So I was off browsing AJATT again, like I normally do when I'm lacking in motivation, and I came across an interesting article I must have forgotten about. It was one about how to learn and review the kanji with an srs (I'd link but I'm on the iPhone without copy and paste functions). Anyway, what I found most interesting was that he suggested putting the mnemonic on the front of the card, saying that Heisig did it. And sure enough, if you go to page 43 in RtK, you find that Heisig also used the mnemonic on the question side of his answer card.

So, how many people do this? It seems like this would make my life easier (which if you read AJATT, you know isn't a bad thing). Please, all opinions are welcome!

I do it. People who don't will try to tell you there are all kinds of negative side-effects, but there aren't. It pretty much just makes things easier without any detriment to your learning at all.

I don't put the story in, but I put in the onyomi readings as a field in anki. They clue me into the kanji mnemonic without giving it away. It's great because it lets me focus on getting the kanji character right.

Hmm I haven't tried it but if I did this then I would never get any of them wrong. I sometimes need reminding of which English word goes to which Kanji but I never forget the story of them. It would feel like cheating if I did that.

CaLeDee Wrote:It would feel like cheating if I did that.

It feels like cheating, but it works. For me and a few others at least

I don't. I won't say that it has any negative effects on your learning, since I haven't tried it myself, but it just seems odd to me. If I were to put the story in the question field, I might as well add a list of primitives.

Still, if it does work, maybe I'll give it a try. I do have a few kanji that I still keep forgetting.

Well, thanks for the replies guys! I think I'm going to start doing this. My motivation for kanji has been horrible lately, especially considering I've got a fail pile around 50 that just won't go away.

I think this will be just the thing I need to become motivated again. So here's to a day spent editing Anki cards, woohoo!

I put the story on the front of the card but I make the text color the same as the background color. I only highlight it with the mouse when I'm completely stumped. The way I see it, if I can draw the kanji just from the story without looking at the actual kanji I'm not really hurting my learning, and if I can't then something needs to change.

I think the idea isn't to look at the story while reviewing. It's been a long time since I finished RTK1, but IIRC Heisig wrote that you have to make sure to recall the stories while reviewing. Looking at the story to answer contradicts that idea.

Those who found that in the example at the start of Lesson 5 Heisig put his notes on the front of his flashcards, don't seem to have cought onto the fact that he wrote them *upside-down*.

Heisig only had paper cards, so it made sense to make notes on the card, but he never says to use it as a crutch. I suggest if you include the answer, you should avoid reading it until you're stuck, and when you do - that is a Fail right there. Time to go back to visualizing the story, or write a better one.

The story tells you what all the primitives are, which is the majority of the effort of remembering the kanji. How will you remember the primitives later, if you don't practice remembering them?

I don't. If I did, I would never fail a single kanji and thus never know which ones are hard to remember and which aren't. Even without the story at the front, I have at least 93% retention every day... I fail maybe 2 cards each day, so I really don't think it's worth it to make life easier for myself.

Actually, I think remembering the story is the hard part. When I see the keyword, I can usually write the kanji right away, but I don't. I force myself to remember the story so I will never get comfortable in just writing the kanji (that will be how I wrote kanji before Heisig, and it's prone to writing them incorrectly).

Heisig did recommend you put the stories (or at least the primitive keywords) UPSIDE DOWN on the KEYWORD side of the flash card you made IF YOU NEEDED IT.

Now, in the day and age of SRS and Anki, I'd liken that advice to this: Have Anki show the Story, but in White lettering (ie invisotext). If you have to highlight the story area to see it, and get it correct off that, give yourself a "barely passed" score.

Yeah, to me, it seems like cheating. However, after thinking about it, I realized I missed plenty of kanji because the damn keyword is too similar to another keyword. So I would not consider it cheating if I had showing on the question side: ['Ｉ' not 俺僕] or ['lady' not 女]

Remember, we're learning to recognize and write Kanji, not be a thesaurus. If knowing the primitives words you can recreate the kanji, well, that's something more than a layman can do.

vosmiura Wrote:The story tells you what all the primitives are, which is the majority of the effort of remembering the kanji. How will you remember the primitives later, if you don't practice remembering them?

Quite easily, as it turns out. In fact, I've come to believe that the majority of the learning of a kanji comes from the actual act of arranging primitives in space to form the kanji, and not from recalling the story. Certainly, there have been times when, given a keyword and list of primitives, I still fail to produce the correct kanj (or more likely, construct the kanji incorrectly). That's a miss.

Then again, I care little for the ability to go from English keyword to kanji, or vice versa. In fact, I'd rather not be hampered by such a connection at all, which is why I wanted to see if I could do Heisig technically by the book, while still minimizing the role of stories in my memory.

End result? I can still work from keyword to kanji if I want to, albeit with a small bit of effort, but more importantly (to me) all the kanji have a place carved out in my head with only an ephemeral connection to the English language. I've been able to easily recall and write all the kanji of every word I've learned in the months since "finishing" Heisig, and for most of them I find it easier to think about them in terms of a Japanese sound rather than an English meaning, which is what I was shooting for in the first place.

I'll say, if you've got different goals than me, then your mileage may vary.

Agree with Mcjon01, as I believe I may have said in the last thread about this. I did the flashcards the usual way, but now I never use the mnemonics when writing or reading Japanese. So I can't imagine a benefit to going out of your way to make sure you can drill them into your memory.
Actually I find I end up having bumps in the road after reviewing here, these days. Like an incredibly simple word like 問題, I never think when I write it. But then I'll review one of those kanji on this website, remembering it's keyword and mnemonic, and the next time I go to write the word I get confused because of the old associations. It happens with the simplest words. So I'm starting to find the whole process counterproductive for kanji I already know in actual Japanese contexts. Which is why I'm eager to reach the point where most of these kanji are in vocabulary items in anki, because then I'll probably stop reviewing here and leave all these keywords and mnemonics behind for good.
I still adore this site, of course. I just view it as a transition stage, heh.

I understand concerns about this basically going back to rote writing that's prone to errors, but a) I would prefer my writing to be rote :o and b) it's a little different. A lot of rote memorization of kanji seems to be purely of the stroke order of a mass of lines, where it can be easy to forget or misplace one of 15. Having gone through the Heisig method in it's entirety, however, we're now trained to think in components. Keyword, mnemonic or not (not in this case, I've forgotten it), I still know that 途 is that scale thing (I really don't remember what they are, see?) and road, which is only two things to remember and place. And further, I know that 余 uses 'potato' and not 'dry,' so it has the hook, or whatever. And on down the line. The point is, it isn't just a sequence of strokes to us anymore, and the mnemonics and keywords are not important for us to keep it that way, so we'll continue to write them correctly. And the same benefits extend to any new kanji we learn in the same way, like one of my more recent ones, 籤. That looks like a bit of a monster, but it's easy to remember as an assortment of primitives, and I haven't thought up even the smallest sliver of a mnemonic for it. It's not really necessary anymore.

All the mnemonics, keywords, and stories fall away after a while - as you become more familiar with the vocabulary, the need for the scaffolding decreases, and eventually, disappears, if you don't conscientiously try to retain it. Through enough practice, your hand will automagically write the Kanji out, without having to go through the story, but sometimes the result will be wrong if I don't pay attention to some details in the story.

The tough part is, if you already know some words at the time you try Heisig - I have run into the exact problems QuackingShoe metioned, but I find it to be a small price to pay for picking up all the Kanji.

The reality is, the keyword isn't even that important after a while - after all, it may only hint at one of the uses of the Kanji in combination; it's only there to help you know one of the meanings and to use as a production anchor.

However, I find that I definitely want to retain some of the story: I want to know if it was "Mr. T", "Flash", or maybe "Spiderman" who is in the story, if I want to produce the correct radical!

I'm not going to say its bad because I did it the story way and I don't know how my results would compare to yours, but I will say that to me remembering the primitives is 95% of remembering how to write the kanji so if I just looked at the story I might as well be looking at the kanji & tracing it because it would be rare to make a mistake, however in a normal situation away from the flashcards I'm not going to have a story or primitive list printed available to look at for help.

The problem isn't that you will write the radical wrong, like QuackingShoe seems to suggest. That isn't where the stories makes a difference. They make a difference in situations like 待つ and 持つ... Two kanji which look almost identical but mean completely different things. When you don't have an actual story, you have nothing to tell you which is the correct one to use... All you know is, you want to write the word まつ, do you use 待 or 持. It might seem easy to you, but trust me, it's because you've done Heisig and learned a story. The story is what tells you why 持 can't be used when you want to write 待つ.

Tobberoth Wrote:The problem isn't that you will write the radical wrong, like QuackingShoe seems to suggest. That isn't where the stories makes a difference. They make a difference in situations like 待つ and 持つ... Two kanji which look almost identical but mean completely different things. When you don't have an actual story, you have nothing to tell you which is the correct one to use... All you know is, you want to write the word まつ, do you use 待 or 持. It might seem easy to you, but trust me, it's because you've done Heisig and learned a story. The story is what tells you why 持 can't be used when you want to write 待つ.

Considering that 待つ　と　持つ　are really common words (持つ　more so I guess), mistakes like that shouldn't be hard to iron out if you are studying everyday.

I'd be more worried about a rare primitive with a strange and perhaps confusing stroke order.　Even those can be taken care of case by case if you apply special mnemonics. For example, for 富, I sometimes couldn't remember the order of the bottom primitives, but now I can remember it easily because "you need one to make a mouth, and a mouth to make a field".

Nukemarine Wrote:Remember, we're learning to recognize and write Kanji, not be a thesaurus. If knowing the primitives words you can recreate the kanji, well, that's something more than a layman can do.

I've stopped reviewing for awhile. While now I can't write a good percentage of the kanji from keyword -> kanji, my recognition and writing (as in writing real Japanese vocabulary) is still really strong.

My point isn't to recommend that people stop reviews, but just like Nukemarine said, the ultimate goal is the kanji. I have written these Joyo kanji so much now that the primitives at least are ingrained in me and I find it incredibly easy to remember the writing of new vocab. I don't really care if I can't remember the exact keyword while I write or if I can't remember that word from an English keyword. The ultimate goal and question is, "is learning kanji easily doable now?"

So, anyway, to get back on topic... I think if it's possible to stop reviewing Heisig while still maintaining a strong sense for kanji, then I don't think putting the stories on the front would hurt.

(Just to add a foot note, I really don't recommend stopping Heisig reviews, unless you think you're ready to. Especially if you're doing Heisig while your Japanese is at a low level. If you're at a higher level and you continue to read a lot and encounter kanji often, you'll probably be ok. I also reviewed for about 3 months after finishing I think until I finally stopped. Lots of my cards in Anki were scheduled for a year ahead.)

sutebun Wrote:So, anyway, to get back on topic... I think if it's possible to stop reviewing Heisig while still maintaining a strong sense for kanji, then I don't think putting the stories on the front would hurt.

(Just to add a foot note, I really don't recommend stopping Heisig reviews, unless you think you're ready to. Especially if you're doing Heisig while your Japanese is at a low level. If you're at a higher level and you continue to read a lot and encounter kanji often, you'll probably be ok. I also reviewed for about 3 months after finishing I think until I finally stopped. Lots of my cards in Anki were scheduled for a year ahead.)

I'm just going to keep my Anki deck open for life. Problem solved.

Tobberoth Wrote:The problem isn't that you will write the radical wrong, like QuackingShoe seems to suggest. That isn't where the stories makes a difference. They make a difference in situations like 待つ and 持つ... Two kanji which look almost identical but mean completely different things. When you don't have an actual story, you have nothing to tell you which is the correct one to use... All you know is, you want to write the word まつ, do you use 待 or 持. It might seem easy to you, but trust me, it's because you've done Heisig and learned a story. The story is what tells you why 持 can't be used when you want to write 待つ.

I'm not sure how you use stories, but the stories have never factored in when determining which words I use with which kanji. The words and the kanji themselves work into that. I never had that sort of problem even before I started using the Heisig method.... they're just plain different kanji, and different words.

Really, I'm pretty confused. I just don't understand at all how the stories could be used to determine which kanji goes with what word.

QuackingShoe Wrote:I'm not sure how you use stories, but the stories have never factored in when determining which words I use with which kanji. The words and the kanji themselves work into that. I never had that sort of problem even before I started using the Heisig method.... they're just plain different kanji, and different words.

Really, I'm pretty confused. I just don't understand at all how the stories could be used to determine which kanji goes with what word.

I'm pretty confused how someone can claim to do Heisig method without learning and using the stories.

Anyhow... What are the kanji themselves? A bunch of strokes written in a certain pattern. At a higher level, a bunch of primitives in a certain pattern. At a higher level still, can be represented by a visual story ala Heisig and hooked onto a keyword, hopefully having some bearing to words that the kanji is commonly used in.

Then, stories can be used to associate kanji themselves to words, because the kanji themselves can be represented by stories. End of story.

The reason why you would want to start with memorizing the story is because its much faster to memorize visual stories accurately than it is to memorize lists of primitives or strokes.

If stories aren't useful to your learning, why do the Heisig method which is all about stories?

Take out the story from the learning kanji & its just not RTK. Its not like learning the stories takes a long time; 1~2 minutes each is all it should take to learn a new one.

Eventually with enough reading & writing practice the story is taken over by visual memory, but its useful to help get you to that point.

vosmiura Wrote:I'm pretty confused how someone can claim to do Heisig method without learning and using the stories.

Anyhow... What are the kanji themselves? A bunch of strokes written in a certain pattern. At a higher level, a bunch of primitives in a certain pattern. At a higher level still, can be represented by a visual story ala Heisig and hooked onto a keyword, hopefully having some bearing to words that the kanji is commonly used in.

Then, stories can be used to associate kanji themselves to words, because the kanji themselves can be represented by stories. End of story.

The reason why you would want to start with memorizing the story is because its much faster to memorize visual stories accurately than it is to memorize lists of primitives or strokes.

If stories aren't useful to your learning, why do the Heisig method which is all about stories?

Take out the story from the learning kanji & its just not RTK. Its not like learning the stories takes a long time; 1~2 minutes each is all it should take to learn a new one.

Eventually with enough reading & writing practice the story is taken over by visual memory, but its useful to help get you to that point.

I agree with a lot of this. I did, in fact, spend a good amount of time one each kanji creating a story that was absolutely crackling with imagery. The only difference between what I did, and what most people do, is that I found simply skimming over the story to be an adequate way to bring all the imagery rushing back. My idea was basically to see if a passive focus on the aspects of the method designed to "support" kanji, like stories, and an active focus on the kanji themselves could hasten the transition from reliance on imaginative memory to reliance on visual/tactile/thefasttype memory.

It worked fine for me.

vosmiura Wrote:Etc

I didn't claim to go through Heisig without learning or using stories - I claimed the opposite in an earlier post.
I did use the stories. I don't use them anymore - I began replacing them with visual and muscle memory and Japanese associations as soon as I completed Heisig, largely by accident. Because of that, I don't think it's necessary to drill them into your head during the push through Heisig, either, when you could instead just drill from the story directly. That's what this thread is about.

I never used the stories to associate kanji with words (other than the English keywords), though. I just connected the kanji (as a raw character, shape, and idea) to the vocabulary directly. That may be where I diverge from some of you. If so, please comment, because that's what I found confusing - I didn't know people did that. My stories in particular tended to have almost nothing to do with the kanji, meanings, or the Japanese words the kanji were actually associated with (not least because I didn't know most of them beforehand), so I'm not sure how one would even do so.

I do think stories are useful for learning mass quantities of kanji at once, at least enough to let them swim in your head until you can hammer them out into actual Japanese words, and I think that the ordering and breakdown of components that Heisig uses is incredibly useful verses methods I'd been presented with previously (which, granted, wasn't a lot). But I don't think that the concerted effort to memorize the stories (which have already fallen out of my personal use), via keyword to story, is vital, anymore than drilling from story to keyword to memorize the keyword would be.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it the 'normal' way. It's obviously effective. But the question that's been going around the forum lately seems to be "Is it OK to do it this other way?" My answer is "I think so."

One person a while back wrote: "If I remembered how to write out a kanji, but can't recall the story, should I mark the card as wrong?" He kind of missed the point that he succeeded with the main purpose, to hell with the story.

Let's say we're learning Japanese. Anki (or iKnow, heh heh) pops up a sentence with the word "ことば"

Ultimately, it's hear a word a Japanese, write it out in Kanji (or see kanji, say the word in Japanese) [yes, Chinese variants can be here if you're learning Chinese]. So you write out 言葉

Ok, that doesn't happen, but you recall from context that it's talking about "word" which you recall is more like word, leaf. Ok, so write the kanji for keywords word and leaf.

Ok, that doesn't happen for leaf. But you recall that leaf is flowers, generation, and tree. Bang, know out the kanji.

Wait, still not happening (not sure what the primitives are, or the placement). Now you go back to recalling a story from last year: the LEAF of the TREE, which fills it GENERATION after GENERATION, makes the TREE look like large FLOWER. Yes, FLOWERS atop the GENERATION of TREES.

So the Stories to the Plot to the Primitives to the Japanese itself is the path. If you progressed each kanji through the paces, you can fall back on any point that brings the kanji to the forefront again. Careful about letting the process take importance over the results.

QuackingShoe Wrote:I'm not sure how you use stories, but the stories have never factored in when determining which words I use with which kanji. The words and the kanji themselves work into that. I never had that sort of problem even before I started using the Heisig method.... they're just plain different kanji, and different words.

Really, I'm pretty confused. I just don't understand at all how the stories could be used to determine which kanji goes with what word.

Easy. I want to write 待つ and not 持つ. I know it's either 待 or 持 I need to use, but I can't remember which radical (I don't understand how anyone can NOT have a problem with this, I lived in Japan and studied Japanese 4 hours a day in a language school, I lived constant immersion yet ALWAYS had to think for ages before I could decide which one was the right one). Not anymore, because I know that if I want to write 待つ i have to use the kanji with the "waiting" meaning, not the "holding" meaning, and I know which is which because the FINGER is part of the HOLDING, the COLUMN of soldiers was WAITING. If you don't have those stories, how would you have any idea just because you happen to see the kanji often? They are just strokes, or some figures connected together, without the story and the radical names, you can only try to remember the last time you saw 待つ and write the kanji you rermember (which will often be wrong).

Well, I think nukemarine tried to say what I'll say now:

While doing your reviews, someday, the story will be there just to resolve your doubts (as it does with tobberoth).

I finished RTK for some months already and I'm still having a ~50 card/day review schedule.
There are kanji that I'm not "strong" yet (the ones keeping my schedule high) but there are kanji that are already part of me and that I'll feel I'll never forget.
For instance, 持 and 待 are two of them. I don't need to think at the story at all to remember them, but if I want, I can.