Hello,
In a video by Cure Dolly, I heard her that the « Heisig method » was actually used already since a long time in China and Japan by kids to learn their kanjis. So that while the Heisig method is new to the West, it’s not new in China/Japan. Actually a Japanese person told me that when she was a kid, she also learnt 黙 as « silence is a black dog burning », which I think is kind of in the Heisig spirit of learning kanjis.
So I was wondering, does anyone knows how this way of learning would be called in Japanese? If there are any Japanese textbooks aimed at Japanese kids who use the same kind of stories to remember the kanjis?
(I know they also learn by grouping kanjis by radicals and by copying a lot 🙂 )
I am interested in comparing the different stories that exists to explain a kanji, the point of view of RTK and the point of view of a native Japanese teacher 🙂 i tried to google directly in Japanese but my level is not good enough to find convincing results. I did stumble on this website that gives pictographic explanations of kanjis
https://okjiten.jp/index.html
Thank you ! Have a good one !
3 comments
Heisig didnt invent mnemonics, he just invented a lot of crappy keywords
They use rhymes / puns (語呂合わせ)
E.g.
https://www.kadokawa.co.jp/product/322009000540/
I’d prefer paying attention to the ‘naritachi’ of a kanji (how it came to be), or finding my own way to remember them, rather than relying on someone else’s made-up arbitrary memory aids.