I've been using Anki for my SRS. However, I've been having troubles with mixing up keywords in my head. Sometimes it's the synonyms and sometimes I'm just mixing up a primitive with another kanji that uses that primitive. However, I'm still unsure on the idea of putting the entire story on the front side.

Well about a month ago, I decided to move the stroke count to the question side of my flash cards. This seems to be helping quite a bit so far.

It's not hard to count the stokes as I write a kanji and if my stroke count is off, that usually means I'm writing a synonym and it gives me a good idea to try something else. This doesn't help with everything, like if you got Seat 席 and Sit 座 confused, the stroke count is the same.

In the 2nd case of getting a primitive mixed up with another kanji that uses that primitive, having the stroke order helps a lot. At one point I got wholesale 卸 & Honorable 御 mixed up. This confusion doesn't happen anymore.

Anyway, so far I think it's working great and I'll stick with it.

Has anyone tried anything similar? How does everyone else deal with Heisig's synonyms or other similar issues?

I use the anki deck with the 読み on the front. Poor man's japanese keywords, i suppose.

Most of the synonyms don't have the same 音読み (訓読み is a different story...), and the 音読み usually gives you a strong hint as to the phonetic part. That's usually enough to stop the most annoying cases.

I would recommend adding or even changing to Japanese keywords, or perhaps just words that have the kanji in it.
I usually have one 訓読み word and usually one 音読み word.

I often got 'wholesale' and 'honorable' mixed up, and adding a few words with お or ご at the beginning under the 'honorable' card helped keep them apart