blargh88 wrote:

In addition, since i don't usually imagine the pictures unless i'm having trouble, I usually forget my small phrase within the week. However, by then I have the kanji well remembered.

I would say that's very temporary, it's just fresh in your memory. We're talking about over 2000 characters, as time passes they're not all going to be well remembered with only a week's worth of reviewing for each one of them.

However, I personally think that the only way you can really fail when it comes to language learning is by giving up. As long as you keep at it, you're improving. If you half-ass all your stories then you're going to have to put a lot more work into reviewing them, but that doesn't mean you can't succeed.

Stop thinking about it. Let the SRS do the work for you. Some cards I really depend on the stories, some I can do just by a keyword or pictograph. It really doesn't matter just keep doing your SRS everyday and it will be impossible not to learn them regardless of your method. The stories help them stick in your head better though for sure.

I used different ways depending on the Kanji, and mixed more than one in the same Kanji, all that matters is that the keyword will lead "eventually" to the Kanji no matter how crowded is your Kanji pocket, i.e each keyword has its unique position in your mind with an associated mnemonic that leads to the Kanji.

I used: pictographs, just sentences (but usually related to other Kanji, for example wither and suffer are sharp in my memory because I tied them together like this: trees wither when they get old while flowers suffer because they look ugly, so there's a combination here), images, weird events or things that I know and jokes.

To summarize, you have to make a clearly distinct place for each Kanji in your head.

Last edited by undead_saif (2012 January 22, 1:46 pm)

For me... I just use the RTK Anki Shared deck that has the top two stories from this site. Making stories for all the kanji is too much work for me, I understand it works for others but I don't see the point. I spend all my valuable time learning new cards by reading through the koohii stories. If I see that I'm failing a card too many times or the stories are too long or stupid, I will edit the card and come up with my own.

This is the best solution IMO, making your own SRS deck, making your own stories, or looking up stories here and putting them into your SRS is a waste of time. There is plenty of resources to be lazy and still learn fast. I've done 50 cards a day this way up to the halfway point, decided to drop it down to 25 new a day though since the reviews started to pile up.