Dudeist Wrote:I seem to be having a problem with element order. For example
Is 書, Write...

I WRITE with my BRUSH all over the DAY
or
I WRITE all DAY with my BRUSH

Even worse are Kanji where in order to put the story in order I have to use very odd word order in English.

I usually fail one of three ways.
1: Right elements, wrong order. Another one I get wrong is Outside, Evening. Divining rod. No problem remembering the elements but left right or right left, bah.
2: Right elements wrong order directional. I try to put in some sort of above or over where there is one on top of the other to keep them straight from side by side where it isn't obvious like with flower, house, schoolhouse, crown etc.
3: The ones where I completely blank out which are few and usually fixable
4: Where I know the story but blank out on how to write one of the elements... that drives me a but nuts.

With recently learned Kanji I fail maybe half on points 3 or 4 but failure and repetition tends to get the stories in the skull.

The first one is more of a problem. I can come up with a story but unless I put the story in order AND remember it verbatim I can fail some I've seen for a while. I figure give it time and it should solve itself. Try to picture those particular Kanji on the page/in Anki.

It is hard enough to remember the idea behind a story without having to remember them in exact word order.

Dudeist Wrote:I usually fail one of three ways.
1: Right elements, wrong order. Another one I get wrong is Outside, Evening. Divining rod. No problem remembering the elements but left right or right left, bah.
2: Right elements wrong order directional. I try to put in some sort of above or over where there is one on top of the other to keep them straight from side by side where it isn't obvious like with flower, house, schoolhouse, crown etc.
3: The ones where I completely blank out which are few and usually fixable
4: Where I know the story but blank out on how to write one of the elements... that drives me a but nuts.

(2015-10-01, 12:12 am)Dudeist Wrote: I did a little experiment the other day. Went through the index on a recognition trip.
First 200 I was getting over 95% right, never 200, about 90%
If I were training for recognition as opposed to recall only I'd probably do even better.
Today I nailed 95% on my recall. I think I might do it more often, no writing and they seem to feed off each other.
I did 21 more from a chapter of 90+ and did a quick read through took a few minutes off and managed to hit all but one on the first round. Those garment ones looked scary. Also there was some police/Junkie action while I was doing the learning phase so pretty good. I did have problem with IIRC distant forgetting to put in the road thingy twice.

I find myself disappointed that I am not doing more. I just sit around farting away time that could be used to hammer away at the Kanji. At least now I'm 20% though. I could have been much further along. Must find a way to get my rear in gear.

(2015-09-27, 5:13 pm)Dudeist Wrote: One thing I don't do is visualisation, nor do I really use stories but rather sentences that incorporate the keyword and the elements. I find those actual stories in RTK just get on my nerves. I know that visualisation is a powerful memory tool, but lets just say if I were required to follow the forever fluent advice of say visually blowing up all male nouns and burning all female nouns, I'd rather take up knitting. Not that Japanese has gendered nouns [right?] but you get where I am coming from.

(2015-11-16, 12:32 am)Dudeist Wrote: I'm a bit beyond 800.
Been stuck in the 700s for ages, by all rights I should have been finished. Sometimes I get a stretch of new ones that scare me but in time and with Anki I get them. Have forgotten some mature cards recently which sucks, but usually it is a minor error or keyword confusion or some other nonsense.

(2015-11-16, 9:36 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: You're probably spending way too much time to add new kanji, which is most likely killing your momentum. You can tweak your story later on if you end up failing. Not only that, failing is also part of learning, so don't worry about that.

One interesting thing about RTK is that you won't spend much time of trying to understand a whole bunch of seemingly random strokes  and studying new radicals almost every time you stumble upon a new word. You're doing that in advance with RTK. Knowing kanji doesn't mean anything if you don't take it one step further, so don't lose sight of your goal. It also becomes easier to remember some kanji once you see them a couple of times, so maybe some of the harder ones won't stick until later on, but you'll eventually nail them.

I can't speak for others, but I've noticed that the keyword doesn't always help me with new words. So instead of trying to recall specific keywords, you'll end up having to recall the story until the new word sticks. That means that becoming familiar with the story and the kanji takes priority, after all you'll end up having to assign different meanings and sounds to them at one point anyway.

Good stories can be very helpful, but it's also important to keep going. If you're too slow, you're probably more likely to get bored and give up. Think about it this way - if you can add 10 kanji per hour with a half-decent or good story, you'll finish RTK in about 220h without taking reviews into consideration. That's a LOT of time. So instead of taking 6 minutes per kanji, let's say you take 10 minutes. That's going to be only 6 kanji per hour, which is very slow. It's "only" a 4 minute difference, which doesn't seem to be a big deal... but that means you'll be spending 366h to finish the book instead. Much more painful, isn't it?

Of course, adding way too many kanji can be stressful as well, so pace yourself. But RTK is just one of the steps you'll have to go through, so keep that in mind because there's more ahead of you than learning kanji radicals and creating 2200 stories in isolation.

(2015-11-17, 1:33 am)FlameseeK Wrote: So yeah, I think you just need to set some time aside and just add kanji! No matter what, spend that minimum amount of time every day adding kanji. Consistency is key. 1 hour a day is great if you add kanji that fast, in a single week you'll add more than a hundred . If you have enough endurance, I'd spend even more time and really challenge myself. If you don't have much else to do, 40+ kanji a day wouldn't be that time consuming and you'd finish RTK in about a month. That is to say, if your reviews don't get out of hand and you end up taking a break.

I wish I could be consistent with both RTK and Genki, but I realize now how insane it was to go for 2200 kanji from the get-go + Genki 1 and 2. I should have just done that 1k kanji deck until the end of Genki 2, but now it's too late. But once I'm done with Genki 2 by the beginning of December, I'll put it a lot of time and see if I can finish RTK asap. I'm looking at you, Tobira! I swear, I'm finishing Tobira by the end of February at most!

(2015-11-17, 7:38 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: Do a lot of people actually study for N1? My guess is that once you get to N2, you'll be at such a comfortable level that using the language would be one of the best ways to reach N1. At least, that's how I learned English - once I got the intermediate grammar out of the way, the rest was a breeze. I don't expect vocabulary acquisition in Japanese to be that easy because most words are incredibly similar, which makes them difficult to remember and not very remarkable.  But seeing these words a couple of times in context probably takes care of that anyway.

(2015-11-17, 8:14 pm)Bokusenou Wrote:

(2015-11-17, 7:38 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: Do a lot of people actually study for N1? My guess is that once you get to N2, you'll be at such a comfortable level that using the language would be one of the best ways to reach N1. At least, that's how I learned English - once I got the intermediate grammar out of the way, the rest was a breeze. I don't expect vocabulary acquisition in Japanese to be that easy because most words are incredibly similar, which makes them difficult to remember and not very remarkable.  But seeing these words a couple of times in context probably takes care of that anyway.

Yes, they do. A lot. I had to study both to level up my vocab & grammar, as well as taking practice tests.

(2015-11-17, 8:38 pm)FlameseeK Wrote:

(2015-11-17, 8:14 pm)Bokusenou Wrote:

(2015-11-17, 7:38 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: Do a lot of people actually study for N1? My guess is that once you get to N2, you'll be at such a comfortable level that using the language would be one of the best ways to reach N1. At least, that's how I learned English - once I got the intermediate grammar out of the way, the rest was a breeze. I don't expect vocabulary acquisition in Japanese to be that easy because most words are incredibly similar, which makes them difficult to remember and not very remarkable.  But seeing these words a couple of times in context probably takes care of that anyway.

Yes, they do. A lot. I had to study both to level up my vocab & grammar, as well as taking practice tests.

I see. I don't know though. Most languages get relatively easy once you get the intermediate stuff out of the way. You inevitably pick up a lot of vocabulary if you do lots of reading and whatnot.

Most advanced English courses consist of grammar reviews, a lot of vocabulary (and a good chunk of it is oftentimes not used in casual settings), native level reading (e.g. newspaper, magazines, etc), and discussions. But the best way to pick all that stuff up is to spend massive amounts of time with the language and read until your eyes bleed.

So would you say Japanese is very different from English in this regard? Or maybe N1 is just very high level academic Japanese and requires a slightly more systematic approach? I don't know if you're a native speaker of English or not, so I don't know if the way I see language learning makes much sense to you... but that's probably what I'd do to learn most western languages - get the basics out of the way, then use it a lot while going through an intermediate level book to get all major grammar points out of the way, and finally just use it as much as I could every day in my free time.

(2015-11-17, 7:38 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: I don't know about 4k hours. I've heard 2k hours should be enough for good language learners to get to N2 level. I don't really know about that, but I'll take less than year to get reach 2k+ hours if I keep up my current pace, no doubt about it. Whether I reach N2 or not, I'll be doing really well at that point so I don't care much.

I've heard that people who finish Tobira are about ready to take the N3 test.  That should be enough to reach my goal, which is to be able to do a lot of extensive reading and watch anime somewhat comfortably while still learning something. Hence, my crazy goals - I want to get there asap, because it'll become a whole lot more fun.

The thing is, I'll probably have to get to N2 to feel truly comfortable. Not sure what I'll do after Tobira, and to be honest I don't even know what my options are after that. Maybe I'll give the core decks a try, but I don't even know how they work and I don't really know how effective they are in comparison to just learning whatever new stuff you stumble upon in your readings and whatnot.

Do a lot of people actually study for N1? My guess is that once you get to N2, you'll be at such a comfortable level that using the language would be one of the best ways to reach N1. At least, that's how I learned English - once I got the intermediate grammar out of the way, the rest was a breeze. I don't expect vocabulary acquisition in Japanese to be that easy because most words are incredibly similar, which makes them difficult to remember and not very remarkable.  But seeing these words a couple of times in context probably takes care of that anyway.

(2015-11-17, 10:52 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: I see. Thanks a lot for the answer. It does make a lot of sense and helps clear some things up.

I didn't make it very clear, but I was mostly thinking about the level you're meant to be at in terms of vocabulary, comprehension, etc. It does make sense that those seriously interested in taking the test would actually take special care to nail it. I'm not interested in taking the test currently, so I was just the nomenclature as a reference - i.e. as a Japanese version of the Common European Framework.

(2015-12-08, 3:31 am)AlphaBetaFoxface Wrote: I'm no Japanese master; I myself am currently just over 1000 Kanji in using RTK. One thing that has really helped me out is writing short, simple, documentation of my progress. Every 5 days or so, I return to old entries and amuse myself at how much less I knew when I started. ......You got this, random dude on the internet!