pretty unavoidable given the overlapping and similar meanings.

I introduce wordplay when possible, as suggested on this forum. Giving people names (or place names or company names) that sound similar to the keyword give a nice hook.

I have found the pinyin very helpful too (Skritter includes it on the front of the card and also plays the sound for it). While I am not memorizing it deliberately, I have found that it's often nicely associated by the time I want to learn it.

chrismerck Wrote:I recommend using pinyin on the front of the cards. This helps to disambiguate the character. I also have found that this technique allows for passive memorization of the pinyin also.

Chrismerck, a *huge* thank you for this recommendation. This is what I started to do (adding the pinyin to the front of the card in Anki is incredibly easy), and it has made a HUGE difference. I was previously getting about an 85% recall rate with just keywords, which was depressing, but with keyword + pinyin, I'm over 99%, and I'm also learning the pinyin for each character very quickly. Also, it's helping me to see the phonetic connections between characters in a big way, so now when I meet new characters, I can often guess their readings (without tone) and be right quite often.

So thanks, and to anyone else struggling with keyword synonym soup, I highly, highly recommend this.