Still haven't come up with a good story for 一,二, or 三.
Guess I am doomed never to learn those kanji :-(

It depends. If you stop and think for a minute, can you recall the story? When you are writing out the kanji, do you know the names of the primitives?

Somewhere in the book, Heisig does say that eventually the stories do fade away, and you are left with just remembering the shapes of the kanji. But if you are simply remembering the kanji from the get-go without thinking about the story, it might cause you some problems later.

ファブリス wrote:

The danger is that you may be using short term memory and you will be fooling yourself thinking that you "know" it when you don't. Those kanji you will pass two or three times and after a 1 month interval with no exposure at all to this character (say the more uncommon ones), you will forget it. So be your own judge, you know when you see a kanji if it's one of those that are everywhere, or if it's a complex/uncommon kanji.

On the other hand no need to stress about it. As a "middle way" I'd recommend at least always try to recall what each primitive is, by their exact english names. Those are the building blocks. There are only 200 or so of them in RtK1 and they will always be useful in Japanese study, for browsing dictionaries etc.

Dictionaries aren't ordered by Heisigs radicals though. While there's quite a bit of overlap, actual kanji radicals are quite a bit more advanced than Heisig. For example, Heisig speaks of the tree radical while in actuality, there are several radicals based on tree, depending on where in the kanji they are placed. He also calls some stuff radicals while they are in fact just a common group of parts put together.

I agree that remembering the radicals is the most important part of Heisig though, as long as you can do that I doubt you'll ever have any problems.

Tobberoth wrote:

He also calls some stuff radicals while they are in fact just a common group of parts put together.

That's why he calls 'em "primitives" instead of "radicals". I think the only time he called them "radicals" was in the section where you can use primitives to look up kanji.