I spend a long time coming up with satisfying stories, it's by far the hardest and most time consuming part of RTK for me. Sometimes I find excellent stories on this site but often times I read people's stories and I wonder if that story works well for anyone. Many of the stories I see are really just a sentence that is true and happens to involve the various keywords.

A great example of that if "fishing" [frame 172]. My first story was something like "fishing is taking a fish from the water" and I could go about 4 days before forgetting that. The sentence is true and it involves the keyword and it's elements. The problem is that there are many other sentences that are true and involve the keyword and other completely incorrect elements e.g. "fishing is best done by a river in the sun" etc. etc.

After failing over and over on that kanji, I switched my story to a scene of fishermen hauling dripping nets of fish out of the sea, picking up the fish and getting splashed with drops and I will never forget that for the rest of my life.

I also see lots of stories that look great for figuring out the keyword when you're looking at the kanji but leave me cold for doing it in the other direction.

So is it just me? Are people succeeding with this type of story? Is there some trick I'm missing. Are people just learning to recognise the keyword from the kanji and not the other way around?

Perhaps it's better to accept a poor story, knowing you're going to fail the card more often but the time saving is worth it. I'm happy enough with my progress and I should finish within the next 3 months but I'd say that for about 1 in 30 kanji I use a story from this site. For the rest I slave to make one up. I'm curious how other people get along with these kinds of stories.

I know what you mean. It seems like you're coming up with stories that are too "literal," ie. 'taking a fish from the water.'

Try to come up with stories that are more visual, that seems to help people out. I'm pretty good with 'literal' stories, but I also know that the tricky ones are helpful to have ridiculously visual stories -- even if it takes a long time to write it in words, the picture is in you mind and it works.

Here's an example of a ridiculously visual story I came up with recently:
離　- Detach. The elements are: Top Hat, Villain, Belt, Elbow, Turkey.
That's an insane amount of unrelated elements.
There's this superhero, "Thanksgiving Man," who basically wears a turkey suit when he fights crime. (why thanksgiving man? Well, he's a turkey, and he "gives out thanks," by doing favors for people...) Anyway, in this adventure he's fighting the "Smokestack Hat Man," an evil villain who can transform into a train, and smoke comes out of his top hat. Well, to save the orphans in the caboose, Thanksgiving man flies up to the train, and lassos it with his belt, grabbing hold of the caboose, and pulling himself up to it. He elbows the connector between the train and the caboose to break it free. He saves the day again.

Do you see what I did here? The visual is pretty easy (a top-hatted villain and a turkey using his belt and elbow to save the day), but the story itself is ridiculously long to type out.

Just try being more visual. It seems to help with the tricky ones.

It's hard to predict what will really work.

I've had stories that I thought were so vivid I would never forget them for the rest of my life that ended up not working at all and some boring stories that just stick no matter what.

Also in some cases I don't really have anything I could describe as a story, just a vague association of ideas and yet I keep remembering the kanji.

Personally I find that focusing strictly on the primitives with no real story at all to be effective.

Status is a Tree for Each. (frame 239)
Twig is Walking over Tree.
Status Quo is a Turtle & Dog.
Escape _A_ Portent. (stressing the A reminds me of the road bit)
Create _A_ Revelation.

Main thing that I try to do is make the shortest sentence possible out of the primitives. One thing that makes a big difference for me is for the keyword to be at the beginning of the sentence/story, not in the middle.

Doing it like this lets me make my "stories" instantly and use the extra time to encounter the kanji more often in the SRS if a story doesn't stick.

If i have difficulty remembering it after 2-3 times, I take a quick peek at heisig's story or the stories on this site. Usually the mere action of doing this reinforces my memory, NOT the new story (I don't always find a new story I like).

I copy most of the stories from the site (I'm at 1,900 now with maybe 20 of them being my own) but when I review I never actually say the story, I just seemed to have automatically assigned the primitives to the keyword. I guess I remember the sentence more than a visual. I've managed to plow through some 40-50 kanji lessons in less than 20 minutes and still have a retention rate of above 85%. I thought after a while I would crash wreck and burn but for some reason I haven't, so...I guess lucky me?

When I've come across kanji where even the story didn't help, then I brute forced them the by their parts.

Ex: FISHING = WATER + FISH

...and it worked.
I always made sure to analyze kanji on my own before even reading any explanations by Heisig. I made my own story for every kanji too.

Yeah, some of the top stories on this site, as per the Heisig method, are technically horrible. Sometimes you get top stories like "a carrier is a boat with missiles". While that may work for for the story writer and some others, it actually violates the philosophy of using visual memory. I generally need a really odd ball story to help things stick in my mind, and even that isn't a guarantee it will work.

Different strokes for different folks I guess. I'm just often surprised how many times stories get a ton of votes when they actually contradict the very philosophy of the method we are trying to follow.

strugglebunny Wrote:I'm just often surprised how many times stories get a ton of votes when they actually contradict the very philosophy of the method we are trying to follow.

For me, I use what works. I don't know about others, but if I fail a kanji too often I'll go back and change the story. Sometimes this means changing from a visual story that I can't remember into a story based on wordplay that I can.

zodiac Wrote:

strugglebunny Wrote:I'm just often surprised how many times stories get a ton of votes when they actually contradict the very philosophy of the method we are trying to follow.

For me, I use what works. I don't know about others, but if I fail a kanji too often I'll go back and change the story. Sometimes this means changing from a visual story that I can't remember into a story based on wordplay that I can.

Of course. I'm just wondering if imaginative memory is all its cracked up to be with so many people using bare bone stories. I mean, I try to rely on images as much as possible, but I admittedly have a memory that's probably worse than the average person.

I'm also a person who's terrible with the abstract, like I never memorize where anything is in my city, I use landmarks to guide me.

strugglebunny Wrote:Different strokes for different folks I guess. I'm just often surprised how many times stories get a ton of votes when they actually contradict the very philosophy of the method we are trying to follow.

Exactly. I often look at a story and wonder whether the orginal author and the people who voted on it actually completed the book and retained the kanji. Scuda above is lucky to be able to just retain the parts without much effort. I consider myself to have a fairly good memory but for kanji I _need_ imaginative memory.

I wonder though how many people use those bare bones stories and end up just giving up with the impression that Heisig doesn't work for them when in reality they weren't using Heisig at all.

It would be interesting to be able to get stats on stories. In particular the average failure rate for that story across all the people who chose to use it.

Unfortunately, the voting system favors those that were posted early in the life of the website. Of course, some of the stories are nothing more than sentence mnemonics with no visual flair. Yet, they were posted first, had a few favorite them as even a sentence mnemonic can work. After that, I think some people favorite a story that others have made a favorite without too much thought. Not much you can do as it is human nature to back what is perceived as a winner.

There's a few ways to help the favorite system: If you notice a story that absolutely is the best, yet is stuck at the bottom, post a note about it on the forums. Those stories will rise to the top as people on the forums go to the story, read, and might even agree.

Oddly enough, it worked for two of my stories (Judgment and Exhaust). I was asking why they were being reported, then the cards favorite count began to rise.

This is simply an issue that cannot be decided collectively. Effective stories are stories that work for the individual who created them, or came across them, and they are very unlikely to be universal. Heisig was obviously someone who learned effectively using visual memory. Heisig himself would probably admit that this does not necessarily work as effectively for some people as it did for him. Some people are going to use word play, simple mnemonics, or a combination of all methods. Claiming that any one method is superior to all others, and at all times, is a bit absurd to my way of thinking. What is effective is simply what works. And what works is almost surely going to vary from individual to individual, as we all bring our different life experiences, etc., to bear on the task at hand.

Wally Wrote:Claiming that any one method is superior to all others, and at all times, is a bit absurd to my way of thinking. What is effective is simply what works. And what works is almost surely going to vary from individual to individual, as we all bring our different life experiences, etc., to bear on the task at hand.

I don't think anyone is claiming that. However given that there seem to be a large number of people who give up on Heisig even with the benefit of this site, it might be useful to find out what stories are outliers on the "does and does not work" graph. The voting doesn't indicate the effectiveness of a story - the votes of someone who doesn't even understand Heisig and quits half way through get the same weight as the votes of someone who makes it to the end by whatever method.

Knowing that "people who use this story fail 80% of the time when it gets to pile 3" or somesuch would probably be valuable information to combine with votes.

It's all complicated by the fact that many people (myself included) don't use koohii's SRS but it could still be interesting.

BTW the fact that different people get better results from different methods just means that a simple average is probably not useful. It is still possible to use other techniques that can identify groups of similar people and deal with the fact that each group has it's own set of preferences. So you can look at someone's results so far and say "you seem to belong to group A, other people in group A found this card to be effective and this one to be terrible". meanwhile someone else gets the exact opposite recommendation. Just like "people who bought X also bought Y" on Amazon.

fergal Wrote:

Wally Wrote:Claiming that any one method is superior to all others, and at all times, is a bit absurd to my way of thinking. What is effective is simply what works. And what works is almost surely going to vary from individual to individual, as we all bring our different life experiences, etc., to bear on the task at hand.

I don't think anyone is claiming that. However given that there seem to be a large number of people who give up on Heisig even with the benefit of this site, it might be useful to find out what stories are outliers on the "does and does not work" graph. The voting doesn't indicate the effectiveness of a story - the votes of someone who doesn't even understand Heisig and quits half way through get the same weight as the votes of someone who makes it to the end by whatever method.

Knowing that "people who use this story fail 80% of the time when it gets to pile 3" or somesuch would probably be valuable information to combine with votes.

It's all complicated by the fact that many people (myself included) don't use koohii's SRS but it could still be interesting.

BTW the fact that different people get better results from different methods just means that a simple average is probably not useful. It is still possible to use other techniques that can identify groups of similar people and deal with the fact that each group has it's own set of preferences. So you can look at someone's results so far and say "you seem to belong to group A, other people in group A found this card to be effective and this one to be terrible". meanwhile someone else gets the exact opposite recommendation. Just like "people who bought X also bought Y" on Amazon.

Yes, I suspect the possibility of grouping "types" exists, and might be useful. Somewhere, a doctoral thesis is calling someone.

It shouldn't be too hard to use the total number of reviews to either determine a threshold for voting, or weighting a vote, maybe even both.

There are lots of possibilities.

A number of times I picked a technically bad story, failed the card on the second or third review, took the time to learn what seemed like a better story, but when the card came up in the future I remembered the original one and forgot the replacement.

Sometimes it also seems like I forget the story and have only the "vague association of ideas". I wonder if this will be a problem later, and whether I should make sure to remember the image at every review. At one level the SRS will take care of it, but I'm a little worried I might start failing a lot once I have more cards.

I'm going rather slowly and have a long way to go, so as people have pointed out, I don't really know what will work in the end

Fergal: Are you posting your stories on the site? I do like the fishing one.

I guess I prefer to see an image of the characters within the stories acting out a scene in my mind, my stories tend to be written within the order each primitive is written, although if there is a primitive which can only be in one place I know I can be more flexible. I guess it's just down to the way an individual's mind works in how they organise things. I find stories that make me laugh tend to give me a higher retention over time, however I think the majority if keywords are pretty tricky to twist into something comical. Instead of copying every decent story I come across I find it useful to take the elements I like, throw away the parts that I don't, and modify it to suit my own methods.

...And it's took me until frame 1531 and 9326 reviews to figure that out. O_o

"fishing" was one of those 'easy' ones that I learn without a story so to speak. "When you go fishing, you get the fish out of the water", I find it strange how people fail these easiest ones yet master the really tricky ones with 4 different primitives that have nothing to do with each other.

bladethecoder Wrote:A number of times I picked a technically bad story, failed the card on the second or third review, took the time to learn what seemed like a better story, but when the card came up in the future I remembered the original one and forgot the replacement.

Yes there were a couple of times when I decided against a koohii story, wrote my own but the koohii one always came to mind even though I didn't even put it on the card!

Quote:Sometimes it also seems like I forget the story and have only the "vague association of ideas". I wonder if this will be a problem later, and whether I should make sure to remember the image at every review. At one level the SRS will take care of it, but I'm a little worried I might start failing a lot once I have more cards.

What I noticed is that even with a card that is going well, I can get to such a long interval that I have no clue. I suspect partly that is because I abandoned the story too early.

Quote:Fergal: Are you posting your stories on the site? I do like the fishing one.

Fishing is up there and has 3 votes I use Anki and sometimes don't even look at koohii so I often don't post. I think I've posted about 25 stories. I've only posted the stories that I thought were better than the highly voted one (generally better not just better for me). Many of my stories have some personal aspect to them, many would require tidying up before they make sense to anyone else and some of them are just too filthy for public!

I had this vague notion that I'd like to upload all of my stories and make them public as a kind of repayment to koohii but there's no easy interface for that and I'm currently spending all my spare time trying to get to the end.

I don't see a way to see all the stories by a particular user. That's a pity because there are some users who clear think like me and some who clearly don't. It would be nice to be able to go straight to them for inspiration.

Robatsu Wrote:...And it's took me until frame 1531 and 9326 reviews to figure that out. O_o

Bingo! 1531 is my next Kanji.

Many of the lessons come so late that it almost makes you want to learn Chinese, just so you have another 3000 Kanji to apply those lessons to

I was having a lot of trouble with linking the word into the story. As soon as I got onto the story I was all set. This continued no matter have detailed and vivid the story was. My solution was to make a rhyme or rhythmic phrase which linked from the keyword to the story, then the story takes over.

Keep in mind that the stories you create now, if they imprint a clear mental picture, will forever be associated with those kanji. If you one day live in Japan or are otherwise exposed to kanji often due to your job or such, what kind of mental environment will you be creating for yourself if flashes of blood, gore and violent sex appear everywhere you look? Creating a slightly less graphic image might not be as much fun or easy to remember in the short term, but will perhaps create a less distorted world-view later in life. Imagination is a very powerful creator of reality. The mind can make a heaven out of hell, a hell out of heaven. Every time I see kids strung out on drugs here in Hawaii, I am reminded of that.

strugglebunny Wrote:Of course. I'm just wondering if imaginative memory is all its cracked up to be with so many people using bare bone stories. I mean, I try to rely on images as much as possible, but I admittedly have a memory that's probably worse than the average person.

Maybe we don't actually use bare bone stories, but rather we use a full imaginative story and just post the bare bone outline of it to inspire others.

bodhisamaya Wrote:Keep in mind that the stories you create now, if they imprint a clear mental picture, will forever be associated with those kanji.

Not according to Mr Heisig. I'm only up to about 1600 now so I can't say authoritatively whether it's true but certainly many of the earlier kanji come to me immediately without a need for the story now.

Long stories are perhaps a way of focusing on a kanji while remembering all the aspects of it. Heisig recommends spending 5 minutes going over the story in your mind after creating it. After spending that much time imagining the scene, the story just pops into the mind upon seeing the keyword or kanji again. When people claim to be creating 20 stories an hour, it is unlikely this step is being followed and so less likely the story will stick. The stories I shared are just highlights of what I am remembering. A user's personal experience has to fill in the rest.

fergal Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:Keep in mind that the stories you create now, if they imprint a clear mental picture, will forever be associated with those kanji.

Not according to Mr Heisig. I'm only up to about 1600 now so I can't say authoritatively whether it's true but certainly many of the earlier kanji come to me immediately without a need for the story now.

Yes, that is what he says is supposed to happen, but I disagree with him on that point. He underestimates the power of imagination in that respect in my opinion.

bodhisamaya Wrote:Long stories are perhaps a way of focusing on a kanji while remembering all the aspects of it. Heisig recommends spending 5 minutes going over the story in your mind after creating it. After spending that much time imagining the scene, the story just pops into the mind upon seeing the keyword or kanji again. When people claim to be creating 20 stories an hour, it is unlikely this step is being followed and so less likely the story will stick. The stories I shared are just highlights of what I am remembering. A user's personal experience has to fill in the rest.

fergal Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:Keep in mind that the stories you create now, if they imprint a clear mental picture, will forever be associated with those kanji.

Not according to Mr Heisig. I'm only up to about 1600 now so I can't say authoritatively whether it's true but certainly many of the earlier kanji come to me immediately without a need for the story now.

Yes, that is what he says is supposed to happen, but I disagree with him on that point. He underestimates the power of imagination in that respect in my opinion.

I guess I could say I did about 20 stories per hour and i'd agree with you there... I only made extremely long winded visual ones for about 20% maybe a bit less? The rest are all short, sharp and to the point often not being too visual at all but I guess I just dont get on well with having to make up long visual stories EVERY time... too time consuming for me but I still managed a 90% retention rate for young and mature cards... So I guess it depends on the person... also a story can be very short but have a huge impact on you. I find I made a lot of stories that I found funny/strange/perverted/retarded/obscene/obscure and thats how a lot of them stuck so well... in saying that 85% of my short stories do have a loose visual image to me.