Remembering the Kanji
The number of textbooks that have made a big difference in my study of Japanese is pretty small – the bulk of my learning has come from natural language materials. There are a couple, though, that I have read from back to front, side to side, and backwards, and send Christmas presents to the authors of. Remembering the Kanji, RTK for short, is one of those textbooks.
You might remember the first time you saw a Japanese newspaper (unless you thought it was Chinese, but that’s okay, go ahead and remember that instead, it doesn’t change my point). It looked like a seething mass of arcane scribblings, right? Kanji (the Japanese word for the characters used in both Japanese and Chinese) present the greatest barrier to Japanese literacy, and as such is the aspect of the language that learners tend to have the most difficulty with. Apart from a few of the simplest ones, most kanji are near incomprehensible to the untrained eye, and many are similar enough to occasionally confuse even native Japanese. In fact, the business of kanji training is biggest in Japan itself – even educated adults spend time on kanji books, video games, and TV shows much in the same way that English speakers might work on building their vocabulary.
RTK is one man’s attempt to turn those arcane scribblings into beautiful snowflakes that lend beauty and richness, rather than frustration, to the language.
The man is James Heisig, and the system is simple:
- Start with the simplest characters and build up to more complex ones.
- Assign a simple English keyword to each character to act as a memory anchor.
- Determine the building blocks (“primitives” in Heisig’s terminology) comprising each character, and give each one a vivid image.
- For each character, create an image or story linking the keyword to all of the primitives involved in the kanji and their positions.
- When reviewing, reconstruct the character starting with the keyword, which reminds you of the story, which tells you the primitives and where to put them.
Those of you familiar with mnemonic devices may find nothing special about this system, unless you try to do all this by yourself. Step 1, the ordering of the characters, is a monumental undertaking in itself. Assigning the keywords so that no two characters are too similar is a logistical nightmare, and splitting up the primitives intelligently has its own special pitfalls. In essence, Heisig has done for you everything that doesn’t contribute to your memory of the characters and their mnemonics – he has built the skeleton for you to gnaw the sweet, juicy kanji meat off of. Vegetarians may prefer to think of some sort of tree/fruit metaphor instead.
Note that this book will not teach you everything about the characters you are learning. You will learn two things for each character: how to write it, and one English keyword that gives a meaning for it. You won’t even get the full meaning of each character, since many kanji have multiple possible English meanings. This means that you should not expect to complete this book and be able to read anything immediately. In fact, you might even say that after completing the book you haven’t really learned any Japanese yet.
That doesn’t mean that you haven’t learned anything though. This is about the mechanics of how memory works. When a learner attempts to learn kanji “cold”, there is nothing for them to connect to in his mind (like cold meat from the refrigerator – limp, lifeless, forgettable, and they all taste the same. Vegetarians may be out of luck here). You have an image, and maybe a word or two, but nothing to anchor them to. As a result they tend to slip away quite easily, an experience that I’m sure many beginners can relate to. The RTK system helps you to create an anchor point for each kanji, which you will later link to readings, compounds, and vocabulary. You might say that it primes your mind to receive the language.
From my own personal experience, I can tell you that the greatest strength of RTK is that it changes kanji from intimidating to friendly. Before RTK I used to dread reading kanji-heavy texts, since without knowing the readings or meanings it was just gibberish, forcing me to look up almost every word. After completing RTK though, or even starting from about halfway through the book, I began to find that kanjified texts were actually easier to read than kana-only texts, since I was able to link most of the kanji to English keywords hinting at their meanings. New vocabulary became easier to learn and remember since I was able to link it to the kanji already in my memory.
Perhaps most importantly, I stopped confusing similar looking kanji with each other. This is something even Japanese natives struggle with sometimes, but having each character broken down and learned as primitives makes the problem almost trivial. When have you ever been able to start with an advantage over native speakers?
The greatest weakness of RTK is the investment of time and committment it requires. It takes a great deal of faith to spend roughly 2-4 months (for the average learner, though it can be done much faster if you have enough time on your hands) without actually learning any concrete, practical language. This makes it a bit much for casual students to handle. For anyone serious about attaining Japanese fluency, and especially literacy, though, I can assure you that the time invested in RTK will pay for itself over and over again.
If you’re still not sold, why not try out the system for yourself? Mr. Heisig has made the first 1/3 of the book available for free. Many public and university libraries also carry the book. Once you’re ready to buy, the 5th edition (the most recent edition) is in print and available from Amazon.com. Note that this post describes RTK books 1 and 3; book 2 attempts to treat the kanji readings systematically, but it doesn’t work nearly as well.
I intend to devote a separate post to describing it in detail, but for now, Reviewing the Kanji is an excellent resource for those already on the RTK path of glory. It’s a website that allows you to share your kanji stories with other RTKers, and look at other users’ stories when you get stuck. It also allows you to review the characters from keyword to kanji with its online, SRS-enabled flashcard system. I pretty much consider it a necessary companion to the book.
勉強中 