zdude255 wrote:

I just started RtK v1 and I think I'll be able to do it at about a lesson a day.

Welcome. One lesson a day sounds a little fast, though. At the beginning you can probably do it, but around the middle I think it may get to be too much to do one lesson a day unless you have a lot of free time.

1) Does anyone have tips on keeping the order and position of the kanji right?

Work it into the story. E.g. Risk: The sun on top in the sky is burning down into your eyes. If the sun is at the bottom, think of the sun going down, or of sunlight on the ground, etc.

As you progress you will notice certain patterns where certain primitives usually appear, which allows you to make an educated guess as to the primitive positions.

And to emphasize a tip I saw on this forum: when reviewing, do not say "Yes I remembered this card" unless you remembered the positions as well. Just remembering the elements, but in the wrong order, is not enough recall to correctly write the character. Make sure you are remembering the elements in the right positions; if not, immediately correct your error and preferably amend your story as well.

Have fun.

Just another "make the story tell you the position" vote.  I always want the primatives to come up in the story in the order that they're written.  So, the story you build would have "sun" and THEN "eye", not vice versa.  Also, I like the story by somebody that says somthing about how risky it is to try to balance the big sunny box on the narrow eye.  It helps me remember the relative sizes, in addition to the order.

Throughout RTK1, I used four ways of remembering positioning:

1) Working it into the story, as people have already mentioned.

2) Remembering where common primitives usually occur in kanji. "Page" (頁) for example, is almost always on the right. Somewhere on these forums there's a stickied list of what primitives usually go where, but I didn't rely on it. For me, putting primitives in certain places eventually just felt right.   

3) Assigning a different image to the primitive depending on its position. As an example, for 糸 ("thread"), I pictured Spiderman when it appeared on the left (e.g. "dainty" 細) and Venom when it appeared on the bottom (e.g. "accumulate" 累). This method only works, though, with frequent primitives that have predictable positions, and you'll probably run into some kanji somewhere that'll put that primitive where you've never seen it.

4) Making the left-hand primitive big in my story and the right-hand primitive small. "Outlook" (観) for example, has "Pegasus" on the left and "binoculars" on the right, so I imagine a huge Pegasus looking through tiny opera glasses at my Microsoft Outlook email.

Some other things I learned along the way:

1) Make your mnemonics from keyword to kanji, since that's the way you're going to review. Before you even look at the kanji, think of what will most likely pop up in your head when you see the keyword in a few days--then, combine that thing with the primitive images. So, to make my "outlook" mnemonic, I didn't look at the primitives and think of something funny a Pegasus could be doing with binoculars; I decided that "outlook" would probably remind me of email, and I figured out a way to combine the Pegasus and binoculars with that.

2) I tried to imagine my mnemonics from as many angles, using as many senses, as possible. I also tried to avoid making episodic mnemonics where one primitive appears after another, since I would be likely to forget one of the episodes, and thus one of the primitives, in the string. So I tried to keep all my primitives in the "shot" simultaneously whenever possible.

3) Coming up with a background story for the outrageous images is helpful too. My Pegasus, for example, probably has bad eyesight from scanning Craigslist for personals ads for other Pegasi, so now when he goes into his Microsoft Outlook he has to use opera glasses to read the small letters in his emails.

Good luck!

Last edited by Stryder (2008 March 19, 7:22 pm)

Some other things I discovered when going through RTK1:

1) Assigning concrete nouns to primitives was much more useful to me than assigning abstract nouns or adjectives. For example, for the primitive on the left of "feelings" (情) I found "Data from Star Trek" much easier to remember than "state of mind" or "hyperactive."  (Likewise, the primitive on the right is "blue," but I picture the Blue Man Group instead.)

2) Generally, I'm more likely to remember mnemonics with concrete events instead of wordplay. A lot of the top stories on this web site, much to my confusion, are like the top story for "feelings": "Feeling blue is a state of mind where you're dominated by your feelings." Personally, I would have to memorize that sentence by rote for it to do me any good, and once memorized I'm still not sure it would pop into my head when I saw the keyword. So instead I picture Data and the Blue Man Group talking about their hidden romantic feelings for each other on Dr. Phil.

3) Along the same lines: When picking an image for a primitive, it is essential to pick a specific object or person instead of a category of them. For example, if you imagine a generic road to go along with the "road" primitive, then when review time comes you'll be tempted to include it in any kanji whose mnemonic happens to occur on an alley, street, or highway, whether you meant that alley, street, or highway to refer to the "road" primitive or not. But there won't be a problem if you picture a particular road (I use a stretch of Rt. 24 that goes over a hill on the way to the York Galleria).

Hopefully those tips save you some of the frustration I encountered!

Thanks for all the tips, if I get the positioning wrong, I can fix it in the review. I'm trying to review often so I don't have a large red stack at the end.

Yeah, a lesson a day is unfeasible with the larger lessons. I should say that I'm going to try to do ~20 a day.

Funny story, before I even started doing RtK, I looked at Remembering the Kana and said "This is crap." I'm quite glad this didn't dissuade me from looking at RtK, but I definitely think that learning kanji components and forming them into the full kanji is better suited to imaginative memory than the more abstract hiragana shapes. I'm stuck with learning them the old-fashioned way, but the frequency that they're used enables this much more than it does with kanji.