hehe, you mentioned a few books,

"Let's Learn Kanji
- The Complete Guide to Everyday Kanji
- 例解学習漢字辞典
- The History of the Japanese Written Language"

And "The role of phonetic coding..." to prove your assertions.... Which one exactly are you talking about?

Edit: found the book Christine was talking about in regards to the studies , its a free trial on google books http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en& … lt#PPA1,M1

Last edited by lazar (2008 June 20, 11:42 pm)

nice! I'm working on genki at school and now I'm on II. As for what you said about practicing on a notebook and memorization through motor memory (hehe, I also play the piano so I know exactly what you mean... I don't remember at all what the music notes look like but my fingers sure know how to play them ) - I couldn't agree any more with you. I write out each kanji I learn from Heisig's method multiple times and then move on; however, I use scrap pieces of paper instead Your argument about audio memory is hands down correct as well.

I'll look more into extensive reading soon enough. I just have one question, are you able to reproduce these kanji? The reason I'm so interested is because I think there's a perfect mix in between your method and Heisig's (in regards to mastering the kanji)

lazar wrote:

nice! I'm working on genki at school and now I'm on II. As for what you said about practicing on a notebook and memorization through motor memory (hehe, I also play the piano so I know exactly what you mean... I don't remember at all what the music notes look like but my fingers sure know how to play them ) - I couldn't agree any more with you. I write out each kanji I learn from Heisig's method multiple times and then move on; however, I use scrap pieces of paper instead Your argument about audio memory is hands down correct as well.

I'll look more into extensive reading soon enough. I just have one question, are you able to reproduce these kanji? The reason I'm so interested is because I think there's a perfect mix in between your method and Heisig's (in regards to mastering the kanji)

I can probably reproduce only a few hundred from memory. That's why I said I only "know" a few hundred. As to how many I can *recognise*, I am no longer sure what the exact count is (since I don't do SRS). My teacher says it must be over a thousand, but I am not so sure (personally I don't think I am as good as she thinks). I do know what I was very pleasantly surprised at just much I could read when I was in Japan - especially billboards, ads etc.

I think you are right in that Heisig is a good technique for memorising how to *write* the kanji. But if I were to use Heisig, I would associate them to Japanese keywords, not English, and I will use stories in Japanese. Problem is, I find the process so boring, and I just can't stick with it.

I'm not concerned about not being able to write Kanji, as far as I'm concerned with the advent of the computer (and IMEs), the writing is obsolete. It's certainly a declining skill amongst young Japanese. Have you seen some of them? They can barely write without a word processor!

haha yes, the IME really makes it pointless for most. But when I get into second year Japanese this September, there will certainly be NO IME's to help me on the tests That's mainly why I use Heisig's method, too eliminate the need to practice kanji writings and close the gap the kanji students had on me

I tried learning kanji through Japanese drill-books for years ALONG with actually learning Japanese from books whatever, but since I picked up Heisig's method at the beginning of the year, it has been far more beneficial. I can actually remember how to draw the kanji! Japanese kanji books just list kanji which some readings and examples with no explanation of what makes up the kanji so it's hard to remember them, so whilst my Japanese flourished, the only downside was trying to write kanji. Seeing it and recognizing it was no problem. My kanji ability was getting left behind.

Since I've been living in Japan already for four years and know alot of Japanese already and suddenly it's like while watching TV and looking at the subtitles:

Ah!, so 帽子(hat) is CAP + CHILD
Ah! so お風呂(bath) is WIND + SPINE
Ah! so 完成(complete) is PERFECT + TRANSFORM.

I already knew the kanji for お風呂 and 完成 (anyone living in Japan for at least a couple of months will eventually learn such common kanji like these just by seeing them everywhere), but I didn't know how to write them.

BAM, these are instantly remembered and I don't have to bother trying to write them. Very gratifying experience! Certainly beats old-school textbook learning.

I personally wouldn't recommend traditional kanji learning. Although I'm not too thrilled with having to forgo Japanese study for a year or more just to get through RTK1 either..

Last edited by frychiko (2008 June 21, 1:51 am)

Without reading everything stated above due to currently in the process of reviewing on this website and now slapping myself for allowing myself to be distracted by the forums of that same website I would still like to state that I do appreciate reading about your specific way of learning Japanese, Christine. (Now that, was a long sentence .) In fact, I would highly appreciate it if you would continue to give us information about it on a more regular basis. *May I suggest a blog to prevent a discussion everytime you post something? *

Christine_Tham wrote:

Depends on what you mean by "old-school textbook". If you mean those horrible Kanji books that force you to write character after character with no context, I agree.
But have a look at Japanese grade school textbooks (by this I mean books intended for Japanese schoolchildren rather than adult learners). Many of them present really fun ways of learning Kanji. I really enjoy reading them. I have a "Snoopy" collection that contains some beautiful artwork from the Peanuts comic strip.

I did mean children's kanji books. In particular books focusing on kanji and not with stories or extra bits. They are certainly pretty and fun to look at which is what appeals to me, but the countless ones I went through just listed the kanji, on-yomi, kun-yomi and some examples.

Christine_Tham wrote:

But when I look at the examples you provide, I instantly recognise them as ぼうし（帽子）、おふろ（お風呂） etc. I don't even think of the English equivalents. It's like the English part of my brain is turned off whenever I see words written in Japanese. And WIND + SPINE is just weird, it's おふろ! It's also weird to think of it as "bath", because it's not quite the same as an English bath (suds in a bathtub, vs the Japanese experience).

Initially when trying to write or recall the new kanji, I will recall the English meanings to help visualize the separate kanji in my mind (such as WIND + SPINE), but eventually that clutch disappears. I don't think of English equivalents when seeing kanji in general though.

As for bath => お風呂 I don't care what exactly it translates to in English, I just know when to use it and how to write it and recognise it. (obviously it doesn't translate directly to English bath) I'm not really interested in the differences between English and Japanese, but I gotta use some word, and bath comes up first.   

Christine_Tham wrote:

And like you, I find it gratifying to know the 子from 帽子 is the same as 子供, and the 風 from お風呂 also means かぜ, but honestly I find it much better to do all this in Japanese. It's the only way to maintain a real time conversation in Japanese, by "thinking" in Japanese rather than translating to and from English.

It certainly is gratifying! It would be nice to have Japanese meanings instead of English for each kanji, but in the end it doesn't really matter once I've learnt the kanji. Also, what's kanji got to do with conversation ability?. The ony time I need to think anything in English and when trying to learn the kanji. 

Christine_Tham wrote:

Certainly, when you are in a train, you need to understand station names in a flash rather than the constituent meanings. Isn't it better to instantly recognise 秋葉原 as "Akihabara" rather than "Autumn leaf meadow" (or whatever the Heisig keywords are - I'm guessing here)? And isn't it much better to instantly recognise 京都 as "Kyoto" rather than "Metropolitan Capital" (again, I don't know the Heisig keywords, so I am just guessing).

I recognise all these without thinking anything, it's instantaneous. But have been unable to write them prior to RTK1. Eventually the English meanings clutch disappears once you start learning the sounds for particular kanji.

Christine_Tham wrote:

I guess knowing the individual semantic associations with the characters can be kind of poetic, but it's probably the last thing on my mind if I am rushing to get on/off the train! And Kyoto has stopped being the "metropolitan capital" for a long time now! And if you can find autumn leaves in a meadow in Akihabara, it must be a picture displayed on a computer screen!

Heh, no I don't do this. As I said I don't think anything in English apart from when learning to write the kanji.

Last edited by frychiko (2008 June 21, 4:02 am)

Christine_Tham wrote:

Dragg wrote:

I'm not going to buy a book just because someone says "buy it".  I'm a relatively poor college student so, unfortunately, I need to be convinced first.  As far as the Japanese phonetic book that you described, about how many kanji really have phonetic markers  that enable them to be learned  this way?  If you say something like 50, its not worth my time or money.  If its on the order of 400, the it sounds worth a look...

Are you actually reading my posts? Did I not specifically say "Why buy them - borrow them."

As for your question, out of the 1945 characters in the Jouyou set, exactly 1310 of them have phonetic markers. You could have found out this information if you read the book. It is stated on the back cover.

I was reading them, but by the time I had finished writing and posting a new one of my own, you already had another one up there so I was a bit backlogged!    As far as getting books from a local library, that looks to be pretty much impossible in the case of "Complete Guide to Everyday Kanji."  Its not available at the Sacramento Public Library or my college.  It doesn't look to be very popular;  in fact, a quick web search reveals that very few people have ever reviewed it:  mainly you if you are Christina F. and 1 customer on Amazon.com.

But of course.... it could be an phenomenal resource, and I guess I should ultimately be willing to plunk down 16 or so bucks to find out, despite my oppressive poverty.   A system based around phonetics is certainly an intriguing idea.

On an unrelated note, if you only have a few hours a week to study Japanese, how are you finding time to read all those dry academic research papers and etymology books? 
I would much rather actually learn Japanese during my time than hear about all the quaint origins or decode the jargonesque babbling of scholars.    I would love to hear more about your methods, but I don't think its very realistic to tell us to read 3 or 4 books when you seem to be able to adequately summarize the main points for us.

Last edited by Dragg (2008 June 21, 4:50 am)

Christine_Tham, since you describe yourself as "obsessive" in your recent "Tonari no Totoro" topic, I second someone here's suggestion to you - to expend that extra energy in writing a blog about your recommended method, and books.

It's incredibly easy to open a blog on services like blogger, and you're welcome to post a link to your blog here.

I'm all for open discussion but I don't see any new arguments from you since the last time you were here. You continue to blatantly ignore RtK2 among other things, and I can already predict this is going to turn in another useless quote war.

Christine_Tham wrote:

Isn't it better to instantly recognise 秋葉原 as "Akihabara" rather than "Autumn leaf meadow" (or whatever the Heisig keywords are - I'm guessing here)?

I don't see "autumn leaf meadow" there I directly hear Aki-***-bara in my mind, only that I havent memorized any words with the second kanji so I would have guessed that reading from context being in Japan but not know it otherwise.

Again you show that you are completely oblivious to how RtK1 works, and completely oblivious to the treatment of phonetics in RtK2.

I've been wanting to respond back to this thread for a while but haven't really had the time. 

Christine_Tham had some interesting points about whether or not it makes sense to delay learning the kanji pronunciations as Heisig suggests or to learn them as soon as possible as in her system of choice.  Lately I've been thinking about the "divide and conquer" style of RTK and why Heisig might have advocated this approach.

When I first started learning kanji on my own, I was trying to learn the strokes, English meanings, and pronunciations all at the same time.  This was a lot of material to input at one time and it overwhelmed me a lot, but I think my difficulties might have had more to do with a lack of a systemized approach than anything else.  Although I understand the concept of "divide-and-conquer" maybe it is not so important so long as you take an integrated approach to learning so as not to be overwhelmed.

Anyway, I was wondering if it might make sense to try to somehow integrate "pure group" on-yomi into stories whenever possible.  I understand that many people here think the keywords and stories are meant to fade with time (with me they tend not to), but I still think it might be helpful to at least have some exposure to the on-yomi early on.  The approach would have to be somewhat similar to the link-words approach and the pronunciation would often be close but not always spot-on. 

For example, for 新　you could make up a story about the ax being polished to have a like-new glistening "SHEEN" since the on-yomi is SHIN.  Or, 車 could be seen as rickSHAW instead of chariot.  Or, 長 could be seen as "the person with longest hair is the  head honCHO."   I think the point of seeing this pronunciation might be secondary at first to the actual meaning of the kanji, but it might help later on during further reviews when you could choose to divert more of your attention to it.  I'm not sure if this would help the average person much or not, and I'm just tinkering with the idea in my head for now.  Does anybody else have an opinion on this subject?

Last edited by Dragg (2008 July 03, 12:50 am)

Oh man, I really have no desire to listen to tham's lunatic rantings again. Whatever. Dragg, I've tried what you've suggested to some degree and it turned out very long winded and difficult. The the only way something like that seemed possible would be to learn kanji by onyomi (learn all the kanji with the reading of コウ at once, example).

My experience with this has been in the form of several methods. Firstly I would try and integrate the kunyomi, onyomi, meaning, and shape in one mnemonic image. It basically became incredibly hard to do, and very difficult to remember correctly the readings. Second I tried it with just the onyomi, with still bad results. It was like, ten kanji took forty five minutes that I'd forget pretty quickly. The only thing I could get to work was making onyomi essential to remembering the imagery and disregarding signal primitives. I was able to get some pretty good stuff based on learning kanji shapes in onyomi groups (signal primitives became something you would learn unconsciously) that was actually pretty effective. Nothing I came up with would work at all for what Dragg is suggesting, though. But there is that plugin that guy is working on for anki I think?
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=1674
Check it out.

I really don't want to discourage you, but all I can say is that based on my experiences it wouldn't work out so well. Since it makes mnemonics very difficult, and phonetic markers are unreliable/doesn't cover that much/insert arguments against RTK2.

ファブリス wrote:

In my experience associating a location with a kanji story worked very well. To this day the few groups I made in RtK1 as experiments are always there, everytime I recall one of those kanji I remember where it was. The mnemonics themselves do not need additional cues, and only one reading is the extra information for each character.

The location which is the mnemonic cue to the chosen reading, for all kanji in the same group, does not take the same effort as adding a component into a kanji story. Unfortunately it's the kind of things that need to be experimented with. In "imaginative" memory a location is something extremely easy to work with.

There's 2 blockers :

1. Most of us looking at optimized versions of RtK have finished it, so it makes it difficult to evaluate and test a new method.

2. It's difficult to evaluate how much help it would be. My feeling is that these basic readings could work like the basic vocabulary necessary to start learning from context.

Wouldn't work out for people already halfway through and finished, which sucks. But it works out great for me. I learn them with onyomi readings only. No kunyomi.

Last edited by alyks (2008 July 03, 11:59 am)