I was eating at my favorite sushi restaurant today when a TV program came on that involved a team of people answering school-subject type questions to try to answer them all within a time limit. There were two items that would have been a breeze for a lot of RTKers.

The first they showed was "write 15 kanji containing 木へん (木 on the left, as in 机) in under 120 seconds." The contestants went one at a time, writing characters on their touch screens and shouting PASS! when they got stuck. Most of the contestants could only produce 1 or 2 kanji.

The other one was the same style but it was kanji containing にんべん (イ).

For another, there were 10 compounds containing 明 provided with the pronunciation with a space for the other character, so like 明◇ めいじ and the contestants had to fill in the missing kanji. And then they did the same thing with 生. This seemed considerably harder than the other type of question.

Sounds interesting! Although not quite as easy as I thought it would be. Managed 7 kanji containing 木へん in 120 seconds. I have a feeling I'm going to be kicking myself lots as I start to review today.

Got 11, not including 机. You'd be a wiz after RTK3!

yeah, I could only get 11, in the time limit.. for some reason, I seemed to pull out the more "difficult" kanji, 機、柳、械、槽、　were some of the ones that came out.

LOL I read this thread this morning and then here at work I decided to give it a shot. Remembering it, I thought it said "20 seconds" instead of 120 seconds. I got like 2 and I was like "shit, time's up already". Now it'd be cheating to try again as I already have a few in my head... curses!!! Maybe in a week I can attempt it after they've been put away.

i was only able to pull out 5 木べん　in 120 seconds (i'm at 1500 in RTK now). i don't think RTK helps much in remembering kanji this way (other than simply having a larger quantity of kanji to draw from). they aren't sorted in my head by radical.

I don't know - 5 is still considerably better than the 1 or 2 Jimmyseal says most contestants managed! I think 木べん might be harder than other primitives such as person or thread, where a lot more kanji using the same primitive are introduced together in a chapter - 木べん is used rather intermittently throughout RTK1 so I wouldn't associate the kanji with each other as I might 30 or so I'd studied in the same chapter.

I'll take that back. Just tried 120 seconds with thread べん (sorry for hybrid - at work and don't have Japanese fonts unless I can copy them off the site somewhere) and only managed 7, which is exactly the same as I managed for 木 in February! Go on, see if you can do better, you know you want to!

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Quote:i don't think RTK helps much in remembering kanji this way

Hmmm, I think it does. Since Japanese oftentimes don't know the meanings of particular kanji, whereas we have a representative keyword for each character.

First thing I did when trying is to rack memory for various kinds of trees, with RtK you can easily remember the cedar, the pine-tree, the paulownia tree (or monk-tree even if you don't remember the keyword), the "spicy tree" (catalpa), then the really obvious grove (tree+tree), the other very frequent "town" (tree+glue), then I remembered "plank", then the chop wood one tree+axe, then tree+genie because somehow my story also involved chopping trees, then I remembered a tree at an exact place in the middle of some kanji chain I made a while ago, the one with a snare (decaying?), then I was drawing a blank so I racked some more for other types of trees and remembered the good ol' oak (tree+white) and I think 2 minutes ended approx there.

I did around 10 for the tree, I say around because I just watched the clock on the taskbar so may have lost or gained 30 secs.

I'm sure RtK fans would rock on those TV games

pS: with that said , I remember seeing this thread when it first came up a while ago (looks like end of February) and I did a quick test and did pretty bad. It also depends a lot on how fresh you feel at that moment, so your memory is at it's best.

As this thread is on 国語 game shows, I'll mention one that I saw the other night. ネップリーグ's final question on the kanji section asked what the reading for 熊猫 was. I didn't get it. But for anyone who didn't see it, think more of animals than of readings. Then scroll down.

Incidentally unless one is an absolute Japanese don, for this type of question knowing Heisig's keywords + a bit of lateral thinking is all you need.














keep going...










little bit more...










It's a パンダ！

synewave Wrote:unless one is an absolute Japanese don

...or has some knowledge of Chinese where it is a very common word... :-)

In fact, for the exercise of combining the tree radical... one can take pretty much ANY phonetical component, combine it with the tree and be certain that it IS a valid character...

edict gives a reading of くまねこ (oh, gasp!) for 熊猫, but rates it as "obscure," but panda is nice, too.

Serge Wrote:...or has some knowledge of Chinese where it is a very common word... :-)

Indeed, xiong mao was one of the first Chinese words I learned.
But I think that trivia question is bull. The reading for 熊猫 is くまねこ, which means パンダ according to Goo 辞書, but I see nothing to indicate that it can be read as パンダ.

Quote:In fact, for the exercise of combining the tree radical... one can take pretty much ANY phonetical component, combine it with the tree and be certain that it IS a valid character...

I wouldn't say that. There are oodles of phonetic components that don't make a valid kanji when combined with 木へん. 及 and 定 to name just two.

JimmySeal Wrote:Indeed, xiong mao was one of the first Chinese words I learned.
But I think that trivia question is bull. The reading for 熊猫 is くまねこ, which means パンダ according to Goo 辞書, but I see nothing to indicate that it can be read as パンダ.

Obviously one shouldn't believe everything one sees on TV! One might feel these types of questions are trivial however as long as you don't overload on them, they can be quite fun.

As languages constantly evolve, dictionaries are always going to be behind the times, e.g. does 'fansub(s)' appear in your dictionary?

Whether or not they are 100% official readings is beside the point. My understanding is that they are valid. However, the topic of the thread was Japanese game shows.

Another interesting one I recall is 聖林 - Hollywood.

I wasn't criticizing you, Synewave. If it appeared on a TV show then by all means put it here but I think it's a bit ridiculous for that to have appeared on a game show.

I did the "write as many kanji as you can with the ~~ radical" game with my ladyfriend last night. I beat her 4 out of 4 times! we did 木, 糸, person, and the house roof radicals.

I guess japanese folks are really unaccustomed to thinking of kanji like that.

johnzep Wrote:I did the "write as many kanji as you can with the ~~ radical" game with my ladyfriend last night. I beat her 4 out of 4 times! we did 木, 糸, person, and the house roof radicals.

I guess japanese folks are really unaccustomed to thinking of kanji like that.

did the same thing a few times when I was in Thailand. Same thing happened as you john. I just thought about what "Jimmy" (my 人偏 ) gets up to and there are a load of kanji that pop up into my head. My girlfriend however had a much tougher time it appears...