I was getting stuck on the word 狩人(かりゅうど). Thanks to Heisig, I had no trouble remembering its meaning (hunter), but I couldn't remember the reading. For some reason, the -ど　part was all I would remember, probably because it was so strange. After a few days of being frustrated I decided to use mnemonics to remember it. か is a mosquito, and りゅう is a dragon. So I remembered that this wasn't an ordinary hunter, but one that hunted only mosquitoes and dragons. I incorporated some imagery of three-story tall mosquitoes from when I played Everquest 10 years ago to help me out. In the subsequent reviews, I would take a few seconds to recall the imagery, and from there I was able to remember the pronunciation. Nowadays, I can read かりゅうど right away without pausing to think of my story.

My guess is that you aren't practicing your other skills often enough to improve your recall rate. Get a typing program and drill every day to improve your keypad speed, and throw a few maps in your srs and grade yourself on how quickly you can recall which direction is East and which is West.

The mnemonics will fade over time. I still do hesisg cards (reviewing via the srs) and over time as I kept getting farther and farther into japanese. It just faded into plain english keywords and japanese ones as well. I believe it works well but for learning the language itself via mnemonics can be annoying and therefore not recommended.

For kanji, I found mnemonics laid a strong memory foundation. While admittedly not helping much with recall speed, this felt pretty easily achievable later on through repeated exposure. Think of it as a 'crutch' if you will; it allows you to index these kanji somewhere in your mind, which ultimately saves you time as you don't have to try to learn the language by rote repetition of squiggly lines of nonsense.

OP wrote:

I was suspecting something like that. It is true that these are skills that I don't use often enough to develop a strong "intuitive" memory, so every time I need them I fall back on the mnemonics (...)

You've kind of described the main purpose of RTK: you can't review and refresh your memory of 2000+ regular use kanji every day. It takes too much time. And you can't get sufficient exposure to 2000+ kanji in reading and textbook exercises in a day, let alone a month. So the mnemonics help you remember things better until you get enough exposure/practice.

I think realistically you need at least a year to get a good exposure to all the general use kanji, and in that time you could suffer a lot of drawbacks from forgetting a lot of characters and loosing motivation. On the other hand, being able to remember even just  half of RtK Volume 1 is in itself very encouraging and boosts your confidence.

But otherwise, I see your point. I have the same problem with "first name", "surname" in English. After years of getting confused between the two, I created a simple mnemonic. Each time I come accross the words in English I can see my mind doing the extra step of going through the mnemonic, but at least I no longer get frustrated by it. It's also something that's too infrequent to become "rote" memory.

So in that regard, I think you're right. You will certainly have kanji that are seldom used, that you will need the mnemonic. But that will still be better than forgetting the character entirely. In other words, I'm not sure how the use of mnemonics is worse than the default rote memorization, considering these seldom used characters are not the ones you'd want to "rote memorize" anyway.

This has been mentioned briefly by others before, but I think it's a very important thing that might take away your fear of mnemonics; the stories disappear over time. The more you come across the kanji, the less you'll actually need the story. With most of the kanji that I review, I can instantly write the kanji without having to come up with the story first. If you were to use West and East every single day, you'd also have no problem whatsoever to remember it. I recognise it; I know very well now where the west and east of Europe are, but when it comes to cities in the US, for example, or other places, I have to think before I can say 'it's in the west' even though I can clearly see it in my mind's eye on the left side of the map.

Anyway; don't worry about having to rethink the story for months and months after you've learnt the kanji. It will fade away and you'll be able to write the kanji instantly. And this is coming from someone who can't even remember what someone said to me yesterday, so don't give me a bad memory excuse. If I can do it, so can you.

Still worried about this...

I've been studying for a week now, about 15-20 kanji a day, and when I flip the pages of what I've done so far (~130 kanji), the characters still look completely alien to me. Sure if I concentrate for 10 seconds I can remember the keyword (and the other way around I can write the kanji), but I wouldn't say I "know" the characters. What I know is convoluted tricks to remember (no offense). If I close my eyes and try to picture in my head some of the characters I've learned, nothing comes to mind unless I try to remember the stories. Scary.

Still, the experience is interesting and pretty fun, although harder than I thought it would be.

A week? Come back to this thread in a few months when you've finished. ;p

Last edited by nest0r (2011 February 07, 2:37 pm)

I remember feeling this way when I first had a crack at the kanji. Honestly, come back to this thread in a year's time and you will laugh - some kanji will be so ingrained in your memory that they'll come to mind as quickly as the English words do. One week is no time at all, but you should start to notice the early kanji sticking within a few weeks. They gradually become more and more familiar, until one day you look back and realise you really know them.

Also, what aphasiac says is true - get some sort of frequent exposure to Japanese. Anime is great for it because there are often characters on the screen. You'll start to focus on them more and more as you learn, it adds an extra dimension to watching. I watched naruto when I did the kanji and pretty much every episode I'd notice another kanji I knew - very motivating.

Last edited by Blahah (2011 February 07, 2:54 pm)

Let me add my voice to the "don't worry about it" brigade.

I've used so many tricks with characters and vocab to get me where I am today (pretty good) and I'm still functioning fine. I think there are just some things that will always give you difficulty. It drives me nuts but I'm forever wanting hidari to be right and ani to be sister. I often have to stop and think while I untangle them in my brain. Arghhh! Why? After all this time...

The process you talked about when working out the characters through your stories sounds exactly right to me. Believe me, it works. As others have mentioned you will begin to speed up and achieve near instant recall.