I'm not using stories at all.  I tend to just look at a new kanji, say to myself, "Ok, that means..." and I am set.  It just seems like it would be a huge waste of time to make and memorize stories if it isn't entirely necessary.

You may be strange. It depends on how good you are at remembering things. Some people are better than others. Most people find that if they don't use the mnemonics, they will start to suffer as the number of kanji gets higher and higher-- your brain gets too cluttered with kanji, and you start getting them confused.

What your success rate is for the 3rd and 4th pile is really the key to finding out if it what you're doing is working for you or not. Remembering something 3-5 days out is easy. It's remembering it 2 months from now that's tricky. By then you will have seen hundreds more kanji.

You don't need to be too complex with stories-- you just need a hook to distinguish one kanji from another. You'll probably start running into problems when you start seeing kanji with similar-sounding or similar-meaning keywords. That's when stories/images will help a LOT.

EDIT: Once you finish and start studying actual readings, you won't see 的 as anything other than ~てき. All of the Heisig stuff will sort of fade away over time as you replace keywords with real words.

Last edited by rich_f (2008 July 27, 4:40 pm)

Due to the simplicity of the earlier kanji, it's fairly easy to simply memorize them visually, especially if you're using any kind of SRS system to boost your retention rates.  However, just because it's possible to do so, doesn't mean it should be done.  The early kanji are meant to be used as a stepping stone into the method, a way to get your imaginative memory and ability to deconstruct kanji by primitives up to par so that you can tackle later, more complex kanji with relative ease. You may see it as a waste of time now, but it's really a way of saving time down the line, which is what the Heisig method is all about.

Plus, it doesn't help that most people's ability to retain kanji the way you're doing it tends to run dry after the first few hundred.

Perhaps I could just make stories for those kanji I may find challenging.  I think I'll test the waters here for a bit and see how long it takes for my retention rates to suffer, if they do at all.  My memory is by no means photographic, but I think I am a more visual learner. Scout, you mentioned that you use stories for the ones which give you a hard time.  Do you have stories for the others as well?  I was really looking for some sort of success story, just to see if people with a similar technique (or lack thereof) have ever gotten past the first few hundred.  And I realize I have only been at it for a few days, so I guess I can't start tooting my own horn quite yet.

And to rich_f: "You may be strange" made me giggle.

I have stories for basically everything other than a few of the low-numbered kanji.  Actually, as time goes on I'm going back and adding stories for everything I get wrong.  Who would have ever thought I'd get "seven" wrong?  That happened when I had about a 240 day interval.  So now I have a story for that too.

I decided to add stories for everything after I realized just how easily I could forget kanji.  Take something like 猫.  There were times in Japanese 202 where I wrote it maybe 30 times a week for 2-3 weeks.  It's such a 'simple' kanji and I wrote it so often ... so you can imagine my utter surprise when two lessons later (~4-5 weeks later) I went to write it and my mind was just blank.  There was nothing there.  While I occasionally forget which keyword is for the kanji I need, or mix up kanji usage (is it 連れる 運れる?) I found that the work of making stories was definitely still worth it.

Running into issues like not being able to pick between 連れる and 運れる made me go on an 18 month hiatus from Heisig (I stopped after ~450).  It finally took stuff like the 猫 issues for me to realize that Heisig may not be perfect, but there were a lot of places where it could help me.  I also realized that just trying to remember the components that went into a character with a brute-force approach wasn't very useful.  The pack of wild dogs makes sense for 猫, but other than a story or your visual memory how would you remember the right side of the character?

More than anything, I think it's important for you to experiment on your own and find out what really works for you long term.  It was only by realizing in the end just how much I really needed a system like Heisig that I was able to get myself through the last 3/4 of the book.

scout wrote:

Running into issues like not being able to pick between 連れる and 運れる made me go on an 18 month hiatus from Heisig (I stopped after ~450).  It finally took stuff like the 猫 issues for me to realize that Heisig may not be perfect, but there were a lot of places where it could help me.  I also realized that just trying to remember the components that went into a character with a brute-force approach wasn't very useful.  The pack of wild dogs makes sense for 猫, but other than a story or your visual memory how would you remember the right side of the character?

Anyways, it works better to take the left primitive as any furry animal, and not just dogs. Too restrictive primitives make for worse stories.

Last edited by DrJones (2008 July 27, 5:49 pm)

The_Dude wrote:

Perhaps I could just make stories for those kanji I may find challenging.  I think I'll test the waters here for a bit and see how long it takes for my retention rates to suffer, if they do at all.  My memory is by no means photographic, but I think I am a more visual learner. Scout, you mentioned that you use stories for the ones which give you a hard time.  Do you have stories for the others as well?  I was really looking for some sort of success story, just to see if people with a similar technique (or lack thereof) have ever gotten past the first few hundred.  And I realize I have only been at it for a few days, so I guess I can't start tooting my own horn quite yet.

And to rich_f: "You may be strange" made me giggle.

If you only make stories for kanji you have trouble with, you'll soon discover that memorizing those stories without the others is all but impossible. The reason Heisig's method works as well as it does is because you build your house of cards on top of all the other work you've done, strengthening previous connections even as you work your way through the more complicated kanji. Even if you lose a card here and there, the whole house remains stable.

I mean, how are you going to construct a story for 微 or 憂 if you never constructed stories for 頭 or 受 or 元? How do you plan to remember the elements that make up your future stories if you never studied those elements in the first place?

Rather than making a new thread, I thought I'd just ask this here.

When practicing your writing, what medium do you use?  The lines in my college ruled notebook are too small! Should I learn to write smaller, or switch to regular ruled? Or maybe I should use printer paper?

Gah!

Yo The_Dude,
I'd follow advices from people here. In the beggining the kanji are very simple and are not confusing at all. In the later part of RTK, things start to get mucky. Stories are one way to get out of the mud.

Of course rote memorization works, it is just painful.

Even if you do well with rote memorization, your memory with the stories would be even better.

Remember: The point here is not going trought the whole book as fast as possible, but to retain all of it as fast as possible.

You can either use printer paper, or just double up the college lines. Might make it a little easier that way. Heck, triple them up if you have to. I usually use printer paper and a brush pen I bought in Japan, because I like to. For drilling readings/sentences, I just use a cheap notebook with regular spacing on it and a mechanical pencil. (I learned early on it's insane to try to practice writing Japanese sentenecs in pen. I only use a brush pen for individual kanji practice. That way, I waste less paper.)

Pen choice was covered in these two threads a while back, and a little about paper too:
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=969
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=1344

(I was writing out my opinions and got the feeling I'd already said this somewhere, and sure enough when I searched there it was, in the second thread). Something with a very fine line and completely reliable flow, is my recommendation -- mechanical pencil or ultrafine nib gel rollerball.

I usually do all of my reviews in a notebook of graph paper with a 0.5mm mechanical pencil, like so:

http://i170.photobucket.com/albums/u251 … ure005.jpg

The graph paper has helped balance my characters, while the pencil makes it easy to write in small spaces with more detail, while at the same time not running, smudging or bleeding through onto other pages.  Plus, it's easy to correct mistakes.