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+--- Thread: How hard is it to get back? (/thread-480.html)
How hard is it to get back? - Ryuujin27 - 2007-04-17
I haven't been able to study as much kanji as I would have wanted to in the past couple of months. I've been quite busy with school and Japanese grammar (plus some Chinese too). I made it up to the beginning of Part 3 (so 500ish?), and then I put it down to master the 500 before I moved on... but I never got the chance.
So, I am probably going to come back next month when school is over and I can concentrate on kanji (with some preparation for next years Japanese and Chinese class). Has anyone ever done this? How hard is it? I tried to review a couple and found I forgot a lot! This concerned me... I wonder if maybe I didn't do it right the first time, or perhaps I just spent too long away. We got to that point in Japanese class where I don't know all the new kanji we are learning already. My sensei was surprised, haha.
Anyway, I hope some people can give me encouraging words. I need the motivation to get back in. I wanted all 2042 to be in my boxes by September.
How hard is it to get back? - ikmys - 2007-04-18
I started Heisig back in fall of 2004, but the amount of time it took to study/review meant that basic Japanese studies fell by the wayside. Feeling really silly spending so much time on a "luxury" (the Japanese have a huge burden compared to other nations by continuing to use a non-phonetic written language, the years of study this takes from other subjects... glad I missed it the first time round!) I stopped my kanji study after a couple months (I made it about 700 in I think) and concentrated on grammar and getting to the point where I was "fluent" (whatever that meant ;-). Once I had gotten all of the grammar down (the basic and intermediate grammar dictionaries, I don't remember the author's name) to the point where I could speak as fast as my lips would go, I knew it was high time to get the kanji in order. I started last September, went back to #1, and restored my stories from there. It took about a month to review that first 600 to the point where I felt I had erased the accumulated of fog. Using this site I made steady progress (I think I hit two lulls, one at about 1400ish and one just before 1900) and got finished with RTK1 a month ago. From my experience, even dropping Heisig for two years is doable as long as you were making notes along the way and at the time construct a distinct story for each kanji. Review takes a while, but you will get the "oh, yeah... now I remember" feeling with enough patience. Reading the kanji, probably, but not till I can write and sight recognize anything that pops up. Who knows, another 1000 or so to go? ;-)
How hard is it to get back? - astridtops - 2007-04-18
I've had a pause between doing the first 900 and the rest of about 18 months. I found I basically had to relearn almost all kanji from 600 onwards, but on the first 500 I still got decent recall rates, and the ones between 600 and 900 went a bit quicker than the totally new ones. I didn't do much in between, so even if it looks like you have to restart from scratch, it's possible to make a lot of progress on your old kanji quickly.
How hard is it to get back? - Ryuujin27 - 2007-04-19
Ahh, thank you for those reassuring words.
I can't wait to get back to the kanji... but I need to wait until the summer. Plus I'll need to teach myself the basics of Chinese so I will be OK next semester.
Why is becoming trilingual so hard?
ありがとう!
How hard is it to get back? - jjazz_kanji_first - 2007-04-19
At around 700 kanji in, I put the books down for a few months because it wasn't fun and I was burning out. Now I'm back full force and doing RTK and Pimsleur and listening exercises (i.e. Naruto).
Reviewing the 700 I had forgotten seems like it's going to take a few weeks, but I find that the second time around things are sticking faster and better. The stories are more vivid, and I'm remembering my stories, unprompted as soon as I see a lot of the kanji. It's rather nice.
How hard is it to get back? - zwarte_kat - 2007-04-20
I was at the same point as you (500ish, part 3) in the beginning of October, then I took a break to graduate from school:no Japanese whatsoever. In march I started again. I found this site and just dropped in all the flashcards in one time and started reviewing. I got back to where i was between 1 and 2 weeks, acceptable, I think.
The only problem that I had, and I still have with this site, is how it handles failed cards. Going through the stack at first I had about 35-40 % wrong (I see a incorrect stroke as wrong so i'm fairly strict). This means that I had about 200 words wrong after reviewing. I couldn't review those again until I clicked "learned" for 200 cards in the study area (I was still discovering how the site works, still am BTW). That sucked. Even now I would like to have an option to review failed cards, is there one? Now I do it manually in the study area, but that's not a very comfortable solution.
Anyway I think you will need some time to pick it up, but not a lot.
How hard is it to get back? - chamcham - 2007-04-20
Well if it helps at all, it took me 2 years to finished RTK1. The first time I made it through the first 12 lessons and then stopped. Afterwards, I started over and got to 900 and then stopped. After that I started over and got to 1200 and then stopped.
Finally, I promised myself that I'll finally get through it all and I made it(thanks to this website!). The best advice I can give is to try to make a little progress every day even if it is small. What prevented me from progressing was my unrealistic schedule. I planned to do 80 kanji a day. But when I realized I would reach that goal, I didn't study any kanji at all that day. Afterwards, I realized that if I just pushed myself to memorize kanji every day(no matter how few it is), that I would eventually make it to the end.
That's what worked for me.
Hope you make it.
How hard is it to get back? - Chadokoro_K - 2007-04-26
Thanks to everyone for your experiences and insights. I am also returning after an absense of several months...
I had studied up to #1400. When I tested yesterday and today I only missed 3% of the first three hundred kanji but went up to 12% on the next two hundred. (I even "cheated" by testing #301-500 in RTK order--my recall rates wouldn't have been as good if I didn't.) I'm going to try to continue to "review test" (in RTK order) through to #1400. And follow-up with proper randomized testing after that (following a spaced scheduling of 3,6,9,15, and 30 days in 100 kanji batches) using Stackz--I can't use the marvelous testing interface here yet because I use different keywords.
Ideally I will be able to get through this process of refamiliarising myself with the first 1400 kanji in two weeks by "review testing" 100 kanji per day and still have a manageable daily load of kanji that need to be relearned. If this schedule is too ambitious I'll cut the load in half until I find something that works for me even if it takes longer.
Actually a quick review of primitives may help even more as I often couldn't quite write a primitive correctly even though I recalled it in the story.
Did anyone here try a full-on primitive review before attempting to test/review previously learned kanji?
How hard is it to get back? - dingomick - 2007-04-26
I took a month off from review a couple times. The essential thing is that you have stories on this website (or in your book) for all the kanji. First, I went back and tested myself in order through the book so my memory could be triggered by stories building on themselves. Then, I had Fabrice delete all my cards, and I started over with totally random review. I think trying to start again by just deleting all the cards and trying to review at random would be slow and frustrating.
I'm in the middle of my second card deletion now. Whenever I miss a kanji, I copy/paste it in the Study area for a reminder. When my missed cards hit 50, I review them in that day's session. I review 150-200 a day.
How hard is it to get back? - Jawful - 2007-04-26
I stopped putting in new kanji a few months ago. But I came back every 2 or 3 weeks in that time and have reviewed. I've forgotten several, and haven't cleared out that failed box yet, but today I just got 125 out of 136 so it's not quite so bad.
But I'm hoping to get back into the swing of it again. First thing to do is re-learn the 80 some sitting in my failed box.
How hard is it to get back? - Mighty_Matt - 2007-04-27
I've often taken breaks of several weeks where I haven't been actively learning new kanji. Thankfully, I always review my kanji during my lunch break at school, so even if no new kanji are going in, I keep on top of the old ones.
So, my advice if you've had a long break and want to start again:
Add the first 100 kanji to the site and review them.
If you got over, say, 90% correct then I'd try the next batch of 100.
Keep doing this until your percentage drops to a point that you think is bad (for me 80%). That's where you should start studying from again.
Of course, if it takes you several days to get back to where you were before then make sure you review any you failed before adding new kanji in.