Hi,

a few months ago I learned 600 kanjis with the Heisig method (I don't know if this piece of information is useful but I say it anyway). I'm doing everything from scratch again, and I've "learned" 94 kanjis so far. I have a different way to learn than the one described in the book and I wanted to know if any of you are doing the same, so here it is:

Instead of thinking of stories like those in the book, I think of an image describing a situation. For example, for the kanji 負 (#63), I "see" in my head a shellfish bound up and stomped by a foot, but there is no real story behind it, it's more like a situation happening, sometimes it can be like a short "animated GIF" but most of the time it's a static image. Whenever I'm learning a kanji for the first time, I'm trying to make my own story, but once it's learned, the story is gone, the "image" is taking its place.

When I review my kanjis with Anki or Kanji Gym Light, I see a word in english, and if the kanji "pops" in my head, I consider that I know it well. If I take 1 or 2 seconds to remember it, I consider it has not really been thought well enough (and it's true, it's usually a lack of a good story/image) and I'm trying again to form a good image for it.

Is this way of learning serious to you? Do you do the same after all? And the most important, am I doing stories without knowing it?

That seems to be a totally new and groundbreaking approach to kanji learning... or wait... I think that was one of the ideas behind RtK. Did you ever read the intro?

Thorstenu,

No need to be sarcastic. He made a self-discovery that many miss or misunderstand when first going through RTK. Trust me, plenty of people post on these forums not understanding what is meant by picturesque or visual stories. They usually apply mnemonics cause that's what most of us are used to in school.

I'd used mnemonics which seemed to work, but I remember going back and redoing missed stories with more visual flair when cool primitives were revealed on these forums. Spiderman (thread), Batman (person) and ET (finger) being my favorite.

That's what the stories are. The story is generally just there to explain a mental image. Forming that image in your head is what's important, remembering a whole story word by word is useless.

Like thorstenu said, you should read the introduction to the RtK book.

Actually, a quick note to the OP: static images are not as effective as moving ones. Still better than relying on visual memory, but... not as good as a rolling film (this has been scientifically proven).

Excuse me, sir. Proving things is the exclusive domain of us mathematicians. You scientists can go toddle off back to your "confirmed to within a margin of error" now.



~J

woodwojr Wrote:You scientists can go toddle off back to your "confirmed to within a margin of error" now.

As a computer scientist, I respectfully disagree! The whole world could be described as an OpenGL simulation with double-precision floating-point numbers. After all, 64 bits are enough to decrease the margins of error to the point they no longer matter

Also, the japanese government should use genetic algorithms to enhance all those tedious kanjis and get an alphabet composed of only 500 genetic kanjis that would be faster to learn

Mathematicians gave us gems like the Pythagorean Theorem, Stokes' Theorem, and Galois Theory. Computer scientists gave us Windows.

Not that I'm taking sides.

mypapa12 Wrote:Is this way of learning serious to you? Do you do the same after all? And the most important, am I doing stories without knowing it?

It's serious to me. I did the same for some but not for all. Stories and images are both mnemonics

If you find that very effective for you then keep doing it.
I didn't use a certain way, I used many ways to remember Kanji from RTK, what determines which one is which one comes first!

I've used images, full stories, short stories, pictographic, both images and stories (it starts with a story then turns to an image, and the opposite) , and visual memory (be careful, I started using it somewhere after frame 1300, but "naturally").

dawhite Wrote:Mathematicians gave us gems like the Pythagorean Theorem, Stokes' Theorem, and Galois Theory. Computer scientists gave us Windows.

Not that I'm taking sides.

Don't forget they also gave us Mac OSX

Ahh the joy of feeding on other peoples tears as they cry about their shitty OS ^^

Rekkusu Wrote:

dawhite Wrote:Mathematicians gave us gems like the Pythagorean Theorem, Stokes' Theorem, and Galois Theory. Computer scientists gave us Windows.

Not that I'm taking sides.

Don't forget they also gave us Mac OSX

Ahh the joy of feeding on other peoples tears as they cry about their shitty OS ^^

Ahh I loved my OSX, had no problems with it whatsoever, until the day my house was broken into and it was stolen. No dissing the OSX.