Don't put your primitives on the front of the card. Anything else is up to your personal style of learning. The goal is to remember the kanji, not to tie them to some obscure, and often very misleading English words. Add whatever you need to get that kanji out of your memory, weather it's stories, pictures, video or something else. Just don't put anything that hints at the kanji elements, and you can be sure that you are recalling it from memory. As long the character remains in your head, you are doing it the right way.

You will eventually realize that Hesing keywords are more of a hindrance when it comes to studying real Japanese words with them.

Last edited by unauthorized (2010 June 16, 2:16 pm)

Zon70 wrote:

no primitives in the front of the card? how am i supposed to remember the strokes without knowing the primitives?

You're meant to memorise the story (which contains the primatives)

The story essentially is the character, and it's what you need to be able to recall from memory. You're giving away the answer on the question side, which is why you can't remember the characters from the keyword. Heisig himself suggests the keyword-character model, and it's how all the shared decks are made as well. Who told you to review from the story?

In Heisig's example card, I seem to remember the notes/story was upside down, so you couldn't use it to cheat when reviewing?

Really the whole point of RtK is keyword -> recalled story -> write kanji. eventually the stories drop away, and the keywords are replaced with actual Japanese words.

Stories aren't written down when you come across kanji in the wild, so you have to memorise them; remove them from the fronts of your cards and start reviewing that way.