I purchased Remembering the Kanji 1 back a few months ago. I am taking Japanese and I plan to major in it in college. I always want to do my best, so I took up Remembering the Kanji so that I would get a better handle on Kanji before I even entered college. I know the method works, because I have a very high retention rate, but as I go on, I am realizing it is taking me a REALLY long time to get through kanji and vizualize them. I used the six steps outlined by Heisig in Chapter 11 of RTK1, but it is particularly step three that takes the most time. When I vizualize the kanji, it can take me a very long time to get the image. Today, I think I went through three Kanji in about 35 minutes. I know this method works, so I am not abandoning it. I just need help figuring out what to do here. When I vizualize, am I supposed to be viewing a picture in my mind, or should I be almost watching a mini movie? Typically, I have done the latter.

It may help if I lay out my steps that I have used as I said were laid out in Chapter 11, with some of my own modifications and an estimate of the time it takes.

1. Read the key word and identify the primitives that are in the kanji (30 sec.)
2. Read the story that goes with the Kanji (30 sec. - 1 minute)
3. Close my eyes and vizualize the story in my mind, taking note of the primitives (a REALLY LOOOONG time! I don't really have a guess.)
4. Open my eyes, say the key word and repeat the primitives that are in the kanji, tracing each one in the air with my finger as I say it (30 sec.)
5. Close my eyes again and go through the story again, juxtaposing each primitive with the image that it is associated with in the story, as they come up (Like step 3, this takes a LOOONG time too.)
6. Slowly write the kanji on my mini white board, verbally going through the story again as I do (30 sec. - 1 min.)

I know that steps 3 and 5 do not have an estimate, but depending upon the story the time varies. But it always seems to take a very long time. Stoked's "One Kanji, One Picture" method is also looking pretty good to me. But I was wondering if the retention time for that method is high or not? I know my method was longwinded and I asked a LOT of questions, but I would appreciate any and all assistance! Thanks!

P.S. - As I mentioned in step 6, I use a mini white board when I write my kanji. I like it better than paper and pencil because you can easily erase and also not have to worry about running out of space in a notebook (I like to practice my kanji by writing them really big). Plus, when you use a chisel-tip marker, you get what looks like brush strokes for your kanji. Just thought I'd put that out there. I even made a square out of that blue painter's masking tape on the white board for me to write my kanji in, because it helps with proportions.

what? 3 kanji in 35 minutes?!

the way i did it was...

1- see kanji
2- create story, store in SRS

in SRS
front - keyword, back - kanji
1- can i write it based on keyword alone
yes: done
no: 2
2- can i write it based on the story
yes: done
no: 3
3- do i even remember the story
yes: review radicals in story, write kanji, fail card
no: review story by viewing card info in SRS, write kanji, fail card

i don't know about this visualization stuff. i kept it fast, simple, and in the SRS.
also iirc the story boosted my retention from 55% to 85%.

Unless I REALLY think that visualising my story will help, I don't do it. Despite what Heisig says, if you just remember a sentence that has the elements in it, you will remember the kanji.

Use visual stories, use Heisig's stories or shared stories here. It should only be taking 2~3 minutes per kanji to pick the story then play it through mentally enough times. Any more and you're not doing it right.

You don't need to visualize that long for most of it to stick. Expect to forget some - that's fine.

Better to go through 20 kanji and remember 15, than to spend a long time on 3 kanji and remember 3.

I guess you'll get quicker with practice:
reading & decomposition: 10s
reading the story: 5 - 10s
If you don't have a story, then creating it should take between 30s and 5 minutes (2 minutes is fair).

visualizing: 5s
You can keep it simple. If I ask you to visualize your new year's eve party, or your gf/bf face, it should be almost instantaneous. Same thing for imaginary things. A tiger making a smoothie in a rain coat > also instantaneous. Keep practicing. You mustn't have a visual mindset to begin with, but has Heisig pointed out, this faculty is universal, and develops. Keep the story short, avoid unnecessary details, keep the story bare, you'll identify it all the more with the kanji.
Also, you might want to get rid of the mini-board at some point, because you lose time erasing, and because eventually, you'll have to learn to write small.
Hope this can help you, good luck, and don't stress out, practice makes perfect.

I think you lose time when you try to juxtapose the image and the kanji strokes. It's quicker to convert the image into kanji strokes. As you know, strokes have a writing order, which is also a reading order. Over time you'll learn to skip the juxtaposition phase which is too much like kanji damage (and that just restrains yourself imo), and learn to rely on organizing your image of the story according to the reading order. If what I said doesn't make sense, don't worry, it will soon.

So to answer your question, you should see a picture in your mind, but at first, a mini-movie is good to fix the picture in your memory. Animating is time consuming, you can't do it everytime you remember the kanji.

Have you ever tried just not using stories? I know they never really helped me. I just remembered the radicals.

Sticking to Heisig's stories and spending too long on visualisation is where you're going wrong. If his story means nothing to you, DUMP it. Some of them are terrible. Don't try to force the visualisation. The keyword is supposed to remind you of the character instantly, so why not use whatever pre-existing memory it reminds you of right now? You're almost guaranteed to remember it when reviewing if it's already there. You may have to play around with association sometimes, but it'll take seconds for most words. 貝 shellfish > Dr. Zoidberg. 争 contend > The Contender > Sylvester Stallone. 疑 doubt > No Doubt > Gwen Stefani. Then it's just a case of getting the character/object to interact with the other radicals, e.g. Stallone with his hands tied behind his back getting raked in the face. Experiment a bit and don't try to force anything. If you force yourself to learn it, you'll find that you have to force yourself to recall it as well.

Thanks everyone. You have been most helpful! Looks liike my initial fears were correct, that it was taking me a very long time - too long. I just didn't know how to fix itat the time - but now I do, thanks to all of you! However, I was still wondering if anyone has tried the "One Kanji, One Picture" method and could tell me how it worked out for them?

When I learn new kanji, I do it like this:

Go the the study page, enter the number where I left of +1.
Look at the keyword (maybe look up a translation as I'm german, to get a connotation right). Look at the kanji, see the elements in it. Look through the stories on the site and pick something I think might work, copy it, maybe modify it. Read the story, write out the kanji. Next.

RTK is supposed to swiftly get you to recognizing 2000+ chinese characters. For me it averts the effect of seeing nothing but scribbles but a kanji instead. With familiar forms. Mostly I even know a meaning of it, which oftentimes already gives away the reading for me with words I know from the okurigana (待ってる for example; I know the kanji means wait, and the tteru basically gives me that it has to be matteru).

Javizy Wrote:Sticking to Heisig's stories and spending too long on visualisation is where you're going wrong. If his story means nothing to you, DUMP it. Some of them are terrible. Don't try to force the visualisation. The keyword is supposed to remind you of the character instantly, so why not use whatever pre-existing memory it reminds you of right now? You're almost guaranteed to remember it when reviewing if it's already there.

Excellent advice! My retention improved greatly when I started using memories/images I already had (when possible), rather than relying solely on Heisig's stories, which sometimes do nothing for me.

Take 呈(display) for example: To me that looks just like my widescreen TV sitting on our 3 shelf entertainment system. A TV is a display. Took me 5-10 seconds to nail that one. If I wanna stay true to the primitives, I can picture a commercial being displayed on the TV for a Pez dispenser with a king's head and a candy coming out its mouth.

WCellon Wrote:Take 呈(display) for example: To me that looks just like my widescreen TV sitting on our 3 shelf entertainment system. A TV is a display. Took me 5-10 seconds to nail that one. If I wanna stay true to the primitives, I can picture a commercial being displayed on the TV for a Pez dispenser with a king's head and a candy coming out its mouth.

Remember that old joke about Sea/see food? Mine is a king opening his mouth and displaying his food. It's stories like that which make me sound younger than I am.

That one is easy enough to visualize and funny to boot.

Thanks again everyone for your help! I've been happily plugging along at one lesson per day. I finished lesson 23 two days ago, so I'm over that hill now. I should be finished by the middle of next month. I appreciate everyone's advice.

Wow, 1 lesson a day?! How long do you spend doing it?

fleet street Wrote:Wow, 1 lesson a day?! How long do you spend doing it?

I'm not DeterminedGakusei, but right now I'm averaging about 100+failed cards from prev day each day. Takes about 3 hours a day, and a next day retention of about 92%. Spend 1 hour in the morning for the first 35~, reviews spaced throughout the day, then final 2 hours for the last 65+failed cards in the afternoon.

This doesn't really answer the OP question per se. but....
Doing RTK should take as long as it takes. If it takes you 10 years, it takes you 10 years..... It isn't a race!
A lot of people seem to want to blast through it and get it done in 3 months, and I can understand the presumed logic behind that: you can then get on to learning real Japanese. However, it took me a year to get through RTK by adding just a few cards each day, and looking back I wouldn't have done it any other way. By the time i'd finished RTK I already finished several word lists (core 2k etc) and was already reading, writing on lang-8 and using those characters I'd spent the year learning. Doing many things at once may mean it takes you longer to complete each goal, but variety is the spice of life; I think I'd have hated RTK if I did that 8~ hours a day for 3-4 months.
Basically all I'm saying is that there are other options and ways of studying depending on how you want to split up your time. My advice would be to spend less time on RTK each day, taking longer to complete it in the long run, but that use that time to learn some real Japanese.

squarezebra Wrote:A lot of people seem to want to blast through it and get it done in 3 months, and I can understand the presumed logic behind that: you can then get on to learning real Japanese.

Yeah, I have thought about taking it a little slower than one lesson a day. I figured a lesson a day would be a good goal for me to achieve when I posted that that was how I was progressing. Let me explain my reasoning behind why I felt like I needed to get through it quickly. First off, I have taken two semesters of Japanese already at the community college, JPN 101 and JPN 102. I wanted to be able to know more kanji to help me when I returned for the Fall semester of JPN 103 and soon to be JPN 104 in the Spring. It wasn't so that I could show up and say, "Hey, I know 2,042 kanji, how about you?" Plus, it is not enough to just know the kanji with their approximate English interpretation, but you also must apply them to an actual Japanese word. My reasoning was because I realized how much easier it made learning vocabulary and keeping words distinguishable from each other. The mess of strokes suddenly would become recognizable and I would be way ahead, instead of the learning the 20 or so kanji that is taught per chapter in the textbook. Secondly, I am still in high school and will be entering my senior year this Fall. I was worried that I would not have time to keep up with RTK because of my experience during my junior year with it. However, I was also trying to do one lesson a day, and was kind of cramming it in at the last moment, not to mention the fact that it took me so long to do (see my original post ). So, now I think you can see why I felt so rushed. I am not impatient, I just was worried. What rate do you think would be best to progress at each day? I know I kind of get burned out at about 50 a day, so I was thinking maybe 30 would be good? Plus, the slower I take it, the more time I have to review every day and continue to solidify each kanji in my mind. My plans for college include but are not limited to, because I also am working on learning Chinese and Korean, majoring in Japanese language, history, and culture. I have always loved the history and culture and have been reading about it for a while. I want to do interpretation or translation with the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and I got an early jump on the Japanese. By the time I enter college, I will be halfway done with my Japanese language major. I just want to be good at what I do and I never like to do less than my best, so I was trying to learn as much of the kanji as I can so I could be well prepared for the road ahead. But now, I am going to take it slower, and not put so much pressure on myself for getting the kanji done before the Fall semester. Slow and steady wins the race!

fleet street Wrote:Wow, 1 lesson a day?! How long do you spend doing it?

Oh, to answer your question, it usually takes me most of the day, between learning new kanji, reviewing old, and studying failed kanji. And I wake up around 6:00 - 7:00AM and go to bed around 10:00 - 11:00PM. Granted, there are other things I have to do during the day besides RTK, but it is still much of my time. I would say a grand total of about 5 - 6 hours (not all in one stretch!). I know I should be devoting time to RTK, but I think you can see it is a little too much. The last thing I want to do is get burned out, because I really do love learning the kanji.

These are those things that just take time. Most of the time, I wait until cards reach maturity to gauge if I really know them or not. Judging my rate(93%). I'm remembering a majority of my cards. While my retention for new cards is low(40-60%). Higher and lower at times but it really comes down to time.

Its different for me because I had no pressure to learn at any pace... My degree was in Psychology so...
I used to add between 5-10 cards a day depending on how I felt, and a maximum of 50 per week. For some people that might be slow as hell, but that really worked for me because I could devote time to other things. I still apply that model to my vocabulary today, although I try to do twice as much vocab (my limit is 100 words per week), and then I spend the rest of the time reading with Rikaichan, or talking on skype. I've NEVER once felt tired, or burned out with the pace that I've set. Sure sometimes i feel I could use a little break, or get a little bored etc, but that quickly fades.

Yeah, I see, but I think I still need to slow it down a bit, because I think I have been putting WAY too much pressure on myself. I think what I'll start doing is working on 30 Kanji a day. And I'll see about starting Remembering the Hanzi soon...

Again, I thank everybody for their input. Everytime people post in this topic, I come away with something more to help me! I think I'll start working at 30 Kanji a day and stop putting so much undue pressure on myself. And, I think I'll look into purchasing Remembering the Hanzi and begin slowly working on that. It's the little steps that get you far!