This may have been covered before but what one or two tips would you give someone about using this method. It could be for complete starters or for people who are on 100, 1500 etc. I'll start with my two.

1) Don't let your failed kanji box build up to any more than ten. Many of your failed kanji hold the key to later kanji and if these are left alone then the flow will be lost. As soon as it reaches 7 or 8, study those kanji very clearly. They may go back into the failed box again but failed ones should be of high priority.

2) Study the keyword clearly before you look at any of the primitives involved. Make an image in your mind that comes very naturaly of that keyword. Then look at the primitives and build upon your origonal image. If this is impossible then go back to the keyword again with the primitives in mind and make another clear image of that keyword, then add the primitives. This means that you never get a mental blurr between the keyword and the primitives in your mind. A clear clean starting image of the keyword is very important.

I chose these two because this is my second attempt at doing this book. the first time around I didn't do these points and didn't do very well. But now I do these points i'm much more happy with my progress.

It would be good if on this thread we gave our main hints and didn't get lost in a discussion on the merits and disadvantages of each person's points.

I agree keeping the keyword in the front of your mind as you make stories is so important. Somthing I highly recommend (I regret not doing myself) is always keeping the general connotation of the keywords clear in my stories - often I inverted the keyword to the opposite connotation so I had an easier time making a memorable story. Just like Heisig did with his story for suitable (441). Which is fine going keyword-to-kanji but I'm now running into problems going kanji-to-keyword. For suitable, if I don't make it all the way to keyword I'm stuck sitting there thinking it has something to do with 'doing something inappropriate' or 'a bad way of doing something'. The exact opposite of what I should be thinking. Which is frustrating.

And if you're not sure of what connotation the keyword is supposed to have, its probably worth it to spend a minute online in dictionaries to see what kind of compounds it is used in so you do get the right 'feel' incorporated into your stories. Heisig and I often had very, very different ideas of what certain English words mean and what situations they are used in. It might take you a bit longer to initially make stories but it will pay off when you start reading and you don't need to think - okay staple gun and missile makes my story about a weapons grade staple gun that fires small missiles but wait - I used the wrong kind of 'grade' so its not really dealing with weapons grade as in quality of materials but grade as in steepness of slope ....tedious.

If I had to do it all over again, I get a list of all the kanji with similar keywords, and give all the kanji in a group the same base keyword, followed by a name of a unique primative for that character. This eliminates difficult english words that were chosen merely to differentiate the characters, and leaves no doubt as to which variation you are to write.