“All failure comes from trying too hard.” / NAKATANI Akihiro

1 is bigger than 0.

Obvious, I know. Common sense, I know. But common sense isn’t common. Common sense is the least common of the senses, as other people have pointed out.

1 is bigger than 0. How often we forget this simple fact.

You know how it is. We all learn about mathematical concepts like negative numbers — which were probably considered a wild and crazy idea at one time, and perhaps for good reason — so we tend to think of 1 as only being slightly bigger than 0.

But it’s not. ¹

In RL ², 1 isn’t just slightly bigger than 0. 1 is infinitely bigger than 0. That means it’s not just a matter of 1 > 0 (1 is greater than 0). 1 ≫ 0 (1 is much greater than 0). Because 1 is the start of everything. While 0 is the path to nothing. No matter how many 0′s you string together, you get nothing. But a bunch of 1′s adds up. A bunch of 1′s, multiplied by a bunch of time, adds up. And it doesn’t just add up — it even compounds, like interest.

0 is a white shirt. 1 is a blue stain. 100 is a red stain. 1 is much closer to 100 than it is to 0. No, 0 isn’t even a shirt. It’s a transparent Ziploc bag. No, it’s not even that. It’s a vacuum. 0 is the total absence of existence. Add 0 to anything and…you get the same anything. Add 0 (nothing) to 0 (nothing) and you get…nothing.

The current evidence from places like Swaziland suggests that humans have had math for some 35,000 years, give or take. Yet for most of human history, we didn’t have the number 0. Apparently, mathematicians in Greece and Egypt were like: “Dude, how the FXXX can nothing be something?!”. The entire Roman empire ³ started, rose, declined and fell all without the number 0. Engineers in ancient Rome implemented public works projects — roads, aqueducts, indoor plumbing, massive buildings — on a scale and to a standard that was not equaled in Europe until about last Tuesday ⁴…without 0. We’re talking about people who had to write the number “2347″ as ”MMCCCXLVII”.

Here — count to 0. Where’s your zero finger? 0 is a very weird number-slash-concept. It sits next to ⁵ 1 on the real number line ⁶, but the real number line, names notwithstanding, isn’t “real”. In content and character, 0 is nothing like 1 or any other number. 0 is not of this world; it is of the math world.

So when you do 0, you’re not just doing slightly less than 1. Doing nothing is of a fundamentally different character than doing something. And doing something is of a fundamentally different character than doing nothing. Something (1, etc.) and nothing (0) are not the same; they’re not friends; they’re not neighbors; they’re not cousins; they don’t know each other; they don’t even live in the same universe.

It’s not doing too little that kills you(r projects). It’s doing nothing. No need to hit home-runs. No need to hit 100. Go easy. Take it easy. No need to swing with all your might. Screw that. Just bunt it. Just do 1. Right here. Right now. No big deal. No fanfare. No parade.

Don’t listen to Japanese. Just play a Japanese song and turn up the volume.

Just do 1.

The tortoise mindset has been good to Michael Johnson

Rest follows every race. Purge follows every binge. Binge on kanji now, and you might end up having to take a break from them for the rest of your life.

And all for what? For a 0 duecount on Anki? Is that what your life has come to? Suffering in order to game some stats?

What gets measured gets managed. You want to milk that Hawthorne effect for all it’s worth.
So don’t get me wrong: gaming stats is a good thing.
Until it stops being a game.

There is no happiness on the other side of that kanji binge. No gumdrops and rainbows. Only burnout and bitterness. You will hate yourself. You will hate the kanji.

So play the game, but be the tortoise rather than the hare. Even just 5 new kanji a day comes to almost 2000 kanji a year. Time and mathematics are on your side; they will work for you if you’ll just make friends with them.

Pheidippides. He binge-ran. From Marathon to Athens. His body needed to rest, needed to purge. Forever. He died. Ran to death.

Are you going to run your kanji self to death? Or are you going to be sensible and take breaks? Take it from a man like Tony Schwartz. He calls modern sprinters “Greek gods“. Because they run themselves to death, right? No, because they look sharp. Because they sprint. Short bursts. Short sprint and long rest.

Are you going to be a chump like Pheidippides? Or are you going to be divine? Your call.

I am still in kanji (only about 150 or so in) and I am finding it extremely boring. I just can’t seem to get myself motivated to do it and I don’t want to delete kanji I haven’t memorized yet.

There are like, what, a kajillion (well, 120,000 ) kanji in the world? Dropping one or two…thousand here or there is no big deal. Plus you can always re-add a deleted kanji to your SRS deck later, they’re not going anywhere .

Boredom and perfectionism kill progress a lot faster than healthy deletion and streamlining. Fear boredom before you fear having a few random (and totally pluggable) holes in your knowledge.

Delete, destroy, skip, fast-forward, throw away, blow off, suspend, postpone anything boring that is in your way. The point is to be making contact with Japanese. That’s it. Everything else is detail. Everything else will take care of itself in due time.

If you want, think of it not as destroying the kanji, but putting it aside until it and you mature to a point that it’s interesting again. Sometimes you’re just not ready for a certain TV show or actor or book or kanji. And then suddenly you’re picking friends based on whether or not they like Stargate SG-1…

Boredom will suffocate and kill your Japanese baby, baby. Each boring thing you don’t kick out is like…like a fine cashmere blanket, and you’re piling these on top of the baby in the crib, and eventually she just can’t breathe.

You like that cashmere? You like how it looks? You like seeing it all nice and smooth and pretty and folded?

Do you want a perfect kanji deck so much that you’re willing to risk infanticide?

This is a guest post from Dr. Aron Levin, author of The Ultimate Word List – Japanese: 2935 Most Commonly used Kanji (with English translation)

Dear People-who-read-AJATT,

Khatzumoto has allowed me the distinguished honor of writing a guest post. The reason for this post is to PIMP my new book. It’s called “The Ultimate Word List – Japanese: 2935 Most Commonly Used Kanji”. I compiled a huge number of Kanji from online books, news articles, wikipedia, etc., and sorted them by frequency. Then I hired a bilingual Japanese translator (and K’s friend) to provide pronunciation of each Kanji (on’yomi and kun’yomi), and English translation.

I created another 15 books in lots of languages in a very similar fashion. All are sorted by the L2, then translated into English and also transliterated if the language uses a non-Latin alphabet (Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese). All translations/transliterations were done by bilingual native speakers.

These types of frequency lists are useful because the most commonly used words, in any language, represent a large proportion of the words you’ll read and hear. According to my calculations, the 100 most common Kanji represent of 36% of the Kanji you’ll read. Over 1/3! In only 100 Kanji! In Spanish, for another example, the first 100 words represent 57% of words you read. It’s easy to understand the value of learning the really common words.

How do I use the Hebrew frequency list? I used it as one of my primary entry points into Hebrew. I found Hebrew kind of hard to beak into because, even though Hebrew uses an alphabet, you don’t necessarily know how to pronounce a word until you hear it. Thr r n vwls n Hbrw (There are no vowels in Hebrew). With my Hebrew frequency list, I was able to learn the most common words and their pronunciation variants. For example, the 2nd most common word in Hebrew is את. (Don’t forget to read right-to-left) It is pronounced either “et” or “at”. Those two pronunciations are both very important words and have completely different meanings. “At” means ‘you (f.s.)’, and “et” indicates the next word is a direct object.

For another example, take the word רק. The first letter is ר, which is an ‘r’ sound. The second letter is ק, which is a ‘k’ sound. רק is pronounced ‘rak’ and means “only”. The book will tell you all this. It’s useful because otherwise you have no idea if it’s pronounced rak, rek, rik, rok, or ruk. “Can’t I just look that up in a dictionary?”, you ask. YES! Of course. But as a newbie Hebrew-learner, you had no friggin’ idea that רק was a realllly common word. And that’s the point. Your dictionary says it’s just 1 of 40,000 equivalently crazy looking Hebrew words. But the frequency list tells you it’s the 31st most common word in Hebrew. Big difference.

Will memorizing these books make you fluent? HELL NO. They are merely a starting point. I am studying Hebrew on my own and made the Hebrew book first because I wanted it for myself. I found knowing the most common words useful in my self-studies, so I figured people studying other languages might want a frequency list, too. It helped me break into the language and gave me confidence that I was learning important stuff right from the beginning. Studying individual words like this is most beneficial at the start of learning a new language. As you progress, however, sentences are the best. People speak in sentences. But those sentences are made up of words. And certain words are used more than others. Knowing the most commonly used words will only speed up your language learning.

As Khatz would say, get this book if you want eternal happiness and sweet abs.

Good luck with your studies,

Aron

This is a gracious guest post by E Dub Kendo. In it, he introduces a sweet mod[ification] he made to lazy kanji cards to increase their effectiveness. Effectiveness and preference can and does vary by person. Nevertheless, I think this mod is a valuable improvement that definitely deserves to be part of AJATT “canon” .

Though I have no hard data, my hunch is that “Lazy Kanji natives”, i.e. people who go straight into lazy kanji with, say, less than 1000 characters’ worth of previous experience, will benefit most from this mod. Heisig did not pen RTK for naught — logical connections matter.

Due to a variety of factors involving chronic pain and fatigue, I found my kanji studies grinding to a halt around #700 in RTK. I just could not get motivated to keep going. Typing up stories, writing out kanji, and trying to remember keywords that meant the same thing despite having completely unrelated kanji was just too exhausting, and made my hands and wrists ache.

Then Khatzumoto-sempai came up with something that sounded like just the thing for me, Lazy Kanji, which turns the process of memorizing kanji into something more like repeatedly dialing a telephone number until it’s memorized. With renewed hope, I made an initial attempt at some Lazy Kanji cards.

However, what I quickly discovered was that it became too easy to forget about breaking the kanji up into its component parts and I was relying on rote memorization and visual memory. In other words, it was too slow, and even more painful than writing Heisig-novels. A little bit of thought fixed the problem though. A simple modification to the front of the cards could, with little effort, bring back all the benefits of Heisig’s mnemonics without nearly as much work.
So, here’s what the cards look like:

Front
党
The TEENAGER went to a _______ in the LITTLE HOUSE.
Back:
party

The task looks like this. First, write the kanji. Attempt to write it just from glancing at the sentence, if necessary, however, it’s alright to look at the kanji. That’s why its there on the front. Then, look at the kanji and say the keyword out loud. The keyword can be any synonym that carries that meaning. So party, gala, shindig, bonnaroo (joking) — would all be correct.

Grading [Anki scale]: If I get the keyword and I can write the kanji just from the sentence, I mark it “Very Easy”. If I have to glance at the kanji I mark it “Easy” or “Hard”, depending on my feeling about it. Missing the keyword entirely gets it marked “Wrong”.

Adding the fill-in-the-blank sentence does two main things:

1. First, it serves as a reminder to break the kanji up into its components, which is the strongest part of the Heisig method in my opinion.
2. Second, it works as a bit of “context”, providing a mental hook which is easy to grasp on to and gives the brain something familiar to grasp at while learning something that initially looks like random squiggles to it.
   But, because of the combination of SRS and blending writing and recognition, it is no longer necessary to use complex or wordy stories to memorize with. A simple sentence that links all the primitives together and to the keyword in some sort of logical structure is all that is necessary.

My deck, which contains all the kanji from RTK1, is a shared deck on Anki, and can be found by searching “Lazy Kanji + Mod”. Some of the “stories” are idiosyncratic to my strange tastes and sense of humor, but most of them are generic enough to be useful to anyone.

Having worked through all the kanji making the cards, and hundreds of them in late stages of review, I can definitely say that Lazy Kanji is efficient and far more enjoyable than the more traditional method. While your grasp on the kanji will NOT be as strong initially as someone who worked through the book the normal way, over time it will balance out. That’s the power of the SRS combined with motor memory and adult logic.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Fists? ¹ Put ‘em up!

Here is a little bookmarklet that looks up multiple kanji dictionaries (Wiktionary, MDBG, Richard Sears’ Chinese Etymology, CantoDict and Goo) for you with a single click:

• Multiple Kanji Lookup Bookmarklet
• Source code: javascript:(function(){var w=window,d=w.document,s="";;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else if(d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open('http://www.surusu.com/addqaui.php?front='+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank");window.open("http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb="+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank");window.open("http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/"+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank");window.open("http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput="+encodeURIComponent(s)+"&submitButton1=Etymology","_blank");window.open("http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/search/?searchtype=3&text="+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank");window.open("http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/srch/je/"+encodeURIComponent(s)+"/m0u/","_blank");window.open("http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/srch/all/"+encodeURIComponent(s)+"/m0u/","_blank");window.open("http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/srch/all/"+encodeURIComponent(s)+"/m1u/","_blank");})()

• MDBG Bookmarklet
• Bookmarklet source code: javascript:(function(){var w=window,d=w.document,s="";;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else if(d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open("http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb="+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank")})()

And it hit me that it may have been this article (about the differences and similarities between AI and cybernetics) by a guy called Paul Pangaro that got me thinking in the direction of lazy kanji. For curiosity’s sake, here are a couple of interesting quotes:

“information (or intelligence for that matter) is an attribute of an interaction rather than a commodity stored in a computer”

This quote in particular (from Humberto Maturana’s Biology of Cognition and Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living) really got me thinking [emphasis added]:

“Learning is not a process of accumulation of representations of the environment; it is a continuous process of transformation of behavior through continuous change in the capacity of the nervous system to synthesize it. Recall does not depend on the indefinite retention of a structural invariant that represents an entity (an idea, image or symbol), but on the functional ability of the system to create, when certain recurrent demands are given, a behavior that satisfies the recurrent demands or that the observer would class as a reenacting of a previous one.”

What does it mean to “know” a language? What does it mean to “know” a kanji? It’s a question of worldview, I guess. To put it a little simplistically, it’s a question of whether one sees things statically or dynamically. And it’s important that each of us gets somewhat clear on an answer to these questions, because that answer will decide whether life is tingly and fun, or toadly sucky.

If one defaults to one of the certification-seller-approved answers and decides that: “knowing” a language means being able to take boring, arbitrary, authority-presuming tests on it, administered by people you neither know nor like, then that’s fine, too — it’ll just…suck.

If one defaults to one of the school-approved answers and decides that: ”knowing” a language means doing insomnia-curing textbook assignments on it and avoiding FUNBUN (for-native by-native media) like the plague (or rationing out FUNBUN as a “reward” for “real learning”, as if FUNBUN were some kind of fattening dessert instead of the nutritious vegetable dish that it is), then that, too, is fine…it just kind of sucks.

Translated specifically into language-acquisition terms, Maturana seems to me to be saying: you don’t get good at a language, you get used to it — it’s a habit; it’s a relationship. It’s as if the language were a person. You don’t learn to “read”, you get used to text; you develop text reflexes. Not only is the language itself in flux, but we are in flux with respect to the language.

In the late 1970s, James Heisig freed us from stifling and ineffective ideas of what it means to know a kanji. To the extent that unquestioned, unfettered attachment to the RTK method threatens to itself become a new orthodoxy, the Lazy Kanji/SRS combination could be a new “mini-shift” in kanji perception: you don’t “know” kanji, you get used to them — just like your phone number. (So used to them, in fact, that you can read and write them in any situation you want or need to).

Having said that, Lazy Kanji is actually built on the core RTK insights, namely that:

1. the component logic of kanji should be exploited to learn each character bottom-up, and each “family” of characters in order of increasing structural complexity.
2. each kanji represents a concept that transcends any one language, and this concept can be represented using a word or words in your native language or L1.

So, to me, it just represents a natural progression rather than a “revolution” or anything drastic like that. Heisig’s always going to be top dog in my book. He brought us so far. He broke the mold.

In any case, I think the ultimate lesson is this: screw doing things “the” right way. Your way doesn’t have to be “right” — it just has to work. Maybe we’ll add that to the “Three Laws of Language Acquisition”

It sometimes seems like a lot of people get upset when:

1. I remind them that Heisig said it was OK to give yourself the keywords and story as a hint, and
2. I tell them to continue doing their kanji SRS reps until the kanji cards fully mature, i.e. until the intervals extend beyond their lifetime.

I mean, what am I supposed to say?

“Learn kanji in the most painful way possible and then quit before any of it sticks in your memory” ? :)

I’m just saying, dawg: if you have an answer of your own you like better already…then there’s no need to ask, right?

</rant>

I wanted to pull a Seth Godin and do a short one for a change

• Wiktionary Bookmarklet

Source code:

javascript:(function(){var w=window,d=w.document,s="";;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else if(d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open("http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/"+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank")})()


• Japanese Wiktionary Bookmarklet

Source code:

javascript:(function(){var w=window,d=w.document,s="";;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else if(d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open("http://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/"+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank")})()


EOF

Jimmy isn’t just good-looking. He’s also blindingly insightful. He has put his finger on something I, in all my verbosity, had not been able to express. You see,  Jimmy has managed to verbalize what it is that makes the Heisig method so great.

And it is this: order. It turns out that the true genius of Dr. James Heisig’s kanji-learning method — his greatest gift to us kanji-learners — is not actually the keyword system. It is the idea of learning kanji in a deliberate sequence based on incremental logic rather than straight usage (i.e. not car, book and house (車、本、家) but big, plump and hound (大、太、犬)). Having said that the keyword system is a pretty freaking sweet idea that has made the kanji world a better place: attempting to learn every nuance of a kanji from the word go does not scale well. Keywords only start to pinch when we spend more time building, maintaining and collating them than actually kanjiing it up.

Anyway, here’s Jimmy’s email [formatting and emphasis added by me]:

Hey Khatz,

A[n abridged] version if you’d prefer brevity:

• “Lazy Kanji” format = Good!
• Dictionary Meanings instead of Keywords = Good!
• Color instead of Stories = Good!…

I just entered my 600th kanji card using the “Lazy” format you talked about a short while back. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve found it to be far, far more effective than the straight Heisig method that I was using before.

The problem with the Heisig method is the very thing that makes it so great: the singular keyword. I’ve come to find that very often the keywords are somewhat off of what is actually implied, or it’d be exactly the right word and I was using it inappropriately because I had no context for its usage (God bless double meanings…).

With this new format, I have simply been taking the kanji (in the order that Heisig presents them – I believe that to be the true genius of his method), and taking the dictionary entry for that kanji and pasting it directly into the answer field. No longer is the keyword an issue, because now I actually have a sense of feel for the broader idea and meaning of the kanji.

But I also think that book you’ve been recommending, Brain Rules, has played a large part in this new formats success as well. In the chapter, I believe it’s in the chapter about attention spans, he mentions that memories tied to emotions stick the best.

I am a person who feels “in color”. That is, when I think back upon a sad memory, it has a certain hue. Happy has one, angry has one. So what I’ve been doing is using color with the cards that highlight the general mood of the kanji. Coupled with the fact that it makes the cards more fun - which also makes the meanings stick better – I’ve seen a dramatic improvement.

Well, just wanted to let you know how your suggestions have been helping your readers. Thanks a lot. I know I’m only 1/4 through and that I’ve a long way before I’m out of the kiddie pool, but I think it’s been a good re-start, and the enthusiasm is doing a great job of propelling me forward.

Thanks, Jimmy . As I said before, this is still very much an experimental thing, and neither of us have any long-term data — yet. But, the short-term data are very promising; I find that I”m:

• Enjoying my kanji reps a lot, and doing them in greater quantity and frequency (consistency) — which is what counts, because if we don’t practice, it’s game over, no matter what the system is.
• Actually making contact with the kanji — not just “thinking about” how I “should” be making contact with them, and
• Actually actively starting on learning new characters rather than queuing them up in some inert “to learn” list somewhere.

That’s all from us — let us know any insight/experience you may have on the topic.

“fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better” | The Fun Theory Dot Com

I have previously written about SRS card formatting for learning kanji.

Recently, however, I have had a bit of a new epiphany on the subject. Many of you know this already, but for those who don’t, I’ll make something clear right here: there is never an end to learning a language, but there is an end to sucking at it and not being functional in it. Whatever language-learning methods you use, none, currently, can withstand neglect of the language.

So, it should come as no surprise to you that I continue to learn new kanji. Obscure motherlovers like 膂 (a character meaning, “backbone”). I mean, why not? We’re either progressing or regressing, right?

Right.

I say these ASM-sounding things a lot, but there’s just one problem: I’m pathologically lazy. Looking at my family situation, it was practically bound to happen. I’m the last child in the family and the only boy. By the time she had me, my Mum was mellower than a rural grandparent. So not only am I lazy, but I feel entitled to this laziness; it’s my last-child prerogative (it’s mah pre-ro-ga-tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive). In the past, I have had my share of skirmishes with perfectionism, and even actual ASM, but, they almost killed me — literally. So screw that.

Everything that matters to you needs to become a game. If it matters to you, then it matters that it be fun or be made fun. If it’s not important enough to design and tweak into being fun, then…it’s not important. But why? Why the apparent strictness about fun? Why the blanket statement?

Because fun gets done. Easy gets done.

As the late Jim Rohn so eloquently put it, success is easy: the things one needs to do to succeed are easy. It’s just that “the things that are easy to do are also easy not to do”. I think there is a way to hack this apparent “equality dilemma”, and that is simply to make your “target behavior” — the thing you want to do — more fun than any rival behaviors — things you don’t want to do. When you do that, the things that we need to do to succeed become hard not to do.

So, as you can see, another way of going about making it easy for yourself to succeed is simply to make it difficult to fail (that’s what a lot of the AJATT immersion advice is about…the core principle is to make Japanese an unignoreable part of your life…don’t hurt yourself trying to follow it…don’t get used by it…use it).

Besides, do you want to go your whole life in a near-permanent state of struggle and boredom punctuated only by some form of socially-approved (legal) drug-induced stupor? I mean, is that all there is? I submit to you that such a life isn’t worth living. If you’re going to be here…have fun. By all means, become an addict. But with a twist: get addicted to good things. Get addicted to constructive things. Fun is the hook for both forming and maintaining those constructive addictions.

The Card Format

So I’m sitting there learning kanji, but I want to make it easy for myself. Easy to make the cards, easy to do the reps. Easy, easy, easy. And fun. On a whim, I came up with this card format:

FRONT

膂

BACK

backbone, spinal column

【膂】
リョ《意味》
①{名詞}行列のように並んでいる背骨｡《同義語》⇒呂(ﾘｮ)｡｢背膂(ﾊｲﾘｮ)(背骨)｣
②｢膂力(ﾘｮﾘｮｸ)｣とは､体力のこと｡▽背骨は力を入れるときの支柱となることから｡
《解字》
会意兼形声｡旅は､旗じるしのもとに隊列をくんだ人々をあらわす会意文字｡膂は｢肉+音符旅｣で､隊列や旅人の行列のように並んだ背骨｡
《単語家族》
呂(ﾘｮ)(並んだ背骨)･侶(ﾘｮ)(並んだ仲間)と同系｡

The task, given the front of the card, is:

1. To write out the kanji once, by hand, in full, while seeing it. Easy, right? But it still counts.
2. To produce the meaning of the character in a vague way, i.e. in a way synonymous (though not necessarily equal) to the meaning written on the back. “Backbone”, “spinal column”, “spine”, “back”, “vertebra”, “vertebral column” — all count — even though, as you can see, some of these aren’t exact matches. What matters is being in the ballpark.
   • Producing the reading is not required…
   • The way I grade it is:
     • (in addition to writing out the kanji) giving the ballpark meaning is the main thing — it’s what gets the points
     • giving a reading is just extra credit
     • giving only a reading (without meaning) gets only “booby prize points” — effort points.

The Rationale

Why this format? Well:

• It’s easy to make — it’s pure copy-paste
• It’s easy to do — write the kanji, give a vague guess as to its meaning — it doesn’t get much easier than that
• No stories to make/manage/decode — saving time and energy to focus on the kanji themselves
• Flexible in the face of kanji synonymity
  • No keyword clashes/overlap
  • No having to struggle to prevent keyword overlap
  • No “synonym errors” — those of you who have been through Heisig know that each character having a single keyword  — a really cool and revolutionary idea, by the way — avoids any confusion between visually similar characters but often causes new confusion between completely unrelated characters whose keywords happen to be synonyms in English. For example, Momoko often gets: 如 (likeness) and 肖 (resemblance) switched in her reps.
• No issues with having to use keywords whose meanings are only tangentially/secondarily related to the kanji in order to prevent keyword-clashing. In other words, you get to use the kanji’s “active, operational (‘real’) meaning” right from the start.
• You get writing practice — so you don’t become a “reader only”
• You get reading practice — so you avoid the “can-write-but-can’t-quite-recognize” problem that affects early-stage, less “mature” Heisigers.

I can already hear the clarion cry of ASM-sufferers everywhere: “but if it’s not hard, how can it be good for me?”

Right.

While (I have read) having to work harder for a memory strengthens it, having to work too hard just makes you not want to practice at all. And having to work hard thousands of times is just hors de question. In any case, I think the spacing of repetitions provides enough “strain” in the case of these kanji cards — we needn’t add more. Also, in my own personal experience, struggle is not necessary to make a memory stick.

Think of how you know your own name, home phone number, and mailing address by heart. You know tons of advertising jingles, by heart. You know the content of the billboards and advertisements in your immediate environment, by heart. Back in the day, before cellphones and their memory, when you were dialing manually, you probably knew your best friends’ phone numbers by heart, too. And this all without ever even trying! Why? Because of repetition. I have yet to meet the non-spy who memorized their own address and phone number using closed-book “test”-style methods.

Now, the situation is different with kanji. There are many of them, right? Surely a laissez-faire approach wouldn’t work…we wouldn’t get enough exposure. Aha! Exposure — there’s the key word. Well, as it turns out, we have a tool that can do all the work of handling exposure timing for us. That tool is the SRS. This is something — along with cellphones and decent clothes — that Heisig didn’t have back in the 1970s. It’s not his fault: those were rough times.

Pre-SRS, I think it may well have been important to work harder to make sure the kanji were really remembered. Maybe.  But not any more. With the SRS handling exposure-timing, I think we can afford to relax and still enjoy the same results we would with the traditional “testing” style approach.

This is just something I’ve come up with recently. I’ve been doing it for about two weeks. I have no long-term data. I may be completely off base. Or it may be that this method is valid, but only once one has learned to memorize/decompose kanji in a more traditional Heisig style. I may just be riding on the fruits of my previous “hard work” (defenders of anything boring and difficult love to bring this one up…occasionally they’re right, but often they, like all of us, are more interested in propping up a certain worldview than in being effective).

My experience with the previously mentioned memory situations tells me this format will work. For one thing, it’ll get me doing one of my favorite things — writing kanji by hand — sans struggle. If this kind of thing, over time, works for phone numbers and home addresses, then, over time, and armed with memory/presentation management software, I see no reason why it shouldn’t work for kanji.

Anyway, something to try with your new kanji if nothing else.

Related link: Lazy Kanji Kendo Mod