I know I should make some that have to do with the stroke order but it feels pretty hard to remember the sentence like for Nightbreak( 旦). 'Nightbreak is the first thing that happens in a *day*.' I know it's night break but I tend to focus on trying to remember two things at once. Once, the word (nightbreak), and 'day' and then 'one' for remembering stroke order but it doesn't seem to help at all. ( That's the best I can explain how it's affecting me.) Any ways to make these more simple ? Maybe just using a picture instead of a story but then that'd be going away from what RTK teaches.

I hope this doesn't sound stupid..just it seems like it's harder than it should be so yeah for me. v.v;

To hell with stroke order. Sometimes it's useful (insect is on THE RIGHT?? madness) but it's not that necessary for most kanji... you won't forget that 'one' is on the bottom, I'm sure of it.

Why don't you just flip it around?

'Nightbreak is the first thing that happens in a *day*.'

becomes

'Nightbreak is the day's first event.' You even end up with words right next to each other, and 'day first' should be an easy trigger now.

'Nightbreak' is a horrible keyword anyway because (a) it's not a word, (b) if it was a word, it should mean the opposite of daybreak, e.g., the start of night. I changed it to 'daybreak', personally (after I kept finding it incredibly difficult to remember kanji that contained a non-word in their stories), and if you need to then change the 'daybreak' kanji to something else then so be it.
(It didn't really bother me to have 'nightbreak' kanji is 'daybreak' element and 'daybreak' kanji is something else, but it might be easier not to do that... )

And honestly, I always thought of it as 'sun coming up over the horizon', if you need to put it in element names 'when day breaks, then the SUN is over the FLOOR of the earth's surface' ...

You do need to get clever later, but it's such a simple pictograph that it's not with stressing over it as long as you can produce the character and element from the keyword. Sometimes a pictograph is better seen as a pictograph.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:'Nightbreak' is a horrible keyword anyway because (a) it's not a word, (b) if it was a word, it should mean the opposite of daybreak, e.g., the start of night. I changed it to 'daybreak', personally (after I kept finding it incredibly difficult to remember kanji that contained a non-word in their stories), and if you need to then change the 'daybreak' kanji to something else then so be it.
(It didn't really bother me to have 'nightbreak' kanji is 'daybreak' element and 'daybreak' kanji is something else, but it might be easier not to do that... )

And honestly, I always thought of it as 'sun coming up over the horizon', if you need to put it in element names 'when day breaks, then the SUN is over the FLOOR of the earth's surface' ...

You do need to get clever later, but it's such a simple pictograph that it's not with stressing over it as long as you can produce the character and element from the keyword. Sometimes a pictograph is better seen as a pictograph.

Hmm..how did you remember the kanji name if you didn't have it there? I would have forgotten it.

Does anybody have any good stories to recommend that aren't this confusing for me? It's just..this is the only problem I've been having and haven't even started on studying kanji because of it. I really need to get started. : C

Betelgeuzah Wrote:To hell with stroke order. Sometimes it's useful (insect is on THE RIGHT?? madness) but it's not that necessary for most kanji... you won't forget that 'one' is on the bottom, I'm sure of it.

Oh okay. I heard someone say stroke order is important though since the stroke order helps with getting things close to making the character look good or something.

Stroke order is important as it helps to build muscle memory. "Sun one" is nightbreak, but "one sun one" is span. As I understand it, the Heisig method is an imaginative method, where you are supposed to replace the kanji by a picture that sums a narrative development you devised. But anyway, for low strokes kanji, and with a little bit of practice, you'll even memorize them without thinking about the story (I have to make a conscious effort to remember "nightbreak" is the sun above the horizon, and "span" is the sun (time) between two boundaries).

Don't worry, just get to it, you'll get the hang of it after 500 or so kanji.
Good luck.

wccrawford Wrote:Why don't you just flip it around?

'Nightbreak is the first thing that happens in a *day*.'

becomes

'Nightbreak is the day's first event.' You even end up with words right next to each other, and 'day first' should be an easy trigger now.

Oh, thanks :3