I think the reviewing section on this site is very good and Fabrice did an amazing job with it. It just has a major flaw. The maximum spacing that the current reviewing system allows is 60 day intervals. So if you progress to 1500 and even if you are amazing enough to get them all into the last box, you will still get at least 25 cards a day on average. Miss a day or two then you've got 50, 75 etc. This isn't the subject of this thread so I'm not going to go into it too much. It's been brought up in the feedback section quite a bit.

For those who would like to use alternative keywords and example sentences, would Fabrice be willing to let us post suggestions somewhere on the site? A page that contained a link to download a file, or a list of all of the frame numbers with alternate keywords and example sentences?

[ファブリス]

Regarding alternative keywords, and non english keywords : something I had in mind is to add information for each character in the Study area, which helps to understand the particular "flavor" of the keyword, and thus differentiate keywords that have similar concepts. I think this is one area where the book is weak.

Perhaps part of this information could be an exemplary compound. However I am not convinced that it is necessary to use a non-english keyword to remember the character. The idea with mnemonics is to link something you know very well with something you don't know well, or not at all. In this case linking from your native language (or one you're very fluent with) to a new language.

Perhaps looking for non-english, or alternative keywords is a work-around for such a problem ? I have to say I would not imagine having completed RTK1 without the assistance of Kodansha's Kanji Learner Dictionary. Too many keywords from RTK1 left me in doubt as to exactly how they were meant to be understood, and how the corresponding characters was going to be actually used.

I quite like also the idea that I can differentiate between the learning aids and the actual content learned. Keywords and stories (which will eventually become redundant) stay in english so there is no confusion between these and what is learned, which is all japanese.

Quote:For those who would like to use alternative keywords and example sentences, would Fabrice be willing to let us post suggestions somewhere on the site? A page that contained a link to download a file, or a list of all of the frame numbers with alternate keywords and example sentences?

I am not against the idea, however I have no plans to support alternative keywords on the website at this stage.

In the Study area, members need a common ground to be able to help one another.

I am worried that learners looking for help with RTK, are getting more confused and get more doubt with the method instead of focusing on creating effective imagery and mnemonic associations, and understanding the meaning of the characters.

Perhaps I should create a separate forum for discussions on adaptations to the original method.

ファブリス Wrote:Regarding alternative keywords, and non english keywords : something I had in mind is to add information for each character in the Study area, which helps to understand the particular "flavor" of the keyword, and thus differentiate keywords that have similar concepts. I think this is one area where the book is weak.

It sounds like a good resource to have but as you mentioned, anyone could get this information by looking in the Kodansha dictionary or Jim Breen's site. I think it would be better to develop the site to promote the unique contributions that learners can give rather than things that can be found in textbooks.

ファブリス Wrote:However I am not convinced that it is necessary to use a non-english keyword to remember the character.

It's certainly not necessary. Just about everyone who has completed RTK 1 has done so using non-Japanese keywords. I am compiling a list of Japanese keywords and example sentences that is slowly replacing the English keywords when I review. Rather than review from

strike -> 打

I now review from

うつ　　雨が窓を激しくうっていた。　-> 打つ

I believe that people don't ever have to use the English keyword and they can go straight to reviewing from the Japanese and example sentence. Even if you don't agree with me on this point, surely you would agree that for yourself (who has completed RTK 1) and others who have reviewed the first 1000 kanji 20 times each, it would be a good time to convert to Japanese.

I'm hoping that there are other people using this site who would like to start reviewing from Japanese rather than English. I think it would be great if we could pool our resources rather than me do it all myself. Even if I end up doing it all myself, it would be great if the list I compile could be used by other people. It doesn't have to be integrated with the rest of the site.

ファブリス Wrote:The idea with mnemonics is to link something you know very well with something you don't know well, or not at all. In this case linking from your native language (or one you're very fluent with) to a new language.
...
Keywords and stories (which will eventually become redundant) stay in english so there is no confusion between these and what is learned, which is all japanese.

I might start a different thread on this topic but it seems to me that there are two ways of making a story for each kanji. Firstly, you can do something visual that has very little to do with your native tongue. eg. Heisig's story for 唱. I envisage a choir master conducting two chanting choir boys with their tongues wagging.

Secondly, you can make a mnemonic or do something that plays with the English language. eg. Heisig's story for 軌. A car gets stuck in a 'rut' and so can a baseball team.

In the short term, both approaches work well. However in the long term, you will have to hope that the memory aid you used for the second approach will become redundant, otherwise you won't be able to write that kanji without thinking of the different meanings of a rut. I believe that the first approach need never be redundant. I plan to continue reviewing these stories for a very, very long time. Kanji are like words, you will never know them all and there will be many that you use infrequently. If you let the keyword and the story go redundant for these kanji then you will forget how to write them. I speak from experience.

ファブリス Wrote:In the Study area, members need a common ground to be able to help one another.

This is a very good point. Any work that is done on creating different keywords and different approaches must not be allowed to interfere with beginners' potential progress.

ファブリス Wrote:Perhaps I should create a separate forum for discussions on adaptations to the original method.

Sounds good. Lets do it.

ファブリス Wrote:However I am not convinced that it is necessary to use a non-english keyword to remember the character. The idea with mnemonics is to link something you know very well with something you don't know well, or not at all. In this case linking from your native language (or one you're very fluent with) to a new language.

Well, yes. But for a lot of ppl here the first language is not English to start with, and many start with some knowledge of Japanese too.

Quote:Perhaps looking for non-english, or alternative keywords is a work-around for such a problem ? I have to say I would not imagine having completed RTK1 without the assistance of Kodansha's Kanji Learner Dictionary. Too many keywords from RTK1 left me in doubt as to exactly how they were meant to be understood, and how the corresponding characters was going to be actually used.

I used to use a Russian electronic kanji dictionary Yarxi for the same purpose (I don't think there is anything of comparable quality in English), but I now find a different way more efficient: I use Twinkle for both the reviews and initial learning, and I have all Kanjidic meanings on the front of the card, along with readings. The first meaning in Kanjidic is pretty much always the Heisig keyword, and the other meanings help to clarify it. Plus, sometimes I recognize a word among the readings to help associate it with the kanji. If wrightak shares his compound database, I'll use those.

Send me an email laxxy and I'll give you what I have so far. Haven't got very far but it's a start.

Interesting to find out that there are others who have similar ideas as I do :-) I'm reviewing the first 1225 kanjis now after half a year of doing nothing about them at all, and the keyword problem is bigger than ever for me. Incidentally, in the first review I failed 300+.. ouch. I use mnemosyne for reviewing, it's a free program that uses an old version of supermemo's algorithm.

I plan to gradually change the keywords to Japanese, as I don't really have much use for the keywords themselves and they are at times a bit troublesome. I often find myself trying to guess what Japanese word would correspond to the keyword, getting some help from that (visual memory, sound associations) and only then recalling the story. I also find (and also found half a year ago) it difficult to go from kanjis to keywords, whereas Japanese examples come to mind immediately for most RTK 1 kanjis. I can read over 2000 kanjis and am going through RTK mostly to lay the foundations properly, so I'm probably quite an oddity here :-) Let's just say that mistaking similar kanjis for each other and not being able to write gets on your nerves eventually.. And the joke "Why do they have two officers in a police car? One knows how to read and the other how to write!" has gotten rather too personal, too :-/

I think there's no need to make whole sentences for each kanji, as short examples often suffice and are easier to get right, too. Here are some question/answer pairs I made with some guidelines of my own:

〈さだ〉める:定
〈おれ〉たち:俺 <--- I have a couple RTK 3 kanjis in my set, too
〈わが〉はいはねこである:吾 <--- yes, I remember which kanji is in the title. 豆知識万歳！
〈ふん〉ど、〈ふん〉げき:憤
〈もど〉る:戻
メールの〈へん〉じ:返
〈さか〉みち:坂
〈てい〉あん、〈てい〉きょう:提
〈きょう〉りょく、だ〈きょう〉:協
とく〈しゅ〉メイク:殊
〈もと〉める:求
〈は〉ずかしい:恥
〈やく〉す、ほん〈やく〉:訳
れき〈し〉がく:史
〈われ〉、む〈が〉むちゅう:我 <--- the second is just for disambiguation
〈とむら〉う:弔

The guidelines I'm using at the moment are:

1. No kanjis in the examples to avoid giving visual clues.
2. The examples must be more or less familiar to me.
3. My pre-existing stories should be adaptable to the examples. I don't care about
the ones I don't use stories for, like 乙 and 求. I also don't care
how close the examples are to the keywords.
4. The examples should limit the set of possible answers to a single
kanji, disregarding silly alternatives. Silly alternatives are e.g.
漢(おとこ) and 己達(おれたち), as 男(おとこ) and 俺達(おれたち)
are by far the most common ways to write these two. I didn't even know there were
other kanjis for おれ before I checked the dictionary just to be sure..

Basically, it should be enough if the examples identify the kanji, as that identification is all I'm going to have anyway when I want to write a kanji. I.e. if 「とくしゅのシュ」 is not enough information to write 殊, what's the use of being able to write it given the keyword? :-) I wouldn't use unfamiliar words though, as that would be too much at once and using such is always risky business anyway.

Welcome to the gang. Laxxy and I have been working on a list for quite a while now although I've been extremely busy recently and haven't made significant progress in a while. If you send me an email, I can send you a list of words that we've compiled and you can compare those with yours. I'd love to see the full list of words that you've compiled too.

I disagree that example sentences aren't necessary but that doesn't matter too much since we both have the common ground of needing the word in the first place.

For RTK 1, you might be able to get away with short examples such as those you've listed, and for really common spoken words like 恥ずかしい it's certainly not a problem. However, in the long run, I'm looking to expand well beyond RTK 1 and perhaps beyond RTK 2 as well. Particularly with kanji that only appear in formal or written situations, 'silly alternatives' become a serious issue. My point is that as the amount of kanji you learn increases, the amount of information you'll need to identify the kanji will also increase. There are lots of other advantages to using example sentences, the only disadvantage is the time it takes to create them.

With your guidelines, I also had 2 and 3, but as I've been working on this, number 2 has become much more important than 3. I don't mind if I'm unfamiliar with the words I choose but they should be of maximum benefit to me. So if I have a choice between two words and one of them is extremely common but unrelated to my story, the other is quite rare but very close to my story, I'll go for the former every time now. Frequency of use has become the most important factor.

For instance, looking at your list, you chose 定める for 定. Are you familiar with さだめる? It looks like you've chosen it over other words because Jim Breen's translation contains the word 'determine'. Personally, I think the word さだめる is pretty rare and used in legal circumstances. I haven't done that kanji yet, (I'm doing them in a random order) but my first instinct would be to go for a really common word that I hear all the time like 定期（券） or 定食. The common meaning is a pre-determined or fixed period of time (for a train ticket) or a (pre-determined) set meal. Thinking about it, maybe 固定する would be good.

Let me know what you think.

I've only just started with these, so my list is still short (about 100), but it's growing pretty fast as I add to it as I go. I also keep changing the examples when I think of better ones, e.g. I just changed むがむちゅう of 我 to がをはる because that fits well in my story of 義. I've also been adding them pretty randomly. I agree that there's probably enough common ground here for sharing to be useful -- the final objective is the same, after all.

It's interesting to hear what has worked for you and what hasn't, and your rationales for different decisions. I see that some of them are quite close to mine. For instance, I find guideline 2 more important than 3, too, and I can see where you're coming from with using unfamiliar but common words. I sometimes use them, too, but try to keep it to a minimum as I've had bad experiences with such before. You can only go so much against "divide and conquer" before it gets overwhelming. But sometimes there's no helping it really, such as with 迭, for which there really isn't any other choice but 更迭 (which I've never heard, こうてつ brings only 鋼鉄 to mind).

As for 定める, most of the time I don't care if the examples aren't close to the keywords, but I still try to keep them close if it isn't too much trouble, especially when the kanji is also used as a component. 定める is mostly familiar to me in the senses of 法律で定められた and 定め (運命), I think. The latter one fits well enough in e.g. the story of 錠. Other words that come to mind with that kanji would be e.g. 設定、確定、定年、定着 in addition of 定食 and 固定 which you mentioned. 定期 isn't so familiar, though I remember having heard 定期的. I don't live in Japan so some everyday words are less familiar to me than one would normally expect.

I don't plan to stop with RTK 1 either, but will cherry-pick kanjis from RTK 3 and add some from outside of RTK altogether. I have another set of flash cards for reading practice, and my goal after finishing RTK 1 (which seems far enough away at the moment itself) is to add those kanjis to my heisig flash card set. Some of the more common ones in my reading set that aren't in RTK at all would be e.g. 絨〈毯〉、〈訛〉る、〈鬚〉、〈睨〉む、〈哺〉乳類 、〈其〉の、〈籠〉、〈舐〉める、〈拉〉致、〈揉〉む、 憂〈鬱〉。It may not be very useful to learn to write these, but as the bulk of useful kanjis are covered in RTK 1 and RTK 3, it's not so big an effort anyway. If you wonder how those kanjis ended up in my reading set, I don't really have an answer, except that I put kanjis I already can read in there to avoid forgetting them (the rationale being that if I learned them once, they're common enough for me).

I generally go for familiar words if I can but for quite a few kanji, I don't recognise any words that they appear in. So having failed that, I go for the most commonly used word.

After reading your post, I'm really interested to find out exactly what kind of exposure to Japanese you get. What exactly do you read? Newspapers? I didn't recognise any of the kanji that you said came up in your reading set. I recognised quite a few of them when I looked up the hiragana reading though. When you've been reading these words, have they appeared as kanji?

Just to let you know, 定期券 is a commuter pass. Just about everyone in Tokyo who travels by JR to the same work place every day will have one. It's a pass that works between two dates and you can go back and forth between the stations you nominate as many times as you want between those dates. You can also get off at intermediate stations with no extra charges. It saved me a lot of money. It's often shortened to just 定期 when speaking.

Send me an email if you'd like to exchange lists.

I recognized 憂鬱 there, I think it is usually written with kanji. the 2nd kanji there isn't even a part of RTK3, but is quite easy to remember, probably because it was so, er, unique

I end up picking slightly rarer words at times to avoid ambiguities, as it's not a problem to think of a more common one when seeing the example. E.g. if I see ひょう〈り〉, it brings うら to mind and from there I get to 裏. Using うら in the example directly would require disambiguation from 浦 and 裡 at least, and that requires more thought than just going with 表裏. On the other hand, if 表裏 is not familiar, then using うら and adding more context sounds better..

I read mostly comics, books and stuff on the net. I started with comics, as they have lots of context and many of them have furigana, but that no longer matters much. I think most of the non-RTK kanjis I know have come up on the net, whether on web pages, chat or whatever. Sometimes I think that there are people who are going for a high score on kanji use, as I can't think of sane reasons for why anyone would write 兎(と)に角(かく)、折角(せっかく)、暫(しばら)く and the like with kanjis, but you get used to it. Still can't help groaning whenever a new one of the kind 薔薇、饂飩、躊躇、髑髏 comes up, though. Input method writers should implement a new, impossible to disable feature, which would measure the user's kanji writing level and would administer electric shocks whenever they type something they couldn't actually write ;-)

I have two questions:
Could we possibly implement grease monkey so that when you pass your mouse over the keyword (in English) the Japanese pops up? That way the system wont affect the clean look of the homepage or people who aren't interested in the system.
2 As for keywords, if we went through and assigned keywords to the nouns only (木、鎌、犬、猫など） we could make significant progress. The we could do adjectives, then verbs, then compounds, whatever. It is very "divide and conquer"ish, which everyone here appreciates, I think. Start small and go from there.
My two cents.

ばら is very famous for being a word that a lot of people can read but no one can write. However, with the RTK method, we're not going to know the kanji until we can write it...

I definitely agree that some people hit space bar on windows japanese ime a little too much. It's just not necessary.

I'd be willing to contribute the lists that I'm creating to a grease monkey script. I just don't have any technical know-how in that department so someone would have to help out...

Chadokoro_K Wrote:I think I may switch over to just one Japanese "keyword". Has the "one Japanese keyword" strategy served you well or do you wish that you would've included more than one meaning sense for each kanji?

One of the things that I think Heisig got right was the idea of breaking the task down into chunks. One of these chunks is remembering the writing of the kanji. I'm doing exactly what's done in RTK1 except that I'm using a Japanese keyword and example sentence as a prompt and not English keywords. My goal is to remember the writing, nothing else, so I choose one reading and meaning and only use that. Learning other readings and meanings are other tasks and I try to move onto them only once I've learnt the writing.

Also, when reviewing, I don't have any of the English notes that I included in my last post. I put them there just to try and clarify things.

Only just discovered this thread (wrightak gave a link to it from another thread that I started).

I will be very interested in using Japanese keywords and a Japanese story accompanying each kanji, because I have recently come to the same conclusion - I find many of Heisig's stories and English keywords counter productive when trying to remember kanji that I already kind of know (but can't write properly).

Has anyone seen a book called "Kanji Isn't That Hard"? I don't have it with me at the moment, but happy to provide more detail (it's published by ALC Press, the people behind the Nihongo Journal).

Anyway, I found this book very interesting, because it breaks kanji down by components (including cute pictures and graphic representations), and then give the Japanese names for these components. It then provides a story that links the components to the kanji and the meaning, in BOTH Japanese and English. The Japanese is deliberately kept very simple (with furigana attached to all kanji), so even beginners like me have no difficulties understanding the story.

The book only covers a few hundred characters, but the author has a more extensive book that covers all the characters (but with no pictures or English translation).

Anyway, I will be interested in getting the "list" that wrightak, laxxy, et al have been working on.

In connection with this topic, does anyone have a list of the Heisig English keywords and the corresponding Japanese readings for each kanji?

Thank you very much for this post. I read this with great interest. I am just starting out with Kanji, but like many of not most of the users of this site, I have have studied Japanese before. I've been feeling like I might not get through this method even though it seems clearly superior to the write the Kanji over and over method most Japanese teachers recommend. I'm on number 122 which is stinking. I know the word Kusai and it was so much more satisfying to connect a Japanese work I know to a Kanji than it has been to use English.

Best of luck in your plan to come up with single Japanese words for the Kanji.

Just found a good resource which shows example compounds for each kanji

http://kanji.ifdef.jp/joyo/a.html