Jun
26
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.
May
27
Due to a variety of factors involving chronic pain/fatigue and an inability to get medications I need, I found my kanji studies grinding to a halt around #700 in RTK. When my meds ran out, I just could not get motivated to keep going. All that typing up stories, writing kanji, and trying to remember keywords that meant the same thing despite having completely unrelated kanji was just too exhausting, and made my hands and wrists ache. Then Khatzumoto-sempai came up with something that sounded like just the thing for me, Lazy Kanji, which turns the process of memorizing kanji into something more like repeatedly dialing a telephone number until it’s memorized. With renewed hope, I made an initial attempt at some Lazy Kanji cards.
However, what I quickly discovered was that it became too easy to forget about breaking the kanji up into its component parts and I was relying on rote memorization and visual memory. In other words, it was too slow, and even more painful than writing Heisig-novels. A little bit of thought fixed the problem though. A simple modification to the front of the cards could, with little effort, bring back all the benefits of Heisig’s mnemonics without nearly as much work.
So, here’s what the cards look like:
Front
党
The TEENAGER went to a _______ in the LITTLE HOUSE.
Back:
party
The task looks like this. First, write the kanji. Attempt to write it just from glancing at the sentence, if necessary, however, it’s alright to look at the kanji. That’s why its there on the front. Then, look at the kanji and say the keyword out loud. The keyword can be any synonym that carries that meaning. So party, gala, shindig, bonnaroo (joking) would all be correct.
Grading: If I get the keyword and I can write the kanji just from the sentence, I mark it very easy. If I have to glance at the kanji I mark it easy or hard, depending on my feeling about it. Missing the keyword entirely gets it marked wrong.
Adding the fill-in-the-blank sentence does two main things. First, it serves as a reminder to break the kanji up into its components, which is the strongest part of the Heisig method in my opinion. Second, it works as a bit of “context”, providing a mental hook which is easy to grasp on to and gives the brain something familiar to grasp at while learning something that initially looks like random squiggles to it. But, because of the combination of SRS and blending writing and recognition, it is no longer necessary to use complex or wordy stories to memorize with. A simple sentence that links all the primitives together and to the keyword in some sort of logical structure is all that is necessary.
My deck, which contains all the kanji from RTK1, is a shared deck on Anki, and can be found by searching “Lazy Kanji + Mod”. Some of the “stories” are idiosyncratic to my strange tastes and sense of humor, but most of them are generic enough to be useful to anyone. Having worked through all the kanji making the cards, and hundreds of them in late stages of review, I can definitely say that Lazy Kanji is efficient and far more enjoyable than the more traditional method. While your grasp on the kanji will NOT be as strong initially as someone who worked through the book the normal way, over time it will balance out. That’s the power of the SRS combined with motor memory and adult logic.
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