So, I'm over half way through RTK at the moment, and I've been thinking that I might have had an easier time along the way had I learned all the primitives up front. I've been thinking about this because my girlfriend is about to begin RTK and I want her experience to be as smooth and as seamless as possible (I think she's still a little skeptical about the usefulness of it and such, as many are... I was).

So, have you guys ever thought about it/looked into it/tried it? I can't imagine how it would be detrimental in any way, but I'm curious to know if it would really make the trip that much smoother and easier to just kind of rote memorize all the radicals/Heisig primitives up front before embarking on the long long journey.

-Seth

Alyks did.

http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com/2008/0...ethod.html

Interesting idea. I find making the primitives into my own thing has been the biggest help, not always deviating from Heisig, but often. When I make my own, it also helps to scout the keywords that the primitive will be in, so I'm doing it inside a lesson, which sometimes yields a loose "theme", and helps create the primitive too. I think if you did do the primitives first, it would be a good idea to spend some time scouting things out. Also it might be hard at first because the whole process is alien to you, and you're not building things, you're creating building blocks, so you don't get to learn the primitive by using it, if that makes sense?

I have, and I wouldn't recommend it.

It gives you more flexibility in being able to add kanji in whatever order you want. But my experience has been that such flexibility is really not such a good idea. After learning the primitives I jumped straight into sentences, but that ended up being horrendously slow as I kept going back and looking up new kanji. Also, approaching the kanji in a logical order makes a *huge* difference. Learning them in a random order (say by frequency or by encounter) will take two or three times as long by my experience. It's important to see kanji you might get confused side-by-side while you are learning them for the first time. Finally, when learning primitives alone, there's a large temptation to change their meaning to something more memorable. I did this many times. But without knowing the context of how the primitives were used, I often ended up choosing meanings which were not useful in story construction.

Have your gf do RTK in the order he presented it. You'll save her a lot of grief.

If I had to go back in time and do it again, I'd try the movie method.

mafried,

I don't know if I'd want her to go out of order, though. I just think it might help her to already at least have a loose grasp on all the primitives so she doesn't have to rote memorize them completely up front.

TaylorSan,

I'm actually considering scoping out future lessons before tackling them. As far as deviating, the only one I really didn't like was "spool" and I changed it to the suggested "toilet paper", which has worked out really well.

So, mafried, do you think some of your grief could have been avoided by maybe doing, say, the first 200-300 to kind of get in the groove, and then starting to learn the remaining primitives? That's another thing I'd considered suggestion for her.

mentat_kgs Wrote:If I had to go back in time and do it again, I'd try the movie method.

Same here. At least, that's what I would try. I think I would find it harder than the Heisig method but there would be a better gain from it. I rarely watch movies so maybe I'd have problems with it, hard to say.

sethg Wrote:I don't know if I'd want her to go out of order, though. I just think it might help her to already at least have a loose grasp on all the primitives so she doesn't have to rote memorize them completely up front.

I'm not sure I understand. Isn't learning the primitives completely up front and by rote what you originally suggested? This gets very tedious and tiring. When I did it there was about 500 primitives (including full kanji that as primitives) that I learned up front and by rote. It was a grinding process. I don't know how many primitives Heisig uses, but it should be around that number or a little less.

sethg Wrote:So, mafried, do you think some of your grief could have been avoided by maybe doing, say, the first 200-300 to kind of get in the groove, and then starting to learn the remaining primitives? That's another thing I'd considered suggestion for her.

In fact, that's exactly what I did. Some years ago I did Heisig up to around from 400 or so, long enough to get a hang of the system. At the time I thought Heisig's method had some flaws so I quit. When I came back to the kanji much later, I decided to just learn the primitives and go my own way. Doing the first few hundred was certainly helpful. In fact I would say it is an absolute necessity. If you insist on learning the primitives up front, then please have her do a few hundred frames first so she can get used to the system.

But why do you want to do this? Deviating from Heisig is never "smooth and seamless" (speaking from experience here!). What do you expect she'll get out of it?

mafried Wrote:But why do you want to do this? Deviating from Heisig is never "smooth and seamless" (speaking from experience here!). What do you expect she'll get out of it?

Thanks for your post. That cleared it up pretty well. As far as what I want her to get out of it, I just want her experience learning kanji to go smoothly, and I know that the biggest snags I've hit are trying to learn kanji from Heisig primitives that I only know loosely in the first place. I think I'm gonna experiment with, before every lesson, learning all the primitives for that lesson, and then tackling the kanji, and see how that works for me. If it works well, I'll suggest she do it, too. I should have plenty of time between now and 200-400, anyway.

Thanks for the input, guys

-Seth

y

seth,

I know this goes against common wisdom on this forum, but I include primitives in my SRS as well (at least those which are not themselves full kanji). This of course is because I originally learned the primitives separately. But perhaps you could try reviewing primitives as well? (in-line with your kanji studies, of course)

If I had to do it all over again, knowing what I know now, my change would be to deviate from Heisig on primitives, like I do now. It felt a little scary at first, but I immediately saw the benefit, and it is really fun. Much easier to use Darth Vader then awl, or Native American instead of Rice Seedling. By doing this you get the advantage of using associations that are much stronger in your mind. I go it my own also to use personal associations that have strong memory strands. Like I used to be a woodcutter and I cut juniper. No juniper in the index, so sub it for silage. I'm Irish, sub Ireland for plaid - instantly I own family crest (I have a Irish family crest), and have a story about a mosquito with an Irish accent. I have cut so much damn juniper in my life, that hooking anything to it will instantly have the power of the super strong memory thread.

I only started doing this a few hundred back, when I saw someone here had switched wolverine for sheaf. After missing out on Spiderman (I was too deep on thread to switch), it FINALLY clicked. Now I go about 50/50. Some of his primitives work great for me, and some I can see are mediocre, or just plain stink (as in a word I have few or zero associative memory strands for, like awl). Even with the good ones, I scan the lesson to see if there is a better one that might instantly click for multiple stories. Your associative memory is the game here, so why not take advantage of memories that are strongly built in, and why not do it from the beginning? I have no doubt that it will be more fun, and much easier.

And I do think it would be easier to follow the Heisig order as well.

TaylorSan Wrote:If I had to do it all over again, knowing what I know now, my change would be to deviate from Heisig on primitives, like I do now. It felt a little scary at first, but I immediately saw the benefit, and it is really fun. Much easier to use Darth Vader then awl, or Native American instead of Rice Seedling. By doing this you get the advantage of using associations that are much stronger in your mind.

I've been lurking these forums for a while and haven't yet felt the need to post, but I'd really like to echo what TaylorSan wrote. Ditching boring primitive words and replacing them with the likes of Bob Dylan, Mitch Hedberg, Gordon Ramsay, Rihanna & Dennis the Menace has made the mnemonics so much easier. For anyone who hasn't tried this yet, I'd strongly urge them to do so ASAP.

I think if you're going to follow the RTK order, you might as well learn the primitives as you go along. The order of the kanji helps to enforce the primitives, so that the primitives themselves should not take much effort to learn at all, in my experience.

Learning all the primitives upfront is only useful if you don't want to follow RTK order, eg for the movie method or if you just don't want to learn all the RTK kanji in one go.

It doesn't need to be about movies. It can be anything. You can use real places and situations.

Thanks harhol, nice to see post #uno!

One other thought

I often find Hiesig's pictograph explanations (the main primitive mnemonic) to leave me scratching my head. In fact, except for the clear ones, I usually learned these types of primitives by straight memorizing them through using them in the kanji, not by the his picto.

Creating your own gives you the added advantage of making a pictograph that suites you, if you want to go that route. I sometimes can make a primitive that woks with the kanji group, AND works with it's pictograph.

mafried Wrote:seth,

I know this goes against common wisdom on this forum, but I include primitives in my SRS as well (at least those which are not themselves full kanji). This of course is because I originally learned the primitives separately. But perhaps you could try reviewing primitives as well? (in-line with your kanji studies, of course)

I've not learned the primitives separately, just as they occur. But like you, I've included them in my SRS.

Some say that it's not necessary, as they're used so often in real characters. That being the case, they rapidly disappear from review, so it doesn't matter. But some primitives are in very few characters, and they can/do disappear from one's mind. So I find that reviewing them in the normal way is quite helpful.

Normally you learn the primitives with the Kanji automatically in the stories. I think there is no reason to learn it before you start RTK.

When learning the primitives for the Movie Method, do the associations have to show the true meaning?

Eg, Could I make 大 mean "webcam" even though it has nothing to do with "large"?
Or is it necessary to convey the meaning with the association? (ie. my large dog)

I have read the Movie Method blog, but I can't seem to find the explicit answer to this question.

Doctorate Wrote:When learning the primitives for the Movie Method, do the associations have to show the true meaning?

Eg, Could I make 大 mean "webcam" even though it has nothing to do with "large"?
Or is it necessary to convey the meaning with the association? (ie. my large dog)

I have read the Movie Method blog, but I can't seem to find the explicit answer to this question.

From "How to use this method" on the blog:

Memorize the components
After downloading the files, you have to at least be familiar with all of the components listed in the "kanji basics" and "kanji components" files before using my system. I've given them all suggested meanings already, but I'd recommend you change them to suit you best. (If you do change them, be sure to assign them meanings that are tangible and easy to imagine. Make sure objects not too big or too small.)

Everything that breaks a big task down into smaller, more manageable pieces, is a good idea as long as the costs aren't too great. I imagine someone probably even put a number on that (in software development, for sure), but I don't think we need to over-think things in this case. If it's done right, the costs seem negligible (a few hours of extra planning work and you have to put a little more effort into the mnemonics for the primitives). And the planning work has to be done by someone already familiar with the method, a newbie student really isn't equipped to do it. But, in this case, your gf has you to do it for free.

There are a couple of issues:

1. You need a good set of mnemonics. And it's harder to come up with good mnemonics than for the Kanji. By learning them with the Kanji, you get away with just brute forcing a lot of them, because they pop up so much.

If you try and brute force them when learning them individually, or if your mnemonics suck, it's just gonna turn into more trouble than it's worth.

2. You gotta pay attention to choose mnemonics that associate the character with the exact meaning you'll be using in the stories for the Kanji. That means you have to pick the names of all the primitives ahead of time, you can't wait to make up your mind when you get to the Kanji. In fact you probably have to know which stories you'll be going with, ahead of time)

The only way I see that to be worth it would be if you helped your gf out, and picked out the primitive names for her. Don't let her just go with Heisig's names, that's gonna make it harder to come up with good stories. Pick the names used on this site. And pick carefully, because some of them are bad (check the stories, before you pick a name, to make sure it has good stories).

You might as well post your picks, maybe it will help others too.

Note that the original post is 4 years old so I doubt sethg is still looking for help on that issue.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Note that the original post is 4 years old so I doubt sethg is still looking for help on that issue.

F&*k.

This is why thread necromancy is bad (especially resurrecting a 4 year old thread to make exactly the same post that was made elsewhere).

At this point, OP and his girlfriend probably already have little 外人 children running around the house, speaking Japanese.