Please delete if such a thread exists already.

Is there a list anywhere with the correct English meanings of the kanji? I have seen many people claim on here that Heisig uses the correct meanings sometimes, but not always (so as to make the kanji easier to learn). I can't imagine the meaning of 串 is actually 'shish kebab'.

If there is no list, is there an easy way to find out the correct meanings, without knowing the pronunciation of the kanji yet?

Thanks for your help!

Koos83 Wrote:I can't imagine the meaning of 串 is actually 'shish kebab'.

くしがき【串柿】 (kushigaki)
persimmons dried on skewers.
白い粉の吹いた串柿　dried persimmons with a bloom of sugar [fructose].

くし１ 串
a spit (大きい); a skewer
串にさす spit; skewer
魚を串にさして焼く broil [grill] a fish on a skewer.
串焼き spit-roasting
串焼きの spit-roasted 《meat》; 《lamb》 roasted on a spit
串焼きにする roast [broil] 《a fish》 on a skewer [broach, spit].

くしざし 串刺し
1 〈串に刺すこと〉
串刺しにする skewer 《a piece of meat》; spit 《chicken》
串刺しになった魚 a fish on a skewer.
2 〈槍で突き刺すこと〉
槍で串刺しにする transfix [pierce] sb with a spear.

Koos83 Wrote:If there is no list, is there an easy way to find out the correct meanings, without knowing the pronunciation of the kanji yet?

We call them dictionaries. I heard you can buy them at so called book stores.

You are from the Netherlands, so maybe you speak a bit of German. You might take a look at Japanisch-Deutsches Kanji-Lexikon von Hans-Jörg Bibiko.

Such a list is impossible, and in any case unnecessary. Really, with some rare exceptions the 'incorrect' keywords are actually chosen on purpose to help remember and disambiguate.

BUT I didn't always think that way, and as a result I've accumulated a nearing-complete list of more accurate keywords. These are being worked into the (BROKEN LINK) one hanzi, one picture project.

xaarg Wrote:

Koos83 Wrote:If there is no list, is there an easy way to find out the correct meanings, without knowing the pronunciation of the kanji yet?

We call them dictionaries. I heard you can buy them at so called book stores.

Thank you for the unneccessary sarcasm. Of course I have checked dictionaries already, but not knowing how to pronounce the kanji, as I mentioned in my original post, makes it impossible to use one.

mafried Wrote:Such a list is impossible, and in any case unnecessary. Really, with some rare exceptions the 'incorrect' keywords are actually chosen on purpose to help remember and disambiguate.

BUT I didn't always think that way, and as a result I've accumulated a nearing-complete list of more accurate keywords. These are being worked into the (BROKEN LINK) one hanzi, one picture project.

Would you say that in most of the cases the original keyword is the correct meaning? I'd hate to go to Japan next year and misinterpret a kanji because I learnt a Heisig keyword that didn't mean what the kanji actually means.

Kanji don't really "mean" things; kanji meanings are assigned to kanji by dictionary or textbook writers based on words they appear in. There's no single "correct" meaning for a kanji, so even if you find differences between Heisig and a dictionary, that doesn't mean that Heisig is wrong. Very common kanji that are used in many words can have as many as 10 meanings (or maybe more) listed in a kanji dictionary.

Knowing only the meanings of kanji is of very limited use in dealing with actual Japanese; you can do some things with them, but having a few less-than-optimal meanings in your knowledge isn't really going to make that much of a difference. The purpose of Heisig's keywords (in the context of his system) is to help you remember how to write the kanji, and to provide a foundation for study of written Japanese, not to enable you to use the keywords directly with actual Japanese.

Everything yudantaiteki said, plus when it comes to building a foundation for learning Japanese it does not matter which keywords you use. They can even be wrong, to an extent, and not hinder your ability to proceed. I find there to be a nice parallel between primitive meanings vs. keywords, and keywords vs. vocabulary. In the same way that it (to an extent) it doesn't matter what meaning you choose for primitives as long as you keep the English keyword intact, at the next stage it doesn't really matter what keywords you remember for individual kanji when learning multi-character vocabulary, as long as you stay true to the Japanese meaning of the term.

Also, what dictionary are you using? Most dictionaries are ordered by radical, not pronunciation.

Koos83 Wrote:Thank you for the unneccessary sarcasm.

First, there was no sarcasm in my words and second, the sarcasm was highly necessary.

Koos83 Wrote:Of course I have checked dictionaries already, but not knowing how to pronounce the kanji, as I mentioned in my original post, makes it impossible to use one.

We need to make this bad news public as fast as possible. I know a lot of people that used dictionaries to look up the pronunciations of kanji. I think they will be sadden to learn that what they were doing was physically impossible.

Maybe they had been bewitched by this evil web page? It claims to contain a method that allows one to look up any kanji just by knowing it's stroke order. If there only was a method to remember the stroke order for all the important kanji. I would call it "Remembering the Writing of Kanji: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Writing of Japanese Characters by James Hogwash" .

I also heard highly sophisticated computer hackers can just copy and paste the kanji from this website into their electronic dictionary. I am a bit envious of those smart computer criminals.

[Katsuo]

As already stated on this thread, a kanji usually appears in a variety of words. It is therefore difficult to say it has a specific meaning and to find a single English word that is a perfect equivalent.

However, assigning an English word to the kanji can make learning it much easier. It also helps if the English word is a good approximation to the kanji meaning(s).

In Heisig's books the keywords are mostly well-chosen, but a small number could be better. Reasons for this are:
1) Heisig's method requires that each keyword is different. Sometimes the best keyword for a particular kanji has already been used elsewhere.
2) As you say, occasionally more evocative keywords are chosen for memory purposes.
3) Heisig himself was a beginner at Japanese when he wrote the books.

Also, sometimes more than one "keyword" would be necessary to cover the variety of meanings.

RTK is not the only source that assigns English words to kanji. It's interesting to compare what several sources have chosen. Hence I made this table.

xaarg: Again, the sarcasm. How about accepting that some people are not as far advanced on the 'Japanese knowledge scale' as you are and are merely asking for help so they can learn.
As for dictionaries: I haven't looked at any online dictionaries yet; being a foreign language teacher and having pupils use those and coming up with complete nonsense, I've lost my faith in those.
Coming across Japanese kanji dictionaries in stores does not happen very often in the tiny town with tiny bookstore I live in, so I've only ever seen one or two dictionaries passing through bookstores in other towns, and they were based on the kanji's pronunciation. Hence why I said what I did.

Thank you, Katsuo, for the spreadsheet. I've bookmarked it and I'll have a look at that later. It looks quite useful.

Thanks also to the people who explained about the keywords being used in other words etc. Now I understand.

To his credit though, he was actually answering your questions and I found his posts amusing. Don't take it personally.

Sure, he was answering my questions, but to me it felt more like he was showing off his 'superiority' and trying to bring me down for being so incredibly stupid that I didn't even know something this simple, rather than just answering my questions (like the other people in this thread were doing). So even though he probably answered correctly, my first instinct is not to take him seriously, no matter what good things he might have to say. This is how you get people to stop asking questions, which is never a good thing.

For what it's worth, I found his responses inappropriate as well -- you shouldn't discourage people from asking questions on a forum created to help people learn Japanese.

yudantaiteki Wrote:For what it's worth, I found his responses inappropriate as well -- you shouldn't discourage people from asking questions on a forum created to help people learn Japanese.

Thank you! My point exactly.

Koos83, as SammyB said, don't take it personally. xaarg is always like this, but he is very kind and helpful member.

Sometimes he makes me remember siomotteikiru (aka atamagii, aya, turaisiawae, etc.) from HTLAL (How-to-learn-any-language forum.) They share many common things.

xaarg Wrote:First, there was no sarcasm in my words and second, the sarcasm was highly necessary.

First, it is rather obvious that you need a dictionary yourself to clarify your lack of understanding of the English word "sarcasm."

Second "highly necessary" in whose view except for your own self-inflated opinion?

what he says doesn't help and you don't like the way he says it>bad
what he says helps but you don't like the way he says it>good

My first post here, after I read so many posts already.
I'm a bit surprised http://www.jisho.org was not mentioned. I think this is a superb online dictionary, I use it all the time.
You have 3 options:
- The 'words' section: Plain dictionary. If you write in romaji it will automatically translate to hiragana.
- The kanji section: here you can see all the meanings of a kanji. It was mentioned earlier that you can copy and paste any kanji on this website to see it.
- The Kanji by radicals: If you see a kanji and you cannot paste it and you don't know the reading (for example when reading a manga), you can click on the radicals and find it.
A website is so much faster that I hardly use a paper dictionary anymore (plus most paper ones have fewer entries in my experience).

P.S. Hello Koos83! I've been following you since I've been on this website, because we started at around the same time, both from the Netherlands, so I thought I would have a secret race with you to see who would be the first to finish. It turned out I have a bit faster pace but it always motivates me when I check under 'members reviewing today' that you reviewed aswell. I hope you don't think I'm a creepy stalker

Hahaha! Hi Kame! Nice to meet you. Not creepy stalkerish at all. And yes, I do my reviews every day, though I don't always have time to study new ones, which is why your pace is faster. I'm glad my reviewing motivates you!

Anyway, that dictionary of yours sounds good, especially the radical option. I'll check it out.

Koos83 Wrote:Again, the sarcasm. How about accepting that some people are not as far advanced on the 'Japanese knowledge scale' as you are and are merely asking for help so they can learn.

There is nothing Japanese about looking up words, characters or grammar in a dictionary. Even more backwards nations like the USA, Canada and Afghanistan have dictionaries. I still fell sorry for them. Not having a mobile phone that can cook rice perfectly must be hard.

You also don't need to be a genius to realize that you don't need to know the pronunciation of a word to find it in a dictionary. Rarely anybody knows how most English words are pronounced, but they can still look them up by their spelling (=the letters they contain). You too can look up kanji by the subparts they contain.

Koos83 Wrote:As for dictionaries: I haven't looked at any online dictionaries yet; being a foreign language teacher and having pupils use those and coming up with complete nonsense, I've lost my faith in those.

I was talking about electronic dictionaries. They are created by turning the paper dictionary into electrons or something like that. If you don't like them, then there are no Japanese dictionary to your liking, because all of them are available in electronic form and a few of them are even on-line.

Koos83 Wrote:Coming across Japanese kanji dictionaries in stores does not happen very often in the tiny town with tiny bookstore I live in, so I've only ever seen one or two dictionaries passing through bookstores in other towns, and they were based on the kanji's pronunciation. Hence why I said what I did.

I am sorry. I did not know they have no Internet in the Netherlands. Must be hard sending all your posts in this forum by homing pigeon, so that somebody in India can put it into the world wide web for you. Obviously without the Internet you can't know what kind of dictionaries exists.

I will tell you a secret, but please don't tell it anybody else. You can order books in a book store. Just tell them which book you want and they will get it for you. You can find the name of good books using the Internet. If you can't do it yourself, just order the people in India using you homing pigeon to do it for you. But please remember, this is a secret that nobody is supposed to know!

It's funny, I think you're trying to answer my questions but all I see anymore is blah blah blah. What a waste of a long post.

If you have nothing useful to say then don't reply to this thread.

(Oh and you'll probably find the need to reply something sarcastic or offensive to this too, so go ahead.)

Actually I think there is nothing more to say. I also don't see me trying to answer your questions in my last post. I think such efforts would be wasted on you.

xaarg Wrote:Actually I think there is nothing more to say. I also don't see me trying to answer your questions in my last post. I think such efforts would be wasted on you.

It's too bad that you think so, since the other people who have posted in this thread have said very useful things that have really answered my question (thanks again for that, people). I guess it's just the way you answer questions that make it impossible for me to understand.

Katsuo Wrote:[...]However, assigning an English word to the kanji can make learning it much easier. It also helps if the English word is a good approximation to the kanji meaning(s).

In Heisig's books the keywords are mostly well-chosen, but a small number could be better. Reasons for this are:
1) Heisig's method requires that each keyword is different. Sometimes the best keyword for a particular kanji has already been used elsewhere.
2) As you say, occasionally more evocative keywords are chosen for memory purposes.
3) Heisig himself was a beginner at Japanese when he wrote the books.

Also, sometimes more than one "keyword" would be necessary to cover the variety of meanings.

I think so too.

Folks who can speak (know vocab by sound) and subsequently learn to read (which would include most Japanese) will process kanji a bit differently than those who start with RTK (at least until a certain level of reading fluency is attained). RTKers will find that the meanings we associate with the kanji will play a role in comprehension. These associations can sometimes be helpful and occasionally a hindrance. If we're going to spend hours of our lives stuffing associations into our brain, why not ensure they are the helpful type?

It's been awhile since I've looked at the RTK book. Does Heisig indicate which of his keywords do not reflect any 'meaning' of the kanji, but are instead chosen only for memory purposes, etc? If not, we should put together a list (I've gone through about 900 of them - apparently others have too.) People who want to should be able to distinguish which keywords are only a tool. Some people realize the concepts they are associating with kanji can be more than mere meaningless throw away placeholders - they can form the basis of a sense of the kanji that will be augmented and refined as they progress.

A keyword (Japanese or other language) won't cover every sense of the kanji. (I noticed, however, that Heisig has sometimes cleverly chosen keywords with multiple meanings covering more than one meaning of the kanji.) But using nonsense keywords as temporary placeholders is missing out on an opportunity to create a foundation.

Using Japanese keywords avoids some of the problems (which is part of the reason some think English RTK as an absolute first step really isn't the best approach.) Another advantage of more accurate English keywords is a smoother transition to Japanese keywords for those interested (b/c you can retain your story/concept/images.)

I'm persuaded by own experience (apologies to the citation police :-)): I learned 500 kanji old school style, another 1000 using RTK (paper cards), then another 1000 or so using Japanese vocabulary. I noticed differences in my ability to read, write and comprehend those kanji groups and in my retention of them 10 years later. People I've met over the years have described similar experiences.

Thora Wrote:RTKers will find that the meanings we associate with the kanji will play a role in comprehension.....Some people realize the concepts they are associating with kanji can be more than mere meaningless throw away placeholders - they can form the basis of a sense of the kanji that will be augmented and refined as they progress.

This occurred to me about 300 into RTK, so I've put a temporary hold on new kanji while I go back and review the entries for the first 300 in my dictionary. Reading through the dictionary entry gives me a much better sense of the kanji's core concept(s) than does a single keyword without context. I never eliminate the Heisig keyword, but sometimes I add one of my own. I also select a Japanese keyword that I can relate to--something I know already, or is familiar, or that I'm more likely to use or encounter than others. I don't have a plan for using them yet, but it's been great katakana writing practice. Sometimes I'll make a note of a useful word or phrase that catches my eye, too. And finally, I make a note of the kanji's frequency number, to help me decide which ones to incorporate into my practice sentences. Once I get through the initial 300 I plan to continue with smaller groups as I go along.