There's more than one meaning for homonym keywords like "post" (mail / job) or "draft" (preliminary document / US military conscription).

Although I can research the correct meaning, it's often easier to rely on the wrong meaning, when formulating a story.

And sometimes I've reviewed so many times before I realize the mistake, that the story is fixed in my head.

E.g.

For "draft" I find it easy to visualize draft dodgers travelling through fields of tall wheat to reach Canada. But Heisig meant "draft" as in a preliminary written document.

Will this become a problem, should I go back and switch past stories?

Thanks in advance!

I don't think it actually really matters what you associate the kanji with so much as that you associate them with anything at all. The goal is to be able to remember and write them.

Now, associating them with an (approximately) accurate keyword is immediately beneficial since you can look at a string of text and reason out what some stuff means. But that's not any kind of fluency, and it ultimately doesn't matter. Your English keyword should melt away into a real, Japanese definition later anyway. All of the English keywords should be taken as extremely temporary, and with a large helping of salt. Secretly: 奴 means a lot more than 'guy,' and has little to do with maleness! It was just a convenient keyword, since it was sometimes accurate, and the whole 'woman crotch' thing lent itself pretty easily.

So, yeah, really. Don't worry about it, in my opinion.

How easy does this stuff melt away. Its hard for me to accept learning an insufficient meaning. I think Heisig should be at least SLIGHTLY more descriptive when he talks about the keywords. Sometimes he does this, sometimes he doesnt. E.g. I just ran across
"park" - 園 -now is that to park a car or a park with trees. I had to look it up to find out, and its frustrating to do this as your trying to establish plots of the kanji at a fast pace.

I don't know, I think learning the right meaning is better. When you start reading and doing a lot of sentences, the English keywords slowly disappear. But the "gut feeling" about what the kanji means remains. So establishing this unconscious "image" correctly from the beginning makes things easier in my opinion.

There's a detailed thread about this somewhere in the forums. It lists all the similar kanji. Very good for going back and reworking stories to solidify the correct one.

sindhikara Wrote:I had to look it up to find out, and its frustrating to do this as your trying to establish plots of the kanji at a fast pace.

If you use Wakan you can look up kanji by Heisig index (it uses EDICT). You can also set it to look up automatically your clipboard. So, you can copy the kanji from this site and check some compounds on the fly.