Personally, I think including the story completely defeats the purpose. The point is to see the keyword and remember the story, not to see the story and remember the kanji. If you remember the story, you remember the kanji automatically if your story is good enough, so the hard part is to actually remember the story. If you include it in the question card, there won't be anything hard about it and you probably won't retain it as well.

Personally, I'm confident I would get 100% correct if I included the story, I only ever fail a kanji because I can't remember it.

Tobberoth wrote:

If you include it in the question card, there won't be anything hard about it and you probably won't retain it as well.

Having gone through the entirety of RTK1 with the stories on the question side of my flashcards, I can safely assure you that your concern here is misplaced.  While it may be easier, the need to look at the story falls away as you review.  I can go just as easily from keyword to kanji as I can from keyword/story to kanji.

That said, I also believe that the idea that remembering stories is the point of RTK is rather backwards.  The point of RTK is to, well, remember the kanji.  The stories are just a tool, a stepping stone to get the kanji into your long term memory.  Once they're there, the stories are vestigial, to be thrown out along with all those ridiculous keywords in favor of actual Japanese.

Yeah I don't see the harm. Not that long ago I would have, but for pretty backward reasons. Having finished and looking back in hindsight, and seeing how I learn vocabulary and both review and actually use the kanji now, I see little inherent value in the stories, and none whatsoever in the keywords.
And indeed, for me, remembering the story has never been the difficult part of the process in the first place; associating the keyword with the story HAS. And the keywords are, again, useless.

Last edited by QuackingShoe (2008 September 24, 1:10 pm)

Hmm, yeah, my line of reasoning is more that I'm not trying to learn the keywords. I'm trying to learn the kanji. In fact, the keywords are more or less arbitrary--they are just there to evoke imagery in your head. The story is just another way of evoking that same feeling. Just as an example, the word "walk" may not evoke the imagery of "stopping", but if I included the story "Even if I'm running late while walking to work, I like to stop a few times to smell the beautiful spring air." I would be able to get the kanji correct. This is probably also going to be a fairly commonly seen kanji, so when I am actually learning Japanese I won't need to think about the story too much, but I will most likely remember how to write it.

I know I seem dead set on using the story in conjuction with the keyword, but here is why I started the thread:
a) it seems too easy -- now, I know this seems ridiculous, but maybe I still haven't outgrown the fear that if it's too easy, I'm not learning anything
b) I can probably guess the kanji from the story, even if I forgot it -- if I see the story for "coin" -- "a gold coin floating", and I have completely forgotten the character, I could probably guess how to write it. Am I learning when I do this? I don't know, I'm not a memory expert, but it seems like the stage that I learned it should be back to box 1 or 2 in the SRS, when in fact it may be prematurely promoted to box 3 or higher. I do suspect that this concern is based on flawed reasoning though..

Perhaps what it boils down to is the often asked question: how will RTK benefit you 2 months down the line? 6 months? 1 year? For all you people who used this method as a springboard, how exactly did you use your acquired kanji knowledge? Now, I can clearly see the benefits, like when I see a kanji I recognize, I know the general meaning--but will evoking the story rather than the keyword be harmful? Even if the story has little relevance to the keyword, or is silly? I am not quite advanced enough in my Japanese studies to be able to quantify the exact benefit (of course, I wouldn't be studying this if I didn't know it would help a lot). I know I could go a lot faster if I used the stories in the reviews (I know, I know..it's not a race!), but I don't want to end up wasting time now that could be used much more productively (by watching dramas and playing video games!).

I would recommend not including the story on the front of your cards at first. After you have learned all of the kanji for a few weeks, and you start learning readings, then it might be an ok idea to add the stories to help you.

The idea here being, you will initially learn to write the kanji from memory. If you just see your story, you aren't having to remember anything, so you don't really learn to write the kanji, IMO. Once you are familiar with them all, then I see no problem with taking the shortcut and using the stories to help get through your reviews faster. At this point, all you really want to do is keep the kanji in your mind somewhat, and not totally forget them.

I just was looking through the book, and found this excerpt from Chapter 5, page 42, available on the sample PDF from Heisig: http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/pub … sample.pdf

In this, it seems like Heisig is suggesting we DO put the story in when we try to recall the story. Though I do definitely see your point in arguing against it. I am still on the fence about it.. if my stories were things like "this on the left, this on the right", then it would be kind of pointless. I don't know..

Heisig wrote:

On one side, make a large ball-pen drawing of one kanji in the top two-thirds of the card. (Writing done with fountain pens and felt-tip pens tends to smear with the sweat that comes from holding them in your hands for a long time.) On the bottom righthand corner, put the number of the frame in which the kanji appeared. On the back side, in the upper left-hand corner, write the key word meaning of the character. Then draw a line across the middle of the card and another line about 2 cm. below it. The space between these two lines can be used for any notes you may need later to remind you of the primitive elements or stories you used to remember the character. Only fill this in when you need to, but make a card for every kanji as soon as you have learned it. The rest of the space on the card you will not need now, but later, when you come to learn the readings of the characters, you might use the space above the double lines.

burritokun wrote:

I just was looking through the book, and found this excerpt from Chapter 5, page 42, available on the sample PDF from Heisig: http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/pub … sample.pdf

In this, it seems like Heisig is suggesting we DO put the story in when we try to recall the story. Though I do definitely see your point in arguing against it. I am still on the fence about it.. if my stories were things like "this on the left, this on the right", then it would be kind of pointless. I don't know..

Heisig wrote:

On one side, make a large ball-pen drawing of one kanji in the top two-thirds of the card. (Writing done with fountain pens and felt-tip pens tends to smear with the sweat that comes from holding them in your hands for a long time.) On the bottom righthand corner, put the number of the frame in which the kanji appeared. On the back side, in the upper left-hand corner, write the key word meaning of the character. Then draw a line across the middle of the card and another line about 2 cm. below it. The space between these two lines can be used for any notes you may need later to remind you of the primitive elements or stories you used to remember the character. Only fill this in when you need to, but make a card for every kanji as soon as you have learned it. The rest of the space on the card you will not need now, but later, when you come to learn the readings of the characters, you might use the space above the double lines.

But he doesn't say you should write the story there. Instead, it seems as though he's saying: "If you really need to jot a few notes down on the harder characters in order to recall the story, feel free to do so in the open space... Only fill this in when you need to..."

And to me, that's no different from the "disambiguation" field on my Anki cards. I do have stories on the answer side of the card for a few of the characters (characters I have difficulty with over and over and over again) but on the question side, the most I ever write is stuff like "GRADE" and then a simple disambiguation like: "as in: rank, etc."

Last edited by FutureBlues (2008 September 28, 5:30 am)