Hi!

I need to translate quite many Keywords - sometimes the meaning in my book - not english - differ from the english version.

f.e. "extremity" would be "finally" in my book,
"shining" would be "glisten" in my book and
"utensil" would be "dishes"

worst part:
"town" would be "village" in my book and
"village" would be "town" in my book
etc
etc

as if the kanjis themselves weren't difficult enough ....
and english as a foreign language itself ...

isn't that sad?

it is a pitty, the translation did not stick to the original meanings.
mr. rauther who did it obviously did not agree with some of heisigs stories.

Now I study with the SRS + hand written memos which list the meaning of english and non-english Heisig keywords (=as they are listed in my book).

´_`

frlmarty Wrote:worst part:
town would be village in my book and
village would be town in my book
etc
etc

When doing reviews, just practice writing both town and village. The meanings are similar enough that it really doesn't matter.

frlmarty Wrote:town would be village in my book and
village would be town in my book

God, that would make me want to tear my teeth out...

frlmarty Wrote:mr. rauther who did it obviously did not agree with some of heisigs stories.

Mr. Rauther never claimed that the German "Die Kanji lernen und behalten" to which you see to be referring are a direct translation but rather calls it an adaption. Read the introduction to see what he has done and why.

I can certainly see why you find the differences frustrating, but you shouldn't let this bother you too much. Like Heisig, the German version has unique keywords which in many cases -if not in most- are pretty close to the Japanese core meaning, just like Heisig's keywords tend to be. The methodology is the same, so it doesn't really matter if some keywords and some names for primitives don't agree with the English version.

I believe there is a greasemonkey script that allows you to change the keywords on RevTK. Personally, I used anki's premade Heisig deck and changed the keywords to the ones found in the German version of RtK. You will find that many story ideas here on RevTK won't work at all because they keyword (or the German meaning of it) doesn't match. But since you need to find stories that work for you anyway, this shouldn't really bother you too much.

Havind said that, I have to say that I am grateful that there are foreign versions of Heisig's RtK. While I consider myself fairly fluent when it comes to English, I wouldn't want to count on being able to see the nuances between keywords all the time. As Mr. Rauther states, this is something that most people can really only do well in their native language.

[Edit: changed that bit about anki, where I wrote 'Heisig' instead of anki'.]

As an alternative to the Greasemonkey script, you could always download and install an SRS program like Anki (http://www.ichi2.net/anki/ , lots of people like it) or Mnemosyne (http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/ , my favourite), and type in the keywords yourself.

This topic is relevant to me because I'm currently taking the slightly unusual option of going through the German edition despite actually being English. This was inspired by Khatzumoto's idea of "language laddering", i.e. learning a foreign language via another one that you're more familiar with. It has been working well enough so far; I'm up to 700. Feel free to call me mad though

cellophane Wrote:Feel free to call me mad though

Consider it done: You are mad.

I'm Swiss and have both the German and English version of the book.

I read them both but keep all my keywords in English. Why? Because I think learning Japanese is the best way to improve my English vocabulary, muhaha. Hey, it works!

siljeal Wrote:

frlmarty Wrote:mr. rauther who did it obviously did not agree with some of heisigs stories.

Mr. Rauther never claimed that the German "Die Kanji lernen und behalten" to which you see to be referring are a direct translation but rather calls it an adaption. Read the introduction to see what he has done and why.

keywords - shouldn't they be as close as possible to the original meaning of the kanji?

if "utensil" is correct, "dishes" isn't and vice versa.

I am not interested in "who is right" but rather "am I learning the correct interpretation/meaning of a Kanji"

this confuses me acutally.

siljeal Wrote:I believe there is a greasemonkey script that allows you to change the keywords on RevTK. Personally, I used anki's premade Heisig deck and changed the keywords to the ones found in the German version of RtK.

I jumped into this Kanji-Review here, no looking left or right, I will check out greasmonkey, thank you!

frlmarty Wrote:

siljeal Wrote:

frlmarty Wrote:mr. rauther who did it obviously did not agree with some of heisigs stories.

Mr. Rauther never claimed that the German "Die Kanji lernen und behalten" to which you see to be referring are a direct translation but rather calls it an adaption. Read the introduction to see what he has done and why.

keywords - shouldn't they be as close as possible to the original meaning of the kanji?

if "utensil" is correct, "dishes" isn't and vice versa.

I am not interested in "who is right" but rather "am I learning the correct interpretation/meaning of a Kanji"

this confuses me acutally.

There is no correct original meaning. Kanji are abstractions of concepts and those concepts can be very wide. One thing is certain, you can never put one english word on a kanji and say you have a 100% representation. Sure, some representations are better than other representations, but in the end, you can never ever rely on the english keyword for more than a hint. For example, 嘱 and 託. Heisig calls one "entrust" and the other "consign" but the fact is, both are used in the word 嘱託... to entrust. They both mean essentially the same thing. The only reason Heisig didn't put the same meaning on both is because if you have two kanji with identical keywords, you will be more than just confused

So really, you shouldn't stress the english keywords. Learn to recognize the kanji then learn japanese words. THAT'S when you learn the ACTUAL meaning of the kanji.

frlmarty Wrote:keywords - shouldn't they be as close as possible to the original meaning of the kanji?

if "utensil" is correct, "dishes" isn't and vice versa.

In addition to what Tobberoth says, you also make the flawed assumption that there is one "original meaning". "Utensil" is more or less correct, as is "dishes" (the former is more along the lines of its meaning in most compounds I've seen, the latter is broadly what it actually means by itself). Consider 武器, or weapon (quite reasonably described as "warrior utensil", poorly described by "warrior dishes") as compared to 器, bowl (among other meanings), which is reasonably described by "dishes" but poorly described by "utensil".

This isn't to say that some of the keywords aren't wrong, or at best hideously misleading (*cough* Dispose *cough*), but the existence of a meaningful difference between the meanings of the sources for two different language versions doesn't necessarily mean that one is incorrect.

~J

I really have to shake my head in amazement at those who speak English as a second language yet are learning kanji/Japanese through English study materials. I look at how un-natural frimarty's English is and appreciate how much easier it must have been for me as a native English speaker to get through RTK without having to think in another language creating stories. Even more impressive is that the majority of contributors to this forum speak something other than English as their first language and have reached a level of Japanese I can only envy! It is unfortunate that a language as illogical as English has become the world's default communication option.

bodhisamaya Wrote:I look at how un-natural frimarty's English is ...

:-(

Yeah, I see what you're saying, to some extent at least. An English-Japanese dictionary probably wouldn't pose too much of a problem for a non native, but I imagine that grammar guides must be quite difficult to read. They often explain constructs by analogy to English sentences, which could easily go completely over the head of someone who was not brought up with the language. Still, I imagine that there'd be plenty of books about Japanese written in German at least.

bodhisamaya Wrote:I look at how un-natural frimarty's English is and appreciate how much easier it must have been for me as a native English speaker to get through RTK without having to think in another language creating stories.

I just wanted to pick you up on that point. As long as you know what the keyword means, you can write a story in whatever language you want.

cellophane Wrote:Yeah, I see what you're saying, to some extent at least. An English-Japanese dictionary probably wouldn't pose too much of a problem for a non native, but I imagine that grammar guides must be quite difficult to read. They often explain constructs by analogy to English sentences, which could easily go completely over the head of someone who was not brought up with the language. Still, I imagine that there'd be plenty of books about Japanese written in German at least.

Unfortunately it is not like that. Hadamitzky (german, http://www.hadamitzky.de/) once pointed out how poor the supply for german speaking students actually is. I think way back (1970s) he also had to study with english material. Until he wrote his own books ;-)

bodhisamaya Wrote:I look at how un-natural frimarty's English is .....

Ouch. That's a bit harsh.

Sometimes I remember the keyword in English although I have no idea what it means. Haha.

Tourne Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:I look at how un-natural frimarty's English is .....

Ouch. That's a bit harsh.

It's not just harsh, it's wrong. I don't find his English unnatural at all. I would have bet he was a native speaker.

I don't agree. I'm not sure I would pegged him as non-native, but that's entirely due to the low standards of native English speakers on the internet; it's not natural by any reasonable meaning of the word (but not awful).

~J

woodwojr Wrote:I don't agree. I'm not sure I would pegged him as non-native, but that's entirely due to the low standards of native English speakers on the internet; it's not natural by any reasonable meaning of the word (but not awful).

~J

No, what you mean is that it doesn't sound like the people where you're from. Everywhere I've lived (in the US), he would sound perfectly normal.

I reject that completely, but this isn't a thread to dissect frimarty's English. If you start another topic, I'll happily continue the discussion there.

~J

[ファブリス]

Edit: my bad, can't read.

ファブリス Wrote:Many times, Heisig chose an english word which can cover a wider meaning for the corresponding Japanese character. Honestly, just eat it up!

I agree. The only keywords I changed are village/town because Heisig messed 'em up I guess. Other than that I stick to Heisig keywords 100% even if some seem weird. If English is not your native language, see it as a challenge to increase your vocab. By the end of RTK1 you will not only have learned how to write and identify 2000+ kanjis but you will also have picked up quite a few new English words for your vocab. It's like a perfect symbiosis.

Having passed CPE 2 years ago I decided to stop learning new words although my English is by far not perfect and my grammar still sucks. With RTK1 it's fun though. That's why I do it in English!

frlmarty Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:I look at how un-natural frimarty's English is ...

:-(

I didn't mean that as an insult. I assumed you already knew this. When ever I try to explain something complex in Japanese to a Japanese friend, I ask them if it sounds strange. The typical answer is, "Yes, but I understand what you are trying to say". Neither of us have reached a natural level of speaking in the second language we are studying. Nothing wrong with that.

[ファブリス]

@stoked : yeah, I didn't get frlmarty's post at first. He is talking about keywords in a non-english RtK book, which are different in meaning from the english version.