Hey all! I just reached FRAME 202 ('shelf') and the last sentence was quite unsettling to me:

"Here again, be careful not to let the rationality of the explanation get in the way before you turn it into a proper story."

It really made me question how I was making and using mnemonics. For example, for FRAME 115 ('nitrate'), I simplified Heisig's explanation to "When you pour nitrate on a rock, you get sparks," but did not take any time to imagine a mental image of this. Is this bad?

After re-reading the introduction, it seems to me that the mental image is important, but at the same time, I don't want to take an extra 3-5 minutes drilling a mental image if it's not necessary. Using only the phrases like the one above, my retention has been good, but I also realize that I've only done 202 kanji and this could change later.

Any input would be grealy apppreciated!

It took me a while to realize that the frequent warnings throughout the book were doing nothing to help me. Sounds like you're doing fine; you can probably just ignore them.

I use a mixture of quick phrases and more detailed images/stories for different kanji. It seems to work for me. If I can remember the kanji with a really simple sentence, I don't bother trying to make it more complicated! Just occasionally I find that a bit further down the line I can't remember a few of those kanji, but it's easy enough to take the extra time then to create a more vivid image, or a more detailed story, rather than giving myself extra hassle over them at the beginning.

I use story + couple-of-words short mnemonic combo. Story describes all primitives in consistent image, while short mnemonic helps to remember which story is to be associated with given keyword. Short mnemonic only directs to the story as a whole and needn't contain all, if any, of primitives. For example, "fear the doctor" is short mnemonic I use for raulir's story for 'fear', while there's no 'doctor' primitive there.

The way I see it, if you learn a kanji badly, you'll know soon enough because you'll fail it quickly and often during reviews. There's your signal if you're worried that you're doing it incorrectly.

markbir21 Wrote:Hey all! I just reached FRAME 202 ('shelf') and the last sentence was quite unsettling to me:

"Here again, be careful not to let the rationality of the explanation get in the way before you turn it into a proper story."

When I went through RTK1, I read that as a gentle reminder that you don't need to ground your stories / mental images / mnemonics / whatever by the rules of the physical world, nor do they need to make sense. Personally, I think it helps if it does. But if your story involes a vegan rock getting into an argument with an eagle over the health benefits of regular exercise, and it is memorable for you, then stick with it.

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markbir21 Wrote:"When you pour nitrate on a rock, you get sparks," but did not take any time to imagine a mental image of this. Is this bad?

Chances are you already have a mental image for it the moment you think about it, even though you did not consciously try to. That's why you can read other people's stories and sometimes one will just "jump" at you and you'll remember it without effort.

Or you read a book, any book, then when you see the book adaptation at the movies, you may feel like the characters do not look at all like what you had imagined, even though you did not make a conscious effort to picture what the characters looked like.

So if it's easy and you remember it like that don't worry about it.

Later in the book you may have to work with combinations of primitives which you can make no sense at all. You may be able to work somekind of plot, or find a story by someone else which you could work with, but you may have to spend some time consciously building images for it.

Personally I would really recommend to take that extra step, as soon as you run into difficult stories, because you'll find the stories will hold on very well. At least that's been my experience, I feel confident saying so because my recall rate, according to the database, is very good (i.e. over 70% of my cards have 7+ successive positive reviews and 0 failures)... actually it's the best, following one other member (this member has more cards with 0 failures than I, but with less successive reviews).

Well, I was going to say "everybody's mind is different, so your mileage may vary" and I find myself compromising again. Actually, I'm sure everybody's imagination works very much the same, but the "skill" at which you turn your primitives into images, and combine them, can vary from person to person. But it's a skill, so it just takes some practice!

So in resume, I think Heisig was right to emphasize on the imagination part. Maybe he was just "natural" at it (my guess), especially to do this sevral hours a day and finish 2000 kanji in under 8 weeks. Admittedly, I don't know what other areas of my life this "image making" process helped me with, but it certainly helped the kanji stick better. It's really not day-dreaming, I'm afraid this is really effort. And surprisingly I found the sustained effort of concentration on had a very relaxing effect outside of studying.

Also it was an interesting experience, you're sitting there writing a kanji... 3 times? and then you remember it. You just REMEMBER it!! (^_^)V Back in the days you would have been called a witch and burnt at the stake!

Thanks for all your replies! I think I understand now. At first I thought the RTK method was kinda "fragile" - i.e. if you do it wrong or misunderstand how to do it, it will backfire on you. But now I see that it is really not hard to follow at all - as Heisig himself says, the method is "simplicity itself."

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