Here are some of mine...
http://electric-raichu.deviantart.com/ga...-Mnemonics

Wow these are all really cool! I actually have stopped drawing pictures but this kinda motivates me to start back up again!

I'm not really good at drawing, but I think I'll try showing the characters to my oldest daughter, telling her the stories, which will help me learn. Maybe she can follow in my footsteps, remembering the kanji with me.

Heh, you don't need to be good at drawing to make it help you remember. If you ever feel the need to draw something, feel free to post it here as well. It only adds to the experience .

roderik Wrote:Heh, you don't need to be good at drawing to make it help you remember. If you ever feel the need to draw something, feel free to post it here as well. It only adds to the experience .

True, but I hope it wouldn't be too embarrassing! I think I might try this in my free time, though, because it might help me remember some of the more obscure kanji I've come across so far.

Wait, you guys actually write out the stories and draw all these pictures?

Am I missing out on some benefit by not doing this? I do write the kanji, but I just imagine the stories, and I store them on this website. It seems like quite a bit of work doing all this, and since what I've done so far seems (relatively) easy, maybe I'm not doing enough work.

Haha, people draw pictures because it's a fun and memorable experience, and so it reinforces the story pretty strongly - but you definitely don't have to do it! I think most RTKers have never drawn a picture, and are doing just fine. To be honest, I haven't even written out a lot of my stories either.

I know Heisig feels too easy at times, but judge whether you need to do more work by your retention %, not by how much work you're putting into it. One of the big benefits of RTK is the size of the benefit compared with the amount of work you have to put in.

Hmm, well, I'm doing quite a nice number of kanji, and i'm scoring around 90% on reviews from the third pile orange stack, so I can't be that bad off.

I've only been doing it for a little while though, so the hard stuff is probably going to catch up to me real soon.

I'm having a bad day today, 52 failed cards... Sometimes I draw very basic things in my notebook when I can't remember certain kanji... But for a change I drew them using MSpaint today xD

I'll probably do more... But here are a few

http://s292.photobucket.com/albums/mm20/savara_eiliana/

So far, conceal, plan, defer and unlucky ^_^; (no idea why I can't remember those. indeed.)

shaydwyrm Wrote:Haha, people draw pictures because it's a fun and memorable experience, and so it reinforces the story pretty strongly - but you definitely don't have to do it! I think most RTKers have never drawn a picture, and are doing just fine. To be honest, I haven't even written out a lot of my stories either.

I know Heisig feels too easy at times, but judge whether you need to do more work by your retention %, not by how much work you're putting into it. One of the big benefits of RTK is the size of the benefit compared with the amount of work you have to put in.

For me anyway it helps with the kanji that won't stick. I've actually finished the book but there are still like 300-400 kanji that just won't stick. So as I go through those I draw picts for the ones that I think it will work for. I wouldn't suggest it for EVERY kanji, otherwise you'd take forever to finish Heisig. But only those that you seem to keep missing.

skinnyneo Wrote:I wouldn't suggest it for EVERY kanji, otherwise you'd take forever to finish Heisig. But only those that you seem to keep missing.

Yup, seems to work like that.

I just did a few images in photoshop - see them at http://heisigpictures.wordpress.com - and it was a really interesting experience. It reminded me how important it is to use the most concrete version of a primitive so you can create a solid visual story - for example 'muscle' (like the arm of a body builder) is a much better version of the [kana]KA[/kana] primitive than 'power' (hard to visualise distinctly).



Making the images is great for me, though it's time consuming and I'm not sure that it necessarily does fix a scene in your mind better than if you imagine it properly. Imagining PROPERLY is the key word though - and actually trying to create a physical image every now and then is probably a really good check to do on your stories.

Also, I really wonder if looking at *other people's stories* (instead of your own) makes it any easier to remember the kanji. Does the cognitive load really decrease? Or are you more likely to skip your own mental efforts and come out worse off? Looking at some other images linked here on this thread, for example, makes me realise that my connection to stories in my imagination is heaps more powerful than any connection I could have to the depictions done by other people. Do others think the same? I'd be interested in your responses to my images linked above, for example.

I used to draw pictures for some kanji the first time I started RTK (I have began it again after some months...) but then I quit because it took me too much time. Since English is not my first language sometimes it helped me a lot (expecially when I had troubles even remembering the meaning of the keyword XD), but now my English has improved so I prefer spend some times to be sure I understood the kanji meaning and making a story instead of drawing. But who knows, I may do it again for very hard kanji.

I have to say, a lot of these pictures are way better than the stories I used to learn those Kanji. If they were an option among the user supplied stories, I would've picked them in a second.

For the ones you guys own, you should post links in the Study section. There already are some links to pics, but very few, and only pictures, not specific drawings or photoshops. Maybe, if there's enough of them, eventually there'll be a reason to add some kind of thumbnail feature, make it look nicer than just links. It wouldn't be difficult to do.

Stansfield123 Wrote:For the ones you guys own, you should post links in the Study section. There already are some links to pics, but very few, and only pictures, not specific drawings or photoshops. Maybe, if there's enough of them, eventually there'll be a reason to add some kind of thumbnail feature, make it look nicer than just links. It wouldn't be difficult to do.

I'm already doing this but agree a thumbnail feature could be a great idea.