Primitives Deck

I created a shared Anki deck with the primitives:

Primitives
This is a deck for memorizing the primitives which Heisig uses to build all the kanji in his book Remembering the Kanji. These are the primitives which are not kanji in their own right, but simply components from which kanji are built. The primitives are similar to, but not identical with those components traditionally called radicals. Although many (most?) of the primitives are radicals, some are combinations of two or more radicals or bits and pieces of two or more radicals put together.

***To use this deck you MUST install the pangolin font. Go to http://www.transient.eclipse.co.uk/Pangolin_font.zip
OR http://www.mediafire.com/?izgnzwdtdnt. To install in Windows: After downloading the file, unzip it and go to Control Panel>Appearance and Personalization>Fonts and Paste the pangolin file in that folder.
Close and re-start Anki to use deck.

Why would you want to bother with specifically memorizing the primitives?
Those using the Lazy Kanji method:

–Become more aware of the various components making up the kanji. Because the Lazy Kanji method only focuses on writing in a secondary manner to recognition, taking the time to memorize the primitive components making those kanji up will improve your ability to remember and write the kanji by building it from its components as opposed to simply recognizing it holistically.

–After memorizing the primitives, using the Lazy Kanji deck means one no longer needs to study with the Remembering the Kanji book.

–I found when I was working through the Lazy Kanji deck that a few specific primitives were giving me problems, working specifically with the primitives allowed me to hone in on which primitives I had trouble with and eradicate the problem.

Everyone:

–Becoming more familiar with the components making up the kanji will increase your ability to learn kanji met “in the wild.”

–Will aid your ability to associate a specific primitive with the keywords used in your stories.

–“Primitives” is a rather small deck, with a little over 200 of them to learn. This can be done at the start of your kanji study or concurrent with it. I imagine that learning just 5-10 a day would enable one to stay ahead of the primitives used as one works through the book.

–Learning to recognize and write the primitives BEFORE attempting to learn and write the kanji which use them means less to memorize at a time. In other words, it turns each kanji into an “i+1″ block of information.

–Additional work with the primitives should increase your ability to see and think kanji in terms of the components making it up.

–The primitives largely overlap with the Japanese radicals, meaning that learning them will make it easier to learn the radicals for Japanese dictionary look-ups and everything else it is helpful to know radicals for.

And there you go. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.