I was just thinking that perhaps my approach to naming and creating stories for primitives might be holding me back. As I'm restarting my study after a loooong break, I was wondering if anyone had a better system for assigning meaning to primitives that works a little bit better than just deciding on a primitive meaning the first time you see it or the first few kanji it's used in? I feel like I've chosen some stupid primitive ideas in the past that don't lend to making cohesive stories later. Thoughts?

(2016-02-23, 3:55 am)Caralain Wrote: I was just thinking that perhaps my approach to naming and creating stories for primitives might be holding me back. As I'm restarting my study after a loooong break, I was wondering if anyone had a better system for assigning meaning to primitives that works a little bit better than just deciding on a primitive meaning the first time you see it or the first few kanji it's used in? I feel like I've chosen some stupid primitive ideas in the past that don't lend to making cohesive stories later. Thoughts?

The koohii kanji study section provides you with two major tools for success that don't exist elsewhere:

1) lots of different stories which are voted on by the community and

2) an easy method to chaining cohesive stories.

Heisig tends to cluster elements together, particularly as the book progresses, so I parsed through each chapter before beginning to study. For example, if there were 6 kanji with similar elements clustered together, I then browsed the top stories at koohii.com to help find a cohesive story that resonated with me and could carry me through the 6 kanji. Then I selected those stories.

Sometimes they were a top story. Sometimes they were they were a story that was chained by a single author. Sometimes they were a low-voted story. On occasion I needed to create my own story.

I found that some elements were incredibly easy to remember (Spiderman, Mr. T, Bruce Lee, etc.). Interestingly, those were tied to vivid images. There are plenty of "hardcore" stores, although they tended to blend together and were less useful than expected, so I would recommend using those sparingly.

I feel it also helps if you add the primaries into the story in the order they appear in the character.  For instance, for 激 I had something like "Amidst the waters white, a lone compass floats along, as the taskmaster drives the waves to violence."

(2016-02-23, 11:26 am)Raulsen Wrote: I feel it also helps if you add the primaries into the story in the order they appear in the character.  For instance, for 激 I had something like "Amidst the waters white, a lone compass floats along, as the taskmaster drives the waves to violence."

I thought that you place the elements how they are placed in the character in your " imaginative memory " that is I create a pool on the left white compass being thrown into the pool by a person on the right. Remembering the sentences with the order of the words in it isn't exactly the Heisig method I think.

(2016-02-23, 1:23 pm)Sztermel Wrote: I thought that you place the elements how they are placed in the character in your " imaginative memory " that is I create a pool on the left white compass being thrown into the pool by a person on the right. Remembering the sentences with the order of the words in it isn't exactly the Heisig method I think.

Heisig's method as described in the book seems to implicitly assume a fairly visual memory. Not everybody's brain works like that, and for some of us remembering phrases, sentence fragments or word games makes up for not having the sort of memory of images Heisig clearly has very strongly.

I like these tips: http://forum.koohii.com/thread-12927.html

But to add an anecdote:

I used the feedback I received from my use of the flashcards. When I failed a story, I took a minute to figure out why. When a story came to me right away, I thought about what kind of story or image worked so well for me. I rewrote the poor stories, or spruced them up with the tips in the link, to try to fix them. Soon I was much better at choosing a good story (for me) from the many suggestions on the site, or writing my own.

I think that sometimes I'm creating a story that has too many details, and I'm latching onto the wrong ones? For example, I have a really hard time remembering "post a bill" because I'm imagining the fortune teller's little slips being hung up in trees an functioning as advertisements, but then I'm trying to remember out of all those concepts (tree? wood? hook?) which ones are actually in this kanji. I'm also confusing "one drop" and "a drop", "human legs" and "animal legs" and forgetting more conceptual ones I created like "Slash's ten magic fingers made him thousands of fans" for 'thousand". >_<