Lozza wrote:

Will these catchy phrases and ryhmes really stand the test of time, or is it always better to construct a more detailed and imaginative story for each kanji?

Shorter is better for me. I couldn't always come up with a memorable short one though, so in those cases I went longer. You might try short for a few weeks, and see if they stick. If they stick that long, they'll stick for as long as you need them.

My thought is:  NONE of the stories will stand the test of time.  The idea is to learn the kanji, not learn the stories.  The stories are just the path to the real goal.  You will eventually forget all the stories, but still remember the kanji.  (If you use them, that is.  If you never again use them, you'll forget the kanji, too.)

So far, the kanji I remember best are from verbal-based phrases/stories, not so much the imagery. A book like Kanji Pict-o-Graphix is rather helpful for getting the imagination going, though many of the images for kanji in that book may be different than Heisig's suggestions, is good for jump-starting the mind a bit in that department.

I have the Pict-o-Graphix book here and it is not good. It doesnt excite your imaginative memory. It relies only on visual memory.
I'm using journeys for my mnemonics lately. They are working very well.

I use whatever seems to stick best, but usually images work far better (and faster) for me. When I see a keyword, I don't think about the words behind the story, but I just look at the image itself and wait for it to materialize. Usually it's instantaneous.

For example, my story for milk goes something like "I go fishing for little birdies by putting a few drops of milk on a hook and lowering it into the nest". I don't think of those words themselves, but when I think of milk, I wait and see what image appears in my head.

When I'm initially learning new characters, it's much faster to glance down at a word and imprint an image into my memory instead of recalling words. I can look at a word, pull up the image in less than a second, and materialize the image into corrosponding radicals.  Thinking of words takes too much time. Doing it this way I can get through a set of 30 new characters in about 45 minutes (with about 90 percent recall the next day)

I don't know about the images fading over time; I'm a little over 800 right now, and except for the simplest, I still have pretty healthy images of all the characters in memory.

Just go with whatever works for you. I've been struggling with RTK on and off for the past few years and this last go at it I think I've got the hang of it.

I think my problem before is that because everybody was stressing the visual cues as the key to learning, I always tried to focus on that. This time around I've been going with phrases, since those are what seem to be working best for me. While I do forget stuff for the first few days, after a few tries at each kanji with Anki they seem to be sticking for the most part.

If a catchy phrase works for you, use it. Don't worry about following what others have done, since the same method won't necessarily work for you too.

mentat_kgs wrote:

Images are very hard for me. They don't stick at all.
What works best for me is to let every primitive be a location and let every kanji be a trip.
The story gets really vivid with little effort and similar trips can be reused.

Could you expand on that? I don't follow what you mean.

I lean toward a mix of both images and phrases, using whatever works best for any given kanji. For "rather", to give but one example, I find "I'd rather have a heart in the house than nails in both eyes" quite enough to remember the character, while the "bore" kanji required a fairly elaborate story with plenty of detail.

When I use phrases, I find that they stick better if I can squeeze some alliteration in there.

I try to go with images, but it can be very hard. Usually, it ends up being a simple phrase which makes me think of a certain image. For example, my phrase for 宵 is basically "When you have candles lit in your house, it's in the wee hours". Of course, I don't really remember that phrase, I just get the idea of a lonely house with candles in the windows during early dawn. With that image in my head, it's easy to remember the actual phrase.

So yeah, it's a mix I guess, it's a phrase turned into an image which let's me remember the phrase ^^

I do a bit of both..  Usually the more difficult kanji to craft an image out of will receive a catchy phrase or memorable anecdote.

I'm surprised by these answers, because about the time this site started up, there was a pretty big minority of people who favored highly detailed, longish stories. Does anyone still use these, or is it pretty well established that short and simple is better?

Whatever gets it to stick. Sometimes the long ones help for sorting out all the different primitives. It also depends on if your story is composed of larger grouped kanji or if you break down kanji into smaller primitive units. And that will depend on the stories you can make with each approach--which one gets it to stick fastest?

There's a lot of "it depends" on this site.