[ファブリス]

There has been some good discussion lately about the right way to study RTK, what works, what doesn't.

I wanted to point out something very important :

wikipedia Wrote:The speed of forgetting depends on a number of factors such as the difficulty of the learned material (e.g. how meaningful it is), its representation (see: mnemonic), and physiological factors such as stress and sleep. The basal forgetting rate differs little between individuals. The difference in performance (e.g. at school) can be explained by mnemonic representation skills. This means that some people are able to "imagine" memories in the right way while others are not.

Source: Wikipedia article on the Forgetting curve.

The most important bits in there are :

The basal forgetting rate differs little between individuals.

This one's to quieten the voices of those who want to believe that some people are much better than others at remembering due to how nature made them. So much for that.

And :

The difference in performance (e.g. at school) can be explained by mnemonic representation skills.

Although not every study material in school was easily dealt with mnemonics, for remembering the kanji efficiently this is really the KEY ingredient!

If you come accross any problem with your memory retention, especially during the first review, before you worry about what time of the day you study, when to review, how to review, what number of kanji a day to study or review, etc... please focus on those "mnemonic representation skills" first!.

I came across an interesting Scientific American article that's only tangentially related to learning Kanji, but maybe some of y'all will find it interesting too? It's about how infants and toddlers learn how to grasp the concept of symbols. The headline:

Quote:Mindful of Symbols
On the way to learning that one thing can represent another, young children often conflate the real item and its symbol. These errors show how difficult it is to start thinking symbolically

I couldn't really find a good thread to mention it in, so I settled on here - because apparently the key ingredient for remembering is being human!

How to improve mnemonic representation skill? I know mnemonic like peg system, etc but what is the meaning by representation skill?

I think representation skill means a person's ability to connect symbols to abstract meaning. I think there's really no way to improve upon the mnemonic system without changing it into another system.

The reason why mnemonics work is because you're creating a path in your head FROM a symbol TO an abstract concept. You drill following that same path every time you need to recall. As you get comfortable roaming through the forest of your mind for kanji, it goes quicker and quicker and you think less and less about it. So what you're left with when your mnemonics melt away over time is simply the path FROM the symbol TO it's abstract meaning. We call that remembering.

Of course, in the Heisig method you drill the other way round to practice writing and recalling the symbol or sets of symbols.

Kanji is collection of primitives directly mapping to mnemonic (and hence meaning). Keyword to story is more difficult. That's why you need to drill the latter and not the former: you get the former for free. It has nothing to do with practicing writing.

No offense, but the subtitle of the book is:

Quote:A complete course on how not to forget the meaning and writing of Japanese characters

So it does have something to do with writing. The reason you're studying primitives and how they fit together is so that you can know and then recall them.

erlog Wrote:No offense, but the subtitle of the book is:

Quote:A complete course on how not to forget the meaning and writing of Japanese characters

So it does have something to do with writing. The reason you're studying primitives and how they fit together is so that you can know and then recall them.

Talk about causes and effects.
What I named is reason by itself (though it has more to do with active vocabulary and process for wearing out of mnemonics). Fact that you review writing is corollary. That reason has more priority as it's relevant even if you don't need to study writing and need just to study anything about kanji at all.