Comments for Roots and Grubs

Comment on A day at the museum by nomitai

nomitai — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:49:08 +0000

おめでとうございます！よくできました！

Comment on A day at the museum by Becky

Becky — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:39:44 +0000

Kudos to you

Comment on A day at the museum by Mark J Musante

Mark J Musante — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:33:17 +0000

I remember the first time that happened to me. I was watching a program that was talking about Japanese internment camps. They showed the forms that they had the people fill in, and I read “complete” “name” (sorry, can’t type kanji), and realized I had seen the kanji for “Full Name”.

Comment on Perpetrating by mamster

mamster — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:32:16 +0000

Good point, dfan. I’ve already been occasionally borrowing a story when I find Heisig’s story unhelpful.

nomitai, it might help if I spell “sewn” correctly. I’m not sure what the elements the story refers to are, because I haven’t gotten to them. One of the controversial things about Heisig is that he invents his own meanings for primitives—like, 九 represents “baseball team,” which is probably not what the creators of oracle bone script had in mind. The idea is to give you strong images to build stories around; as long as you remember the meaning of the character as a whole, who cares if you give the parts goofy names?

Comment on Perpetrating by nomitai

nomitai — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:15:01 +0000

I LOVE the explanation for “beat” (which is pronounced “utsu,” but I cheated - I had to look it up). Thanks for the mnemonic. I have to admit I don’t get the other two (although I’m a big “Trek” fan).

Comment on Perpetrating by dfan

dfan — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:41:34 +0000

You’re already past where I got to. But note that the Reviewing the Kanji site that you mentioned last time allows people to publish their own stories for kanji (and vote on them), so you can easily retroactively crowd-source your mnemonics.

Comment on Perpetrating by Mark Musante

Mark Musante — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:07:42 +0000

Yeah, that’s about where I stopped with RtK, alas. Good luck!

Comment on Calling Tokyo by riye

riye — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:37:01 +0000

That’s so funny. Reminds me of the time my Japanese boss wrote in a letter to a former colleague “I wish you to remember me as I was before.” (Translation: “I’d like to keep in touch.”) And the office staff was all “WTF?” so we finally had to ask. Boss: “Oh I want him to keep in touch.” Me: “Well why don’t you just write that?” Boss: “Oh! Okay.” (surprised tone of voice)

Comment on Hazy with a chance of brain breakage by ARC

ARC — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 02:20:30 +0000

memorizing that many of anything makes me itchy just to think about it, now that I've been out of school for that long, but the book sounds awesome. I bet that guy could lead a kickass in-person crash course over a weekend and you'd learn SO much.

Also, thanks to you, my toddler's favorite book is Bread and Jam for Frances (we never would have heard of it had we not read Hungry Monkey when she was a newborn). Now she's pretty much memorized every item in Albert's lunch. We are getting a little sick of Albert and his fastidiousness, but it's all good if she's happy :)

Comment on Hazy with a chance of brain breakage by dfan

dfan — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:45:26 +0000

Whoops. Perhaps I need to work on reading English before I move on to Japanese.