No matter how many reps and reps and reps and fails and fails, you just can't connect them?

For me, it's "risk". I've done well with tough ones before (a story change worked for 'specialty' when I was having trouble with that). No matter what, when I get this one I pull a blank. Story, gone. Kanji shape, gone. Primitives, gone.

I think it's because of it's weird shape and also because the primitives have absolutely nothing to do with the word. My sentence is "It's risky to look at the sun directly with your eyes" but I can't seem to even remember it. When "risk" comes up, I totally forget it. And the problem is, there's not many alternative stories for this one .

What do?

Now, I'm not sure what your level of Japanese is, but I would say change the keyword to something that you can remember, preferably a Japanese word using the kanji.

For me, I read your post and I had no clue what "risk" was, until I realized that it was the ぼう in 冒険. I have it in my deck as ぼう険[ぼうけん] instead of "risk."

If that doesn't work for you, an English word may be a substitute, as long as it's not being used in RtK. What I do to look up keyword -> kanji is search on http://ziggr.com/heisig/. If "risk" isn't working, go to a thesaurus, find a word that does work, make sure it's not on that site, and hopefully it'll work.

But, I think switching to a Japanese keyword would be the best. But maybe that's just because that's what I do

What I do is not worry about it, and move on, because:

1. The English keyword is not all that important.

2. You have years and years of study ahead, more than enough opportunity to remember this kanji.

3. By the time you get towards the end of RTK1, you'll be failing kanji by the dozens anyway, and risk, having come up so often by then, will probably be one of the ones you do remember.

Eventually, and I talk from experience is that. Your going to replace the English keywords with japanese ones in your head. It's only natural, so if you forget some it's alright, just keep going and keep learning japanese. Even Heisig said it himself in his book that when learning real japanese the keywords will get replaced by japanese ones. Actually you don't need to do RTK to learn Japanese even but it gives you the edge on meanings/learning the writings separate from the other skills.

Should I be actively replacing keywords that I know the matching Japanese word for them with Japanese keywords?

For instance, 見る instead of 'see'?

Would that screw future stories up or what? lol.

When I can't remember something (in Anki) I star it and hit hard. No matter how many times I review I hit hard. I keep hitting it until I finally understand it. Then I click miss and review it like normal.

No use forcing it sometimes.

Quote:Would that screw future stories up or what? lol.

This is something I never thought of...It has the potential to screw them up, unless you keep your mind open and understand multiple meanings for certain primitives. People use Spiderman for 糸, but my stories range from string, spiderman, rope, cobwebs, etc...they all come down to the same thing.

If you want to stick to straight RtK without changing anything, I'd go with what kazelee suggests.
I didn't add Japanese keywords until I was far done with RtK.

I'd probably recommend keeping the english keywords. I finished months ago, but I still study my kanji deck fairly strictly as english keyword->kanji, with the 読み also on the card to disambiguate the ones with close keywords (what's the difference between scold, chastise, admonish and rebuke? Who cares). I'm not sure how stories are supposed to work if you purely use japanese keywords and your japanese isn't good enough yet to come up with stories in japanese (including renaming all the primitives??). Maybe once you know a kanji well enough that a story isn't necessary, then using a japanese keyword as a prompt is probably better.

I use skritter to practice writing actual words (which i suppose is equivalent to heisig with japanese keywords).

Edit: Right, answering the actual question, lol. Just hit again, or hard if you're sick of seeing it for a while. Generally though, i found that the amount i worried about kanji that i kept missing was far out of proportion to how much time failing them actually wasted. Ie, just fail them and don't think about it. You'll probably end up rote learning some of them in the traditional style through all the failing, which imho is fine so long as you're not trying to do it for hundreds. The kanji you're failing are either fairly uncommon (in which case who cares if it takes a while to sink in) or common enough that they will click pretty quick when you see them in the wild.

I think the biggest advantage of keeping English keywords is that you can write stories for kanji that are based upon your personal connection with the English word. For example, if you play a word association game, and the first thing that "wheat" makes you think of is "wheat bread" (a slice of brown bread), then it might be useful to create a story for that kanji, which can then be inserted into that same mental slot. After a while, especially with constant use, the story becomes less important, as your visual memory takes over for recognition. If you use a Japanese keyword, then you miss out on your preexisting connotations and memory triggers for the English word. Your memory slot for your English keyword will naturally be stronger and more defined.

For "risk" in particular, I naturally think of the board game "Risk", the movie "Risky Business", etc. However, I learned the kanji for it by using the phrase "You risk losing your eyes, if you look at the sun overhead." If that doesn't stick for you, then you can imagine playing the game Risk with Tom Cruise, who doesn't risk going blind looking at the sun, because of his sunglasses (I realize that sunglasses aren't designed for direct solar viewing however). So try to use the keyword as a strong personal trigger; most people will have similar or the same triggers, so it's easy to use the most popular stories in most cases.

I think of the stories as training wheels, which exist to help me get strong in remembering the form, before I go freewheeling. The goal is simultaneous visual recognition, without processing through the mnemonic. Like, I could tell you the nine planets in order without using a mnemonic, just because I'm familiar with the solar system (and there are only nine total), but some people might want a mnemonic to make it easier to familiarize themselves with the concept. since RTK has thousands of kanji, it makes sense to use memory methods and mnemonics to make the task smoother.

If a change of story doesn't help, I just keep failing them. Sooner or later most of them get imprinted on my brain through repetition. If not, I figure I'll get 'em later when they cross my path in some other context.

with a kanji as easy as risk,im sorry but i think you are doing something wrong.

"My sentence is "It's risky to look at the sun directly with your eyes" but I can't seem to even remember it"

i think that is the part you are doing wrong,are you forming vivid images in your mind?or are you just memorizing sentences?because the second way isn't what heisig is about and won't get you anywhere.you have to feel the sun in your eyes,you have to make a good image that will stick.
if i am mistaken and you are doing it the right way,then invest more time in those kanji,there are TONS of stories on this site,if i am having a really hard with a certain kanji that i cannot make any sort of connection between its keyword and the primitives,i give it more time(maybe even up to 30 minutes with reaaaally hard ones,its worth it),i look at a lot of stories,sometimes i find a really good story buried far down the page,and other times im just looking at a good story then it just hits me,my brain automatically morphs that story into my own,and i probably would never forget that kanji.invest more time in studying rather than waste it on failing reviews.i am curious,how far are you into the book?

I'm 100 characters in.

It's not like I had an issues with any other ones. The rest so far have either been easy, or after a fail or two it just snaps.

"Risk" just screws me up. I don't think of my story when I read the word risk, or the kanji either. I changed the story to something better though, that no one on the site thought of. I'm gonna see if it works tonight.

Another thing -- phantombk201 says to make vivid stories. This is true. However, once you get farther into it and seeing what works for you, perhaps you'll like the stories that are more "wordplay" than vivid stories.
One of my favorites is 栗 (chestnut). The story? "Chestnut tree? WEST-nut TREE"

What you need to do (at first, it'll fall away) is think, "What does this word mean, how does it feel to me?" Get the correct connotations and get a story that matches that. "Risk" when you hear the word what is the FIRST thing that goes through your head? That's what you should base your story on.

thats great,just see what the first thing your brain thinks of when you see a certain keyword,and try to apply that into your story,what works for others might not work the same for you,just keep in mind that using your imagination and investing time in your stories will help you greatly in the future,im at frame 718,and i can tell you it gets much harder to create stories after about 1/4th of the way through.take your time so you don't regret when a kanji you let slip by is a part of a more complicated kanji later on and that could mess up both for you,that happened to me quite a lot because when i first began i didn't really understand what to do,for example,the kanji for risk will be used later as a part of the kanji for cap(if i remember correctly)
Anyway,good luck and have fun
Edit:yes,asriel is right,ofcourse don't try to rely on wordplay too much unless you find that it works good for you.

Thanks for the help guys. I'll take the advice to heart, especially about creating your own stories.

I've had the habit of picking out a couple stories from RevTK (copy paste) that I thought were perfect, but would quickly forget because they weren't of my own creation, or because my brain wasn't wired right for the phrase. It sounds weird, but here's an example.

For specialty (専), the top starred sentence was the following:

"After you have chosen your 10 fields of study, measure how good you are at each to find out your specialty."

The problem was that despite being a great sentence, because there was a comma (phrase break, take a breath) right before 'measure', I kept using the mnemonic and thinking that ten fields was on the left side, then there was a 'break' and measure was on the right, because there's a break in the Kanji.

It looked something like this:
古寸
(except as one kanji, and the box in the left character was 田, not 口). Basically, terribly wrong.

I wasn't consciously thinking that, but just naturally for some reason I would write it wrong. When I reworded it (and thusly, thought about it myself), it came to me instantly and the next time I ran into the card I got it right (and so on and so forth).

So I'm going to try not to steal stories from RevTK word for word from now on, rather thinking of my own stories and using RevTK as inspiration. Thanks for the help.

PS: I just hopped on Anki and did 35 reviews and got Risk right without using the story because I was reminded of this thread, haha . I pushed 'hard' anyway so next time I'll push 'good'.

If it helps for risk, imagine a scene in a torture porn movie like Saw, but is called "Risk" where the guy has a magnifying glass using the Sun to burn a hole in the victim's eye. Painful imagery like that helps relate not only the Kanji, but the meaning behind the kanji.

I figured something out for my learning process.

I guess in my mind, for me, brevity is essential. Basically, when I'm first learning complex Kanji (made up of 2 or more primitives), the primitives in my story (for instance, in the case of 'sand', stone and few) are the most essential thing in my mind. If I can remember the primitives, then I can remember how to write it.

However, when the stories are too complex (I risk looking at the sun which hurts my eye), or not concise enough, I lose the primitives in a sea of prepositions and unrelated nouns. Actually, it seems like the actual keyword (Risk, sand, etc) is not as important most of the time. I mean of course I need to connect the story to the keyword somehow, but more importantly, be brief and concise about it.

So, I try to write my own story that's as concise as possible before I look at the RevTK examples (as the advice above suggested), then see if the RevTK stories are any better and if they are, shorten them as much as possible to get barebones. That also adds the effect that the story becomes more 'mine' instead of a copy paste job.

That's why I had big success with one, 'bright'. Sure it's easy, but the first time I failed it for whatever reasons (not focused or something), so in my mind I just reinforced the story, "the sun and moon are bright" instead of "the sun and the moon brighten the sky" and it stuck.

So, I guess I can learn a little about being short and sweet in English while I'm learning my Kanji in Japanese

I'm doing basically the same thing: after I have figured out the exact connotations that come with the keyword (English is not my native tongue - I'm learning quite a bit about that language on the side here) I capture the image that forms in my mind, then try to work the occuring primitives somehow into a story that describes that image.

As for the brevity of the stories, I beg to disagree. Essential for reproduction of the kanji is (at least for me) the image in my mind, and I have found that in some cases of complex kanji with 4 or even more primitives, a perfect image pops up in my head within a split second. But to write down a story describing that image often takes an entire paragraph.
In my experience, I have a lot more trouble remembering those kanji, where I packed all occuring primitives into one sentence for the sake of brevity.

I'm around frame 1350 now and it took me quite a while to figure out an MO that works for me. Still it is not perfect - just the other day I skrewed up with 'intestines' (腸, frame 544) and 'entrails' (臓, frame 851). Those synonymous keywords give me quite a struggle. Or is there a subtle difference in meaning I don't get?

Well, there is in how it's used in compounds, but until then you'll have to find really distinct pictures:for intestines/entrails, the piggybank story vs the pharaoh story usually does the trick.

If two words with similar meanings are confusing you, consider the nuance of both words and try to incorporate that into your story. When I think of "intestines", I think of the tubes carrying digested food, and still inside my body. For "entrails" however, I think of a dead body with all its guts splayed everywhere, and birds are picking at the remains. I often keep the Merriam Webster dictionary open in a separate tab when I'm going through the stories on this website. For "wisteria" and "chrysanthemum", and other unusual and uncommon words, I have to read about the meaning in a dictionary or on wikipedia before I feel comfortable making up a story.