liosama
Member
From: sydney
Registered: 2008-03-02
Posts: 896
Ok so i get to lesson 11. I read his introduction to the chapter, and got scared when i read
"The one thing you must distrust, if the system outlined in this book is to work for you, is your ability to remember kanji just as they are, without doing any work on them. Once you start making exceptions for characters you "know" or "have no trouble with" or "dont need to run through the steps with" you are headed for a frustration that will take you a great deal of trouble to dig yourself out of".
How many people follow his advice here?
woodwojr
Member
From: Boston
Registered: 2008-05-02
Posts: 530
I'd say taking it as it is it's pure bunk, but throw a "probably" in there and I'd agree. It's a bad idea to rely on remembering large numbers of characters "as they are", but some here and there can easily be done that way. He even recognizes that, if implicitly--look at the primitives, which are learned "just as they are".
~J
Last edited by woodwojr (2008 June 29, 2:32 am)
timcampbell
Member
From: 北京
Registered: 2007-11-04
Posts: 187
Actually, it's not nonsense at all, and I'd stick with his advice. As you move through the book, you will come across kanji where all the primitives fall together nicely, and making a story is easy. That's great, but don't take a shortcut and assume you don't need to focus on getting that story sunk deep into your brain like the others. You do. Don't scrimp on the basics. When you have more than 2,000 kanji in your head and you need to recall one you haven't seen in months, you'll want that story to be rock solid. I tried to cut corners with kanji that seemed simple, but they just come back to haunt you later. You may as well spend the time at the beginning to get foundation right. It's easier and faster that way in the long run. (BTW, I have 2,063 kanji in my final pile, so I'm well down the road, and know exactly what Heisig means, so follow his advice.)
Last edited by timcampbell (2008 June 29, 1:13 am)
furrykef
Member
From: Oklahoma City
Registered: 2008-06-24
Posts: 191
I have 1827 kanji and have been stuck there for months because I haven't been studying (I intend to finish the book very soon; that should be much easier now that I'm using this site), so also I'm pretty well acquainted with the Heisig method... I agree with timcampbell in that just because a story is simple doesn't mean you don't need to make any effort to memorize it. But I think Heisig's advice does not need to be followed if you really do know the character already. I studied a fair number of kanji before doing Heisig and I still don't see any problem with skimming over the more familiar kanji, at least when it's difficult to make a story for them. 角 is a case in point... I find it much easier to just remember that it means "angle" than to try to remember a story for it, but that may well be because I already knew that character.
In fact, my only real frustration with Heisig is how easy it is to confuse similar English keywords, or stories with a certain common element (although in the latter case the obvious answer is to change one of the stories). While I do sometimes simply forget a kanji rather than confusing it with another one, I don't find it to be a big problem at all.
- Kef
Last edited by furrykef (2008 June 29, 2:10 am)
furrykef
Member
From: Oklahoma City
Registered: 2008-06-24
Posts: 191
As I said, in my case, I've learned plenty of the "others to come", and the problems that I have do not appear to be related to this.
I should note that I didn't skimp on all the kanji that I already knew, especially if I wasn't completely sure I knew it that well, or if I would have trouble correlating it with the given keyword. But there are some characters I never found a point for learning a story for. I can't remember the story for 竜, and why should I? I'll never forget that kanji, and I remember its elements ('stand up/vase' and 'eel') just fine without it.
- Kef
Last edited by furrykef (2008 June 29, 2:56 am)
woodwojr
Member
From: Boston
Registered: 2008-05-02
Posts: 530
To illustrate the point, an example I just got to:
何. There's a story for 何. No, seriously. [EDIT: there is not in fact "a story" for it, it's after there stop being stories, but it's set up for one just like everything else. I misspoke.] For people doing things in the AJATT/RTK "recommended" order (learn the kanji first, then do other stuff related to the language), it's probably helpful. For everyone else, they've probably learned it, and they probably don't need to relearn it because it has a trio of features making it easy to remember:
1) It's simple. It gets simpler than this one, but not much.
2) It gets taught very early. I'm not sure I've seen a course plan that teaches kanji at all that doesn't cover this one in its first 25 kanji.
3) It gets used constantly.
I don't know about you, but I'm not going to bother even trying to come up with a story for this one. If it bites me, I'll make sure to come back and let people know, just don't hold your breath.
~J
Last edited by woodwojr (2008 June 29, 6:22 am)
liosama
Member
From: sydney
Registered: 2008-03-02
Posts: 896
oh hmm, well even with the kanji that i DO know and skip over, i still read his story for it, and grab any notion of keywords he ever uses for it, so if i do come across a kanji for which he uses that specific keyword for i end up using it.
So in a sense im also dis abiding by his rule which he says "dont use this method as a crutch, rather a different way to walk completely" I for one am using it as a crutch, BUT, for 99% of the kanji so im pretty much walking in a different way anyway.
Another question though, i know Heisig digs in "keyword to kanji, not the other way around" i live by this code even closer to Heisig himself does, but i just want to know one thing. [This is for the sole purpose of being able to draw a kanji and "hit two birds with one stone", as heisig puts it]
If i come across some word that is not a keyword of Heisigs but something similar, what do I do? I know that each kanji has a variety of meanings (infact i look them all up on JWPce and see that some are more or less the same while others have very different meanings) how will all this work out in the end? Im so worried that it won't. How do you guys cope? Why did heisig SPECIFICALLY pick that one meaning, rather than another. I've only done a semester of Japanese study at university so i don't really know how all the pieces fit together but im told that in the end they just do. An example would help though!
!@!@!@
rich_f
Member
From: north carolina
Registered: 2007-07-12
Posts: 1708
I don't know how much you know about kanji yet, so I'll explain a few things. (Very rough explanation here. Others could probably give better details, but this will do for now.)
Each kanji has an onyomi and a kunyomi. The onyomi is the way the character was originally pronounced in Chinese when it was adopted in Japan as a character to use. Over time, it has changed to be more Japanese than Chinese, but they do have some pronunciation similarities still.
Kunyomi are uniquely Japanese readings for the same character, which came when they needed a character for a concept, but didn't have anything else to get their hands on.
If you want to say you "know" a kanji, then you need to know both its on- and kunyomi. Not all kanji have both, but many do. Now, trying to learn them all at the same time as you're learning how to write them and read them is difficult. So Heisig breaks down the tasks for you.
The English keywords really are just tags or labels you put on a kanji until you can attach a Japanese reading/meaning to it. It does all work out eventually. It's just not apparently obvious. The English keywords just keep a spot open in your memory so that when you see the character, you can go, "oh, that's (English Keyword). I wonder how you say it in Japanese?" As time goes by, (English Keyword) starts to fade away, and the Japanese readings take over as you learn them.
woodwojr
Member
From: Boston
Registered: 2008-05-02
Posts: 530
liosama wrote:
If i come across some word that is not a keyword of Heisigs but something similar, what do I do? I know that each kanji has a variety of meanings (infact i look them all up on JWPce and see that some are more or less the same while others have very different meanings) how will all this work out in the end? Im so worried that it won't. How do you guys cope? Why did heisig SPECIFICALLY pick that one meaning, rather than another. I've only done a semester of Japanese study at university so i don't really know how all the pieces fit together but im told that in the end they just do. An example would help though!
My opinion: like the readings, most of the meaning is just "stuff you do afterwards". A lot of the keywords happen to be close enough to the meaning much of the time that you can guess at what a word means, but the idea, as I see it, is that you come out of RTK ready to learn words that contain that kanji--and by learning those words, you will learn the meaning of the kanji in that context, even if it's different from the keyword.
~J
Last edited by woodwojr (2008 June 29, 12:33 pm)
