brendanmacdonald wrote:

So my question is - do we even need to buy Heisig's books when this site is good?

I think so...one, it's supporting the author, who seems like a pretty cool guy, two, it's nice to have a portable version of 2,000-odd kanji and stroke order in one book. (Third superficial reason: it looks really cool carrying it around in public.)

Sometimes I preferred Heisig's stories to the ones on the site, and it's explicitly stated several times NOT to put Heisig's stories in the Review section. I have both a digital copy of the 4th edition and a print copy of the 5th edition, and I'm glad for it.

wccrawford wrote:

But once I get through them, I'm going to buy RTK and start using this site (or Anki, not really sure which yet) extensively.

I recommend this site over Anki. The review area (where you do your flash card repetitions) is integrated with the study area (where you study new cards or review ones you missed), so the stories you use to remember the kanji are always just a click away, and there are always new stories right there if the one you're using now just isn't doing the trick.

I do use Anki for everything else, though. It's great.

- Kef

Last edited by furrykef (2008 July 02, 6:12 pm)

samesong wrote:

Does anyone use anki to review kanji the other way around - looking at a kanji and identifying its keyword - ? I thought this process would come naturally to me, but I often find myself looking at a kanji and being able to recall the story, but not the associated keyword.

I would like to point out that:
a)This is the wrong topic to be posting it under
b)There are at least two threads that deal specifically with this.
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=1701

Heisig's book(s) offer certain benefits: Stroke order, extra information, motivation, study tips, unique stories, etc. that you're not going to get anywhere else. In addition, you can loan the book to a friend to let them see how it works. I found I enjoyed his brief essays that scatter the book. Very entertaining.

Now, at a certain point it loses its usefulness, but it's not exactly a reference book. It's so good that by the time you're done, you don't need it. However, you need the book to get to that point.

I'd love to buy the book, but If buy I'd be paying much more for the shipping expenses than for the book itself. Or anyone know a nice store to import books from the US?

woodwojr wrote:

it's a printed, professionally published and bound book. That gives it an appearance of authority that may in some cases make the nonconventional techniques it proposes easier to swallow. This is the intrinsic benefit.

Well, given that the book is full of mistakes including incorrect stroke order, keywords with incorrect meaning, wrong primitive references, etc., for me it doesn't quite count as professional.

Although it comes pretty close. And please don't get me wrong, it's a great resource. I see it's main value in (a) explaining the approach and giving many tips, (b) identifying all the primitives, (c) giving many helpful suggestions for choices for primitives and keywords.

In other words, he's giving you the building blocks. You can then make a building tailored to suit your needs.

Raichu wrote:

Well, given that the book is full of mistakes including incorrect stroke order, keywords with incorrect meaning, wrong primitive references, etc., for me it doesn't quite count as professional.

I'm speaking from the perspective of being able to look at it on the shelf next to all the other textbooks (as opposed to it being "some guy's website"); by the time you're encountering everything you've mentioned, you've probably already bought the book

~J

I think this site is great, and so good in fact, that you could do without the book.  But, I'm also one of these guys that believes in rewarding the creative forces who worked so hard to come up with the philosophy/strategy and worked out the order and stuff.  Nobody is perfect, but that was really, really a lot of work.  The site, good as it is, would have been impossible to implement without the book to reference.  So, I buy the book, and put it on the shelf and come to this website.  I've got all 3 volumes.

I use a pdf version of the book I downloaded naughtily, because the book is great for studying in the library but is very crap when you have to balance it and your computer together. It's the same version as the print book I have so perhaps I can be forgiven...

The print book is very solid and sturdy but making it stay open on one page is a nightmare, you have to literally put a brick on it to keep it there. I often use a whiteboard (edit: an a4 size one!) to draw the kanjis out to reinforce the stories and for that its better to use the real book to copy them from.

Last edited by Wizard (2008 July 04, 12:23 pm)

Yes, this site is a great supplement to RtK, but is still a supplement. I mean, with a little more work this site could supplant the book entirely, but then again that would just be messed up--one person essentially stealing another man's methods. Any book or method could be hijacked in this way.

The book gets me going on each set of kanji, and when the stories are good they're great. He's done the work of breaking down the 2000+ kanji into some logical groupings (the bulk of the work he's done, really) and so the chapters make sense. From there, if a Heisig story isn't particularly mentally shocking, I'll use one from here or my own. But each chapter starts in the book and I can't imagine it any other way without this site becoming official.

woodwojr wrote:

You do realize that this method dates back, at minimum, to the ancient Greek orators? Even setting that aside, "taking and improving" != "stealing", even if the first person does happen to be making money off of the idea. To argue otherwise is to argue against the main body of human advancement.

The Ancient Greeks were studying kanji? (kidding, kidding.)

Heisig's method is public domain, of course, but the particular order of kanji, their keywords, and the primitive keywords are not. (Although the site itself does not actually have the primitive keywords anywhere, they still appear all over the site in user stories.) So we would have to basically reinvent Heisig, not just improve upon it, for it to be right.

Which actually isn't a bad idea, I think. RTK1, as good as it is, definitely could stand some improvement. But it would be a LOT of work just to get something that is only somewhat better than what's already out there.

- Kef

Last edited by furrykef (2008 July 06, 9:37 pm)

woodwojr wrote:

Heisig's method isn't even public domain, it's completely separate from the idea of copyright. Likewise the order--it's just an order, not a separate expression of an idea. The keywords for actual kanji are right out of any kanji dictionary, and Heisig would be in hot water for copyright before this site would (but neither will be). The one place where trouble might occur, though I'm inclined to believe it wouldn't based on the brevity and lack of artistic merit involved, is in those primitive-keyword mappings that come from primitives which aren't kanji or radicals in and of themselves, or whose meanings diverge substantially from the actual meaning (for instance, "puppet" for 者).
~J

Sorry, woodwojr, but at least some of what you just said is likely wrong under U.S. law.  Your first statement is right - you can't copyright a method itself.  And, of course, you can't copyright the kanji themselves.

But you're probably wrong after that.  Copyright applies to any work showing even a little bit of creativity.  The Supreme Court has said that an alphabetical arrangement of telephone listings isn't creative enough for copyright, but an alternative arrangement could be copyrighted.  I think that would apply pretty strongly here.  Heisig created his own order for the purpose of making the kanji easier to learn under his method.  That may not be as creative as Star Wars (or Pride and Prejudice, or whatever), but it's certainly some level of creativity.  I also think his choice to select specific keywords to match the kanji (out of the various possible meanings for a specific character) would be considered creative.  And of course the new primitives would be creative. 

I don't know what that adds up to in terms of copyright, but I'm pretty sure it's more than nothing.  Happily, it seems like we've all bought copies of the book, so this is just an academic discussion. (And I apologize for the long post.) 

Disclaimer:  I am a lawyer, but not a copyright lawyer.  And this is certainly not legal advice.