Because most people don't want to put the extra work in to do RTK correctly.  They think they can cheat the system and make things faster, but they're just making it harder on themselves in the long run.

For that matter, Heisig wanted each person to make their -own- stories.  Why?  Because the more complex kanji are harder to master and making your own story is part of that.  It isn't that he gave up after a hundred or so kanji and decided that his readers would have to write the rest of the book for him.  There was method to his madness.

I think that's a valid ‘story’. Whatever works, especially once people chunk primitives as concepts and refer back to stories. Wordplay also helps, playing with keywords and such. (There is a lot of terrible stuff though, but the majority of it I think is forgotten/ignored and falls by the wayside as people get better at RTK.)

I do think that people will quickly vote for a story that's short and seems like it would work, but it's actually worthless, and perhaps they never un-star it even if they change stories or develop some inefficient workaround during reviews.

It's a similar mentality that is explored in studies on the spacing effect, where those with poor metacognitive awareness and study skills tend to think short-term success/ease is important, when it's actually less effective in the long-term than desirable difficulty.

Last edited by nest0r (2011 June 05, 4:22 pm)

I put story in single quotes because like I said, you can't define it as one thing. There's various ways to go about it. The amount of text is unimportant, and in my experience and study on the topic(s), having more visuals is also highly overrated.

A story where you have to literally split yourself into halves in order to spend enough time with your consorte or in order to marry her according to a weird tradition would be much more heisig or would be a much better use of imaginative memory.

damicore wrote:

Most stories you read in the study section are not even stories in the Heisig sense of the word.
Like I.E.:"The person who is your consort is most commonly "your other half"."
This is not a story, it's an easily forgetable words play and most of the stories that get the highest punctuations are like this

Take look at the "last edited" info regarding the story....

wccrawford wrote:

Because most people don't want to put the extra work in to do RTK correctly.  They think they can cheat the system and make things faster, but they're just making it harder on themselves in the long run.

For that matter, Heisig wanted each person to make their -own- stories.  Why?  Because the more complex kanji are harder to master and making your own story is part of that.  It isn't that he gave up after a hundred or so kanji and decided that his readers would have to write the rest of the book for him.  There was method to his madness.

No offense, but on what exactly are you basing your assertions?

Heisig's method front-loads the effort: spend a while coming up with a memorable story and reduce the need to review it (a necessity as his method was developed before SRS). With SRS, something much closer to rote learning becomes practical, where you just use a fairly simple mnemonic to tie the primitives together and rely on spaced reviews to maintain the memory. Yes, you'll likely fail the card more times, but you save a lot of time in coming up with the story (especially if you're not terribly imaginative). Card fails are cheap, 15 seconds tops. I never got why people think rote learning is dumb for learning kanji but fine for learning vocab. There's a bit of a disconnect there.

The real key to the heisig method isn't the imaginative stories, it's the breakdown of kanji into sensible components with memorable names and learning a large number of them in an order that lets you obtain economies of scale when learning the primitives.

And before you ask, i've finished RTK (well over a year ago) and my mature card recall is north of 90%.

It's fine to simply play with phrases and words if it is an effective bundling of meaningful, distinctive, integrative information to the learner, such as combining ‘person’, which will be familiar through encounters with kanji using this (especially if it's been personified) and the idiomatic resonance of ‘half’ as a reference to a partner in a relationship. My problem with the original example in the OP is that it has a weak connection to ‘consort’ as a keyword; the elements themselves are good and combine well. It would work better if instead of ‘person’ one used the extra semantic hooks of personifying a specific person and then used that information to add more of a connection to the keyword.

Simple wordplay can also be useful on a mostly superficial level to help tweak and disambiguate.

Last edited by nest0r (2011 June 05, 6:22 pm)

damicore wrote:

Most stories you read in the study section are not even stories in the Heisig sense of the word.
Like I.E.:"The person who is your consort is most commonly "your other half".

Short ones like this are more like suggestions, and allow the reader to fill in their own details. You can elaborate on this idea and make your own fully fleshed out memorable story - that's why people have starred it, it's still really useful.

Also word-play can totally work. For example, I only needed to see the phrase "A house with a spine, SHINTO SHRINE" once and I've never failed that kanji. As long as you don't use it too often, it's all good.

Some of the kanji that I've remebered best over the last couple years were the ones that used word-play rather than a real story. 

Those of us who have done RTK for a long time have good data sets to check on this.   I just went through and found that I have 288 cards that I have never failed and have passed 7 or more times.  This is my set of cards that I remembered perfectly over a long time--my most successful stories.  I didn't count exactly, but it seems like about 40% of those cards are not really 'stories' as Heisig described them.  I could count and find the exact number, but I'm already done with RTK so I don't really care at all.

I've never really taken what Heisig said about stories too seriously.  Despite how sure he sounds, we actually don't know very much about human memory.

Last edited by Tzadeck (2011 June 06, 12:02 am)

For me, the extraordinary about Heisigs Method is
a. to give a distinct name to every "primitive", i.e. every graphical unit that occurs more than once or twice in the Kanji world.
b. the order in which the Kanji are learned (which of course is based on a.)

Every brain works differently: Heisig himself seems to be a very optical type, that's why stories->images worked best for him. Other peoples brains may work better the logical way (which would be "The amount of people who can order around the weather") or, like mine, are good at memorizing little sentences ("A house with a spine, SHINTO SHRINE").

And one funny detail: There were several Kanji where i neither came up with a good own story, neither found one on this site that worked for me. And while i was desperatly thinking and re-thinking and trying to make something up, i realized that i had already learned the primitive combination just by spending so much "wasted" time with it.

kazelee wrote:

The stories are a mnemonic device that will eventually be discarded. The length is irrelevant as long as a good association is made, such that the imagery or wording is present long enough to be replace by the actual Japanese meaning.

This is the end goal. Not memorizing a bunch of long stories.

Exactly. I mean who is memorizing 2000+ stories? Other than those who have no "visual memory," and there are many that lack this skill. Those who are not able to visualize anything, are bound to use words or mnemonics. In the end it really doesn't matter if it's the visual or the word or mnemonic learner, as long as the goal is achieved to be able to go from keyword to kanji. With or without the story, and no matter if they are long or short.

These were my favorite stories.

The reason? The play on words was a nice start, and then it was short enough that it kind of clued me in to a good way to approach the keywords, thus allowing me to make up my own, stronger, story.

*EDIT*

This was also a method popularized by Raichu, an old member I haven't seen around here in a while. It caught on pretty well, but people always realized stories that short were ok once and a while, or to build on, but never as a full fledged story.

Last edited by Ryuujin27 (2011 June 06, 1:31 pm)