I heard that Kanji Pict-o-grafx is worse than Remembering the Kanji, but I do not see much difference other than the ammount of Kanji and "Stop" not being depicted as a foot...

try make a pictograph for 癌　鬮　闘　寿　... seems a bit crazy. Heisig is defs easier than the pictograph type methods i've seen.

mezbup Wrote:try make a pictograph for 癌　鬮　闘　寿　... seems a bit crazy. Heisig is defs easier than the pictograph type methods i've seen.

while I agree with you 100%, can you try and tell me a Heisig story for 鬮? Or keyword, for that matter? And don't mistake it with 籤

It's "lottery" and my story for it is "I won the broken gates lottery and all I got was this lousy old-turtle?". There's often 2 kanji that are the same thing... who know's what the chinese where thinking.

I think the difference is you can make Heisig work with any Kanji and it can just go on indefinitely plus you use it to build on the kanji you've learned before. Pictographs seem kinda harder to work with imo and definitely not as flexible.

Kanji Pict-o-Graphix = DO NOT WANT

I own this book and it's completely useless. There is no unified system; kanji are grouped by topic, some of the images are downright disturbing, and the mnemonics don't make any sense. It also doesn't help in the slightest in learning how to write the characters.

Drift over to Amazon and read the two featured reviews that give the book two stars.

Here's the review that I gave it on Amazon:

Quote:I got this book as an early learner of Japanese hoping it could help me learn kanji. After a very short time, I realized that it wasn't going to help. It's basically 1000 kanji arranged by category with strange pictures for each one with no real explanation of why certain pictures appear where. As one reviewer mentioned, many of them are even creepy and disturbing. There's also a short English phrase with each one that's supposed to work as a mnemonic device, but rarely seems to bear any relation to the picture so it's really just a way to remember the English word by itself. The book also gives the reader no idea how to write the characters, and they have the kanji written in some weird style, with the pictures provided to further confuse the issue.

Even learning the kanji by rote is better than trying to use this book. If you really want to learn kanji, go with Remembering the Kanji, Volume 1 by James Heisig. It costs twice as much, but it's 100 times more useful.

I highly suspect that most of the people who gave this book high ratings did not actually use it, or else they would not have rated it how they did. One reviewer who gave it 5 stars even says, "I wish I had it in college." Let's get real. This book is a novelty, not a way to learn kanji.

Agree with the negatives. Kanji p-o-g seems like a great idea, right up until you start Heisig. Heisig does the same thing, only in Heisig's method, everything builds on a system.

Put another way. KPoG is like trying to learn 2,000 kanji by coming up with a completely random story each time. Two kanji that look almost the same might end up with wildly varying stories, and neither of them help you remember how to write the kanji correctly. One kanji could be "two dogs playing in a field", and one that looks the same is "two old men under a gate" (not real examples). Heisig's method will usually point out two similar kanji, and try to incorporate something into the story to help you know how to write them correctly. Not to mention the stories are generally built on a framework. so in Heisig, you might go: "hmm.. I see a needle, then ten-rice-glue, so that's 'specialist' and a drop... wait... a specialist with a needle and a drop, that's 'Dr.'!".

Or put another way, take Heisig's book, then shuffle all the kanji so they're not in any logical order. Then try to learn them that way. Let me know how it goes.

I own it too and I wold agree, it doesn't work for 90% of 漢字.
There is a lot of nudity too. :\

I also purchased this book when I tried to starting out in 2007. Like others the book is a novelty with minor strengths and major weaknesses. And just like almost every other book I bought to learn Japanese, it was barely used.

Now, if he had used the same image for each radical (primitive) there may have been merit to the method. Other books did this with actual images to better effect. Heisig does it, but only with mental images.

I'll put it this way: The "One Kanji, One Image" thread gives you better for free and those look NOTHING like the kanji. Speaking of which, when the open source RevTK goes live, is anyone thinking of adding a feature to share images?

I own this book too, i bought the Brazilian version of Japanese in Mangaland and it came together with them for free, I rarely opened it, but it did help to remember some radicals.

and as for the creepy thing, I think that creep is good. Creepy glues more on the brain.

Pict-o-graphics has some use, but I found its much more limited than RTK.

Pict-o-graphics shows you how to visualize the radicals, which can be helpful, but a more important thing IMO is how to remember what radicals are in the kanji. RTK method excels at the latter with its visual stories, and not only for just a few kanji but for almost any kanji. Pict-o-graphics' 2D depiction of the Kanji is a lot more limited than what can go into visual stories.

Now I'm curious about what is creepy in the book.

The one that stands out in my mind is that the "taskmaster" primitive is a faceless silhouette of a person raising a beating stick in the air, like a poacher clubbing a seal.

So is this stuff related?

gyuujuice Wrote:I own it too and I wold agree, it doesn't work for 90% of 漢字.
There is a lot of nudity too. :\

I'm suddenly interested in this book.

Smackle Wrote:So is this stuff related?

Yeah, that's the same guy. Here he is spreading misinformation about the origin of the words Rambo and bimbo:

http://kanjipictographix.com/2009/04/eng...-in-japan/

JimmySeal Wrote:

Smackle Wrote:So is this stuff related?

Yeah, that's the same guy. Here he is spreading misinformation about the origin of the words Rambo and bimbo:

http://kanjipictographix.com/2009/04/eng...-in-japan/

Styx's "Mr. Roboto" was originally in Portugese, but for marketing purposes they changed all the lyrics except for one word which they altered only slightly, to keep the rhyme.

So kinda off topic but still keeping with the theme of Kanji... I took a look at all the kanji books my uni has for Japanese and Chinese majors... man even looking at that shit made me wanna cry it was practically criminal.

mezbup Wrote:So kinda off topic but still keeping with the theme of Kanji... I took a look at all the kanji books my uni has for Japanese and Chinese majors... man even looking at that shit made me wanna cry it was practically criminal.

Were these books meant to teach kanji or were they reference books of varying quality?