alantin wrote:

I didn't have a clue, what the little train was either.. Or that stocks might be called "blue chip"!


How come he didn't realize that not everyone is a north american!

Okay.. That was a little provo.. Sorry..

I limited my statement to NA since that is where I have cultural experience. Maybe the story is well known in most/all English countries, I'm not going to make guesses.

meolox wrote:

Am I the only one who is annoyed by the christian imagery used in some of Heissig's stories?

meolox wrote:

I know it's few and far between but couldn't Heissig have been a bit more considerate in realising not everyone is a christian.

You yourself acknowledge that the inclusions are few and far between, so why should these few times annoy you. Do you want less than few, (i.e. none)?

I'm sure he realises not everyone is Christian. However, not including any stories with reference to Christian imagery, which it seems your advocating, would not be considerate at all.

For "enlightenment", he talked about an Indian sect that tries to gain an enlightened state of mind by covering the 'five mouths' of their face with their fingers and thumbs. He even invites the reader to adopt the position to aid memory. Honestly, did you find this story annoying? I found it useful.

Your question should really be, do you find it annoying when you don't recognise the cultural or religious references in Heisig's stories? Otherwise your unnecessarily singling out Christian imagery as particularly annoying, which comes across as intolerant.

For me the answer is no, unless I cannot find out what the references mean and even then I'd probably only get annoyed if there was no better story on this site.

You should use the stories with unfamiliar cultural or religious elements as a way of expanding your knowledge of the world and its people, and learning.

On a personal note, his story for "reformation" was nowhere near what I would attach to the word naturally, but because of how the story relates to me I remembered it easily. He talks about the reformation of Ireland by St. Patrick, who drove out the snakes. My first name is Patrick as I was born on St. Patrick's day (feel free to send birthday presents) so I am very familiar with the story and I felt happy that Heisig knew about it and included it in his book.

In my country we have people that like to think about themselves as objective thinkers but for some reason all objective thinking gets thrown out of a window the second something that, somehow relates to christianity or the Bible, pops up. Be it christian christmas songs or a priest saying that good moral instruction is found in the Bible. (I really saw a guy getting mad at a lutheran priest in a television show for that!) Muslims are okay, thats just who they are. Hindus, nah, don't know anything about them. Buddhism, sound kinda cool.. But christians don't have the right to be christians and should use all their energy to conceal it..

Now get that..

Last edited by alantin (2007 September 18, 1:03 pm)

Well.. I have run into the same problem a bunch of times myself and I beat only few americans could read the book and get everything without a pat of an eye..

meolox wrote:

Am I the only one who is annoyed by the christian imagery used in some of Heissig's stories?

I know it's few and far between but couldn't Heissig have been a bit more considerate in realising not everyone is a christian.

Yet this does give a certain type of impression. Especially after running into few of those people I just described.

I might just be being over sensitive thought. He did say he hoped he wasn't offending anyone..

Last edited by alantin (2007 September 18, 1:44 pm)

naniwa wrote:

For all those having trouble with the little train:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little … That_Could

.. and there you go. A pretty colourful picture to fit the story. Google/Wikipedia FTW!

PS: funny, I realised that I didn't look up that particular kanji when I first studied it, and in Heisig's story I was in fact imagining Thomas the Tank Engine that I had seen somewhere before.

PPS: yawfosu88 I don't think meolox meant to annoy anybody or single out one religion in particular, he just put forth what was most apparent to him. No need to get worked up about it.

yawfosu88 wrote:

I think this could be a really informative and interesting thread if it isn't directed particularly towards any religion or culture, but all or any that might produce obscure Heisig stories.

Anyway I agree with you there, so I renamed the thread so it's more representative of how the discussion evolved so far.

this is an interesting thread, and i think it could be well put to use if people can ask questions to the general forum populace about particularly obscure stories and get some background information on them (as has already happened with the judas tree, little engine that could, and st. patrick).

however, i really don't understand the point of going on and complaining about heisig's own stories in the book and whining about the need for some revised version of the text that would be religiously neutral or only use internationally recognized cultural references.  should that revised edition be printed in esperanto perhaps?

but don't misunderstand this statement as me being a cultural elitist.  seriously, if you read the prefaces to the book, you will see that these are heisig's own stories.  the ones he used to lock the kanji in his own mind way back in the 70s.  heisig was a student of religion and culture, so he had a ton of material in his head to help build his associative bridges to the different kanji.  if you were setting out to create images for 2000 kanji, wouldn't you use any reference at your disposal?  christian, satanic, obscure, profane?  whatever could wrap that kanji into a very distinct and relevant story?

and if you then put all this into a book for others, why would you want to change the stories from the ones that worked for you?  how much more useful would it be to your readers to invent new stories that were untested in real life usage?

i am pretty anti-christian myself.  but because i studied western literature and have at my mental fingertips a whole host of christian allusions, i found all his christian references to be quite helpful as they are often distinct, relevant, and rooted deeply in a cultural consciousness that many westerners have access to.  further, i found myself relying on christian imagery quite often in the second part of the book for all the same reasons (see some of the stories for OVERDO with samson killing thousands of philistines on the road with the jawbone of a donkey).

anyways, heisig didn't include these stories to offend or confuse anyone.  he included them because those are the stories he actually used to learn the kanji himself.  if that is what really worked for him, why would he go back and change them?  should he come to this site and pick up some stories about some superheros that not everyone knows about and certainly won't know about 30 years from now?  or maybe some of the gory, disgusting stories about aborted fetuses?

Last edited by decamer0n (2007 September 18, 7:37 pm)

decamer0n wrote:

should that revised edition be printed in esperanto perhaps?

Good God! (By saying "God", I'm speaking metaphorically, not in support of the actual concept, by the way.) What have you done? You bring doom down upon all of us.

On-topic, the main thing is that these references are obscure for you. If you actually know what the story is alluding to, then they tend to work pretty well. I, for one, never heard of Black Widow prior to RTK and I still have no idea who she is, but she works really for kanji that use thread as a primitive.

Megaqwerty wrote:

the main thing is that these references are obscure for you. If you actually know what the story is alluding to, then they tend to work pretty well. I, for one, never heard of Black Widow prior to RTK and I still have no idea who she is, but she works really for kanji that use thread as a primitive.

yes, that is exactly my point.  basically, anyone who complains about one cultural reference being obscure is probably going to find themselves along the way using a cultural reference that is equally obscure to someone else.  and so, it quickly becomes a circular whinge-fest.

which is why i think this thread could be more useful if we use it to generate background info on what people find to be obscure references rather than to whinge and cross cultural swords about the references themselves.  it seems meolox, who gave us the original topic, has just started the ball rolling in that direction with that nice summary post of wikipedia articles.

one caution i would like to give is that for copyright reasons we should be careful not to end up posting heisig's stories here in this thread.  it would be sufficient and safest just to point to the references (exactly in the way meolox just did in his summary post).  we don't want to get fabrice into trouble.

Last edited by decamer0n (2007 September 18, 10:19 pm)

Let's not forget my favorite Heisigian character - the Prophet Jeremiah. Used in frame 621, LAMENT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah

The poor prophet was told by God that no one would believe him, but nonetheless he spent his life trying to warn the ungrateful plebs to change their sinful ways.
In desperation, he thought people would take him seriously if he took to wearing a wooden yoke around his neck, but strangely that didn't work either.
So as well as giving me an unforgettable image to learn a kanji, Dr Heisig gave me the invaluable advice that if you want to win an argument, it's best to leave your wooden yoke at home.

Alot of the stories he used for part 1 and 2 annoyed the hell out of me (litte train/religious/etc) , so much that I remember them easily

着 is used in 着る （きる）and does indeed mean "to wear (from the shoulders down)", which is most likely what Heisig meant. The reading of はく does exist though but is out-dated according to my dictionary. 履く（はく） seems more like it. Then there's 着く（つく） of course but thats just a second meaning and Heisig chose the other one.

So this thread is ancient, but I have seen this mentioned a few places (as a negative to the book), so I thought I would give my 2 cents.

First off, I don't perceive Heisig as being all that Christian, as in one frame (元) he refers to God as "she" and in another (明) to the "biblical myth", neither of which are pro-Christian wording. I was mildly annoyed by his wording, but it doesn't matter because it helped me remember them and that is the point of the book.

Secondly, many of these stories are from the Old Testament, so they should be familiar to people with a Christian or Jewish background, so it isn't just a Christian viewpoint.

Thirdly, Christianity is the world's #1 religion (by population) and is the dominate religion of the West, so he is simply writing to his audience.

I came across this thread while Googling "Japanese Judas-tree" because I kept getting that kanji confused with the kanji for the paulownia tree. After reading all this, I won't get them mixed up again.


Resurrection!