Using Heisig without using Mnemonics?

emily00 Member

From: Ohio Registered: 2007-12-05 Posts: 21

Hey guys, hoping I can find some advice (and encouragement) here. I've been doing RTK and I'm around 150, but the thing is I'm not really the type of person that mnemonics really work well with. So far I've just been trying to memorize the keyword & kanji but not really using the story system to remember them (I have a little bit but not for many).

Right now I'm doing fine with it this way but I'm worried when I get into the higher numbers it'll lead to disaster. Have any of you just went through RTK this way successfully?

I'm thinking if it starts getting bad I'll TRY to see if I can get into using the mnemonic/story system more, though so far when I've tried it it's seemed to hinder me more than help. Maybe my brain is just weird.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

bodhisamaya Guest

What from RTK are you using? The keywords are often not the most common meaning. The keywords and order were both designed for the purpose of building upon previous stories.
How are you remembering the kanji without any memory device (mmnemonic)? Do you have a photographic memory? Is it just this website you like? A little confused about how you are going about this.

On a side note about your weird brain. It can actually be a blessing. Speaking from someone who spent all of his elementary years in special-ed because they thought I was retarted. If you don't learn like other people, you become creative to keep up and end up seeing the world from unique perspectives. Often seeing things from angles others never bother to examine.

Last edited by bodhisamaya (2008 December 23, 11:54 pm)

Raichu Member

From: Australia Registered: 2005-10-27 Posts: 249 Website

Heisig's method is mnemonics. If you're just rote learning kanji1=keyword1, kanji2=keyword2, ..., then most people tend to hit a limit around 400 kanji where their brain can't take in any more. You need something else. For millions of people, it's living in a culture where you are continuously bombarded with kanji that you don't have a hope of not forgetting. For others, it's constant repetition and exposure to the language. For us, it's using mnemonics based on kanji components to help shorten the process a little.

However, if mnemonics doesn't work for you, I can understand that. I have to say that RTK hasn't worked for me as well as for others. I just can't make up mnemonics that stick for many kanji.

I would suggest sticking with it just a little longer. Try to use other people's stories on the study pages to help you with ideas for remembering the kanji. If that doesn't work for you, then forget RTK and don't waste your time on it. Use traditional methods. You'll get there--it might just take a little longer.

(Although RTK is not that entirely untraditional--even the Japanese use some mnemonic tricks to remember some kanji, and it appears that some kanji were created with mnemonics in mind.)

JapanesePod101 Sponsor

alyks Member

From: Arizona Registered: 2008-05-31 Posts: 914 Website

emily00 wrote:
I've been doing RTK and I'm around 150, but the thing is I'm not really the type of person that mnemonics really work well with.

Maybe you can tell us exactly happens. Because my initial thought when people say they're bad at something off the bat is that they need to do it more. Sure, it's easy for me say this after finishing it, but I even sucked when I started mnemonics. Practice = skill. I have a feeling that if you really tried it and gave it a shot for a couple hundred or so kanji, you'd do a lot better then you'd think.

Last edited by alyks (2008 December 24, 12:56 am)

zodiac Member

Registered: 2008-04-01 Posts: 123

I'm not sure how you can "just try to memorize the keyword and kanji" using Heisig.

I believe Heisig consist of two parts:

1) Decomposing a kanji into primitives
2) Memorizing keyword-->primitives

So for learning laugh-->笑 I would do

1) 笑-->bamboo primitive + heaven primitive
2) laugh-->bamboo + heaven

And the mnemonics are used only at the second stage.

So when you say you're trying to memorize the keyword and kanji, it doesn't sound like Heisig at all, more like using visual/muscle memory to remember the kanji, skipping both parts.

tibul Member

From: UK Registered: 2008-07-17 Posts: 110 Website

alyks wrote:
Maybe you can tell us exactly happens. Because my initial thought when people say they're bad at something off the bat is that they need to do it more. Sure, it's easy for me say this after finishing it, but I even sucked when I started mnemonics. Practice = skill. I have a feeling that if you really tried it and gave it a shot for a couple hundred or so kanji, you'd do a lot better then you'd think.

I must agree with what alyks says here, I personally think that I'm useless at thinking up mnemonics and tend to use other people's and at first I was also not very good at using mnemonics to remember them but I kept on trying and it became easier and easier for the story's to stick, yeah maybe I'm not as good as some people as I still regularly get 20-40 failed every review (out of over 100 to review) and I've been finished for a week or so now but I can guarantee that I would never have finished nor would I have remembered so many if it wasn't for the mnemonic way of doing things.

A good example for me is that I'f i fail a Kanji i usually instantly recognize it (and its story) and i can almost always remember every primitive that makes it up, and if i see it on its own i.e. in a sentence its very rare that i don't know what the keyword was, which I'm sure i wouldn't have got to this stage without heisig.

Last edited by tibul (2008 December 24, 2:39 am)

Nukemarine Member

From: 神奈川 Registered: 2007-07-15 Posts: 2347

I changed up jow I approached the method as I went along. Early on, I mainly did straight mnemonics: laugh = bamboo and heaven. Later, I went for the visual: Laugh - scene from "Losing my Religion where the guy is laughing after the man the fell from Heaven loses his wig. Brief image of the other guy prodding the hole in the tummy with a bamboo stick" Now, it takes longer to type up and read than the image comes to my mind. Plus, its been so long even that is not necessary.

So yeah, you can use mnemonics. Seeing that you are bad at that, create that visual scene in your head instead. Take 5 minutes if you have to, as I found it was time well spent. It is no surprise that Heisig said just that.

Ben_Nielson Member

From: Japan Registered: 2008-12-19 Posts: 164

I suck at making up the stories as well. Or I should say, it's just really not enjoyable and really time consuming. I made up stories, though, for the first 1000 or so Kanji. Almost all of the last half of the book, I used stories from this site.

I noticed no negative difference in retention - in fact, it was probably better.

Anyways, I do remember some Kanji based solely on the primitives used where the story just never made sense and was much more difficult to remember than just remembering the primitives was.

About a month off completing RtK, when doing most of my reviews now I don't recall the stories - just keywords. But it helps having the story there if I need to "dig deep" for the answer.

I would think it's possible to do. Even if you don't use mnemonics, I think RtK could serve as a good guide for learning Kanji as it presents them in a very logical order to learn them (as building blocks). This allows you to look at Kanji in a totally different way.

Still, I recommend sticking to the mnemonics. I'd never really used mnemonics before this book (maybe even considering them a bit childish), but the effective of RtK has convinced me otherwise.

Last edited by Ben_Nielson (2008 December 24, 4:57 am)

Tobberoth Member

From: Sweden Registered: 2008-08-25 Posts: 3364

Rote learning is a bad idea for anything but the primitives since it will make you much worse at splitting kanji into smaller parts which is vital to becoming good at writing them properly every time.

You don't need to do mnemonics, just create an image in your head and connect it to the keyword. It shouldn't take long and shouldn't be hard, especially not with all the stories on the site.

Index » RtK Volume 1

emily00 wrote:

alyks wrote: