Heisig Keywords Are In

In Uncategorized by Skritter

author photoI’ve just finished adding, for Chinese and Japanese, support for Heisig keywords built into the practice page. This uses the upcoming custom definitions to replace the standard definitions with the Heisig ones for the applicable characters (1500 so far in Chinese, all 3007 in Japanese). You can easily turn it on and off from the language settings page. Have a try!

The changes don’t propagate to the other vocabulary tools, like the list editor and viewer, but if the practice page is where you need the keywords the most, then you should be good to go. I’ve also included them into the character decompositions which are in alpha testing, but some of the characters with radical forms don’t have the Heisig keywords applied to them yet.

The motivation behind Heisig keywords is that when you’re learning a ton of characters using Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji/Hanzi method and book, you don’t want a lot of extra meanings slowing you down. So you learn just one keyword per character first (usually corresponding to its primary meaning). Later, you learn all the rest of the ways the characters can be used in context in words.

Enjoy!

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