Hello, I seem to be having trouble remembering the Kanji from story :/

I notice that I don't really get a picture or a story that stick to anything, I remember when I was at school I was never learning anything and was just listening / writing lessons and I could do my tests fine without even reviewing the lessons (only the really tough parts).

So that's one of the main question I'm asking myself today, do my stories suck? Or am I just not someone that is working fine with "stories"? Maybe I just have a graphic memory or something?

Just in case anyone would wonder I'm at 15-20 kanjis a day and that's how I usually "learn" them:

1/ I take the book and read what heisig says.
2/ I trace the kanji on paper a couple times.
3/ Goes on the site, open the kanji page and try to remember the story I had made (kinda easy since it takes a few seconds after reading).
4/ Reading other people's stories and trying to find which one is better or easier to remember...

I spend about 5-10min on each kanji so that's roughly 1h40 max to learn 20 kanjis but I do it twice a day, I learn like 10 the morning and 10 others the afternoon or something like that unless the lesson is 24 kanji for example I just do 12-12.

Then I do something else that day, and when I come back I can't even remember the whole kanji, just maybe a few strokes off or completely wrong. And what's weird is that I can't even recall the whole story either lol

So yea anyway help would be appreciated, maybe someone ran into that problem before. Learning something should not be a problem for me, I learned english alone and it turned out fine so the speaking part of Japanese shouldn't be much problem after, just annoying not being able to remember the Kanji. Was fine to remember the Hiragana and Katakana (without stories or anything, just writing them and reading them in sentences while listening to song for example, just katakana are harder since we don't see them often, I just follow MLB games on major.jp now to help me)

Thanks in advance.

I'd recommend slowing down. Yes, many people here can breeze through RTK1 in like a week or whatever, but not everyone. With my own schedule and other Japanese-learning activities, I can only review my kanji, SRS my vocab, and then add 6-10 kanji a day right now. I'd like to get it up, but I'll do it slowly to make sure I'm not getting way ahead of myself.

It could be you haven't nailed down the earliest stories. The stories attached to primitive elements and first-instance elements that get re-used a ton are the most important. For instance, "Stop" is something that's then used a number of times, as is "Words." If you don't get these types of kanji down well, all the kanji they are used to construct will fail. If you get them down (and other similar building-block kanji), then the compounds will be very easy and you won't need to work hard at memorizing the building-blocks, since eventually using them in the compounds reinforces the memorization of the building-blocks.

Slow down, maybe stop for a bit, and pick up something like KanjiGym, and in addition to this site, do some additional review of individual chapters in KanjiGym, starting at the top, to make sure to nail down those building-blocks. Because at this rate if you wait for the SRS in this website to pull those early kanji up, you'll could be waiting a long, long time.

RiP70R Wrote:1/ I take the book and read what heisig says.
2/ I trace the kanji on paper a couple times.
3/ Goes on the site, open the kanji page and try to remember the story I had made (kinda easy since it takes a few seconds after reading).
4/ Reading other people's stories and trying to find which one is better or easier to remember...

That would be a big problem for me. I have a hard time rewriting stories without the whole thing going *blonk*.

RiP70R Wrote:Then I do something else that day, and when I come back I can't even remember the whole kanji, just maybe a few strokes off or completely wrong. And what's weird is that I can't even recall the whole story either lol

Another big problem of mine. Review about ten minutes after without thinking about them in between, just to solidify them. This is a very important step for me that makes a world of a difference.

Focus on remembering the story and not the kanji. Always the story. Maybe your problem is that you're trying to remember how to write the kanji directly, as opposed to using the story to remind you. In my mind it goes: English keyword>mnemonic>elements>kanji. Then I get familiar with it and don't have to see all the elements in my mind to remember.

alyks Wrote:Focus on remembering the story and not the kanji. Always the story. Maybe your problem is that you're trying to remember how to write the kanji directly, as opposed to using the story to remind you. In my mind it goes: English keyword>mnemonic>elements>kanji. Then I get familiar with it and don't have to see all the elements in my mind to remember.

That's exactly my problem. I can't seem to work with the stories. OR maybe the stories are well learned and I already forgot to use them? It happens for the first few kanji I don't think about it and can write them right away. I don't even remember the whole story I made but I don't use it anyway. I just tried KanjiGym (btw thanks a lot plumage for that it's going to be really helpful) and I could go through the first 40 without even thinking about them, I saw the keyword in english and wrote the kanji. Then I tried in my mother tongue, keywords in French and didn't think about them before writing them either. So I guess I DID it properly for the first 40 and then maybe I did try to go too fast like Plumage said.

I will slow down and use KanjiGym after learning like 5 or so (like I was kinda doing when I learned the Kana, I kept rewriting them a few times and have them randomly displayed after, I used thejapanesepage.com for that)

Thanks both of you for the answers, it's better to fix these kind of mistakes before I hit the 100 marks or even worse the 300 marks lol I would have had too much failed anyway by then that I would have gone back to the start, or wait before I know some vovabulary before actually do the kanjis.

Also, and this site has taught me this: even if you take Heisig's stories for your own (and many are worth using), many of them should be re-ordered from left->right/top->bottom. Often you can get the stories right, but their reading causes you to flip the placements of characters. Since the writing takes a particular order, rearrange all stories to the same order and you'll notice a lot of improvement. Even sliding in words like on/under/over/beneath when you can between primitives (for instance, in "agreement" you get *footprint* "on" *body parts*) can help clue you into their writing.

So I've been doing some test the last few days, and here is what I have found work best for me.

I've decided to try without stories, and actually that fits the way I was learning at school, I never learned anything and got my diplomas with a mention. So I thought about that and tried to write a kanji 10 times (more for the hardest one) while repeating the keyword. I've noticed that after 10min I could remember it fine, so I went to an hour before review another one, I remembered it fine, I went 2h / 4h / 12h / 1day and I could still remember them fine. What I do also is use kanjigym to show me random keyword each day, this might not be recommended to review the kanji like everyday but I noticed that it works great for me. So I left the first few kanji off while doing that with new ones, and went back today on kanjigym with the first 40 after not reviewing them for like 3 days. I could remember them perfectly fine, with the few hesitation for the toughest ones but yea.

So my conclusion is that stories doesn't really work for me, I don't know why lol I might not be normal but I seem to remember very well EVERYTHING I write, being school lessons or kanji. Maybe this post will be useful to those that working with stories doesn't really help, they're maybe like me.

I understand that when I will reach like 200-300 Kanjis it's gonna be tough to review them all everyday but by letting the SRS take over after a few days of reviewing they seem to stay there in my memory. I need to do more tests but that's what I think works best for me. The important is not really HOW we do it but to actually remember them at the end right? lol

I am happy that you already found a way to remember the Kanji, but I wanted to post anyway because other people might have similar problems. I experienced this myself: I saw a Kanji and thought: "Ah well that was the story about this and that...", but I didnt VISUALIZE it. A story sticks much better if you close your eyes and imagine a picture in your mind.

Hi Ri70R,

I was like you when I was in school. And I was too disapointed when having trouble with kanji, even if so many people where succeding. And aparently so easily.

As people have shown here. It is not only a matter of learning the kanji. You have to learn how to make your stories, and how to remember them.

If you have no prior experience with SRS, you'll probably have some trouble when you reach a certain amount of kanji. Dont give up, as you learn how your memory you will succeed too.

Also, dont worry too much about the retention rates in the beggining. The important retention rate is the one of the 4th stack. Just try to make your reviews manageable.

Silmara Wrote:I am happy that you already found a way to remember the Kanji, but I wanted to post anyway because other people might have similar problems. I experienced this myself: I saw a Kanji and thought: "Ah well that was the story about this and that...", but I didnt VISUALIZE it. A story sticks much better if you close your eyes and imagine a picture in your mind.

Once again showing Heisig is not entirely about mnemonics.

RiP70R Wrote:That's exactly my problem. I can't seem to work with the stories. OR maybe the stories are well learned and I already forgot to use them? It happens for the first few kanji I don't think about it and can write them right away. I don't even remember the whole story I made but I don't use it anyway. I just tried KanjiGym (btw thanks a lot plumage for that it's going to be really helpful) and I could go through the first 40 without even thinking about them, I saw the keyword in english and wrote the kanji. Then I tried in my mother tongue, keywords in French and didn't think about them before writing them either. So I guess I DID it properly for the first 40 and then maybe I did try to go too fast like Plumage said....

...So my conclusion is that stories doesn't really work for me, I don't know why lol I might not be normal tongue...

I understand that when I will reach like 200-300 Kanjis ... The important is not really HOW we do it but to actually remember them at the end right? lol

Hmmm.... Could it be....

Perhaps....

You might just be....

Negatively focused. >_>

I'm not normal- Giggle....

Course you're normal. If you wasn't normal, you'd be carrying a tail on your backside.

You can work with the stories just fine. Trust me. I know. That was how I was when I first started.

That was why I quit.

This story don't stick. This story stupid. What a pretentious schmuck!!!

I opened kanji gold and was like, "this is the way to go." A few days later I just forgot about Japanese completely. That was back in February. At the end of May I decided to pick it back up again. (got annoyed that an episode of a show I like wasn't subbed)

Guess what?

I remembered more than half the kanji that I thought I just completely forgot using Heisig's method.

What's this mean?

Finding a story that sticks is the hardest part of remembering a kanji using this method. But once you find it. It's there to stay. Not only that, but you learn what types of stories stick better and what types of stories don't. Hint: It's usually the ones that make you laugh.

I'm almost at 900 kanji now. I'd be farther, but I slowed down to enter all the previous info into Anki.

Yep, thats right. I went from bearly remembering anything to almost 900 once I got the hang of it.

You say: the method of just writing works best for you.

I ask: how much time have you given heisig's method?

You've spent your entire life developing your own method (or rather internalizing the standard), but how much time have you given to developing your imaginative memory?

What I mean to tell you by all this: Give this method its fair shot. I just gave it a couple of weeks and quit. But now that I've started again. I think it's awesome. If you've got a problem with the stories in english, translate them to french and see how that helps. Make up your own. Find some on the internet.

Now that I've typed all this, I look back, and think that the real reason for quiting was unrealistic expectations. Take one look -instantaneous recall. That's what I was expecting. I have a feeling that might be part of the reason for you as well.

But you have to actually train yourself to recall the stories. Especially if you're used to having the information hand fed and recovering it from your short term.

Quote:I remember when I was at school I was never learning anything and was just listening / writing lessons and I could do my tests fine without even reviewing the lessons (only the really tough parts).

Woah! Wait! Just noticed you didn't type normal, you typed normal tongue...that changes everything...

Or does it.

First post- Long post

Nah it was a joke saying I'm not normal, of course I am normal lol

Nope I don't expect instantaneous recall, I'm realistic about this, it's like when we learned to write / read, we couldn't read without any hesitation at first it comes later with practice.

Thanks for your answer.