Lately, I've been finding that I can reading pronunciation by creating stories
similar to the way it's done in Heisig. This is VERY useful for kanji that only have one onyomi reading(or kanji with only one kunyomi and no onyomi readings).

For examples, with kanji that are pronounced "koku", I would replace with the word "coke" and involve either the drug or the soft drink in my Heisig story. Or maybe the kanji for "guess", it's pronounced "satsu". One guy used a detective in his Heisig story. So including a "SATSUjin" in the story would be pretty easy.

Or for example, 掘, in it's dictionary form is "horu". The kanji means to "dig, or excavate". So I think of a gold digging "horu" (or whore)

What do you think?
Again, I think this is only useful for kanji that only have one reading(which are more than you think). Making stories for kanji with multiple readings is just too much work IMHO.

chamcham Wrote:Lately, I've been finding that I can reading pronunciation by creating stories
similar to the way it's done in Heisig. This is VERY useful for kanji that only have one onyomi reading(or kanji with only one kunyomi and no onyomi readings).

For examples, with kanji that are pronounced "koku", I would replace with the word "coke" and involve either the drug or the soft drink in my Heisig story. Or maybe the kanji for "guess", it's pronounced "satsu". One guy used a detective in his Heisig story. So including a "SATSUjin" in the story would be pretty easy.

Or for example, 掘, in it's dictionary form is "horu". The kanji means to "dig, or excavate". So I think of a gold digging "horu" (or whore)

What do you think?
Again, I think this is only useful for kanji that only have one reading(which are more than you think). Making stories for kanji with multiple readings is just too much work IMHO.

I think it is definitely a good thing to do, as long as it does not make the story less effective, or harder to invent. But being overly concerned with every story having that would detract from the main objective imo.

Yes, I do agree that doing such a thing for EVERY kanji might be a distraction from the main objective. But if you take a look, you'll notice that so many kanji have

1) only ONE onyomi reading and NO kunyomi reading
2) only ONE kunyomi reading and NO onyomi reading

For these kanji, I think it'd be a no-brainer to try to create a way
to memorize their pronunciation. There's only one reading. So it's one
of the few situations to guess the pronunciation 100% correctly.

In addition if there was a way to make custom piles and share them, it'd
probably create such a stack and share it with everyone(in addition to kanji
for JLPT and Kanken). But that's a completely different topic, though.

[ファブリス]

Something I did during the last quarter of RTK1 is to check the main reading of each kanji in Kodansha's Kanji Learner Dictionary. Since many primitives correspond to phonetic groups in the characters, there are often small groups of 2-3 kanji sometimes 4 that come in sequence in RTK1 and for which you could use a common location or theme to "tag" a reading to your stories.

In theory you could also jump back and forth between those groups and expand them but unless you're having fairly easy at RTK1 I would recommend to stick to the main goal, and perhaps do only these small groups as I explain above. The expanding of existing groups is time consuming because each time you have to refresh your memory of the group (or "chain").

The small groups are fairly easy though, and can in fact help you remember the kanji due to being all linked together. You can see an example of such a small group with my stories from frame 1527 to frame 1530. Another example would be 1555 to 1559 ("life") 生, 星, 姓, 性, 牲.

In fact some of the kanji I remembered best were during an experiment of kanji "chain" where I placed all the kanji with a certain primitive within one large building, choosing a clear spot for each kanji and its story taking place there. However since the location was not a hint to the reading, and I started creating reading-based groups later, I didn't continue linking kanji in this way, because I knew I would have to re-link them based on readings later. That's why I created some mini-"kanji chains" like above, during the last quarter of RTK1, taking advantage of the fact that kanji are easier to remember when they are interlinked, but only linking them when they had the same chinese reading.