aussie
New member
Registered: 2009-02-18
Posts: 4
When you learn the stories that go along with the kanji is it important to learn the story in sentence form, or is it sufficient to just remember the mental images of the story?
Thanks in advance.
Nukemarine
Member
From: 神奈川
Registered: 2007-07-15
Posts: 2347
I think it depends on how strong your mental "pictures" of the primitives happen to be. With strong images, you can create strong mental stories using the images. What happened with me is as I missed earlier kanji (that had weak or no picturesque stories), I went and created stories for them. They held stronger.
Sometimes, a simple mnemonic is all you need so go with that.
Guess the point is, go with what works at first. If you end up missing them after long stretches (4 weeks or 2 months), just change up the story to make it stronger. If you created a better image for a primitive, change up the story if the kanji rolls around.
Matthew
Member
From: Purgatory
Registered: 2006-03-20
Posts: 84
Short answer: whatever is the most helpful for remembering it.
However, you will find that you need the stories less over time, and you will even stop thinking in terms of keyword elements eventually. For many kanji now, the elements come immediately to mind even if I don't remember the story, and for others I just imagine the whole kanji whole.
RtK1 as I see it is just an intermediate step; the point is to just get all the kanji inside your head at this point. When I took Japanese class at a university, we learned the characters just as a seeming random series of strokes by rote memorization. Most people found that the kanji didn't 'stick' inside their heads this way. RtK1 makes the kanji stick in your memory, then once you've got them solidly inside your head, you can easily layer the readings and compounds on top of that foundation.
Anyway, I think it's a natural progression to think about stories and keywords less as you get better at reading. I mean, when you eventually get to say, being able to read a newspaper, you're not going to be imaging stories about turkeys walking on spoons for every character you see. 
Ampharos64
Member
From: England
Registered: 2008-12-09
Posts: 166
I would also say just do whatever works. I have a better memory for words than images, so without trying, I usually end up remembering the words of the story, which I 'hear' read out when I see the keyword (Heisig's sound how I imagine his voice to sound, mine sound like me, and those I got from here sound, uh, how I imagine fellow Japanese learners to sound..am I weird? (Uh, yep)). I may have an image, but it's usually secondary, and they usually just involve the primitives themselves anyway. I am now genuinely surprised, whenever I explain the method, when someone gives me a weird look and points out that my 'samurai' is just three lines, which 'looks nothing like anything!'.
In images which don't involve the primitives, I tend to see the Kanji, complete with story, exactly as it was on the page of the book or this site, which somehow feels like cheating...is it possible to have a semi-photographic memory? ; )
Story and image should fall away eventually anyway, which you've probably already noticed with some Kanji.
