I just got to these yesterday, about out of the bulk of them now (on 1375 will hit 1400 tonight). But they are destroying me. The primitive thread wasn't sticking at all. So I tried Spiderman that everyone seems to use. And Spiderman makes sense to me to use as the primitive for thread, but that doesn't stick either. I simply can't remember these Kanji. I only remembered about 5 of them during my reviewing. And among those 5 or so 2 of them I already knew before ever reaching them in RTK which are 終 and 級.

So I'm curious what some of the other people here did for these Kanji. And what worked.

Pick something which you can clearly visualize. Spiderman is good for this, thread isn't, but anything goes. Be sure to really image the stories, you can't just say "The end of spiderman 3 takes place during winter" or something like that, you have to really see it, see it happen in your brain.

Once you've done that, use the Learn plugin in Anki to really fuse the connection between the story/image and the kanji, 5-7 kanji at a time, and go thought them all more than once. Don't be afraid to spend some extra time when you think it's rough.

Those kanji are just as easy as the others, you just seem to have extra weak connections in this particular area, some extra effort and the learn plugin should fix it in no-time, no worries. Who knows, maybe you will think those kanji are some of the easiest a few months from now.

I chose 'anything having to do with Final Fantasy VII' (since there are so many damn FFVII threads online). Worked great for me, haha. Most of my stories are posted.

Thread is a great starting point, but the trick is to bend it into something that works for you. Spiderman works for a lot of people. A lot of my stories had an ugly old sweater with a hanging thread that was slowly unraveling it. I don't know why that worked, and it probably won't work for you but I hope it shows how you can take something generic and give it character to make it memorable.

[Katsuo]

I read a book on memory techniques when I was a third of the way through RTK1, and that helped a lot. The most useful advice was in methods to make memories stronger, such as:
• include yourself
• include emotions (surprise, fear, relief, etc)
• include senses (smell, see, touch, taste, etc)
• fit things into patterns and sequences.

So for example, 繰, number 1,369 "winding", we have
winding = thread + furniture
(I call 品 + 木 "furniture" because it a common type of "wooden goods")
Story: You live in a high-rise apartment, and are winding your new furniture up on a thread (to get it in through the window).

This story will be more memorable if the thread is very thin and you imagine being worried that it's going to break at any second with your precious new furniture plunging down to earth.

There are loads of thread kanji, so it's ok to have two or three different images for the 糸　 primitive and use whichever one works best for each character. As well as thread and Spiderman, I also sometimes use a "pair of threadbare jeans".

I mostly use a yo-yo for 糸. Like 紅 is Geppetto vainly flicking a yo-yo at a shark as the sea turns crimson with his blood.

Tzadeck Wrote:I chose 'anything having to do with Final Fantasy VII' (since there are so many damn FFVII threads online). Worked great for me, haha. Most of my stories are posted.

Shit, I wish I'd known that when I was doing RTK1. I love FFVII. When the primitive first came up, someone posted a story where it meant 'old sweater'. So I thought: yeah, I'll go for that (since I'm not a big fan of Spiderman so I can't see him vividly). But this person ($%$#&) had only posted one story and I had to come up with all the other ones myself! So yeah, I got some decent stories but some were really hard to come up with. ><