Is your problem reviewing the kanji you've learned or learning new ones?
If the thought of doing Anki reps makes you cringe, here's something that helped me out a lot recently: put the story on the front of the card. [*] I also add synonyms, kana, memorable phrases, etc., to the keyword, to help recall the full story. I did this and realized that I hated reviewing because of the stress of getting things wrong; by making it "easier", that stress is gone, and I do my reviews with quite a bit of joy.
And that joy is related to the other side of the coin, that of not wanting to learn new kanji. I find myself enjoying learning new kanji because I enjoy making up stories for each kanji, mainly because I have come up with gross, inappropriate, offensive, hilarious, or explicit person or object for each radical and primitive that I encounter. It has to be a concrete person or object, like the keyword [**]. Each primitive/radical has to be concrete because that ensures that any story involving them will inherit the salacious and scandalous nature of the components. The top stories for 谷 and 欲 might make the following quote from a recent popular book on memory techniques more concrete:
In "Moonwalking with Einstein", Foer wrote:
[The fourteenth-century English theologian and mathematician] Bradwardine could translate even the most pious benediction into a preposterous scene. To remember the topic sentence of a sermon that begins “Benedictus Dominus qui per,” he’d see “the sainted Benedictine dancing to his left with a white cow with super-red teats who holds a partridge, while with his right hand he either mangles or caresses St. Dominic.” The art of memory was, from its origins, always a bit risqué. Preoccupied with Gothic and sometimes downright lewd imagery, it was bound to come in for harsh criticism from the prudes eventually. ... When the moralistic attack finally came, it was led by the sixteenth-century Puritan reverend William Perkins of Cambridge. He decried the art of memory as idolatrous and “impious, because it calls up absurd thoughts, insolent, prodigious, and the like which stimulate and light up depraved carnal affections.” Carnal indeed. Perkins was particularly steamed by Peter of Ravenna’s admission [written in 1545] that he used the lustful image of a young woman to excite his memory.
Like Foer, I find the activity of combining concrete elements (characters from films, friends I know, objects, body parts, bodily functions, etc.) enjoyable in its own right. The fact that I'm learning kanji makes it just that much more fun. And this is also why I enjoy doing reps: I am always pleasantly surprised and slightly appalled when I recall the story.
So that's how I've been able to beat my aversion to Anki. There's other little things (like, I don't use the Anki Deck Browser to edit cards, it's so ugly that it saps my will to live) but maybe these will help you out.
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Notes.
[*] I made the story on the card-front small and gray-colored, with the keyword much larger, so I only look at the story if I really want to. And then usually the first 2--3 words is sufficient to remember the story and nail the kanji. (Also, on the front of the card, I added some Javascript magic to replace all kanji in the story with boxes, since sometimes I put the target kanji in the story.) I read about this method first on AJATT, where it was called Kendo's method.
[**] If the keyword isn't a concrete thing or person that I can visualize, I annotate the keyword with some concrete sense of the word. "Green" becomes "emerald city" (from Wizard of Oz, a film that I particularly loathe). tangorin.com is my friend.
Last edited by aldebrn (October 03, 10:21 am)
