Still Remembering the Kanji

Having finished Heisig's Remembering the Kanji I (RTK1), I was eager to get them yomis down. But it is much harder than I anticipiated. That was, untill I found a project named KanjiTown, coined by a guy LittleFish at Crisscross.com forums.

I didn't really see how that would work at first. When you open RTK2 the first time, you are immensely discouraged. It seems that all your hard work with RTK1 is now to be put on the shelf. There will just be hard, rote memorization left to learn the yomis.

But then I read an example story of LittleFish's kanjitown method. The smart thing is, that in RTK2 there is an alphabetical list of all kanjis in the book RTK1/2. So you already can see all kanjis that are pronounced "aku", for instance. There are two. Those kanjis are BAD and GRIP. So I made a story about a powerplant AKUmulator that went BAD in an explosion, and then the firefighters just hung in there by a GRIP of their fingers from the roof. Mentally I placed this AKUmulator Powerplant somewhere far outside of the fictional KanjiTown. Having played SimCity 4 helped me formulating this image in my mind.

Suddenly it makes sense. You simply work your way through the on-yomis by taking them one sound at a time. You can learn the on-yomi by heart very quickly and consistently this way. Sometimes more than 10 kanjis share the same pronounciation, and you are then forced to make a very long and very good story to remember it. But once the chain is solid, you will probably never forget any of them again.

Now it is as if your story making skills from RTK1 really get to pay off. You make whole chains, placing them carefully in different parts of your imaginary KanjiTown.

What about kunyomi I hear you asking? Well, I have seen no solid method to learn them, but they do have one big difference from the onyomi reading. The kunyomi, or japanese reading, is very often used as the first character in a verb or an adjective. You sort of learn that by heart. When I see 行くI know it is いく.　But when you talk about the compound words, such as 阿弗利加 (Africa) it is onyomi all the way. Thats when it helps that you can just recite the readings automatically. Then you taste a bit on the word. "Afurika? Ah, AFRICA! hehe"

I am highly encouraged by this method. It is actually fun to write those silly stories.

If you arrive here by a googit, don't forget to read the rest.