damicore Wrote:which we all know heisig advices us NOT to rely on, EVER

Who cares what he says - if wordplay works, use it!

Btw, I'm talking from experience here. I completed RtK in Septemeber 2009, and believe me I still 100% remember "A trunk, a trunk, BODY of a MONK" or "house with a spine, SHINTO SHRINE" more than most of my proper imaginative stories.

But if you'd rather exactly follow what Heisig says, up to you..

This is kind of getting interesting as would kind of speed me up (I'm doing about 20-25 frames a day) hahaha.
But I'm afraid my remember ratio could drop drastically (95-98%) mmmmm will try with the next few kanji and see how it goes I guess.

I'm guessing they're people who have not been using the method for very long, because if you have, you probably noticed this is the kind of mnemonics that don't work. You have to visualize ridiculous stories or they won't stick.

DKnight Wrote:I'm guessing they're people who have not been using the method for very long, because if you have, you probably noticed this is the kind of mnemonics that don't work. You have to visualize ridiculous stories or they won't stick.

Err... you might want to read the posts before you before saying something so obviously wrong.

When I started RtK one I would imagine the stories but after a while I decided that took too much time so I just depended mostly on mnemonics, which seemed to work just as well. If you're not using a SrS you probably would need to depend more on imagination though.

Kuma01 Wrote:When I started RtK one I would imagine the stories but after a while I decided that took too much time so I just depended mostly on mnemonics, which seemed to work just as well. If you're not using a SrS you probably would need to depend more on imagination though.

This is exactly what happened to me. At around 700-800ish, coming up with or trying to remember long stories was just too difficult.

I rely solely (唯 eating a turkey SOLELY with one mouth) on this sites SRS. If I get the kanji wrong its not a problem it will keep coming back up till it sticks. I pick the shortest most vivid wordplay/story I find from the user list and stick with that.

I just went and shot 650 Kanji in Anki to get back to my old count of 900ish after a longer break. Most reviews took between 1 to 5 seconds. The "stories" mostly became mere fragments, and some of the longer good old heisig stories still were there for me, even if fragmented, to help me remember the kanji.
Most of the time I have really short stories or fragments of them in my mind... even if I don't really remmeber the story anymore, if I could correctly write down the kanji, I just let it be - no use trying to "fix" something that works. The long stories fade, giving you all the goodness you could wish for.

damicore Wrote:Most stories you read in the study section are not even stories in the Heisig sense of the word.
Like I.E.:"The person who is your consort is most commonly "your other half"." [...]

Just adding to what was already said, besides people giving stars to what's more visible and already has many stars (a kind of bias), there are those who give it to cues that triggered a good story in their heads, something which made them remember the character well. For example, for the one you've quoted, they can imagine a person physically made of two halves, one of them being themselves (or Mr. T) and the other half their consort, walking around naked or something like that.

If you go back to it, the original mnemonic method Heisig's is based on — the link system — doesn't actually require the person to write down all the stories containing items he wants to memorize, only that he works them really well in his imagination. That is, it doesn't matter if the story is really well-written or not, what matters is what's happening inside the person's head.

Yeah I have a hard time remembering the wordplay stuff but if it's a definition of the keyword than it works well. Lately when I write my stories I've focused mainly on the first idea that they keyword gives to me and trying to fit the primitives into the story or definition. I've been remembering the the kanji much better in the reviews from this method. My main problem before was linking keywords that rarely see to a particular story. Also, so many of the words have similar meanings so I found that if a phrase or movie or something immediately comes into mind when I see the keyword I associate my kanji with that rather than the actual meaning of the word. It's easy to think of the keyword's actual meaning you don't need it to define your story writing. Take for instance "Tang" the dynasty one... that didn't give me any stories or images and was hard for me to decide so I chose the Tang drink which is highly memorable for me. Anyway that's my story writing technique.