I'm only in the 700s right now but it's a ton of fun. Usually the top rated story is all I need, other times I see a gem in a brand new story, and I think, wow... these stories are GENIUS! I don't know what I'd do without you all.

Same here.

I agree!

But I also disagree!

I think people tend to rush through (I know I do) and only use the top rated story! A lot of stories never get read. I wish there was some other way to get people to read the newer stories. It's like youtube. People always watch the most watched videos, assuming that they must be good if everyone else is watching them.

But a lot of videos that may have been classics NEVER get more than 100 views or so.

What do you guys think?

The way it went for me is I started to have favorite story "writers", from people who think alike. So rather than go for top rated, I also looked for stories shared by people whose stories I generally like.

Edit: There's no point to read all the stories if you quickly find one that seems to stick.

Hmm... a lot of the times I find the top rated stories to be plain or really obvious, I usually read through the top five, and a couple of the new ones. Sometimes I have to combine stories to get one that really sticks.

I always try to remember to star the stories that helped me. Especially the lesser rated ones, so that others might notice it too.

[Katsuo]

@Cheesemaster64

The new stories get one month in the limelight and then usually drop into oblivion. The simple voting system in place at present works very effectively, but one drawback is that a new story, even if excellent, finds it hard to establish its deserved place in the pecking order. It will then be overlooked by most users.

Fabrice is, I believe, redoing the voting system so maybe this will be addressed.

A simple (?) tweak to the present system might be: If a new story gets votes in its first month, then keep it in the "Newest and updated stories" section, and maybe do that for 3 or 4 months. Then it should amass enough votes to remain prominent when it gets booted below.

Going back to Cheesemaster64's main point, the tweak above would also make looking at the newest story section more worthwhile.

I love the stories as much as everyone, however a lot of the top-rated ones tend to rely on wordplay and association rather than visual imagery. Not that this is a problem, since they're easily ignored if you don't want to use them, but I find that almost all of the abstract keywords have highly-rated stories which... dare I say... miss the point.

Re: favourites, you could change it so that a story required a certain number of votes per week to remain at the top, otherwise it would move down to the regular section.

I have an idea... how about rating decay: Every 100 days a story loses 25% of its ratings. This makes it so that new good stories have a chance against good old stories. If the old story is really good though, it can easily regain its ratings. Its also flexible to the amount of people who come to this site.

Another idea is that users must wait 2 days after initially viewing the kanji on the website to rate it. This makes it so that stories that seem good but aren't good don't get rated high, while stories that are memorable in the long run although don't sound as good in the short run get more votes.

How about listing the stories in random order? It would give every story an equal chance of being seen.

You could have favorites listed at the top with random stories listed right below.

True a lot of them are wordplay, but they pave the way for our own imagination. Either way I'd be having a hard time without them, thanks to all.

[ファブリス]

Thanks, I wrote down some ideas here. The Story voting system update is not for this 99.9% done release (tomorrow in "test" *fingers crossed*), but for the next one (as I explained in a recent News Post). The coming update has small improvements on the Study page regarding relearned kanji though!

Ideally the program would track what story each user uses for particular kanji, and adapt the ratings based on the review results. In practice that's difficult to do without limiting the freedom for editing the stories, plus.. you can never really guarantee that what story a user has edited is actually the one that he associated with the kanji in his/her memory.

Short of doing that I agree that many voted stories are too logical, and not necessarily as good as they seem in the first place.

There are no perfect solutions or even elegant solutions I can think of, keeping simplicity in mind (I wouldn't want for example, to force the users after every succesful review, to confirm their rating of the story for the kanji being reviewed... even if that may help to finetune the ratings).

As for top rated stories, I'm reading a book by Seth Godin in which there is a graph that shows vanilla flavour is like 220% more successful that the 2nd favorite, accross all ice cream sales in US, and he quotes "The marketplace loves a clear winner". The more stories there are, the more people will vote for the top rated story. If there were only 4 or 5 on display then users would gove more equal attention. With more and more stories being published, this is clearly a problem...

My one recommendation is ability to "favorite" authors so that their stories are top listed. In addition, there can be a hide author (story not shown) and bury author (story at bottom) feature. I recall having early favorites by the same guy, so even his non-starred stories would be of interest to me.

The star system was useful early on when the number of submitted stories was limited. It still has it's use.

I like the idea of randomizing the zero vote stories instead of going by date and giving starred new stories extra time at the top (I think 1 extra week per star added, max of 3 months).

has anyone ever after reviewing something went back to check a story and realised its not the same as how you actually remember it.. but as the story was added so long ago its changed in your mind.

case in point. Copper . my story is that "its almost the SAME colour METAL as gold."
but whenever copper appears the only thing that flashes through my mind as im scribbling the kanji down is "Monk Metal"

jmkeralis Wrote:*bows*

Seriously, I'd have to agree. Some of them really make me laugh, too, which is a nice. Tornadic Indignation's stories always have me either laughing or raising an eyebrow, at the very least.

Is there a way to view stories of specific users?

harhol Wrote:I love the stories as much as everyone, however a lot of the top-rated ones tend to rely on wordplay and association rather than visual imagery. Not that this is a problem, since they're easily ignored if you don't want to use them, but I find that almost all of the abstract keywords have highly-rated stories which... dare I say... miss the point.

Missing the point isn't the only problem. When you start using Japanese words with the kanji, word-play is difficult to recall because you're thinking in Japanese. A good image is much better.

wrightak Wrote:

harhol Wrote:I love the stories as much as everyone, however a lot of the top-rated ones tend to rely on wordplay and association rather than visual imagery. Not that this is a problem, since they're easily ignored if you don't want to use them, but I find that almost all of the abstract keywords have highly-rated stories which... dare I say... miss the point.

Missing the point isn't the only problem. When you start using Japanese words with the kanji, word-play is difficult to recall because you're thinking in Japanese. A good image is much better.

That's kind of short-sighted. When you're thinking in Japanese you should eventually just directly think of the kanji with no mnemonic shim (image OR wordplay) in-between. When I want to write 新しい, I just directly think of 新, not a mental image of standing in a tree with my new axe or whatever.

The mnemonics are supposed to be temporary. As such, I think wordplay can work just as well as imagery. Personally I used both, whichever helped me make an effective mnemonic as quickly as possible.

Jarvik, I agree with you on the vast majority of your posts, but I'm afraid that I think you’re dead wrong with this one.

With the exception of 500 or so very common kanji, the value of your Heisig story never goes away. Probably like you, I've been doing this for a while now and occasionally I forget how to write a kanji that I once knew very well. Anki helps with this of course but it doesn't do a perfect job. When this happens and I think to myself, “Did it have this element in it or that one?”, my story comes back to me and it saves the day. I find that stories with good images, like the scorpion dripping out its poison (池), or the brush swirling the ocean into a tsunami (津), are really easy to bring to mind when I’m writing in Japanese. Stories with English wordplay aren't.

The kanji are so numerous that forgetting how to write some of them from time to time is inevitable. The stories and imagery will always be useful.

Wrong for you maybe. I for one don't remember any of my stories anymore, or even many keywords. I treated my stories as temporary from day one (I never wrote them down or saved them), so I soon became independent from them.

For your 池 example, I just remember it as さんすい + チ. The right element I always remembered as チ since that is its phonetic value (it's used in this character as a phonetic element). The left element is obviously さんすい since it's a water-related kanji and that element is the bushu. So if I somehow forgot this character, I would just think of a water radical kanji that sounds like チ. When I see the kanji I just think いけ, when I want to write it I just think さんすい、チ; not the keyword or my story or the element's keywords (which I'd have to think about to remember).

I did the same thing for 津 (right element is phonetic for つ).

Other than imagery and wordplay, I also skipped making stories entirely for kanji which were obvious or I already knew. Towards the end of the book (when I was going 100+ per day) my stories were pretty bare indeed. I think I somewhat developed photographic memory thanks to RTK o_O.

If you use kanji enough I think you'll get to a point where you don't have to think about stories or keywords. Heisig says the same in the forward if I recall. Even if you can't recall a kanji off the bat, you can recall it just from 部首+phonetic element.

Granted my experience is likely different from many on this forum since I was already at a high level (~JLPT2) of Japanese when I did RTK. I already knew words for many of the characters, so I mentally associated them with those words (and their readings) when studying.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Heisig says the same in the forward if I recall.

Indeed, I think it’s misleading.
One of the fantastic things that Heisig did by inventing his system was to avoid the problem of several elements that represent the same phonetic. If you remember 池 as サンスイ + チ then it doesn’t help you much because there are other elements that are pronounced チ.

Recognising the pronunciation of elements helps a lot with reading but I think it doesn’t help much with writing. Do you write in Japanese much?

Sorry for saying you were “dead wrong”. Probably a bit too strong!