mezbup
Member
From: sausage lip
Registered: 2008-09-18
Posts: 1681
Website
I completed Heisig and it worked really well for me at the time, however now I feel that his naming conventions for things are perhaps not the greatest. Speaking about the "primitives" namely. It would be a wonderful addition to the site if you could choose to have a "Heisig" mode and a "True" mode in which the real names of the radical are used instead.
When talking about kanji to a Japanese person, they know the real names of the radicals (often but not always) but of course they're not going to know Heisig's made up ones. After talking to a guy I know who's done a tonne of research on kanji learning he said the Japanese people that are the best at remembering how to write kanji subconsciously use virtually the same system we do by associating an image with each of the radicals and thinking of them in an imaginative way and the Japanese people that we're the worst at learning kanji just tried to remember the shape as a whole.
Through kanken i've had to kinda backtrack and learn lots of radical names as it's a part of the test and I find that now I know the names of them I actually use them to refer to the components in remembering how to read and write them.
You could name the "primitives" or "radicals" after hamburger ingredients and the method would still work, so it'd be cool if there we're an option to swap out Heisig's made up "primitives" for a list (in the order that they are written in) of the radical names so that one can work with them that way.
Eventually I'm intending on trying for KanKen 1.5級 which i'll need work through Heisig book 3 for but I will definitely be using the real radical names instead so it'd be a real help! It also gives other people options which is always a good thing.
Jarvik7
Member
From: 名古屋
Registered: 2007-03-05
Posts: 3946
One problem is that a lot of primitives were totally made up by Heisig and don't actually "exist" (they are actually combinations of two+ independent things that occur together frequently). Another problem is that radicals only cover the primary meaning element of the kanji, elements that contribute secondary meaning or sound values aren't "radicals". In other words, some characters will not have any way to describe a component without resorting to a Heisig primitive.
I agree that it's a good idea to distance oneself from the fiction of RTK once you are comfortable with kanji, but I don't think it can work with something as simple as a name replacement.
Last edited by Jarvik7 (2010 February 09, 4:06 am)
Yes, Japanese radicals do exist. You can find more about the radicals in this thread: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=5190
Mezbup's suggestion, as I understood it, was to use them instead of Heisig's primitives when doing RTK. Not sure what's the link with this site though.
He said:
Mezbup wrote:
It would be a wonderful addition to the site if you could choose to have a "Heisig" mode and a "True" mode in which the real names of the radical are used instead.
Since radicals aren't even used on the website I'm not sure what he meant by his idea of a "True" mode. Still, replacing the Heisig primitives by the true Japanese radicals seems like a good idea to me.
mezbup
Member
From: sausage lip
Registered: 2008-09-18
Posts: 1681
Website
Transparent_Aluminium wrote:
Since radicals aren't even used on the website I'm not sure what he meant by his idea of a "True" mode. Still, replacing the Heisig primitives by the true Japanese radicals seems like a good idea to me.
That in and of itself is the point. By "true" I mean "true meaning" rather than stuff that's just made up. It's just nice to have choices as some people are really turned off by Heisig's stuff straying too far from the true meaning. I didn't mind at all when I first used it and I've forgotten now almost all his naming conventions but anytime I know the real radical name In Japanese, that's how I always refer to it and think of it and when coming across a new kanji now I break it down in my mind with the radicals and again use a bit of visual memory to 覚え込む
Edit: I don't think it's "academic" in the least. It's not different to learning Heisigs names. You have to know a way to refer to something in order to work with it and in Japan the actual radical names are how they refer to parts of the kanji. So its useful when you need to talk to a Japanese person about kanji, whether you're explaining how to write one or asking for an explanation on how one is written. Heisig won't help you there at all.
Last edited by mezbup (2010 February 10, 6:36 pm)
Katsuo
M.O.D.
From: Tokyo
Registered: 2007-02-06
Posts: 887
Website
I posted a table of radical vs. RTK primitive names.
However, I would not recommend using the radical names when working through RTK1 as it would make an already difficult task much harder. Using unfamiliar terms to remember unfamiliar items is not effective.
Learning two thousand kanji is a major task; learning the radical names when you already know the primitive names is not. Techniques to ease the kanji learning, such as those in RTK, are important.
Almost all of the primitive names have been carefully chosen to ease memorization. The main associations are as follows:
1. Related to the Japanese meaning. E.g. 糸 is "thread"; 心 is "heart"; etc.
2. Related to previously-named primitive(s). E.g. fiesta => parade => march; 大 is named "large dog/ St. Bernard", derived from 犬 (dog) and used because "large" by itself can be too abstract.
3. Related to the shape. E.g. 乙 "fishhook"; also "sparkler", "spade", etc.
Heisig seems to have started with the etymological meanings and only changed them when needed to ease memorization. In fact many members here have gone a stage further and changed/personified some primitives in order to make more vivid memories (e.g. 糸 => thread => Spiderman). These, again, should be naturally linked to aid memory; "Batman" would not be a good choice for 糸.
ファブリス
Administrator
From: Belgium
Registered: 2006-06-14
Posts: 4021
Website
Back to the site suggestion, the Study area does not create references to primitives/radicals, instead the users are free to name primitives any way they want with the * syntax *.
Ideally from the start I would have had links to primitive entries, and perhaps non-links for custom primitives that can't be matched to the exact ones Heisig named. However on Heisig & publishers request, the website does not list primitives separately.
So the suggestion would only work with actual linking from stories to named primitives, using non RTK primitives to avoid copyright restrictions. This is all due to copyright stupidity really as linking to primitive entries in the Study area could have been done very early on, it wasn't like something difficult to do, just something that was outside of my agreement with Heisig.
