i'm following the ajatt system, in the kanji phase day 000000001 i have a question that might seem simple for you guys (im in frame 15, a real n00b)

should i learn the special primitive meaning of the kanji? cause i reviewed my first 15 kanji and there is no special primitive meaning in the answer field. which means i should only learn the core meaning (and the kani of course )?

thankx in advance

the first few kanji aren't really made up of primitives so to speak. If you take a look at the radical index you'll see that most of those kanji class as entire radical (primitive).

You'll start seeing them being used as primitives in other kanji once you get a little bit further along. So for now you just need to remember them as they are. Luckily the first 100 or so are pretty easy.

alright man, thankxs.

let me see if i get the heisig method correctly.

i learn first the primitives (the kanji that themselves are primitives and the ones that arent kanji but are primitives). then as i continue my studies, kanji are formed by these primitives, so i use them to make up stories to remember the core meaning and also the writing of it cause i know the primitives. is that right?

Absolutely my friend! Spot on.

Are you using Anki to review or this site?

One thing i'd definitely suggest if your using Anki is to review both ways. I know Heisig says in his book that if you can review Keyword - Kanji then the other way will come naturally but it just simply isn't the case in my experience. After JLPT is over i'm going to go back and review the whole deck Kanji - Keyword so I can easily Identify them by sight which will in turn boost my ability to write them and the KEY thing here is my ability to remember how to write vocab!

Anyways good luck and I hope you enjoy (or survive?) the journey!

thank you for the advice man. and your responses. i am indeed using anki. was gonna use this site, but i feel more comfortable using anki for some reason. also making my own cards helps in the learning process.

any way to flip the cards? so itll show you the kanji as the question?

I will Enjoy the journey! hope you do too.

It'll pay off big time to get familiar with how decks work in Anki and what you can do to customize them to your learning needs.

Head to settings - Deck properties - select the current model and click edit - click over to the card template tab and if you need to you can create a whole new card template. By default theres usually two Foward and Reverse. By default reverse is usually disable but if you enable it it should generate the cards going the other way. You can set up additional card templates for different information such as readings or radical names, stroke counts or whatever takes your fancy if you find it useful.

thank you man. if i ever need to reverse them, now i know how.

errtu Wrote:also making my own cards helps in the learning process.

Lies. It may, however, induce you to throw yourself off a building after you have to manually make a thousand cards and realize you've got a thousand more.

(Seriously, it's just a waste of your time that could be spent learning more)

Quote:any way to flip the cards? so itll show you the kanji as the question?

This is a bad thing to want. There is essentially no value in being able to produce a keyword from a kanji; the keyword is a tool to learn the kanji, nothing else.

~J

woodwojr Wrote:

Quote:any way to flip the cards? so itll show you the kanji as the question?

This is a bad thing to want. There is essentially no value in being able to produce a keyword from a kanji; the keyword is a tool to learn the kanji, nothing else.

Heisig himself seems a little inconsistent on this point; in places he seems to indicate that the primary purpose of RTK 1 is writing the kanji, not the keywords, but then in other places (like the intro to book 2) he seems to indicate that one thing you learn from RTK 1 is what the kanji "mean". But I imagine people who have actually used RTK 1 successfully may have a better idea of what is good to take from it and what isn't.

To some extent you do learn a single meaning of most of the kanji, I can't argue otherwise. However, this meaning ranges from incomplete ("present") to subtly but distinctly wrong in implication ("nickname") to outright misleading ("dispose"). I would advise viewing whatever you retain of the keyword as an added bonus (or sometimes penalty), making no effort to maintain it.

~J

@woodwojr: Indeed. People seem to forget that Heisig created RTK when he knew 0 Japanese and hasn't changed it much since then aside from layout and stroke order errors. What he achieved when creating RTK had nothing to do with Japanese ability and everything to do with having good analytical skills. The keywords should never be considered meanings, just placeholders.

On the other hand I don't think it's important to study what a kanji means at all, since the majority of them serve no purpose in isolation and only contribute a portion of meaning to a word. As such one should learn what kanji mean in words (構成), much like it makes more sense to learn readings in the context of words instead of in isolation. When you learn a new 熟語, think about how the characters in the word relate to each other instead of just remembering that a word is written with those characters. Why is just as important as what.

If one is speaking just about primitives, the keywords become even more useless. Some overlap with radicals and so have some semblance of a meaning, but since kanji are thousands of years old many characters have radicals which now have nothing to do with the meaning. The ones that don't overlap with radicals were made up by Heisig for the benefit of the RTK system and have no meaning whatsoever since they don't actually exist.

I agree with what's been said so far, but I'd also like to mention that the keywords can help you decipher text to some degree - giving you better context when reading books, etc. I could follow what was generally happening in a fully Japanese novel despite being early in my overall Japanese studies after adding all the RTK1 kanji for example. Of course, I still see it as a pure bonus and I'm aware you have to watch out for becoming too dependent on them. Anyhow, they can be useful the other way around, too.

A slightly related question (with a slight risk of derailing the thread) is where one could find a list of primitives that are linked to onyomi, like the right side of 嬢. I've been searching but haven't found anything. Does anyone have this?

Surreal Wrote:A slightly related question (with a slight risk of derailing the thread) is where one could find a list of primitives that are linked to onyomi, like the right side of 嬢. I've been searching but haven't found anything. Does anyone have this?

Heisig book 2? That's the only source I know of that has an essentially complete list of primitives linked to on-yomi, and broken down by whether it 100% accurately gives the reading, or gives it with one exception, or gives it with multiple exceptions.

No I mean a compiled list of primitives that directly influence the onyomi and the kanji it's in. Like the right part of 嬢 always makes the kanji it's part of carry the onyomi じょう. There's like six kanji with that primitive in RTK1 (actually I found about this one from comments on koohii), and I've found examples of other primitives that have the same effect. So recently I concluded that 義　as a primitive does this, giving me:

ぎ　義　犠　議　儀

A list like that would be useful when building memory palaces and so you can avoid wrongly assuming that primitives really have this effect (say it turns out there are kanji with 義 that don't carry the ぎ　onyomi)

Surreal Wrote:No I mean a compiled list of primitives that directly influence the onyomi and the kanji it's in. Like the right part of 嬢 always makes the kanji it's part of carry the onyomi じょう. There's like six kanji with that primitive in RTK1 (actually I found about this one from comments on koohii), and I've found examples of other primitives that have the same effect. So recently I concluded that 義　as a primitive does this, giving me:

ぎ　義　犠　議　儀

A list like that would be useful when building memory palaces and so you can avoid wrongly assuming that primitives really have this effect (say it turns out there are kanji with 義 that don't carry the ぎ　onyomi)

Heisig book 2 does have exactly that. After a little chapter about the kanji that the kana were derived from, he gives "pure groups", which are groups of characters that share the same primitive and an on-yomi. Then he gives groups which only have one exception, then those that have more.

Oh okay I misunderstood you sorry. I actually did a quick check in RTK 2 but I must have missed it. Thanks!

There's a lot of criticism here of RTK 2 but I think that if you've done RTK 1, at the very least the pure groups and groups with only one exception sections would be useful.

Well yeah it's like, I've had it lying around (that is, digitally) ever since I started RTK1 but I haven't really looked in it much. Upon closer inspection I realized how utterly stupid I was for not realizing that the SECOND CHAPTER is what I've wanted for a long time now. This is absolutely worthwhile and very easy to combine with whatever method/non-method you use for learning kanji. Man. I feel like giving Heisig a thousand high fives. Really, huge thanks for telling me about this (hadn't realized what a goldmine it is when I made the last post).

woodwojr Wrote:

errtu Wrote:also making my own cards helps in the learning process.

Lies. It may, however, induce you to throw yourself off a building after you have to manually make a thousand cards and realize you've got a thousand more.

(Seriously, it's just a waste of your time that could be spent learning more)

Quote:any way to flip the cards? so itll show you the kanji as the question?

This is a bad thing to want. There is essentially no value in being able to produce a keyword from a kanji; the keyword is a tool to learn the kanji, nothing else.

~J

We agree on your first point.

I think your second is bullshit. It's rubbish to say there is no value in being able to say what the keyword is from just looking at the kanji. Heisig is about a complete course on how to not forget the writing and meaning of the jouyou kanji.

Writing... And... Meaning.

Now really here we mean keyword and look we all know they're not 100% accurate but tbh they're bloody good enough. You definitely don't need to take his keywords as gospel because as soon as you get out into the real world of Japanese you'll notice a few discrepancies here and there and you'll put the peices together.

Now my counter argument is this and it's extremely valid:

If you complete heisig and you can remember how to write every Kanji but could not remember a single keyword, when you went to read Japanese and wanted to break down to words to their keywords to be able to write them from memory easily you essentially would have no ability to do this. If you have no ability to remember how to write words... why the hell did you bother with Heisig?

I encounter this a lot. I feel it's extremely useful being able to identify keywords and therefore a rough meaning from looking at Kanji present mainly in compounds for the ability it gives you to remember how to write whole words with virtually NO effort.

It's absolute shit to say theres no benefit to it. Complete rubbish.

They're like a scaffolding for learning how to write the kanji, yes. Don't throw the scaffolding away when all you've done is layed the foundations! They are useful in building the rest of the building knowing as literacy.

I think you'll find the same thing you do when a Kanji becomes really mature in your memory and you can just write it with no story. The story falls away and you're left with just the kanji. The same thing begins to happens with words once they become mature in your memory and you don't really need to think of the kanji/keywords that make it up BUT initially this is a very bloody useful!

mezbup Wrote:Heisig is about a complete course on how to not forget the writing and meaning of the jouyou kanji.

Writing... And... Meaning.

Then you'd best just forget about the "meaning" part, because it's fantastically bad at that.

Quote:Now really here we mean keyword and look we all know they're not 100% accurate but tbh they're bloody good enough.

No, no they aren't.

Quote:You definitely don't need to take his keywords as gospel because as soon as you get out into the real world of Japanese you'll

Learn what they actually mean, a pursuit in which the keywords are not of sufficient use to spend time reinforcing.

Quote:Now my counter argument is this and it's extremely valid:

You could have stopped here, then. I'm glad you were able to evaluate the validity of your argument for us, we'll just take you at your word.

Quote:If you complete heisig and you can remember how to write every Kanji but could not remember a single keyword, when you went to read Japanese and wanted to break down to words to their keywords to be able to write them from memory easily you essentially would have no ability to do this. If you have no ability to remember how to write words... why the hell did you bother with Heisig?

Never mind valid, I'm not sure how on earth you're getting from "spent no effort on reinforcing keywords" to "remember not a single keyword" and then even more stupendously to "no ability to remember how to write words". If your uncle was a woman would she be your aunt?

Quote:They're like a scaffolding for learning how to write the kanji, yes. Don't throw the scaffolding away when all you've done is layed the foundations! They are useful in building the rest of the building knowing as literacy.

They're less than a scaffolding; maybe a scaffolding by which you construct a real scaffolding. The actual scaffolding is what I've referred to elsewhere as a "sense of kanji"; Heisig helped me bootstrap to a point where I could directly decompose most characters into a manageably small number of components; note that I say "directly", this is without reference to mnemonic. This has even carried on to novel components; I left Heisig's method before I got to 船 or anything else that uses the left-side component, but picking it up was essentially a process of looking at it carefully for about fifteen seconds and writing it a few times.

Quote:I think you'll find the same thing you do when a Kanji becomes really mature in your memory and you can just write it with no story. The story falls away and you're left with just the kanji.

As noted, you reach a point where that happens even with kanji you don't know.

Quote:The same thing begins to happens with words once they become mature in your memory and you don't really need to think of the kanji/keywords that make it up BUT initially this is a very bloody useful!

The keyword isn't what makes it useful; it's just there to build a mnemonic on top of for bootstrapping. It is marginally more useful than if it was completely random, but "marginally" really needs to be emphasized; if you were good enough at mnemonics to make it work, you might as well just number them.

~J

I'm sure we agree everyone learns different, thinks different and puts the pieces of the puzzle together in their head a different way. I feel that your argument is coming from an angle more of learning how to read? Where as I feel keywords are useless when learning to read but they have a use in remembering how to write vocabulary.

At the end of the day whether or not you assign hamburger ingredients as keywords purely for mnemonics sakes if you can read and comprehend the text then you can understand it no problems. If you assign random numbers, pharmacuetical drug names, car parts or types of dog as a keyword for mnemonics sake but you wind up being able to read just like anyone else then it's irrelevant because you will take away what everything truly means anyway in some sense. I believe you'd have to in order to comprehend it.

You can learn to read with no keywords, mnemonics or any other special method other than looking every single word up until it sticks until one day you can read. You'll achieve a sense of what kanji means. You can learn to write if you brute force the Kanji until they stick and you'll achieve a great sense of what kanji mean when you're fully literate.

If you use keywords and mnemonics as a stepping stone, you too will eventually achieve the same sense of what kanji really mean once all that has fallen away. It's the same end result. It's just a different start.

My point is not about reading but about being able to write vocabulary.

I want you to put semantics aside and see my point. I'm not trying to force you or anyone else to idolize keywords, I'm pointing out (a bit strongly) what my experience is and has been on how keywords play a role in learning how to write, not really to read (although sometimes they do!). You're opinion was that there is no value. 0. Absolutely nothing. My experience, not my opinion, is that I personally (not saying you do) have found there to be value in being able to recall a keyword from looking at the Kanji. This runs contrary to your opinion (which may come from your experience, I don't know enough to comment about that).

Perhaps, I should ask... how are you going about garnering the ability to write vocabulary and whole sentences from memory? And how far along in the process you are with this, I would also like to know. I don't wish to attack you or your methods, in fact i'm interested in your progress and your method for writing vocab.

For me doing lots of reading helps big time in remembering which kanji are used in the compounds im trying to dredge up from memory. Lots of reading is a must! Sometimes, no matter how much reading I've done I just can't quite remember which kanji gets used and it's frustrating, but I believe it's fairly normal. This is where the value I have found in keywords steps in. I'll simply take a look at the keywords and think about what the kanji mean together and how they relate to eachother in this sense to get an idea for how the word comes to mean what it does. Sometimes the keywords are total rubbish and this doesn't really happen but tbh it doesn't really matter. What im looking for when I'm at this point is a mental hook that I can use to remember how to write the given word I'm having trouble with...

Aside from brute forcing it no other way really comes to mind? I can put it in Anki and review it til I get it right and so I should! I'd just prefer to create that little mental association or 'hook' if you will first to make it all the easier to recall initially.

So you see how it is I come to disagree with you (a bit strongly) when you say there is no value in being able to do this. It has value for those who find value in it.

Okaaay. I pretty much said the same thing, that there is a bonus if you can do it the other way around but I'd assume either way you can get the same benefit sooner or later because you have an underlying "keyword" for kanji, that's better than just the original one (Heisig mentioned you should get a feel for the kanji instead of using the keywords directly, ideally). This may go faster or slower depending on if you can use the keywords "backwards" - because it could become a crutch too.

In either case, this discussion is probably way over errtu's head; errtu, this isn't something you really need to worry about, you should figure out for yourself how you want to handle it later on. Oh and also the discussion was made way too personal. It's easy to see why you disagree but it's not like anyone's being racist or anything so it's not worth getting all flustered about it.

Surreal Wrote:Okaaay. I pretty much said the same thing, that there is a bonus if you can do it the other way around but I'd assume either way you can get the same benefit sooner or later because you have an underlying "keyword" for kanji, that's better than just the original one (Heisig mentioned you should get a feel for the kanji instead of using the keywords directly, ideally). This may go faster or slower depending on if you can use the keywords "backwards" - because it could become a crutch too.

In either case, this discussion is probably way over errtu's head; errtu, this isn't something you really need to worry about, you should figure out for yourself how you want to handle it later on. Oh and also the discussion was made way too personal. It's easy to see why you disagree but it's not like anyone's being racist or anything so it's not worth getting all flustered about it.

Agreed on all points. I feel im developing a feel for the kanji too though, I often will describe what it means rather than its keyword if I have to explain it to someone.