Hi Ningen. I agree that comments should be better left out of the Study area, though I don't have an ideal solution for this.

But don't let that bother you too much, you will find that this becomes less of an issue as you progress. Most people are still learning and don't yet understand all the ins and outs of Heisig's choices because it's too early in the book. By the time you get to frame 500 or so, the shared stories get better.

One of my earliest plans for the Study area was to disable story sharing completely for the first two Chapters as this would have made it impossible to post duplicates of Heisig's stories. In some ways it may have been better, but Im' sure there are also a few gems shared for the first 500 stories.

Type 'x[whatever]' (xa= ぁ・ァ、xtsu= っ・ッ), or just 'fa', etc. (ファ、フィ、フォ) to get small kana.

Jarvik7 wrote:

Criticism leads to improvement. Nothing is perfect and to pretend that something is is fanboyism.

Only if the person doing the criticizing actually has something constructive to say.

Questions of whether or not a keyword is correct are best left to the forum, where they are often discussed.  At the most I think a study area comment should be confined to "Be careful not to confuse your image for x with your image for y coming up."

Maybe a middle ground would be a forum topic for each kanji.  Then a link to that topic could be placed on the study page along with the post count.  If someone studying gets to a kanji with a reasonably sized post count it will be obvious that there may be some cause for concern and that person can then decide if they wish to deal with the added overhead of reading the topic.  If not they can just accept the keyword/stroke count/whatever and move on.

I actually appreciated having some of that criticism in the study section. It prevented me from going too far off the rails in directions that we're going to hurt me later on.

dilandau23 wrote:

Jarvik7 wrote:

Criticism leads to improvement. Nothing is perfect and to pretend that something is is fanboyism.

Only if the person doing the criticizing actually has something constructive to say.

And if the person being criticized can hear you.  I seriously doubt Heisig checks the kanji on this site to see what criticisms people are making about his method.

I think Ningen took issue with comments from users criticizing Heisig's choices. He also gave a clear example with "Ri".

I can see how it'd be annoying to see comments questioning the validity of the very method you're putting your trust into, because we know that Heisig's method requires a bit of faith, the results don't show up straight away.

Still, don't worry about it. "Ri" is just one of those kanji like "fishhook", where Heisig had to make a choice and everyone has a different opinion of what could have been the better keyword choice. I think most people are happy the majority of keywords in RtK1. There is about 50 ? (just a rough estimation) kanji that creates some controversy. For example "village" and "town".

Don't let doubt slow you down. If doubts creeps in; then stick to the book. Otherwise read all the comments and make up your mind and then don't look back. Because no matter what making up your own stories is always a creative effort.