The more I have revised them, the more immediate I become at producing Kanji from keywords. The brain might still make a short reference to the story, but this you barely notice as you make progress. Don't let the method presented in this book turn you away. The first time I read about this book, I thought "WTF? When am I going to learn the readings of each character?! This is STUPID!" Don't hesitate to include weird characters in your stories. The kanji for person (人), for example, often appears as a primitive on the left hand side of many kanji, e.g. in 何 or 僕. In my stories, this primitive referred to Mr. T, but you can use anyone you want. There are many primitives that can refer to such characters ((糸 has the keyword ”thread“, but I used the meaning Spider-Man, when it appeared as a primitive) and they make your stories way easier to remember than just including a person, because many stories contain different persons and their respective kanji don't necessarily contain this primitive. In the first few weeks, I read through RTK and kept a notebook by my side, writing down each kanji and just copying Heisig's story by hand, sometimes even writing them down 10 times, just to make sure. When I realized that writing the stories down by hand will take way to much time and that I won't be able to alter my notes significantly, I began writing down everything in a LibreOffice spreadsheet (to which I will give you the link). Heisig, James W. (2009). Remembering simplified Hanzi: how not to forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters. Timothy W. Richardson. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3323-7. OCLC 236142649.

I went to a Japanese Language School in Japan, with many Chinese students. The Chinese students had a lot of problems learning Kanji because they are similar enough to their Hanzi, but have as much in common as Magyar (Hungarian) to English. James W. Heisig, Author James W. Heisig is a permanent research fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan. Of course, this isn't the real origin of the character. And learning the character by its real origin wouldn't be that difficult: it's said to be derived from the character 人 (person) pointing at their head. It became 儿 (legs) and 二 (two) as it developed. A person's head = beginning, origin, base. Remembering the Kanji 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters (English and Japanese Edition) I would also recommend doing this book simultaneously with other Japanese reading because seeing the Kanji used in real texts reinforces their meanings and helps you add actual vocabulary to cement them even further in your memory. And, although the book discourages you from doing this, I'd recommend even replacing the keywords of the book with the real Japanese words used for that Kanji, but only if you really know that word and have no trouble recalling it. For instance I used " kimi" for 君 and " ore" for 俺 because I knew these words already, instead of the confusing English keywords of "old boy" and "myself". There are other keywords like "boy" and "oneself", "self", and "me" and I didn't need the extra confusion. You're not going to read Japanese Kanji in English after all... But if you're a newbie in Japanese with an empty word bank it might be better to just follow the book's instructions to the letter though.Learning the writing and the meaning of each kanji puts you on the same level as them, associating each character with an English keyword and a story for each of what he calls 'primitive elements', some of which correspond to traditional radicals. Reading, can then be learned on its own.

I then decided to learn hiragana. I admit that trying to learn kanji before hiragana is like trying to run before you can walk, but equally, learning hiragana after trying to learn kanji is like trying to run, breaking both your legs in the process and then razzing around in a snazzy new wheelchair for a couple of months. Blissful. (I haven't thought this all the way through and I have never even broken one or both of my legs and even I can see the holes in this analogy are markedly obvious if pondered for even the briefest of moments. But alas!)

Remembering the Kanji 1 | Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture". nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp . Retrieved 2021-10-24.

Heisig's keywords can be a bit weird sometimes, at least for someone like me, who is not a native speaker. I know the word ”coincidence“, but I've never heard the word ”happenstance“ prior to using RTK. Nevertheless, ”happenstance“ is a keyword in the book, ”coincidence“ is not.

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