Learning Kanji: Creating Micro Stories in Your Head (II)

In the last post of ‘Learning Kanji: Creating Micro Stories in Your Head’ we already talked about how helpful it can be to create little stories to help better remember kanji. We broke down the character for okoru 怒る into its elementary meanings to come up with a story. However, we did not go beyond the level of the radicals as a unit: I want to clarify at this point that when it comes to learning radicals, I normally learn them ‘only’ stroke by stroke. For radicals themselves I do not come up with stories – I figured it would get too complicated for me. Plus, you see these radical so often that soon you do not need stories anymore anyway. With the stroke-by-stroke method you rely on your muscle memory. After writing the radical a few times, your hand will know what to do automatically.

There are radicals that can also stand alone and do not need to be put into ‘context’ together with other parts or radicals, like the kanji for ‘heart’ kokoro 心 for example. When ‘heart’ appears as a radical in another kanji, it often looks like it is squished together, like on the bottom of the kanji for okoru 怒る (it needs to make room for the other parts of the kanji).

Let’s look at another example on what a micro story could look like: the kanji for kazoeru 数える ‘to count’ consists of the radical for rice 米 on the upper left, woman 女 on the lower left and the bigger part on the right side that looks like a chair 攵. We need to combine rice, woman and chair to create the meaning of ‘to count’. In my story a woman is sitting on a chair counting grains of rice. Now we have successfully linked the elementary meanings with the meaning of the kanji for kazoeru 数える as a whole.

Creating stories like this will become easier with time because you will get more creative over time but also because you will become more familiar with the different parts of the characters and will not need to start from zero anymore.

Written by Jannick Scherrer