I don't put the story in, but I put in the onyomi readings as a field in anki. They clue me into the kanji mnemonic without giving it away. It's great because it lets me focus on getting the kanji character right.

CaLeDee wrote:

It would feel like cheating if I did that.

It feels like cheating, but it works. For me and a few others at least

Well, thanks for the replies guys! I think I'm going to start doing this. My motivation for kanji has been horrible lately, especially considering I've got a fail pile around 50 that just won't go away.

I think this will be just the thing I need to become motivated again. So here's to a day spent editing Anki cards, woohoo!

I think the idea isn't to look at the story while reviewing.  It's been a long time since I finished RTK1, but IIRC Heisig wrote that you have to make sure to recall the stories while reviewing.  Looking at the story to answer contradicts that idea.

Those who found that in the example at the start of Lesson 5 Heisig put his notes on the front of his flashcards, don't seem to have cought onto the fact that he wrote them *upside-down*.

Heisig only had paper cards, so it made sense to make notes on the card, but he never says to use it as a crutch.  I suggest if you include the answer, you should avoid reading it until you're stuck, and when you do - that is a Fail right there.  Time to go back to visualizing the story, or write a better one.

The story tells you what all the primitives are, which is the majority of the effort of remembering the kanji.  How will you remember the primitives later, if you don't practice remembering them?

Last edited by vosmiura (2008 October 16, 6:06 am)

Heisig did recommend you put the stories (or at least the primitive keywords) UPSIDE DOWN on the KEYWORD side of the flash card you made IF YOU NEEDED IT.

Now, in the day and age of SRS and Anki, I'd liken that advice to this: Have Anki show the Story, but in White lettering (ie invisotext). If you have to highlight the story area to see it, and get it correct off that, give yourself a "barely passed" score.

Yeah, to me, it seems like cheating. However, after thinking about it, I realized I missed plenty of kanji because the damn keyword is too similar to another keyword. So I would not consider it cheating if I had showing on the question side: ['Ｉ' not 俺僕] or ['lady' not 女]

Remember, we're learning to recognize and write Kanji, not be a thesaurus. If knowing the primitives words you can recreate the kanji, well, that's something more than a layman can do.

Agree with Mcjon01, as I believe I may have said in the last thread about this. I did the flashcards the usual way, but now I never use the mnemonics when writing or reading Japanese. So I can't imagine a benefit to going out of your way to make sure you can drill them into your memory.
Actually I find I end up having bumps in the road after reviewing here, these days. Like an incredibly simple word like 問題, I never think when I write it. But then I'll review one of those kanji on this website, remembering it's keyword and mnemonic, and the next time I go to write the word I get confused because of the old associations. It happens with the simplest words. So I'm starting to find the whole process counterproductive for kanji I already know in actual Japanese contexts. Which is why I'm eager to reach the point where most of these kanji are in vocabulary items in anki, because then I'll probably stop reviewing here and leave all these keywords and mnemonics behind for good.
I still adore this site, of course. I just view it as a transition stage, heh.

I understand concerns about this basically going back to rote writing that's prone to errors, but a) I would prefer my writing to be rote and b) it's a little different. A lot of rote memorization of kanji seems to be purely of the stroke order of a mass of lines, where it can be easy to forget or misplace one of 15. Having gone through the Heisig method in it's entirety, however, we're now trained to think in components. Keyword, mnemonic or not (not in this case, I've forgotten it), I still know that 途 is that scale thing (I really don't remember what they are, see?) and road, which is only two things to remember and place. And further, I know that 余 uses 'potato' and not 'dry,' so it has the hook, or whatever. And on down the line. The point is, it isn't just a sequence of strokes to us anymore, and the mnemonics and keywords are not important for us to keep it that way, so we'll continue to write them correctly. And the same benefits extend to any new kanji we learn in the same way, like one of my more recent ones, 籤. That looks like a bit of a monster, but it's easy to remember as an assortment of primitives, and I haven't thought up even the smallest sliver of a mnemonic for it. It's not really necessary anymore.

I'm not going to say its bad because I did it the story way and I don't know how my results would compare to yours, but I will say that to me remembering the primitives is 95% of remembering how to write the kanji so if I just looked at the story I might as well be looking at the kanji & tracing it because it would be rare to make a mistake, however in a normal situation away from the flashcards I'm not going to have a story or primitive list printed available to look at for help.

Tobberoth wrote:

The problem isn't that you will write the radical wrong, like QuackingShoe seems to suggest. That isn't where the stories makes a difference. They make a difference in situations like 待つ and 持つ... Two kanji which look almost identical but mean completely different things. When you don't have an actual story, you have nothing to tell you which is the correct one to use... All you know is, you want to write the word まつ, do you use 待 or 持. It might seem easy to you, but trust me, it's because you've done Heisig and learned a story. The story is what tells you why 持 can't be used when you want to write 待つ.

Considering that 待つ　と　持つ　are really common words (持つ　more so I guess), mistakes like that shouldn't be hard to iron out if you are studying everyday.

I'd be more worried about a rare primitive with a strange and perhaps confusing stroke order.　Even those can be taken care of case by case if you apply special mnemonics. For example, for 富, I sometimes couldn't remember the order of the bottom primitives, but now I can remember it easily because "you need one to make a mouth, and a mouth to make a field".

Nukemarine wrote:

Remember, we're learning to recognize and write Kanji, not be a thesaurus. If knowing the primitives words you can recreate the kanji, well, that's something more than a layman can do.

I've stopped reviewing for awhile. While now I can't write a good percentage of the kanji from keyword -> kanji, my recognition and writing (as in writing real Japanese vocabulary) is still really strong.

My point isn't to recommend that people stop reviews, but just like Nukemarine said, the ultimate goal is the kanji. I have written these Joyo kanji so much now that the primitives at least are ingrained in me and I find it incredibly easy to remember the writing of new vocab. I don't really care if I can't remember the exact keyword while I write or if I can't remember that word from an English keyword. The ultimate goal and question is, "is learning kanji easily doable now?"

So, anyway, to get back on topic... I think if it's possible to stop reviewing Heisig while still maintaining a strong sense for kanji, then I don't think putting the stories on the front would hurt.

(Just to add a foot note, I really don't recommend stopping Heisig reviews, unless you think you're ready to. Especially if you're doing Heisig while your Japanese is at a low level. If you're at a higher level and you continue to read a lot and encounter kanji often, you'll probably be ok. I also reviewed for about 3 months after finishing I think until I finally stopped. Lots of my cards in Anki were scheduled for a year ahead.)

Last edited by sutebun (2008 October 16, 9:42 pm)

Tobberoth wrote:

The problem isn't that you will write the radical wrong, like QuackingShoe seems to suggest. That isn't where the stories makes a difference. They make a difference in situations like 待つ and 持つ... Two kanji which look almost identical but mean completely different things. When you don't have an actual story, you have nothing to tell you which is the correct one to use... All you know is, you want to write the word まつ, do you use 待 or 持. It might seem easy to you, but trust me, it's because you've done Heisig and learned a story. The story is what tells you why 持 can't be used when you want to write 待つ.

I'm not sure how you use stories, but the stories have never factored in when determining which words I use with which kanji. The words and the kanji themselves work into that. I never had that sort of problem even before I started using the Heisig method.... they're just plain different kanji, and different words.

Really, I'm pretty confused. I just don't understand at all how the stories could be used to determine which kanji goes with what word.

vosmiura wrote:

I'm pretty confused how someone can claim to do Heisig method without learning and using the stories.

Anyhow...  What are the kanji themselves?  A bunch of strokes written in a certain pattern.  At a higher level, a bunch of primitives in a certain pattern.  At a higher level still, can be represented by a visual story ala Heisig and hooked onto a keyword, hopefully having some bearing to words that the kanji is commonly used in.

Then, stories can be used to associate kanji themselves to words, because the kanji themselves can be represented by stories.  End of story.

The reason why you would want to start with memorizing the story is because its much faster to memorize visual stories accurately than it is to memorize lists of primitives or strokes.

If stories aren't useful to your learning, why do the Heisig method which is all about stories?

Take out the story from the learning kanji & its just not RTK.  Its not like learning the stories takes a long time; 1~2 minutes each is all it should take to learn a new one.

Eventually with enough reading & writing practice the story is taken over by visual memory, but its useful to help get you to that point.

I agree with a lot of this.  I did, in fact, spend a good amount of time one each kanji creating a story that was absolutely crackling with imagery.  The only difference between what I did, and what most people do, is that I found simply skimming over the story to be an adequate way to bring all the imagery rushing back.  My idea was basically to see if a passive focus on the aspects of the method designed to "support" kanji, like stories, and an active focus on the kanji themselves could hasten the transition from reliance on imaginative memory to reliance on visual/tactile/thefasttype memory.

It worked fine for me.

One person a while back wrote: "If I remembered how to write out a kanji, but can't recall the story, should I mark the card as wrong?" He kind of missed the point that he succeeded with the main purpose, to hell with the story.

Let's say we're learning Japanese. Anki (or iKnow, heh heh) pops up a sentence with the word "ことば"

Ultimately, it's hear a word a Japanese, write it out in Kanji (or see kanji, say the word in Japanese) [yes, Chinese variants can be here if you're learning Chinese]. So you write out 言葉

Ok, that doesn't happen, but you recall from context that it's talking about "word" which you recall is more like word, leaf. Ok, so write the kanji for keywords word and leaf.

Ok, that doesn't happen for leaf. But you recall that leaf is flowers, generation, and tree. Bang, know out the kanji.

Wait, still not happening (not sure what the primitives are, or the placement). Now you go back to recalling a story from last year: the LEAF of the TREE, which fills it GENERATION after GENERATION, makes the TREE look like large FLOWER. Yes, FLOWERS atop the GENERATION of TREES.

So the Stories to the Plot to the Primitives to the Japanese itself is the path. If you progressed each kanji through the paces, you can fall back on any point that brings the kanji to the forefront again. Careful about letting the process take importance over the results.

Well, I think nukemarine tried to say what I'll say now:

While doing your reviews, someday, the story will be there just to resolve your doubts (as it does with tobberoth).

I finished RTK for some months already and I'm still having a ~50 card/day review schedule.
There are kanji that I'm not "strong" yet (the ones keeping my schedule high) but there are kanji that are already part of me and that I'll feel I'll never forget.
For instance, 持 and 待 are two of them. I don't need to think at the story at all to remember them, but if I want, I can.