If you're getting stressed out on the 4th character, I think you need to try to relax a bit and not sweat things so much.

In 3, he's referring to how 二's top stroke is shorter than the bottom one, so if you stack 一 on top of that, you get something with a shorter stroke in the middle

一　　 →　　三
二　　/


For 四, he's pointing out right there in the text that 口 is mouth and 儿 is human legs.  He's not explaining the strokes; just saying that the character's visual representation is made up of those two parts.  And when he says you'll see them in later lessons, that means that he hasn't fully introduced them yet and you're not supposed to know all about them.  :-)

Last edited by JimmySeal (2011 December 28, 9:51 pm)

JimmySeal wrote:

If you're getting stressed out on the 4th character, I think you need to try to relax a bit and not sweat things so much.

In 3, he's referring to how 二's top stroke is shorter than the bottom one, so if you stack 一 on top of that, you get something with a shorter stroke in the middle

一　　 →　　三
二　　/


For 四, he's pointing out right there in the text that 口 is mouth and 儿 is human legs.  He's not explaining the strokes; just saying that the character's visual representation is made up of those two parts.  And when he says you'll see them in later lessons, that means that he hasn't fully introduced them yet and you're not supposed to know all about them.  :-)

Ohhh I seee. I thought he was explaining ways to remember the kanji already. Thanks. I really need to calm down. :B

Omoishinji wrote:

Hmm what are radicals exactly?

Radicals are building blocks that make up kanji.  When you look at kanji, you see certain patterns of sub-kanji that show up over and over again.  The same thing is also true of primitives, with the distinction being that radicals are the traditional components that kanji can be reduced to, whereas primitives are the ones that Heisig and followers of his method came up with.  For the most part they overlap, but radicals are based on Chinese etymology and primitives on easy memorization.  So you will see things like two different primitives where they are traditionally considered variants on the same radical, or primitives with names that are arbitrary but easy to visualize and make stories about.