Okay, you got me curious. Why?

When you say you do 40 in a half hour do you mean you learn/do the extra reviews of those 40 in that half hour?  Even if that's what you mean, I'm not sure it's all that much faster once you get into a groove with the stories.  When I was doing a hundred a day, it took me around 3.5 hours to learn a hundred, type up the stories in anki, and do all 4 to 5 hundred reviews I had, and then grade the new 100 in anki. 

I would stick with the stories if I were you, because in my experience your brain just gets better at creating images and mental hooks from the stories that will stick with you, and it'll get easier to learn more and more in a short amount of time.  I'm not sure that just looking at the primitives has the same potential.  I also hear that after 1000 or so your recall goes down because they're not as well embedded in your memory if you don't use mnemonics, but I've never actually seen evidence of that, just something someone said once.  I think anki should ideally be able to take care of that but I don't know.

With an SRS, brute forcing RTK is doable, but you may find yourself struggling a lot more as you go on.
If mnemonics really aren't your thing, who are we to tell you to do them?
I do suggest you give them a decent try, as for the majority of people they help quite a bit. Also, the ability to quickly form mnemonics is quite the handy skill for other pursuits.

That's pretty intense. I guess you could just resort to mnemonics only if a kanji gives you trouble.

I tried and it didn't work for me. Stories make it much easier at first and later they just phase out.

It's certainly possible but I think its quicker with some kind of mnemonic.

I'm sure it's possible, but it's probably going to take you quite a bit longer than it would take to just get in the groove of using mnemonics.  Since there are lots of great ones provided by this site, you don't even have to spend time coming up with your own stories.  In my experience, the RTK memorization process tends to get a bit hairier around the 800-900 kanji mark.  At least that's when I started having to refine some of my stories to keep them more clearly distinguished from my stories for similar English keywords (e.g., "week" and "weekday," "sea" and "ocean," "intelligent" and "clever," etc.).

There's an added benefit to the stories as well.  Say you're trying to write the word 「四字熟語」 .  If you've rote memorized all your kanji and then haven't been reading/writing Japanese very much lately, there's a good chance you'll write the top part of 熟 and then forget whether the bottom part should be the bottom part of 熟 or 塾.  It's hard to explain how frequently this happens to someone who doesn't have the experience of memorizing kanji by rote and then not being able to study much Japanese for a year.  But it does happen, and it happens with a lot of characters.  It even affects my reading ability sometimes.

On the other hand, if you've done Heisig, you have the mnemonic there that reminds you how to distinguish between "cram school" and "mellow."

I'm going to chime in again here.  Here's an example of why I like the story method so much:

In my many years of studying Japanese, I probably learned at least two or three times how to write 驚き (おどろき; odoroki; "surprise").  I would learn how to write it for a kanji quiz and then a week later I wouldn't be able to write it any more.  I wouldn't be sure whether the top left component underneath the grass radical was 可 or 何 or 句, or I might confuse the top-right component with 又.  With Heisig, that doesn't happen.  I think of someone who is surprised and in awe of Mr. Ed, the talking horse.  As soon as I remember that story, I know exactly how to write what was formerly a very difficult kanji.  Of course, over time that story has begun to compress itself down to nothing more than "awe-horse."

Now it turns out that my friends who have high-level kanji skills tend to do the same thing, but they've just done it naturally from the start.  They don't need Heisig because they're already using their own version of his technique.  I don't know why, but it just never clicked for me to do this naturally.  The difference in my ability to write and retain kanji after starting this method has been nothing short of astounding.

Last edited by nebusoku (2009 August 18, 10:34 am)

Sure it seems to work. But I disagree with you when you say it is quicker to do it without mnemonics. It is not.

Jaunty wrote:

Yeah, I'm a bit confused. The first several hundred kanji in RtK are really easy and it's quite possible to brute force them without mnemonics. Can you give us some more detail on how you're reviewing and how well you know the 700 characters you learned "normally". (ie. can you go from the English/Japanese keyword to the kanji with no problem? How do you deal with primitives or characters that look very similar?)

I'd be very surprised if you could make it much further in RtK without mnemonics since that's basically what makes it possible for most of us. If you really can make it through RtK like this then you might have some type of photographic memory, although I'd be skeptical since it's still debated whether eidetic (photographic) memory really exists. I haven't heard of anyone else being able to make it very far without mnemonics.

With the previous 700 I'd just brute force about 10-20 a day as I learnt vocab. Basically like anyone else learns kanji if they're not learning them in an RTK-like fashion. As long as I SRS'd them in some form I remembered them well. (Of course, then I hadn't heard of software SRS so I ended up forgetting to test myself on the odd few)

Where there are obvious connections like the "fish" in "fishing" and "carp", or simple visualisations like an old flower for "suffering" I use them, but any rate, we all learnt the 26 letters of the alphabet visually (I assume).

Went through another 54 in RTK today (36 new ones). Will keep updated.

Did 235-299 today, still going well.

nebusoku wrote:

On the other hand, if you've done Heisig, you have the mnemonic there that reminds you how to distinguish between "cram school" and "mellow."

This is incredibly true.  Without using a story I'm not quite sure how I would remember something like this after a year, as it is the "dirt" and the "oven flame" that take my stories in very different directions, making it so there is no confusion at all between the two. 

aphasiac wrote:

Warning - I had a 95%+ recall rate up to kanji 352...then came the arrow/parade/float chapter. That was the first time I really struggled, due to the number of similar and confusing primitives.

Will be interesting to see how you cope; keep us updated!

I too would like to know how you do/did on this section.  Also how you do/did on stop/correct/walk/mend/zoo.

These two sections were, and sometimes still are, my nemesis.

wonderflex wrote:

nebusoku wrote:

On the other hand, if you've done Heisig, you have the mnemonic there that reminds you how to distinguish between "cram school" and "mellow."

This is incredibly true.  Without using a story I'm not quite sure how I would remember something like this after a year, as it is the "dirt" and the "oven flame" that take my stories in very different directions, making it so there is no confusion at all between the two.

I don't have a mnemonic for them(I did briefly ages ago), I just remember that 塾 uses dirt and 熟 uses flames.