Can anyone tell me if they have found it beneficial to write down stories and how well it seems to help in the long run? Often I will forget a story (I'll remember the character) but stories start to get cross threaded and I can sometimes make a mistake.

Thanks

Your goal is to remember the character, not the story!

It's even better if you can go keyword -> kanji without thinking about the mnemonics; in fact, in the end they will fade away and be replaced by visual memory (I'm quoting Heisig here).

It's enough to repeat the story in your head while you are writing down the kanji, IMHO.

Helps to know that this is what should be naturally happening overtime (I didn't full understand his intro in all honesty :p). Then I shall continue on as I have!

Thanks

You're welcome.

By the way, the relevant informations are at the beginning of Lesson 31.

I usually try to read the top 10 stories for each kanji and then choose try to memorize one that sticks to my minds. Sometimes I make my own story that suits me better than any of those 10 that I read. Most of the time one or two stories on this website are sufficient. From time to time I combine two stories on this website into one story of my own or I just made some small changes just to make it easier for me to remember.

I often forget partially forget stories, so each time when I look at the keyword I recreate the story and then kanji from the story. So the stories turn out a little bit different every time, but that's fine. After a while I get even better story than before. I don't bother to write the story that I memorized. I know that If I forget the story I need to make a new one anyway. In that case I just look again at the list of 10 ten stories to figure out a slightly different one. However, I rarely need to do that.

I have never used any of Heisig stories, they all are hard for me to remember.

Right now I'm using my Anki deck that contains:
first page:
)keyword
)Sometimes I copy and paste the dictionary definition of the word just to make the meaning of the word more precise. I do this every time I mistake one kanji for another one. This helps me reduce the collisions.
)Alternatively, I could just write an example sentence to convey the meaning of keyword that is used.
)Since English is not my native language I always write a translated word as well. As I found it hard to remember the English keyword by itself. That is especially try for keywords that I've never seen being used before.

second page:
)One or two words using that Kanji that are used just as a reminder. If a kanji doesn't have a commonly used word then I just don't use any examples.

)The top 10 stories copied from this website + a few selected ones that provide examples/links to webpages/etc.

In the last 17 days I learned 864 kanjis while maintaining 93% correct answers. So it's not bad at all. xD

I would share my deck in Anki, but it's still incomplete. To make the life easier I added hyperlinks from each Kanji to a dictionary on the iPad(Midori and Japanese). Usually I try to check how a word is used in kanji compounds with just one touch of a finger xD

Quote:I don't bother to write the story that I memorized. I know that If I forget the story I need to make a new one anyway.

I couldn't agree more.

If I can't remember the story, I change it straightaway.
So there is no point in writing it down, not even the first time!

Sometimes when a kanji is harder to remember I try to memorize two stories. In the next review I'm usually able to recall one of them or both.

As a general rule, the more time I spend thinking deeply about stories the easier it is to remember it. It can be trying to make a few stories of my own, or just analyzing the top 10 stories starting from 10th to 1st, etc. Sometimes I try to change the meaning of a primitive slightly or I check the examples of usage of that kanjis so that I can understand the meaning of the keyword.

I'd honestly say it depends on you. What helped me was writing down the story in very simple form and using this site to flesh it out a bit more. It also helped to write the kanji 5 times while saying the story, but again, that was me. As stated though, eventually the story fades. Going through my reviews now I usually don't even bother recalling the story and sometimes I need to go back and look the bloody things up if I've forgotten a kanji. They helped at first blush however.

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A five time increase in time might seem like a lot, but it takes a few seconds at most to write out a single kanji, doesn't it? Even doing something like 200 cards every day wouldn't take all that long, would it?

uisukii Wrote:A five time increase in time might seem like a lot, but it takes a few seconds at most to write out a single kanji, doesn't it? Even doing something like 200 cards every day wouldn't take all that long, would it?

Depends on how detailed he writes the kanji, what paper he uses, distractions, writing the kanji wrong and having to re-write etc..

Of course it wouldn't be that much if he added like 10 new kanji per day.

uisukii Wrote:A five time increase in time might seem like a lot, but it takes a few seconds at most to write out a single kanji, doesn't it? Even doing something like 200 cards every day wouldn't take all that long, would it?

Depended on the chapter, for RTK1 I was usually going through 20-40 a day. My general target was 20ish, or thereabouts.

I only have my own experiences to go by, so I'll just share it here.

In the margins of my RtK book I wrote down the stories for every kanji, underlining each primitive element as they showed up and circling the keyword. I've virtually never had to do a "story repair," that of going out of my way to look it up, nor have I needed or missed them on my SRS cards. In the rare case I need to repair a story in my brain, it's as easy as cracking open my RtK book, and there it is.

Doing this also helps loads in the unlikely event of stopping/forgetting RtK over a long period of time, as happens to the best of us.

Greetings,

Before I learned of this awesome site, I began my Kanji study from RTK with word cards. I continue with this method because I think that having to write out each story helps me to recall it rather than just copying someone else's story here, electronically. I also use the way that I write my stories to help me organize how the primitives are arranged in each kanji.

On the front of a card I first head it with the keyword, underlined. I then write out a story which includes the keyword, underlined again, as well as the primitives which are placed in parenthesis. I use the space of the card to help organize the Kanji. For example, Kanji 622, "pining", the card looks as follows:

Pining

at the (graveyard)
a (valentine)
is placed on the grave of one who I am still pining for

The back side only has the Kanji

I do this because there is some interesting information about spacial memory encoding, and I arrange the parenthetical primitives in hopes that this is an extra little nudge to cement the mnemonic in my memory.

I am still making word cards as we speak. I like them, even though I mainly use the SRS system here to do my review. It is nice to have a physical, tangible artifact of my study.

Hope this helps,


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