Please post a couple of your favorite primitives or Kanji stories as defined by 1) Heisig and 2) by the RtK community.

Remembering the Kanji has been an invaluable resource for all of us, and for imaginative as the book asks you to be, the cover is bland, unattractive, and doesn't even come close to sampling the creativity and fun preached within its pages.

For this reason, I'm interested in designing a new cover for the book, and I figure the best way to do so would be to ask the community who have been ritualistically exercising Heisig's method every day.

I can't guarantee the quality of the final product nor that it will ever replace the current one.. but I'm interested in having a little fun with it and getting some community input.. So won't you share your favorite primitives and stories with me? ^0^

That's why you should never judge a book by its cover

I agree with Musashi, the cover is purely coincidental. For all I could care it would just say "Remembering the Kanji", a book still garners a reputation regardless of it's front cover.

Although! One very beautiful cover design I've seen is "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary"

互 is probably the best looking kanji, not really a primitive though.

I've always been a big fan of 守 as well.

I really like 我. The shape, the way it is drawn.. just perfect.

I love 鳥 and 馬。 I'd put 潟. on the book cover, but I think that's already taken for "remembering the traditional hanzi", corrrect me if I'm wrong.

Slightly off topic, but if someone can come up with a story for 虋 I'll give them a cookie I saw it in a Mandarin novel a while ago, and it was printed in such a small font in the book that I had to try out three magnifying glasses before I could finally look the damn thing up in a dictionary

Aijin Wrote:Slightly off topic, but if someone can come up with a story for 虋 I'll give them a cookie I saw it in a Mandarin novel a while ago, and it was printed in such a small font in the book that I had to try out three magnifying glasses before I could finally look the damn thing up in a dictionary

So we drove to *garden* *city*. Over there, you pick out -asparagus- and zap *crowned wine* out of them. They could be found throughout many *parts* of the city.

Okay, that's terrible - but I would be able to remember it after that :lol:

That's an interesting mnemonic!

...I don't think I'll worry about it too much though, as unless I start reading vegan newsletters from China I hopefully won't come across that one again

Let's see...
Flower/tens, Staples, ???, crown, west/whiskey, part = ???
We need two pieces of information:
#1-What do we call the area between the staples
#2-What does the complete Character mean?

雌. I had trouble remembering it, until I looked at the RTK communities stories, and 'STOP SPOONING TURKEYS, spoon females' came up. Instantly went from one of the hardest to one of the easiest

lagwagon555 Wrote:雌. I had trouble remembering it, until I looked at the RTK communities stories, and 'STOP SPOONING TURKEYS, spoon females' came up. Instantly went from one of the hardest to one of the easiest

jesus that's simple, my story for that was some convoluted tale of scientists looking for female turkeys because they had become an endangered species tracking them with a spoon with notches in the handle to measure the footprints.

and as for the cover I think there are two types I've seen a fugly kind with blue and yellow and lots of squares on the cover but I have the nice kind with just blue and then 書
written on it in yellow.

Squintox Wrote:So we drove to *garden* *city*. Over there, you pick out -asparagus- and zap *crowned wine* out of them. They could be found throughout many *parts* of the city.

Lol. Where did garden and city come from?

虋 = flowers + 興 (without the legs) + 酉 + 分

It doesn't appear in edict or kanjidict so this one's a rare one!

I'm thinking of someone thinking that a few *minutes* with the *whiskey bottle* are more *entertaining* than *flowers*.... but I've got no idea what the character means!

From wikipedia:

Han character

虋 (radical 140 艸+25, 31 strokes, cangjie input 廿竹月竹 (THBH), four-corner 44227)

1. asparagus
2. a variety of red-stalked millet

大漢和辞典: character 32664! -obviously not common in Japanese

stehr Wrote:大漢和辞典: character 32664! -obviously not common in Japanese

Assuming that
1. the ordering of characters in 大漢和辞典 resembles something like the order of frequency of use in Chinese (as well as Japanese)
2. Aijin was reading a normal book and the character popped up

It would imply that Chinese people can read over 30,000 characters. I will test this one on my Chinese colleague later…

No one believed me back in 2006: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=226#pid226

How about this story?
At the dinner table, the kids thinks it will be *entertaining* to hide granddad's *whiskey* behind the *flowers*. He soon spots it and is acting smug when one of the kids plops his #asparagus# inside. Grandad only managed to drink *part* of it.

I'm guessing you don't care that much, but I'll give it a shot just for kicks:

Your friend thinks it will be *entertaining* to bind up your legs with a *crown* so you can't move them and then torture you by tickling your feet with a *flower*. You grab a *whiskey bottle* and hit him over the head before escaping, and you get your revenge by force-feeding him ASPARAGUS, but he can only take it for a *minute* before he begs for mercy/throws up/dies.

wrightak Wrote:虋 = flowers + 興 (without the legs) + 酉 + 分

It doesn't appear in edict or kanjidict so this one's a rare one!

I'm thinking of someone thinking that a few *minutes* with the *whiskey bottle* are more *entertaining* than *flowers*.... but I've got no idea what the character means!

Maybe it is my computer font but 興*entertain* is different from what I am seeing from 虋. Where *same* would be, there is instead a moon with a walking stick underneath it or maybe *crown* is a lid with a moon between *staples*.

Interesting. I've tried various fonts. Only the Chinese ones work and they all clearly show 興. Maybe you can show us a picture? Perhaps it's similar to the different ways of writing 高.

wrightak Wrote:

Squintox Wrote:So we drove to *garden* *city*. Over there, you pick out -asparagus- and zap *crowned wine* out of them. They could be found throughout many *parts* of the city.

Lol. Where did garden and city come from?

虋 = flowers + 興 (without the legs) + 酉 + 分

It doesn't appear in edict or kanjidict so this one's a rare one!

I'm thinking of someone thinking that a few *minutes* with the *whiskey bottle* are more *entertaining* than *flowers*.... but I've got no idea what the character means!

I took 興 without legs to mean city >_> Makes for better stories than "staples".

wrightak Wrote:Interesting. I've tried various fonts. Only the Chinese ones work and they all clearly show 興. Maybe you can show us a picture? Perhaps it's similar to the different ways of writing 高.

I don't know how to post a picture here so I put it on Myspace:
http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cf...D=12044374

wrightak Wrote:

stehr Wrote:大漢和辞典: character 32664! -obviously not common in Japanese

Assuming that
1. the ordering of characters in 大漢和辞典 resembles something like the order of frequency of use in Chinese (as well as Japanese)
2. Aijin was reading a normal book and the character popped up

It would imply that Chinese people can read over 30,000 characters. I will test this one on my Chinese colleague later…

No one believed me back in 2006: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=226#pid226

Hah, I don't know if I'd classify it as a 'normal book', but I was definitely surprised the publisher allowed such an obscure character.

There are most certainly people who can read over 30,000 characters though, as insane as it is to think. I've met quite a few people who know 10,000-20,000. Most of them were a little obsessed and had a lot of free time on their hands though