Seriously, I just spent five hours finding the best stories for 30 kanji (6 kanji an hour) - that "row" primitive drives me nuts, and the primitives often have absolutely no logic connection to the meaning of the kanjis

Yeah, "row" caused me problems too, it might be useful not to think of it as just "row" as that's a little too vague, try thinking of it as a row of something, I think of a row of people waiting in line for something.

When in doubt, just make up your own primitive

I used a cinema for that. Everything with row involves a darkened cinema room.

Thanks for your suggestions, I think the problem is that combining the three different strokes for row into a single meaning wasn't a very good idea from Heisig to begin with, I think I'll just assign my own based on the positions (read about penguins somewhere, that looks good) That helped me with the thread primitive (spiderman vs. spiderpig)

Oh crap, I'm in the same spot, and still debating with a few of them whether I should change their meanings or just go with it. Some things that helped me:

Row is a real bastard because of the three different shapes. The "upside-down in a row" shape worked better for me when I changed the meaning to "bending over backwards," from the fact that the elements are inverted from the original kanji.

I decided that the right element in 僕 might as well be "servant" (a husband bending over backwards for his wife...), since 僕 itself means manservant, which is a far more concrete image than "me," and it's feasible that an upset servant's master might slap 撲 his servant with only his fingers (in order to not catch the servant's low-class germs). 業, profession, comes fairly easily from bending over backwards and not yet.

I got a few using the 且 primitive as a general sort of shelf and a few more as a bookshelf, but there's a few that I'm still stumped on. The full kanji has a meaning of something like "moreover," which is about as unhelpful as they come.

僕には分かる。

*懐かしく、音楽が天空から流れ始める*

貴方のその痛みが、僕には分かる。


”さらば涙は友のみのためでなく、自分の身の上のためにも流れるだろう”

--萩原朔太郎

*風の吹く音*

sorry, i rolled through that in lesson in a 10 minute timebox last night. was actually really surprised by how quickly i got it done - that's like 1 story every 20 seconds...

i haven't added them to my srs or written them yet, so we'll see how that goes...

chamois Wrote:sorry, i rolled through that in lesson in a 10 minute timebox last night. was actually really surprised by how quickly i got it done - that's like 1 story every 20 seconds...

i haven't added them to my srs or written them yet, so we'll see how that goes...

It doesn't count if you can't remember even half of them on the next morning.

And if you can, then you are clearly above most people's learning capabilities, so there is no reason to compare yourself to the rest of us.