I've found that one of the sources of repeated mistakes for me are keywords that are ambiguous due to being synonyms or homonyms.

An example that got me today is 職 "post". When I reviewed this, instead of thinking of post as in "job/position" I thought of it as in "postage" which led me to recall the story for postage related kanji 届 "deliver", for which I have a story "Flag sprouts up from the postbox when postman delivers the mail". Had I not mistaken the homonym "post" I would've easily recalled "worst post ever, kazoo tester". So why not make the keyword something like "post (job/position)" to avoid ambiguity?

Another example is 党 "party". I always recall this correctly, but what annoys me is I always have to go through a two step process. First I search my mind and recall that Heisig meant "political party", and then the correct kanji comes to mind. I see only upside to naming the primitive "party (political)". It should aid correct recall, and teach the more accurate meaning of the kanji.

I'd like to get other's opinions on those.

Oh, and what do people suggest for methods to distinguish synonyms?

There are many, but I'd like to give one example of a method that worked for me. I was getting 処"dispose" and 捨 "discard" mixed up. My mistake was the stories I used initially both involved getting rid of garbage. One disposed of garbage; the other discarded the garbage. They keywords were very easily interchangeable in the stories.

What worked is I found this story shared by someone "The wicked witch with a *cottage* of candy has trapped Hansel and every day she discards him as her choice for dinner because his *finger* doesn't seem fat enough yet...".

The trick is that "dispose" doesn't sound right in this story, and that stops the keywords from being easily interchangeable. So now I keep this in mind when learning synonyms.

I agree with you. Hassles that you shouldn't have to go through.

Japanese keywords will solve these problems.

I think your first time through, you should avoid Japanese keywords, unless you have a very high vocabulary level already. A better idea would be just add a word or two in parenthesis after the keyword. I do this on a few of mine like "recreation (as in activity)" because I kept reading it as re-creation for some annoying reason. Also for a few others.

I will take this opportunity to also say don't worry to much about getting the correct English meaning of the keyword. Until yesterday, I thought of 瞳-pupil as a student. In fact it is the "black dot" in an eye. Here is the cool part of using an English keyword. Even though I had the "wrong" meaning and may have made a story for the wrong meaning, there is no trouble making the switch because the relation between the two exists in my head already. This has happened to me on a good number of occasions. By the end of the book, I was even exploiting that feature of my brain. If I couldn't get an image for one meaning, I would just use another with no negative repercussions.

I am sure some people will disagree with me but it seriously took away some of the stress my first time when I learned to let go of my resentment for some keyword choices. I almost quit when I got to "decameron" I was so angry. Thank god I didn't.

The simplest way to get rid of this problem is to clarify the keywords by changing them slightly. Party could become Political Party. Post, workpost.

It's also true that it's not important to use the same keyword as Heisig. You can change juvenile to student if you want. But if you do change the keyword, then it's important to record the change and remember exactly the new keyword. If you don't, then you risk getting mixed up between keywords, as some express very similar concepts. (Pupil and juvenile for example).

Another related problem is that Heisig never tells you which meaning is relevant for each keyword. For example, dispose (処) doesn't mean to discard. It should be taken in the sense of disposing of a task as in 処遇 or 処理. At least, that's what stems from a summary search. (example from edict: あなただったらその問題をどう処理するか -> How would you deal with the problem?) That's why I mostly looked up kanjis before learning them in order to learn the keyword by its proper meaning.

Using a keyword in the wrong way is especially dangerous if you're replacing keywords without looking them up. Then you can definitely end up with keywords that have absolutely no relation to the kanji. Pupil is a bad example, because it means both the pupil of the eye and a student, but what if you renamed this kanji "pupil of the eye" when it only means student.

Quote:I almost quit when I got to "decameron" I was so angry.

Keywords like decameron can be frustrating because you have to learn both the kanji and the keyword, but you can just replace it by "ten days" if you want.

I have been changing Heisig`s keywords slightly as suggested above (eg. party --> party [political]). But I am still having problems with keywords that are synonyms. For example, today I drew the kanji for "hug" when the keyword was "embrace". When I looked it up in edict, they meant basically the same thing, so I don`t know how I can change the keyword to make it more clear. Another kanji I missed today was "plug" vs. "plug up". Any suggestions for fixing this problem, or am I worrying too much about it?
Also, Wrightak mentioned using Japanese keywords. What do y`all think about having BOTH an English and Japanese keyword for these difficult synonym kanji?

[Katsuo]

laner36 Wrote:For example, today I drew the kanji for "hug" when the keyword was "embrace".

For keywords with similar meanings like "hug" and "embrace" I'd suggest taking something you readily associate with one of the words and linking it to the appropriate kanji.

E.g. "hug" makes me think of "bear hug". Just modify that to "bird hug" and you know it's 擁 (due to the "turkey").

laner36 Wrote:What do y`all think about having BOTH an English and Japanese keyword for these difficult synonym kanji?

I think sometimes learning the Japanese word is fine (learning all of them while doing RTK1 would slow you down too much).

For this example, 栓 "plug" is read "セン". So imagine noticing that the River Seine (pronounced "sen") in Paris has a giant plug consisting of a whole tree.
(To make the story more memorable, imagine yourself pulling out the plug/sen, the river draining away, and lots of irate French people surrounding you saying, "Eh, why did you pull the セン on the 'Seine'?")