I discovered a way to help me remember the Kanji. Larger stories. Instead of learning individual stories for each Kanji, I now group them together into one big story.

With a little imagination, the story basically writes itself. Start with any lesson and make up a story using the key words in order. The order of the key words makes up the story, you just fill in the gaps. When filling in the gaps, it is important to use different words to represent things since they may be used later as key words. Also, include primitives.

The reason it works for me is that it is easier for me to recall the story as a whole. I will know which keyword comes before and after. This helps in the review, especially when a keyword has a primitive that does not stand alone on its own.

When I make up the story, my mind makes up vivid images, like watching a movie inside my head. The images are orginal to me. It is like when someone tells you an interesting story and your mind makes up the images. When you recall the story to tell it to someone else, your mind goes back to those images.

The keyword seem to have a natural flow to them. Even within the lesson, they natually come to a stopping place and you can begin a new story with new characters.

When using a keyword, you have to incorporate the elements that make up the Kanji. For example: I will start with keyword 568. Noon.

It was high NOON in the Old West. The HORSE'S HEAD came out of a sillohuette behind the sun. I am walking along the path when a sheriff stops me and says, "Son, I need a few WORDS with you and your HORSE. You need a PERMIT to be in this part of town."
I said, "What horse? This is a PEGASUS!". The sheriff's face came to a DELIGHT because he had never seen a pegasus before. He LACKed experiance with PEGASUS. To his DELIGHT, he said, "Well, it is within my AUTHORITY to grant you that permit. My AUTHORITY allows you to fly your PEGASUS to that TREE. While you are up there, get an OUTLOOK from you PEGASUS's eyes and SEE what is out there."

And so on. I move on to FEATHERS to continue the story. If I repeat the story, it is easy for me to remember. Just as we can quote lines from movies, we can recall Kanji. The better I visualize the pictures in my mind, the easier it is to remember. Like Heisig says, "If you can remember the story, you will remember the Kanji.

I call this a novel because it is written first, in our minds, unless you actually want to spell out the whole thing. Maybe someday, someone will make a movie.

Imagine, a movie with all the keywords and elements and visual imagery. Watch the movies a few times like we all do with our favorite movies to the point of memorization and we could have a powerful tool to learn this faster.

The way I learn now, is I make up the story first until I get to a natural stopping place, then I go back and learn how to write the Kanji.

I am going to go back to the beginning and following this method. I hate to think I am reinventing the wheel, but has this been done before?

Wisher

I doubt it's a good idea, you're connecting kanji to each other even though they really don't have any specific connections. When you're studying proper japanese later, you'll rarely see the kanji in your stories together, and you'll have to remember the whole story to get just that specific kanji. The stories are supposed to let you know 100% which primitives are needed to write a kanji, and how they stick together to form a meaning. Your technique seems to mainly teach you in what order Heisig listed the kanji, something which isn't important to know when learning japanese.

But, as with everything concerning studies, there's really no true best way. If this works for you, keep doing it.

I've done this with a few groups of kanji (mostly kanji sharing a common primitive) but ignoring Heisig's order. I think it worked out nice.

One of my short 'novels' uses 倫 (ethics), 偏 (partial), 遍 (everywhere). MARIO gives a talk about ETHICS at a SYMPOSIUM. The talk is so biased, he is KICKED OUT. And the pattern repeats EVERYWHERE he goes.

If it works for you, I think it's a good idea.

But going back to the beginning... If you know the first ones, you know them. Why re-do them and tempt yourself to confusion? The object of RTK isn't to make up stories... The object is to learn the Kanji. It's important not to lose sight of the actual goal.

[ファブリス]

I did similar experiments and I found also that connected groups of kanji were remembered better. While I agree with Tobberoth about using a pracitcal connection between the characters, I found that remembering individual characters is easy and possibly even faster due to more connections; rather than requiring a longer recall. There is no need to recall the "overarching" story if you visualize enough. It feels more like you're "zoomin" into something.

Only problem with that is when you are done with RtK you may wish you had grouped characters by chinese reading, or at least by primitive to make it useful beyond remembering the writing alone. For this reason I agree with wccrawford, I think you shouldn't go back and re-do older stories.

Have a look at Vadim Smolensky's "chain method". Member alyks also wrote something about a "movie method" which is similar.

Alyks method is very different. He puts the kanjis in stories he already knows. That's why movies are important to him. It is much like a movie themed, out of order, RTK.

Thanks everyone for your input. You are right in the sense that I will not go back to the very beginning. 1-71 keywords are so locked into my memory, I cant forget them if I tried.

All I am doing is using a tool to recall, until the info becomes second nature. This all donned on me when I would make up, what I believe, good individual stories and then fail 3 times in a row at the reviews. I remember all the elements but in the wrong order.

The whole point of this is NOT to ignore the order. Just like Heisig has his method and logic for learning the Kanji by having one Kanji lead to the other, this allows the Kanji to build from the previous info. If you forget an element in a paticular Kanji, just recall the story to what happened before that key word and the info will be there. Again, this was a problem for me when a key word would have a primative that does not stand on its own.

Another thought occured to me. I don't have any kids myself, but I would use these stories as bedtime stories. Of course I would dress them up using voices and stuff. I would ask them to retell me the stories to check for acuracy. Kids have amazing memories. They would be learning all 2042 Kanji without even knowing it. Or at least a tool to get them there faster. All they would have to do then is learn the writing, which would probably only take a few weeks.

Wisher