Lesson 16's primitives and kanjis are a bit difficult to get accustomed to, what are your secrets for this lesson and any advice would help. Thanks in advance.

Most of us who finished RTK a long time ago have long since forgotten what was in specific chapters. What primitives are you having trouble with?

Arrow, quiver, fiesta, thanksgiving, parade, march and float. Sorry about that.

Each builds off one before, with arrow being the first. You just have to build some good imagery as to why arrow with an extra stroke is a quiver and why with a different stroke it's a fiesta. Honestly, i've forgotten what stories i used. They're all used in many kanji (although quiver is a little rarer), so you really just need a way to differentiate them long enough for the repeated exposure to drill them in. Like all primitives (and eventually, kanji), soon they just become a picture in your mind (and muscle memory when writing).

Ah okay thanks I've been trying them slowly looking good so far.

I've noticed Heisig's primitives are very similar to actual Japanese radicals.

I saw one else post something similar.

Use extremely vivid stories for these Kanji, and you won't go wrong. For intimidate, 威

I did this massive image of a LINE of INTIMIDATING WOMEN MARCHING down a road. ]

After you revising it a few times, it gets much easier, and if you read any Japanese ( even those you can't understand ) you will see the different ones pop up here and there.

[Katsuo]

Jenkoi Wrote:I've noticed Heisig's primitives are very similar to actual Japanese radicals.

I made a table to compare them: Radicals vs. Primitives

I studied them two weeks ago, and I had trouble with them as you do. I was worried too, but I just kept reviewing them in Anki and now they're easier (but I'm doing RTK Lite, not the full version).

Who there's 17 stroke primitives crazy!

I turned some of Heisig's primitives in this lesson into weapons to visualize them better.Arrow,quiver,spear,and scythe.I couldn't find any replacement for float or thanksgiving so i memorized them like that,there are few of them anyway.

Edit:i also remember using the grim reaper primitive,can't remember the radical's name though but its the scythe with the extra stroke inside it.

Jenkoi Wrote:Who there's 17 stroke primitives crazy!

There are kanji in this book with up to 22 and even one with 23 strokes. And you will most often find some kanji that have 21. But the number of strokes doesn't really matter. And you should not worry about kanji with that many strokes. The beauty of the RTK method is to break bigger kanji down into digestible pieces. This makes it easy to learn to remember beasts with higher stroke counts. You might also find that remembering kanji with 21 strokes is sometimes easier, than to remember some consisting of just 8 or 12 strokes.

When you master the method you could also try to remember some of these:

厵 鱺 癴

They have as many as 30 strokes! But they are not from the book. I got curious and did a check over at jisho.org to see what the maximum stroke for a single kanji would be.

Hang in there and you will be fine.

Primitive deck really helps a lot. Should have thought about it earlier.

I had trouble with this chapter too... I put RTK away a couple of times before I had a stroke of motivation again to sit down and really tackle this lesson. And what I did to tackle this lesson was basically just focus on the confusing components only and write them next to each other to sort of visualize and focus on the differences between them (arrow, quiver, float, thanksgiving, fiesta, parade, turn into, march etc). I worried about the stories and filling them in to form the other characters in the lesson later on after I was more familliar and comfortable with differentiating these confusing primitives with specific images. It's kinda like... well this might be a bad analogy, but it's kinda like if you know the frame/skeleton of a house... you can decorate it and play with it any way you like and make as many different kind of houses as you like. This really breaks down the 17 kanji into groups of 7 (eg. Float only has 3 kanji that belongs to it; arrow only has 2 kanji, thanksgiving has 2 kanji etc--i'm only speaking for lesson 16 to get over this hurdle of learning the kanji in this lesson)... hope this helps and makes sense..

I also want to add that when you're writing or focusing on the primitives or the components that are confusing down next to each other, it's not just about writing but also using Heisig's method of fitting out a specific and clear story for each and making sure they are distinct from each other. That way when you fit each of them out with actual kanji stories (ie. plantation, scaffold, coin etc), you'll be *adding* to the basic distinguishing story of the primitive that was confusing. But the main thing is just focusing on the confusing primitives only and learn them, put them side by side, know the differences and similarities before fleshing them out.

I started getting better at recognizing through actual use of them and through Anki. I'm not sure if this is cheating but I look through the RTK book a lot refreshing on most of the hard Kanji for me. Should I stop doing this?

I don't think additional exposure could be considered cheating. In that case, you might as well stop your mentioned usage of kanji, too.

The SRS is not a goal in and of itself; it is a means to an end. Its purpose is to make sure you don't forget things down the line. If I found something hard, I'd just make sure to cement it properly for now and then leave the algorithm to do its job; time will tell the rest. If you don't remember it later, nothing's stopping you from failing it again.