Not a thread exclusively for ALTs but considering the amount of free time we have as well as our access are you making use of 国語 lessons?

MightyMatt mentioned doing some calligraphy. Might give that a bash when they do that here again.

But today some of my "buddies" wanted me to come to their class. I've never bothered to go to Japanese lessons in school before, preferring to do my own study. And there are obviously various types of lessons that the kids have to do, but today was RTK BY Japanese FOR Japanese (slight digression: I found this so surprising coz the teacher is a bloke in his 50s that struck me as 'old school' so I really didn't expect anything like this).

Anyway, the bulk of the lesson involved searching a page from their textbook for kanji that had other kanji with the same ONyomi reading OR were in a group where only ONE reading differed. I was sitting there thinking "how many pure and semi-pure groups do you want me to give you?".

It took the students （中学２年生） more effort than I would have expected to come up with different groups. So just by being Japanese it wasn't something they were automatically aware of. Also from what I thought I knew of Heisig I was under the impression that Japanese didn't learn this way.

He then started to go into what I think was etymology (sp?) of various characters. Suggesting that 'signal primatives' (Heisig's term, not the teacher's) determine reading and 'the other bit' is for meaning (not quite sure I get it though).

Other stuff that he talked about was how state of mind comes from 心 and saber comes from 刀 etc. Surprisingly not everyone knew this stuff! Then we went on to try and come up with various country names in kanji. All in all, an excellent lesson (as far as I was concerned anyway), I probably enjoyed it more than any of the kids!

Recently, on various drinking binges with my Japanese friends, the topic of my Japanese studies has come up a lot. Abviously this was my signal to regail them all with my RTK exploits.

What I found interesting was that when I explained that (?) to me had the primitive meaning of flesh that half of my friends agreed and told me that that was the way they learned kanji when they were younger. The other half had no idea and told me I was crazy...

I think what Heisig did was expand on an idea already being taught by Japanese to Japanese, much in the same way that Rowley expanded the pictographix method to cover the full range of kanji.

Its cool that you got to see it being taught first hand though. Did you get a chance to wow them with your RTK knowledge?

Heisig was certainly not the first person to bring mnemonics to kanji, but may have been the first to systematize it on a large scale, and suggest the blasphemous idea of learning the kanji in English before dealing with anything else.

Signal primitives are certainly not something Heisig invented! And they're even more helpful in Chinese, where the characters originated.

There is quite an established tradition of using waka 5-7-5-7-5 poems for remembering kanji. Basically the parts of the kanji are introduced in the poem (which describes how they are put together) and then a reading or two for the character come at the end of the poem. I took out a whole book of these poems from the library, but I have returned it.

I was giving a speech to some Japanese people and explaining how I learn kanji. I put octopus and owl(both REALLY easy with RTK) on the screen and explained why they were easy for me, even though some Japanese can't write them. Some old business man raised his hand and asked me to read them, because he couldn't. Yay for the RTK method!