Riding back from the grocery store with AJM, I'm reviewing my kanji cards. (Focusing on the cards keeps me from gasping, shrieking, and nagging as he drives.) I stare at a card and nothing comes to mind. Sometimes deconstructing helps, since I make up a lot of my own stories as memory aids. "Dog. Plant. Field." Hmmm. Still doesn't ring a bell, so I turn the card over. "Oh, of course, neko. Cat."
"Cat!" snorts AJM. "There's no way you're going to rationalize some explanation for writing 'cat' out of 'dog, plant, and field'." He can see I'm thinking about it. "So don't even try." Oh, well. I bet I remember it now.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
February 08, 2003
Comments
Kanji is also the tough part for me.. Level 4 kanji are already giving me headaches.
Comment by: pikey. Posted February 8, 2003 11:06 PM.
Here's the story I use, based on the elements "wild dog", and "seedling", from Heisig's book "Remembering the Kanji"...
BTW, "seedling" is "flower" over "brain"... Thin of some image of planting brains and letting them grow up from the ground, or growing a flower out of your brain, or something... :)
The story for 'neko':
Cats are created by _wild_dogs_ who plant them as _seedlings_ and wait for them to grow up, so they can chase them around and fight with them... :)
Comment by: Trevor Hill. Posted February 9, 2003 03:53 PM.
Yeah. I've got Heisig's book, as well as Henshall's "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters" which we used to study a lot when we lived in Japan. However, I don't do well with other people's stories. I find that it just gives me two things to remember, the kanji and the story.
Currently, my favorite kanji book is P. G. O'Neill's "Essential Kanji" which is one of the first book on Japanese that I bought. He explains both the radical and the phonetic components of each character.
Anyway, both Henshall and O'Neill explain that the phonetic portion (seedling in a field; myou or byou) is pronounce miao in Chinese. So it means 'clawed beast (dog radical) that meows'.
Comment by: M. Posted February 9, 2003 09:05 PM.
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