**Edit: Here's a spreadsheet of Jouyou onyomi counts, in addition to some having movie suggestions - Onyomi Kanji Count. I found this useful as sorting by count let me tackle large number of onyomi with minimal use of movies. I then sorted those with Onyomi counts of 4 or less by KO2001 order and just did brute force method with those (not that hard actually). **

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=r...vy9p3_RAFA

The above is a rough spreadsheet I threw together based of Alyks spreadsheet. The second sheet has the movie stories.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=r...IEwOVEgSaw

The above here is a list of popular movies via voting or box office.

Anyone can view these.

Here's how it works for those wanting to help add to it:

1. Request here or message me if you want editing permissions, I will need an e-mail address.
2. After being added, add a column with your name to put in different items

If there's a better way to do this, please suggest or implement. I'm not very creative (as you can tell, I stopped at 700 kanji), and I don't program so I'm sure somebody can come up with a better way to share movie method stories.

I did an extra hundred, by I haven't typed them up. Any opinions on what I submitted so far? Yeah, I know, I skimped on putting stories in for Lord of the Rings.

Nukemarine Wrote:I did an extra hundred, by I haven't typed them up. Any opinions on what I submitted so far? Yeah, I know, I skimped on putting stories in for Lord of the Rings.

I'm kind of curious about how this process is going for you. You've already finished RtK but are going back to do the Movie Method right? So are you taking your pre-existing images/mnemonic and placing them into the Movie world somehow? Or are you actually re-crafting a new image entirely? Either way, when reviewing do you often find yourself recalling the original kanji image instead of your new Movie Method image? The beauty of doing the Movie Method to begin with is, if you can remember the kanji, you can remember the reading. But this advantage might be mitigated by pollution and confusion between two existing versions of your image.

And, finally, has the process been made any easier by the fact that you already know the kanji? Could it be thought of in a similar fashion to somebody going through RtK for the 2nd time and being able to breeze through most of it?

The reason I ask is, I'm starting holidays (a month and a half solid break! ) in 2 days. So I'm seriously considering doing the Movie Method, if somebody like you who has already finished RtK, has found it useful.

Nukemarine Wrote:I did an extra hundred, by I haven't typed them up. Any opinions on what I submitted so far? Yeah, I know, I skimped on putting stories in for Lord of the Rings.

Nukemarine, I found that using MM tends to de-emphasize the story part and put more importance on the location. So in this sense, a list of locations would be more valuable than a list of stories for a location. Good Job.

Blackmacros, the process is simplified I think. It's just a matter of putting images of the kanji and of its primitives into the movie in some way. I tried just putting the kanji keyword into the movie, but this fails a few times. It's best for me to have the primitive images and the kanji keyword image both into the scene.

Thinking about it, remember the occasional Kanji to Keyword threads that pop up? Well here it's Kanji to Onyomi. I see the kanji, see the parts, on that pops up the movie scene which pops up the onyomi (or multiple onyomi). There's been no interference when I do Keyword (which on my cards also show the Onyomi) to Kanji. In fact, by seeing the onyomi, it's given me two stories to draw upon at times to get the right kanji.

The most annoying part, and the main reason for this thread, is I'm not really that creative. I'm wasting too much time thinking of movies. Maybe if others can add their own ideas/movies, we finish this all faster.

Alyks, yeah, however when I say story, it's more like scene descriptions for that scene.

PS: I added a link to various popular movies (around 400 of them).

Its good to hear that there isn't much intereference.

How long does it usually take to go through and create images for an onyomi group? Also do you plan on doing all of the groups? By my calculation there are a 103 onyomi groups of just 1 or 2 kanji, which covers the readings of 156 kanji (I think). Do you plan on doing these? At this end of the scale it strikes me as one of those things that delivers diminishing marginal benefits. It seems at this point you would be better off learning those readings by just adding sentences with those kanji in them.

Actually, having said that... another question just occurred to me. When you learn the onyomi, do you also add a sentence containing that kanji/reading? In the "I just finished RtK2 thread" Machine Gun Cat says he did this to kill 2 birds with 1 stone as it were. Hmm..perhaps I can add sentences from KO2001, but instead of doing it in KO order, I will go through in movie method order (whilst also doing the movie method). Although doing it this way, I will lose the benefit of thematic grouping. But again, if I'm adding KO sentences to learn the reading why do the movie method as well? Hmmm. I'm really interested in the movie method concept (and wish I'd known about it *before* I started RtK) but now that I've started sentence mining I'm not too keen to go back to a more abstracted form of study ala RtK.

EDIT: Btw, looking through your spreadsheet, for the movies I have seen even your brief description of the scene is quite helpful. One of the major things holding me back from the movie method is I don't watch a lot of movies often, so I have a hard time coming up with scenes etc. But once someone sketches out a scene of a movie I have already seen, it is easy enough to recall and it comes back vividly. I gave the method a bit of whirl (using my kanji image for director, in star wars/シ) and it seems like it should stick.

EDIT2:

alyks Wrote:Nukemarine, I found that using MM tends to de-emphasize the story part and put more importance on the location. So in this sense, a list of locations would be more valuable than a list of stories for a location. Good Job.

Yeah. This. A list of locations is really helpful.

What does "KOUbo Baggins" mean?

Just a very silly mnemonic to help me attach KOU to Lord of the Rings. If there's a better one out there, I'm all ears.

Nukemarine Wrote:Just a very silly mnemonic to help me attach KOU to Lord of the Rings. If there's a better one out there, I'm all ears.

Ah! I used American Psycho (Christian Bale) for こう.

Nukemarine Wrote:Just a very silly mnemonic to help me attach KOU to Lord of the Rings. If there's a better one out there, I'm all ears.

Conan, the babarian
KOUnan, the babarian :-)

blackmacros Wrote:One of the major things holding me back from the movie method is I don't watch a lot of movies often, so I have a hard time coming up with scenes etc. But once someone sketches out a scene of a movie I have already seen, it is easy enough to recall and it comes back vividly. I gave the method a bit of whirl (using my kanji image for director, in star wars/シ) and it seems like it should stick.

Yeah, same here. That's why I'm planning on doing a mostly "video game method". I can easily recall scenes from say MGS or the FF series. You could do this with anything that's firmly in your memory though: movies, books, video games, tv shows, places you've visited, etc.

I just reached the halfway point in RtK so I'm still a month or so away from finishing. I'm not sure if I should try and add readings for the rest of the kanji as I go or just finish and go back at the end once I've got the meanings down. I just decided to try this out fairly recently so I don't have a list of games set up yet.

Nukemarine Wrote:Just a very silly mnemonic to help me attach KOU to Lord of the Rings. If there's a better one out there, I'm all ears.

The KOUsins, Merry & Pippin. The KOUncil of Elrond. .

koul the conquerer?

I did mine a little differently. I also didn't do the groups as a whole, I went in Heisig order, which the exception of ア (Ace Ventura). I found that it didn't seem to make any difference (although I remember all the ア kanji even though I did those first, then never reviewed them because they don't come up till later on in RTK order.)

I used Kobold for コウ (from world of warcraft), as in this guy:
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwik...boldMG.JPG

I tried to get all my movies/etc to have the same sound as what they were representing, some exceptions morphed on their own in my mind however.

キ started off as Mr. Mom (Michael KEEton), but later it just became Batman (Played by Michael Keaton of coarse) except the 1 or 2 kanji where changing it to batman didn't make sense 規 for example "Mr. Mom is not your standard husband as you can see"

テイ was the movie Taken with Liam Nieson, but later just morphed into LIam Nieson with me picturing him as Qui Gon Jin from Phantom Menace for some odd reason, but hey it worked.

エン was Enter the Dragon, even though it became tiring to always have to say "In the movie Enter the Dragon..." that was a really good one though, it's easy to picture Bruce Lee doing something odd: 塩 "Bruce lee is reclining in the dirt with his mouth in a dish of salty snacks"

ショク was my friend and Arena pvp partner from Wow that was a Holy Paladin (holy SHOKU) but I got tired having to work him casting "Holy shock" in every story so it just became Holy Paladin.

ジョウ was the Joan of Arc (played by Mila Jovovich) but I didn't use the movie just the character. Seems like it might not work "醸 Joan of arc drinks a special brew while wearing nothing but a grass skirt" but it seemed to work just fine (maybe because I've had a huge crush on Mila Jovovich for, well most of my life).

ショウ was Tonight show, but for a while I just used "Jay Leno" without mentioning the tonight show at all, but then Conan took over so I sometimes used Tonight Show, and sometimes the Mexican character he plays in skits "Conando".

and of coarse セイ was Satan, easy. For some reason the mental image that came up was the robot devil from Futurama. http://media.photobucket.com/image/the%2...turama.jpg

so for kanji like 青　"When Joan of arc (ジョウ) grows up she will go to a blue moon with Satan (セイ)." Obivously picturing them going to the moon, which is blue, together.

At fist I tried to use movies, but it became too hard to pick a memorable movie so I just used whatever would work, and apparently my brain simplified things when it was necessary.

Just wanted to mention you don't have to use movies if you can't think of a movie, you can use anything you can work into a story I even have some bad ones like アツ was just "Hats", that's terrible though... but luckily I think it only came up like twice Pressure and Auspices, I think.

kanjiwarrior Wrote:I did mine a little differently. I also didn't do the groups as a whole, I went in Heisig order, which the exception of ア (Ace Ventura). I found that it didn't seem to make any difference (although I remember all the ア kanji even though I did those first, then never reviewed them because they don't come up till later on in RTK order.)

I used Kobold for コウ (from world of warcraft), as in this guy:
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwik...boldMG.JPG

I tried to get all my movies/etc to have the same sound as what they were representing, some exceptions morphed on their own in my mind however.

キ started off as Mr. Mom (Michael KEEton), but later it just became Batman (Played by Michael Keaton of coarse) except the 1 or 2 kanji where changing it to batman didn't make sense 規 for example "Mr. Mom is not your standard husband as you can see"

テイ was the movie Taken with Liam Nieson, but later just morphed into LIam Nieson with me picturing him as Qui Gon Jin from Phantom Menace for some odd reason, but hey it worked.

エン was Enter the Dragon, even though it became tiring to always have to say "In the movie Enter the Dragon..." that was a really good one though, it's easy to picture Bruce Lee doing something odd: 塩 "Bruce lee is reclining in the dirt with his mouth in a dish of salty snacks"

ショク was my friend and Arena pvp partner from Wow that was a Holy Paladin (holy SHOKU) but I got tired having to work him casting "Holy shock" in every story so it just became Holy Paladin.

ジョウ was the Joan of Arc (played by Mila Jovovich) but I didn't use the movie just the character. Seems like it might not work "醸 Joan of arc drinks a special brew while wearing nothing but a grass skirt" but it seemed to work just fine (maybe because I've had a huge crush on Mila Jovovich for, well most of my life).

ショウ was Tonight show, but for a while I just used "Jay Leno" without mentioning the tonight show at all, but then Conan took over so I sometimes used Tonight Show, and sometimes the Mexican character he plays in skits "Conando".

and of coarse セイ was Satan, easy. For some reason the mental image that came up was the robot devil from Futurama. http://media.photobucket.com/image/the%2...turama.jpg

so for kanji like 青　"When Joan of arc (ジョウ) grows up she will go to a blue moon with Satan (セイ)." Obivously picturing them going to the moon, which is blue, together.

At fist I tried to use movies, but it became too hard to pick a memorable movie so I just used whatever would work, and apparently my brain simplified things when it was necessary.

Just wanted to mention you don't have to use movies if you can't think of a movie, you can use anything you can work into a story I even have some bad ones like アツ was just "Hats", that's terrible though... but luckily I think it only came up like twice Pressure and Auspices, I think.

Cool, so you did MM also?

Yes, I probably did it differently than intended though. I used your spreadsheet to keep track of what the readings were associated with, but eventually I didn't have to look at it anymore.

I am very curious to know how the MM is coming along for yourselves. It seems to me that most of you have previously completed RtK I sterling fashion and are now looking to MM in order to remember readings and/or as a alternate review method.

Myself, I am a longtime resident of Japan with good ability at speaking and hearing but very little ability at reading or writing. This imbalance in my overall fluency with the language has been an embarrassment to me for years. Now that I have 4-5 months to devote to remembering the kanji I have decided to jump in with both feet and become literate (at least half way literate)!

Until yesterday I had pretty much decided to bunker down for the next few months and follow the RtK I method utilizing this great website ... but then I came across Alyks' posts and website for his Movie Method and decided to have a second thought. The idea of knocking out the meaning, writing of the kanji and onyomi at the same time is appealing. But familiarity with RtK I, the helpful stories and support from the members of the website are also factors for consideration for staying with RtK I.

In a nutshell, I guess am curious to know if each of you were to do it all over again (having experienced both methods now) which would you recommend RtK I or MM? If I do decide to pursue MM I will try to pitch in with movie title suggestions/scenes (stories) if that will help out--provided you will help me out with some silly questions along the way. I am still fuzzy on how to actually implement the MM and I have never used Anki.

Regards,
edmud in Tokyo

Well, I'm altering the way I'm approaching.

Again, I'm approaching this as someone that learned kanji via RTK and stories. I'm using Movie Method as just a variant of Memory Palace. The only reason I recommend RTK route first is you have tons of pre-existing stories to help draw upon. If you can make up your own stuff, MM can be done in isolation.

On to my alteration:

First, I decided to use a list Khatsuo posted that had Onyomi readings, but also put an asterisk by the "rare" readings. With that list, it's easier to tell which onyomi to even bother learning with Movie Method.

At the moment, I have a dedicated deck to Movie Method kanji (about 800 of them at the time). Fairly simple. Now, my RTK Anki deck has Keyword to Kanji and Kanji to Keyword cards. Seems a bit redundant to do Kanji to Keyword in one deck and a Kanji to Onyomi is another, so I'm now going to kill two birds with one stone.

Using Khatsuo's list, I'll go through my RTK deck, color "blue" the kanji and the onyomi that I want as a passable answer. I'll reset the spacing on those recognition cards also. I'll do this at maybe 100 kanji at a time.

The benefit is if the recognition card comes up black, I just worry about recalling the meaning or keyword of the kanji. If it comes up blue, that means I must recall the meaning and the onyomi to pass the card.

Thank you Nukemarine,

Your comments were very helpful. Last night I read all I could find on the RevtK site and internet about Mind Palace and KanjiTown. As an experiment I decided to make my town setting my childhood home town just because I believe I have the greatest number and most vivid memories there to draw upon. After setting down for just ten minutes I easily listed 200+ locations and people I can draw upon to populate my KanjiTown. Since I am not so familiar with movie scenes I think I may go this route.

Now my plan is to go about it something like this:

1. Use the RtK method while liberally mixing in my KajiTown locations, themes and characters into my stories that correspond to the specific location (onyomi) for each kanji mapped out in my KanjiTown. By the way approximately how many onyomi/locations are we dealing with here?

2. Follow the RtK order to remember the meaning, writing as well as populate (i.e., drop in) the key word/kanji into my KanjiTown as I come onto them.

3. My plan is to construct my KanjiTown first with locations that are vivid and phonetically similar to the onyomi for each group of kanji. As I come on to kanji in the RtK method I will drop the key word or primitive elements into the location corresponding to their onyomi building the story (stringing the key words) for each location as I go.

4. At the end of the day I hope to remember the meaning (english key word for each kanji and primitive) and writing via RtK method as well as construct and populate my own KanjiTown with the complete list of RtK kanji.

As you said my plan is to treat the KanjiTown as an aside and keep my first priority with the RtK method but I do think it would be helpful to be completely familiar with my KanjiTown upon completion of RtK. What do you think about this approach?

To begin with I think I will need a spread sheet with a complete list of the kanji and primitives (and RtK key word) sorted in RtK order, also listing the onyomi (indicating less essential readings as you pointed out). Do you know anyone who has created such a spread sheet that might be keen to share it? I suppose if it is in Excel I could sort it anyway I prefer so long as it contains the necessary the fields.

Again your comments or suggestions are very welcome.

Added the updated Onyomi Kanji Count link at the top page.

*push* I got quite inspired by this, after having discussed various options on how not to forget and retain these nasty on yomi.. i absolutely tried everything see a thread on the forums.

So, I started working around on an anki deck, so here is my "small" result, containing only a few examples so far. Still looking for helpers (maybe adding the kanji parts can be automated by a script? i have no clue, help!). Here goes the link: http://www.file-upload.net/download-3061...M.rar.html

I picked the film "gran torino" as it stays in my mind best.. some explanation on your spreadsheet are so vague, nukemarine~

Additionally i used German ("English") Heisig keywords (see in the deck) to achieve multilinguality.

Haven't looked at your upload, but I did see Gran Torino. So, which Onyomi did you pick for that movie? There are some key locations in that movie (church funeral, house party, garage, barbershop, thugs yard, etc) which are vivid enough to populate with kanji.

About my spreadsheet, I kept it vague only because I was too lazy to type in the details. Pretty much what I did was pick a movie, start dividing a sheet of paper up with squares representing large scenes, then putting kanji into those scenes with maybe a little note. Of course, that was last year and I threw away the papers which had the scene notes. To be honest, I was in Africa and most of sheets got messed up during a large rain storm that leaked into my living container (yes, a shipping container modified slightly to a no frills room for two people). However, that I could do it in a foreign nation to both my native and target language is evidence that such methods work.

Well, then please have a brief look into that file.. I - rather http://tmmia.blogspot.com/ - associated the Gran Torino film with the reading "kei" ("It's oKEI to make mistakes!" -> all kanjis with a kei-Reading are put into here). I just found it more memorizable, to be honest. It also contains whole sentences, unlike yours, describing the whole scene by using the kanjis keyword in the sentence, combined to the film.

Although this method seems to be the only method getting ON readings into my head, i see a huge disadvantage in following this. I won't learn any compound words (having sometimes exceptional readings, mixed up with KUN yomi!), so no vocabulary.. I'm thinking of adding another field on the answer (or question, i'm not sure, what would you say?) for "Compound" (bilingual, english/german for our convenience, rather mine )

Please have a look at it.. Also the question how to add something automatically - for instance by a script - is unclear, yet.

Remember it's not about learning vocabulary. Like RTK did with kanji,it's about learning the onyomi systematically that speeds up learning vocabulary. However, it's a great idea to have vocabulary words to help learn onyomi in context also.

About your stories, if you find that the keyword is not enough, use the kanji and it's primitives in the story. This has helped me not only with creating my own "signal primitives" (primitives that mainly are in one type of onyomi group) but just to relate the kanji to the story and the onyomi when I see it without having to remember the keyword.

Yeah, you are right, Nukemarine. The first thing i recognised while doing this deck with on-yomi, so systematically learning the on yomi, is that i was pretty fast able to read compound words (90%.. well, there are bloody exceptions, containing kun yomi f.e.) i picked from "Alice in wonderland" (in japanese), which i added with Rikai-chan in a seperate Anki deck called "Misc.". Supposingly i will add every day 10 new vocabularies containing like 2 kanjis, building a compound, with "Reading" (-> Furigana).

It works. Thanks a bunch!!!

(Just one last question, erm.. Do you think MY Question/Answer fields are correctly made? I mean the question gives the Kanji itself plus a picture/poster of the film, like in Gran Torino's case? I have no idea which movie to pick for "kou".. What the heck is "koubo baggins"? I mean i have seen Lord of the rings long time ago, but i cannot remember every detail -- I watched the horrible unlimited extended versions of all three films in A ROW with friends.. that took about 9 hours LOL)