Meaning of 員 - Heisig vs world


I'm studying the kanji on the Heisig's book "Remembering the Kanji" and
yesterday I came across the number 56: 員 which is translated in the book as
"employee". I also have a subscription on JapanesePod101 and the today world
of day was: 従業員 which turned out to mean... "employee".

I'm actually quite confused. After a search on wwwjdic I found out that 員
means "member" so why Heisig translates it as "employee"?




Heisig's keywords aren't translations. Remember that you aren't actually
learning any Japanese when you do RTK--you're learning mnemonic devices which
help you to remember how to write all of the kanji in his list. This skill is
supposed to help you when do you start learning Japanese.

The book does purport to teach you the meanings of characters, too, but the
single keywords are **not** reliable translations of anything. If it were
otherwise, we could say that a 弁護士 is a **Valve Safeguard Gentleman** , but a
弁護士 is in fact a **lawyer**.

In this case, he probably chose the term "employee" for 員 based on certain
compounds it appears in, including the one you mentioned as well as (for
example) 社員 and 店員. If we play the game of putting keywords together, we get
"company member" and "store member" for these. Are these really that much
better than "company employee" and "store employee"? (Note that your word 従業員
is gibberish either way--neither "accompany business member" nor "accompany
business employee" makes any sense.)

The truth is, you can't learn the meanings of all the words and morphemes
written with a given kanji by memorizing a single keyword. It'll work okay in
some cases, but in a lot of others it won't. Instead, you need to learn what
words (like べんごし) and morphemes (like いん) mean, and you can't assume that
their meanings will resemble Heisig's keywords for the kanji they're written
with.

So when you encounter a keyword that doesn't seem to match up with the meaning
of a word or morpheme, just shrug and move on. There'll be plenty more where
that came from.




> Each kanji is assigned a key word that represents its basic meaning, or
> **one of its basic meanings**. The key words have been selected on the basis
> of **how a given kanji is used in compounds** and on the meaning it has on
> its own. [...] To be sure, many of the characters carry a side range of
> connotations not present in their English equivalents, and vice versa; many
> even carry several ideas not able to be captured in a single English word.
> _By simplifying the meanings through the use of key words, however, one
> becomes familiar with a kanji and at least one of its principal meanings.
> The others can be added later with relative ease, in much the same way as
> one enriches one’s understanding of one’s native tongue by learning the full
> range of feelings and meanings embraced by words already known._ (RTK1, p9)

Heisig's keywords are just that: keywords. They don't represent the full range
of meaning of the kanji and certainly are not "translations". I suspect Heisig
chose "employee" for 員 for its use in common words such as 社員 and 従業員 etc.
While in this case I agree that "member" would have been a better keyword, I
think the real problem here is that you haven't properly read the introduction
to RTK.

As a small aside: while there's a fair amount of controversy (opinions both
ways) regarding Heisig's method in the Japanese learning community, I will
just add that I found the method helpful and found the italic'd part of the
quote to be true.

