Hey everyone,

I'm pretty new these forums and RTK in general. I just hit kanji 300 and something is bothering me, so I have a question about reviewing in general. When reviewing a card in Anki, it feels almost cheap to read the whole story as it basically lines up all the primitives for me even when I wouldn't remember the kanji only from the keyword itself. Will it help me remember later even if I use the story to help me in remembering?

Also I have another question about another topic: Is it okay which meaning to choose for each primitive I come across? I see that Heisig assigns meanings to each one for the stories he gives us, is it okay to use another meaning?

Thanks, and sorry for my noobiness.

Ramsey Wrote:I'm pretty new these forums and RTK in general. I just hit kanji 300 and something is bothering me, so I have a question about reviewing in general. When reviewing a card in Anki, it feels almost cheap to read the whole story as it basically lines up all the primitives for me even when I wouldn't remember the kanji only from the keyword itself. Will it help me remember later even if I use the story to help me in remembering?

I don't think it makes much of a difference in the long term, but if you feel like that, you could put the story on the back of the card instead if you like.

Ramsey Wrote:Also I have another question about another topic: Is it okay which meaning to choose for each primitive I come across? I see that Heisig assigns meanings to each one for the stories he gives us, is it okay to use another meaning?

Yeah, it's much better using customized primitives, it makes them much easier to remember. Primitives like "state of mind" are much easier to remember in kanji when you use somthing like data (of startrek) instead.

bombpersons Wrote:I don't think it makes much of a difference in the long term, but if you feel like that, you could put the story on the back of the card instead if you like.

Hmm, is that how most people do it? Do you guys usually just read the whole story with every card?

You don't want to read the story when reviewing, just go keyword-->kanji, if you can't recall the kanji immediately, or recall the story to help you grope your way to the kanji, then you should revise the story or spend more time imagining it.

Probably what people did up to a year or so ago, was people used this site first, then switched to Anki after words.

This site follows the book's reccomendations, going keyword-kanji with no story.

If you cant remember the story, then you are supposed to go back and rework the story after your reviews.

I think with the flexability of Anki and advice from AJATT, people have been putting stories in the Question side (as do I).

Here is what did/do.

I did RTK using this site, only keyword to kanji. After I finished all of RTK1, I switched to anki.

after about a half year, I now have the story in the Questions side, but with white text on white background, so that check it only when I need to.

You could try that.

Yeah, if you are reading the story and it's lining up the kanji for you, it sounds like the story is on the wrong part of the card. I don't have any of my stories in anki to be honest, I just use this site.

Keyword only, if I can't come up with the kanji from that then it gets failed and i review the story, tweak it, whatever.

If putting the story on the front of the card feels like cheating to you, then it's cheating.

I never did it, and as you can tell from the replies, most of us didn't do it, either. Most people here go keyword -> kanji. The stories just help you lock the kanji into your brain.

Using personal keywords for various primitives is perfectly fine. A lot of people do it, because frankly, some of the keywords Heisig chooses are kind of bland and not very conducive to good long-term memory formation. State of mind is a notorious one, as are person, thread, and a few others.

Hell, you're already breaking a bunch of rules in the first place, what are a few more?

If you don't like it, you can replace it.

Personification helps some people a lot, that's why you'll see a lot of stories where Person gets replaced with Mr. T or Chuck Norris, and Thread gets replaced with Spider-Man.

Just make sure before you replace something to check in the back of the book to see if the keyword you're replacing it with isn't already being used later on to avoid confusion.

I have started using "hints", written in white text on the front of my card in Anki. If I can't remember the story when seeing the keyword, or feel that I am perhaps mixing it up with another keyword, I mark that area so I can see the hint. The hint never contains any keywords. It may be a part of the story, or a few words to hint about what the story is. I find that using these hints makes it easier for me to tie the keyword and story together.

@rich_f. Heisig himself writes that you shouldn't use "person" as just person, but instead use a particular person for it.

I used to put it in the front of my card because it was endorsed by Khatz. But later, I did not remember any kanji even if it had an interval as long as 16 days. It hurt more than it helped.

I put it at the back side of the card now, if I fail a card, I read the story so I don't fail it next time.

The whole point of a 'story' is for a notion/concept of the kanji to float in your mind so there is a kinda 'direct neuron path' from the keyword to the kanji. By adding the story on the card I feel it is making you do one thing, memorise the story, which is fine if you're going to do a couple, I memorised about 5-10 stories, early on. It worked out in the end because I actually use the stories instead of memorising them (if you get what I mean by that).

But if you're going to have the story on every card, then there's a chance you may end up memorising all of them and not having a genuine feel to the actual story. I'm really not sure if I'm right or wrong, I'm just going off my memory of how I work with kanji where I memorised the stories simply because I couldn't think of anything better. The two off the top of my head were　博士　and 昇る. I just memorised their stories.

For me the whole point of the kanji was getting their stories right, I'm not as strict on myself as most of the guys here, So I'd think most of them would be against it as well.

I have always put the story as part of the answer. I still don't get why Khatz thinks it works well on the front. The objective is to learn to get from keyword to kanji, the story is a temporary bridge and having it on the front seems to me like something you would end up depending on.

On occasion I have gone from keyword to the story to writing the kanji and I am convinced I got it wrong because I have never seen that kanji before but actually I got it right. I find that one of the most amazing things about Heisig and I'm not really sure how you get to that stage with the story on the front.

That said, creating the stories is really the most time intensive thing for me. I look at many of the stories on this site and I really wonder how anyone managed to get from the keyword to the parts using the story. Many of the stories appear to be just a sentence that happens to contain all the relevant words.

Possibly spending a lot less time on creating the stories (just taking anything from koohii), then putting them on the front and racing through RTK to get on to "real" Japanese and let that reinforce the all the kanji through use in context is what Khatz is taking about. I don't know

What I do know is that after 6 months of 1-2 hours per day (that's a good day, some days it's 0 hrs, I have no idea what my average is) I'm at 1463 and I'm very confident about those 1463 kanji. Of my last 84 "mature" cards in Anki, I got 82 correct. I could easily believe I've gone too far towards correctness and that a bit more speed would increase my efficiency but I'm happy enough with my current method and don't want to screw it up.

One thing I regret not doing is changing the anki schema to produce 2 cards per kanji. a keyword -> story card and a story -> kanji card. Because my abiliity to recall a story is independent to my ability to turn the story into a correct kanji and continuing to test both parts for a kanji that only causes trouble for 1 part is a waste of time.