When you learn the stories that go along with the kanji is it important to learn the story in sentence form, or is it sufficient to just remember the mental images of the story?

Thanks in advance.

Anything that helps you remember how to write the actual character is fine. For me, this was sometimes a mental image, and at other times the exact words used in my story.

Generally I found a powerful mental image worked best, yet others times a sentence was so perfeectly formed it was hard to forget. Whatever works.

Doesn't matter, whatever works best for you.

I think it depends on how strong your mental "pictures" of the primitives happen to be. With strong images, you can create strong mental stories using the images. What happened with me is as I missed earlier kanji (that had weak or no picturesque stories), I went and created stories for them. They held stronger.

Sometimes, a simple mnemonic is all you need so go with that.

Guess the point is, go with what works at first. If you end up missing them after long stretches (4 weeks or 2 months), just change up the story to make it stronger. If you created a better image for a primitive, change up the story if the kanji rolls around.

Thank you for the replies. Much appreciated.

I have been concentrating on the mental image because that is what I thought Heisig's method was about. But, with all the stories on this site I stated to wonder whether I should also be remembering the words that describe the story as well. I am getting good results with just concentrating on the mental image so I will stick with that.

From the book:

"Your memory" by Kenneth K Higbee P.H.D

"The image process appears to be best suited for representing concrete events, objects, and words, whereas the verbal process may be best suited for representing abstract verbal information."


So.....pictures for APPLE, words for NOURISHMENT.

Short answer: whatever is the most helpful for remembering it.

However, you will find that you need the stories less over time, and you will even stop thinking in terms of keyword elements eventually. For many kanji now, the elements come immediately to mind even if I don't remember the story, and for others I just imagine the whole kanji whole.

RtK1 as I see it is just an intermediate step; the point is to just get all the kanji inside your head at this point. When I took Japanese class at a university, we learned the characters just as a seeming random series of strokes by rote memorization. Most people found that the kanji didn't 'stick' inside their heads this way. RtK1 makes the kanji stick in your memory, then once you've got them solidly inside your head, you can easily layer the readings and compounds on top of that foundation.

Anyway, I think it's a natural progression to think about stories and keywords less as you get better at reading. I mean, when you eventually get to say, being able to read a newspaper, you're not going to be imaging stories about turkeys walking on spoons for every character you see.

I would also say just do whatever works. I have a better memory for words than images, so without trying, I usually end up remembering the words of the story, which I 'hear' read out when I see the keyword (Heisig's sound how I imagine his voice to sound, mine sound like me, and those I got from here sound, uh, how I imagine fellow Japanese learners to sound..am I weird? (Uh, yep)). I may have an image, but it's usually secondary, and they usually just involve the primitives themselves anyway. I am now genuinely surprised, whenever I explain the method, when someone gives me a weird look and points out that my 'samurai' is just three lines, which 'looks nothing like anything!'.
In images which don't involve the primitives, I tend to see the Kanji, complete with story, exactly as it was on the page of the book or this site, which somehow feels like cheating...is it possible to have a semi-photographic memory? ; )

Story and image should fall away eventually anyway, which you've probably already noticed with some Kanji.