Hello, I'm new to the forum, hope this is the correct section for my post.

Today I got the book "The Key To Kanji", one of many Kanji learning books that take an etymological approach. I was wondering if anyone with good knowledge on Kanji has taken a look at it. Reading your comments on "Kanji Isn't Hard"
( http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...1#pid55611 ), I realized that it is impossible for me to know wether the book is actually accurate or if the mnemonics are just made up.

It looks well organized with standardized page layouts (4 Kanji per page) and has a nice cover.



The drawings look like doodles by children but that's the way all ancient/cave drawings looked, I guess.
http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?pictur...9pOH2i7Dp1
(Please excuse the distortion at the bottom)

Thanks for your opinion!

Edit:
Interview with Noriko Williams
http://www.cheng-tsui.com/blog/?p=34

[Katsuo]

From my moderate knowledge of kanji etymology, the examples appear to be accurate.

The layout of the book looks clean and attractive to me, and preferable to many others using the etymological approach.

Heysig's method differs in several ways. He breaks down each kanji into common components (e.g. 格 = 木 + 各) and gives each component a unique name so that they can't be confused. Many of the names he chooses are etymologically correct, but others are chosen in order to ease memorization.

The "Key to Kanji" book examples 142 and 144 both explain how an older form of the character was constructed and then show the present form without any further explanation. This is interesting, but not as efficient as learning how to remember the present form, as in Heisig.

If you can remember large numbers of kanji using this book, then great. My experience using this kind of approach was that after a few hundred I started getting them confused with each other (the book I used was less attractive-looking, mind).

I've seen several attempts to use etymology to facilitate the learning of kanji. Of these, the one that seems to me to take etymology most seriously is Henshall's book; I base this opinion solely on the fact that Henshall's etymological descriptions are filled with controversies, conflicting hypotheses, mysteries, and other sources of noise, and this somehow rings true...

What I'm getting at is that, although the etymological approach seems very tempting at first, if one takes it seriously one discovers that the real etymological data is so messy, that more often than not the hope of finding a neat mnemonic disappears.

Of course, if one is just learning kanji, there's no reason to insist on the "true" etymology; for the purpose of learning characters, folk/fake etymologies are fine, as long as they are memorable, and one does not put too much stock in their factuality. (Maybe they should be called "truthy etymologies".) I particularly like de Roo's stories. They are invariably cast in terms of life in ancient China, which gives them an etymological ring, but I think that more often than not they are products of de Roo's creative imagination rather than historical fact. They are more "truthy" than true. (Unfortunately, de Roo's book is out-of-print and hard to find, and worse yet, his primitives often differ from Heisig's. I can tell you from personal experience that trying to use some de Roo's stories within the context of Heisig's method, however compelling these stories may be, can lead to much confusion.)

But I find it so hard to come up with memorable stories, that I welcome any new source... The more the merrier.

The only thing I'd use these sorts of books for is to learn kanji etymology for 'fun' after finishing RTK. Well, that's what I always planned on but I never went back to read one of these books, too busy trying to learn Japanese.

There must be books of this kind written IN Japanese, which would be awesome for killing two (or actually more) birds with one stone.

Some of the mnemonics are from Henshall but many other sources are listed. The author, a Japanese teacher at various American universities, seems to have done a lot of research but I also think, often there simply isn't any definite data available.

From what I've seen so far, I find some of the explanations much easier to remember and more logical than the Heisig stories but they sometimes explain an outdated version of the Kanji, while the Heisig mnemonics help you to remember each current part and therefore might be more useful. I still feel that it helps to understand why (on earth!) a Kanji is written a certain way today as it shows both versions.

___

Update:
I found some of the etymological mnemonics to be very close to the Kanji. For example 貝 is supposed to resemble a "shellfish" in most books, which is a generic term raising associations with crabs or clams but TKTK shows the original bone indent being a cowry snail, more specific and more like the Kanji, where the round body was replaced by the "eye"-form:


Image: http://eposvriende.blogspot.com/2007/10/pictures.html

Here's another interesting example. The Kanji for easy/change/fortune telling is a lizard with sun rays (easily changing its color in the sun).

The book Kanji Pict-O-Graphix which features beautiful but sometimes hard to remember mnemonics is based on Henshall's mnemonics and does mention the lizard and the sun in the schematic explanation while a human is used as mnemonic:


Heisig, also splits the symbol horizontally into sun (top) and "knot" or "not" (bottom):


But the top part, according to TKTK, is actually the head of the lizard and the sun rays are the short lines that could be mistaken for legs:


The text also explains how to remember several of the unrelated meanings, while the other books only teach "easy". The part I don't understand is the fortune telling. Does it mean that lizards are used for fortune telling?

Here is an interesting list of books on this topic in Japanese.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%..._2_rdssss0

I still have no idea how to get books from Japan though, without selling my soul for cash.

I have ordered books from Amazon Japan before, no problem if you have a credit card or debit card. Your country might add taxes, for some reason items from Japan always slipped through while items from the US, even if used, always required me to visit the duane hq and pay taxes.

If you want to study the origins of the characters, this book was done by an expert on the subject and is fun:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/常用字解-白川-静/dp/458...393&sr=8-1

After reading a bit, I don't think the origins of the characters are necessarily all that useful for learning them, given the transformations involved in a lot of them.