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Does anyone know of a resource online or a book using a method identical to Remembering the Kanji ?

What seems to me really unique to the RtK method (or really new if you prefer, though the book is out since? 20+ years?), is the "tagging" of graphical variations of the same chinese radicals.

It seems everything else has been done in one way or another, or is based on universal principles like "divide and conquer".

The reason I'm asking is that I continue to be amazed and surprised that nobody seems to have built a website that lets people learn kanji online in effective ways and by using the age-old tried and tested "Art of Memory" (i.e. mnemonics).

Especially in the "web2.0" age, this must have been done. So where is it ? o_O

ファブリス Wrote:Especially in the "web2.0" age, this must have been done. So where is it ? o_O

It's right here :p

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Hehe, it's a serious question though. Reviewing the Kanji's Study area is quite succesfull, but it's based on RtK, it's not a course in itself. Which is fine by me, as there is plenty to build around reviewing, practicing, sharing, etc.

But I would be really surprised if there are no good online systems for learning the kanji. Where are they? Such a website would expose the composition of each character. Basically what many Japanese study books do, but afaik, nobody's putting a patent on the use of mnemonics applied to learning the kanji. On top of that, Jim Breen graciously made the JDICT and KANJIDIC resources almost freely usable (donations recommended if used in a commercial project), while CEDICT is not free for use in commercial applications and requires express permission (meaning, royalties or such). And yet, I have still not come accross a dedicated online resource for learning Japanese characters.

Maybe RTK is 20 years old/young, but the pervasiveness of the internet is a pretty new thing.

There are still many many places where studying with the help of an online-only tool is just impractical, and you'll find that this is still the case for a lot of users of this website. Many people have asked for an offline version of RevTK because they don't always have a net connection ready to go when they have the time to study (say, on the bus, or when traveling away from home, etc).

I think that you'd have more luck trying to find *supplementary* online resources for commercial courses. Or, as you mentioned, websites that allow you to look up the components of characters, such as online dictionaries and such.

As much as Zarxrax's post was a compliment to this site/community, I think it's also accurate. *THIS* is the site that you're talking about. *THIS* community is breaking new ground and paving the way for commercial applications that allow people to learn the kanji online through decomposition of characters.

Get your patents in now, Fabrice, or you'll never make your million! *wink*

I think a lot of us forget that, while the internet is old hat and familiar territory for us, it isn't for everyone. Until courses can be created entirely online for major profit, I can't really see any company going out of their way to investigate innovative methods of teaching kanji.

By the way, have you ever mentioned to Heisig that this community exists? I would think that there would be a GIANT link to RevTK right on the back cover of the latest edition, if he knew about this great forum for sharing stories... (^_^)

-ang

This is the only other one I'm really aware of, along with the kanji add-on for Facebook.

http://www.kanjicafe.com/icemocha.htm
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application...5132078849

Don't leave it up to Japanese educators. The official japanese CD at my university, in its sample dialogs, still shows Japanese businesspeople using ancient monochrome computers and typewriters. The official Mandarin material isn't much better. Their kanji/hanzi isn't even real text, just images, so people won't have to install font packages, as if noone would ever want to copy and paste. And of course both cost in the $100 range.

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amthomas Wrote:Maybe RTK is 20 years old/young, but the pervasiveness of the internet is a pretty new thing.

Very, very good point!

Fab, could you be more specific? There are certainly some books, for Japanese and Chinese, that use a similar approach. By that I mean they assign a word or meaning to each "primitive" and character, and suggest linking them with a story. Some add readings and tones too. But none of them are exactly like Heisig, and yours is the only thing I know of like this online. There are so many members here, I'm also surprised there aren't more sites like this. Anyway, you're probably not asking for this, but the books I know of are
1) RTK1 & RTK3
2) Kanji ABC
3) Learning Chinese Characters
4) Cracking the Chinese Puzzles

ファブリス Wrote:Does anyone know of a resource online or a book using a method identical to Remembering the Kanji ?

Kanji in Mangaland will teach you the 1006 common kanji that are in one of those government approved basic lists... it starts with a K but I can't remember it right now.

Anyways, it uses Heisig's method, likely not even acknowledging Heisig's genius idea to learn the Kanji, with actual drawings to fix upon you a better image in your head for the primitives. The author translated RTK in Spanish so he definitely isn't blind to Heisig's original idea...

Don't quote me on any of this though.

I know I've encountered another book on similar lines, along with a review which gave it slightly tempered praise for sticking faithfully to the standard meanings/classifications of radicals (praise because it means you can then discuss radicals without sounding like an idiot, tempered because some of the changes did, in the reviewer's opinion, make it easier to make memorable mnemonics).

I don't remember the name, though.

~J

Is this radical confusion a real thing or a theoretical thing. I understand that it could be problematic but Heisig's book is for people who are learning Japanese. For the most part he sticks with the original meaning of the radicals, but the ones that he doesn't stick to...can't those just easily be fixed later? That has been my experience.

It's a valid criticism of Heisig, but it's so easy to avoid, so rare, or so easy to fix that I feel like it just becomes a non-issue.

It's a real thing. It may not be a serious thing, and possibly may be a short-lived thing, but there exists a time during which you cannot discuss radicals without significant risk of referring to a fictional radical--and you might be surprised to see just how many of them there are, even amongst those not obviously of Heisig's creation ("sunglasses", "missile").

~J

http://www.kanjiclinic.com/kc88final.htm

This site has some reviews of other books
(go to reviews section)
he does roughly ~25 kanji books (including heisig )

edit: incase you don't find it
http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/KanjiWiki/

this was another attempt at a kanji wiki and a quick browse there by anyone from these forums will find the site a complete joke

This book looks to be the closest to RTK1 that I've seen

http://www.thejapanshop.com/product.php?...=63&page=2

While it seems a bit like Henshall's "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters", the author has at least re-organized the kanji by primitives, and the mnemonics are much better.

Still, nothing beats RTK & RVTK imo.

ファブリス Wrote:The reason I'm asking is that I continue to be amazed and surprised that nobody seems to have built a website that lets people learn kanji online in effective ways and by using the age-old tried and tested "Art of Memory" (i.e. mnemonics).

Because mnemonics are old, archaic, not well known. It is only in this new age of technology and communication do the truly good ideas become mainstream, and only in this sub-youth culture. It is communication on a massive level that allows such ideas to spread, and indeed, be shown a new light.

Sure, Remembering the Kanji was written a while ago, but how many people knew about it before amazon or peer to peer? The internet has allowed the genius of the method to get out and spread. If this were the eighties or nineties, would half as many people know about it? Would half as many people even be studying Japanese?

I believe the internet is a massive filtering system that allow the best and brightest ideas to be shown to the world, regardless of social class or remoteness, and allow the collective intelligence of the world to be brought together. The result is exemplified in this website. Because of this website, we have a community collaboration with AJAAT. We're constantly discussing new ideas for learning the readings, so much that people aren't alone and have options. Would half as many people learn the readings without this community? We have brought gems to light, like Understanding Japanese Grammar, All about particles, Kanji odyssey. Would anybody here know about SRS without this website?

Web 2.0 is a joke, and refers to an older generation's idea. This is something else. Something much better.

smujohnson Wrote:Anyways, it uses Heisig's method, likely not even acknowledging Heisig's genius idea to learn the Kanji, with actual drawings to fix upon you a better image in your head for the primitives. The author translated RTK in Spanish so he definitely isn't blind to Heisig's original idea...

In the first part of the 'in MangaLand' series(Japanese in MangaLand 1) there is an appendix written by Heisig. He is also mentioned a few times in the Acknowledgment part of Kanji in MangaLand.

One reason that there are so few web-based systems for learning kanji must be the fact that kanji is traditionally viewed as an advanced subject. Heisig reversed the order of learning, but I don't think kanji-first is a very popular idea yet for anybody other than Heisig fans yet.

Let's face it: Most Western people who set out to learn Japanese will give up and fail. If you go to any major retail bookstore, you will often see dozens of "Beginning Japanese" books, only a handful of intermediate titles, and almost no advanced books. To put it simply, most people following the traditional order never get far enough to even seriously attempt learning more than a few kanji. The handful of kanji books that you see at said bookstores are almost always reference books instead of complete methodologies, and to the people who buy them, often represent wishful thinking more than anything else.

Web-based solutions tend to suck or not exist because there is so little demand for them. To most casual learners, kanji continues to be perceived as the most intimidating aspect of the language.

The most flexible and user friendly is Kanji ABC. The late Fr. DeRoo wrote a similar book.

In fact, Kanji ABC takes the Heisig 'divide and conquer' approach a step further by presenting all the primitives at the very beginning. A student can proceed in a few ways: learn all the primitives and then the kanji, learn a group of primitives and the kanji based on them, or learn the primitives and then apply them to kanji as they are presented in your regular language textbook (eg. Japanese for Everone). With RTK the user needs to stick to Fr. Heisig' order. This is not a criticism: there is something to be said for the simplicity of having it all laid out for one, and the fact that there is only one route through the kanji using Heisig's text made producing this site less complicated than it might have been (though Fabrice has clearly put an enormous amount of effort into it as it is).

One thing that is more important than any other consideration: think twice before you change horses midstream. Kanji ABC and the other alternatives may seem more attractive but they are no better than RTK and RTK, for anyone using this site, has the advantage of having received a fair amount of the users' effort already.

oh man, that kanji wiki posted by liosama cracked me up! I love how every "contribution" appears to be a scanned doodle drawn by an artistically-challenged high school student. Literally!

That wiki is the funniest thing ever. I'm sitting here, clicking on links, laughing like an idiot. There are some great/terrible drawings in there.

HEI GUYZ BECAZ OF THAT WIKI I LRNED ALL THE KANJIS!!!

Serious: This is like a bad version of that kanji pictograph book. And I thought it couldn't get any worse.

http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/KanjiWiki/?K49

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Aww don't be too harsh. I think it's a good idea but the implementation failed because there is no agreed upon method to use, or a way to indicate what method is used with what story. There's even a story from Mary Sisk Noguchi up there, which is based on the RtK method.

For what it's worth, I've tentatively started a graph of radicals and kanji, with edges from components to full characters. I'll post a sample in a new thread if I manage to get any nontrivial number of characters entered.

~J

The same Purdue TELL network that hosts the kanji wiki also hosts a separate tool called Chakoshi: "Use a search & collocation tool on Japanese text and conversation corpora. It is also the home of Nagoya University Conversational Corpus."

Hmmm. So far I have seen the Tanaka Corpus and Tanuki Corpus, but Ive never heard of a Nagoya one. Too bad I can't try the tool out because I don't have access to IME. And it doesnt look they bothered to post any instructions in English either so it would take a bit of deciphering to learn how to use it properly.