zachandhobbes
Member
From: California
Registered: 2010-07-31
Posts: 592
I'm at 508 Kanji.
On my Anki I have a 90% retention rate of 'young' cards, so I'm remembering them pretty well.
However I find that when I'm glossing over Japanese text, I can identify kanji that I know how to write, but the keyword takes some effort to come to mind, or I can't make it come to mind at all.
Is this normal? I know Heisig says don't go kanji->keyword, but a lot of people here seem to reference being able to 'understand texts without knowing the actual pronunciations or words because they knew the basic gist'.
Can most of you gloss over a kanji and quickly know the keyword? Or are you like me?
Quick to go keyword -> Kanji. Slow to go the other way around.
chamois
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2009-10-12
Posts: 44
yeah, i always used to think that i must be doing it wrong because it was sort of hard to go kanji -> keyword. then i realised that it served no real purpose except to glean some quasi-meaning out of the kanji i was presented with while watching tv or skimming websites or whatever though it would be completely wrong as often as it was right.
now that my vocab is growing and i'm not repping my heisig deck anymore (i know, i know, but i just haven't got the time to do sentences AND vocab AND heisig so i had to let something go) the keywords are falling away, the kanji remain and the space left behind is getting filled by readings, meanings and words...
so yeah, don't stress on it one bit.
mikankun
Member
From: Massachusetts
Registered: 2008-11-22
Posts: 49
Website
Having finished RTK recently I only see the story for a few of them. What does come instantly is seeing the components (house, soil, water, person, etc) and remembering how to write it.
Last edited by mikankun (2010 September 02, 1:15 pm)
There are three modes I use when playing Japanese games:
Write down unknown things for lookup later.
Read the words I can, don't read the words I can't, try to understand.
Japanese Fail Mode: Just skip all the text and go straight to the gameplay.
In mode #1 or #2, if you can't read the word, I try to think of the keywords together might mean, since it's extremely common in Japanese to have the keywords related to the actual word and rare for them to be unrelated to the actual word.
Like take a random sample of words a beginner didn't know:
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=6353
There are 80 words there. Now let's identify ones that are NOT related to the key words.
挨拶 push open + be imminent = greeting?
頂く (heisig error, I think)
私達 me makes sense, but accomplish?
順調 obey + tune = favorable?
土産 soil + products = souvenir?
お守り guard = charm? This doesn't make sense to me but it might to others.
足りる leg = be sufficient?
慎重 humility + heavy = discretion?
8 words out of about 70. There are 80 words on the list, but you can't count words with 0 kanji. So that is absolute, undeniable proof that the keywords will help you get the meaning 9 times out of 10 (approximately). You have to use some other method to learn how to read it. I'm struggling with this myself. Understanding the meaning is usually not difficult, except that when I see a kanji I have only about a 50% chance to recall the keyword.
Mushi
Member
From: USA
Registered: 2010-07-06
Posts: 252
The RTK kanji I've learned seem to go through three stages for me, with the stage of any particular kanji depending on how often I've seen it after I learned it through RTK.
For example, a few weeks ago, I learned 信, which has the keyword of "trust". At first, when I saw it, I thought of the keyword. About a week later, I started to think of it less as the word, and more as the wordless idea of trusting something. A couple of weeks after that, it became simply "しん". I can go back to the keyword and story, but it takes more effort now than going from the kanji to しん.
Asriel
Member
From: 東京
Registered: 2008-02-26
Posts: 1343
jcdietz03 wrote:
There are three modes I use when playing Japanese games:
...I try to think of the keywords together might mean, since it's extremely common in Japanese to have the keywords related to the actual word and rare for them to be unrelated to the actual word....
I do pretty much the same thing as you when I'm reading things. Usually method #2. If it's games, I'll probably do #3...but hey, I'm weak willed an a prisoner to entertainment.
But regarding figuring out the "meaning" of words based on keywords. I definitely do it to a certain extent. If I'm browsing something and I don't care too much about it, that is. An example of this would be 保証 and 保障. EDICT gives them as the same "guarantee, security," but they're different. You could give a convoluted heisig-type story to help with the difference, but just by the keywords themselves you couldn't figure out the difference between them if they were unknown words.
Mushi
Member
From: USA
Registered: 2010-07-06
Posts: 252
zachandhobbes wrote:
Mushi, I know that you are a speaker of Japanese since your parents are Japanese, so it's a bit difference, but I too find that Japanese words that I know are much easier to think of the Kanji for.
That was badly worded. For example, 見る. 見 comes to mind instantly when I see the keyword "see" because I know "see" is みる and somehow I just know みる is 見る much quicker than having to break down the keyword and story or even just keyword -> kanji recollection.
I know what you mean, and I feel the same. 見 is very compelling as both kanji and word.
Some might wonder why I or anyone else would bother to use Heisig if you're ending up at the reading anyway. But I continue to be impressed with the benefits of RTK, and I don't believe I could get too many kanji to that third stage as readily if it weren't for Heisig. As it is, my mind is a hodgepodge, and there are only a select few kanji that I've seen often enough for them to be kanji > reading. Most of them are still English keywords, Japanese keywords, wordless ideas, or at worst, just stories with the principal meaning forgotten.
Mushi
Member
From: USA
Registered: 2010-07-06
Posts: 252
jcdietz03 wrote:
お守り guard = charm? This doesn't make sense to me but it might to others.
Oh, oh, this *so* makes sense! A thousand お守り must have passed through my hands in my lifetime. You get one when you want to get well, when you want to pass a test, or when you want to travel to Mexico without getting diarrhea. You hang one on your rearview mirror, you put one on your backpack. You go to a Shinto temple to pray, then you get one. Then, you go to a Buddhist temple and get another one. You give one to your mom. Your mom gives you back like three of them. You visit your grandparents and end up with five more, etc.
Why? Because we believe the kami of these charms will protect you and 守る you when we're not there.
zigmonty
Member
From: Melbourne
Registered: 2009-06-04
Posts: 671
zachandhobbes wrote:
Can most of you gloss over a kanji and quickly know the keyword? Or are you like me?
Quick to go keyword -> Kanji. Slow to go the other way around.
Bit hard to explain, but i'll try. When i see a kanji i know in a word i don't, a guess at the reading pops into my head (onyomi or kunyomi depending on which is most likely from the form of the word)... but that reading *means* what the kanji means. Ie, many kanji are read as こう but when i read one of those kanji, it's like each of the こう's are a different word that mean different things. So when i see, for example, 外交, がいこう pops into my head, not just as sounds but a meaning loosely translated into english as "external mingling" or something along those lines, but far more vague than that.
Yinake
Member
Registered: 2009-07-14
Posts: 11
I feel you. I have the same problem, and I'm currently at 500 kanji.
For example, the other day in the subway station, I got out at the station Chungmuro (I live in Korea), and it was written in hanja (Korean kanji) as 忠武路. I recognized the second kanji as one I'd learned, and written many times, but I couldn't remember the keyword.
BUT it was easy to look it up since I happened to have the RTK book with me, and once I remembered that it was 'warrior', it seems to have really deepened itself in my mind, and it comes to me quicker when I review it keyword -> kanji now. So I think that the problems with not remembering keywords will go away once you start learning vocab and associating the kanji with words and sounds.
Perhaps I'm totally off since I'm only one quarter through RTK, but it seems to me that what all our senpais say about not worrying about it too much will be true in the long-term.
