Sup from a newcomer,

I got RTK last Thursday and I was thrilled to start studying (I still am). After a few days, realizing how much I actually already could remember I wanted to set a goal mark in my calendar. So I went for 40 Kanji per day and I'm now aiming roughly towards the 20th of April. However, and there it comes, I was a bit struck at first, by people giving the impression that it should take you about half a year or more to finish RTK1.

I just finished Part 1 of the book today, but I feel like I could do way more than I am doing right now. Splitting my Kanji sessions into two and not only one per day, I guess I could easily do around 80 Kanji every day. (I don't know how difficult this will get still later on, since I only got 276 right now)

So here's my question: How many Kanji did you or do you do per day? Do you think there will be any major drawbacks in doing too many per day? (My biggest concern is, that in a week or whatever I could forget too much of the "old" Kanji I already did, although right now I'm around 95% while reviewing) I got plenty of free time right now. In fact I got nothing else to do than learning Kanji all day, if I wanted to. So I'm basically finished after 2 hours or less, but I still don't want to rush and perhaps ruin everything in the long run.

Maybe some advice from someone who did finish the book in around a month and a half or less would be great. Did you have serious problems reviewing huge stacks of Kanji after two or three weeks, or was it still manageable? As I already said: Right now I feel I could do way more per day than I'm just doing.

Many thanks in advance.

Please don't rush yourself, I fell into the same trap I was doing 20 a day at first but that became 40 a day then 60 a day, now I'm paying the price many of the kanji I rushed through im now forgetting while the ones i did when I only did 20 a day are easier to remember.

I'd say 20 a day is the perfect pace, but thats just how many I would do a day if i could start over.

I'd say about 20 too. That's how much I did, and turned out well (high retention, low number of reviews to maintain).

If you have time to do as many as 80 that's fine but you'll probably end up with hundreds of failed cards at the end, plus a couple of hundred reviews to do per day long after finishing the book.

It all depends on how fast your memory works and how much time you devote each day to studying. You can definitely do more than 20 or whatever per day, but you still need to make good solid memorable stories.

I just memorize 1 chapter per day (when I have time to study, otherwise I just do the reviews) and my recall rate is about 98%. However my situation might be unique since I've done quite a bit of study before rtk and can recognize many of the jouyou kanji already.

The secret to completing Heisig is finding a VERY comfortable pace
that you can deal with. 80 kanji per day is crazy for most people.
People spend their whole lives and never even get close to memorizing
2000 kanji. So basically you have between now and your death to finish Heisig.

Btw, If you do 6 kanji a day for the whole year, you can finish Heisig.
So 20 if more than enough.

I think that a large number of Kanji per day is entirely possible as long as you've got the motivation to not compromise the amount of time spent creating each story in order to reach your daily goal. Equally important is keeping up with you expired stacks on a daily basis and reviewing your failed cards at the same rate; that takes care of keeping the old Kanji in place. In the introduction Heisig says he finished in a month, and there are some examples of people on this site having finished in a month or two at a rate of 50-100 Kanji per day.

But I imagine finding one's ideal pace is entirely individual.

I found that when trying to do more than 50 a day, my motivation, efficiency, and retention rate plummeted.

What I did:
I studied 50 a day, reviewed those same 50 cards from their blue stack, reviewed around 100-150 old cards, and went over all the stories in my failed stack for that day.

But I did get motivational issues at around 1200 and am finishing now a few weeks later than I might have.

Thing is, as I said before, I got the luxury to be able to completely devote myself to studying right now. No other tasks at hand + I'm going to Japan for three months starting mid May.

Right now I'm not feeling I'm at my limit, but I don't know if I will break it by doing too much in a short period of time and regretting it later on. I'm thrilled of course to complete it as early as possible, but I don't want to rush now and forget too much later on. I thought about trying to speed up a bit for now. Maybe 60 per day. But only as long as it seems managable - i.e. my review rate doesn't drop.

As things become more difficult I may be forced to slow down again, but I don't want to waste time. I still hope I can finish the book in April. It would be a major advantage, cause I guess I can manage reviewing daily while being in Japan, but I don't know what will happen in the first few weeks when I'm there.

I'd like to hear what people think about it, who actually did finish the book in a really short period of time (after all Heisig still claims for himself you can do it in 6 weeks or so) and whether or not they were struggling with extreme difficulties either later on during their studies (forgetting too much at some point sooner or later) or after finishing the whole book and still a few weeks down the road. I understand that the slower you move on, the easier it will be, but right now I want to push my limits.

I did 20-25 a day. If you go too fast reviews will catch up with you and you'll start regretting it/forgetting a lot etc.

If you could work at it full time, 100 a day has been done, but I don't recommend it.

Instead of aiming for a certain amount of kanji per day, I focus on spending a certain amount of time on RTK per day - which is usually a couple of hours. On the days I add new cards, I learn anywhere between 30-60.

At first I tried to make myself learn a certain number of kanji per day, but found this frustrating because some days I would be too busy or tired to meet my goal, and other days would be the exact opposite.

Focussing on time spent learning rather than amount learned per day has worked well for me so far (I'm at 950 after a month, and happy with my progress).

People have different amounts of disposable time. I only had an hour or two per day, so I tried to average 20~21.

Keep in mind that its not constant difficulty. It takes longer per kanji after section 2 because you have to find or make up your own stories. Also not every chapter is equally difficult; some are a breeze and some can be a headache.

Just try to do as much as you can, but if you feel like you're losing motivation or that you have so many reviews that it's hard to do them every day, then cut down the rate at which you learn new kanji.

If you have nothing else to do and you are at the beginning you should go hard at first. The first five hundred are quite easy and show up a lot in the later ones, so you will get a lot of revision of them. Until chapter two heisig gives you his stories, so it's much quicker to get through them.

If you are going to Japan in three months, then you can finish in three months, it's a good pace for someone with a lot of time. Just make sure to clear your failed stack every time you sit down to study more kanji. The failed stack should be the first thing you always do in a session.

I did it in two months, because I wasn't working and had almost all day everyday. If this is the case with you, then I see no reason to go as fast as you can. Kanji is not meant to be easy, so don't expect it to be, it's hard. If you can do six hours review a day then you can do a hundred a day. Split the learning into a session in the morning and a session at night, or even three sessions. The first thousand felt quite easy, so speed through them and take a little more time on the second thousand.

If you start to fail a lot of cards then you know that speed is too much and you can relax a bit. Just don't stop, don't take a break, you will just have to learn them all again. Do you want to read manga right now, or in six months?

I agree with everyone else. I'm right at 1583, and finding that some chapters are just total pains in the butt to get through, and others are a breeze. I found the first 1000 or so to be pretty easy, with a few rough spots along the way, but nothing major. Now I'm finding some chapters are just plain hard, and I need to take the time to review them until I'm comfortable with them. I think a lot of us breezed through the first few hundred or so. It's the later ones that will start to challenge you.

A few things that may help: someone posted a list of primitives in RTK1 that are actually kanji from RTK3. Edit: It's right here, 3 posts down:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1119
It may help with some characters.

The best thing I've done to help retention rates it to track how many times I fail a kanji. Too many times, and it goes on my "Troublesome Kanji" list, which I review a lot now. You can find it in the master list of all your known kanji. Just click on fail to sort by fails.

I'm also taking notes on "Confusing Keywords" as mentioned in that thread. If I get a kanji wrong because I get a keyword confused, I make a note of it, too.

The tricky bit for me has been figuring out just how far to push my memory to the "edge of forgetfulness." That, and I'm still pondering why some stories are vivid and stick, and some others just don't stick no matter what I do. Seriously. I could even put mudwrestling supermodels feeding me deep fried peanut butter sandwiches in some of them, and I won't remember them. Human memory is just weird sometimes.

rich_f Wrote:A few things that may help: someone posted a list of primitives in RTK1 that are actually kanji from RTK3. See if you can find that and make use of it. It may help with some characters.

It's on the sticky thread of this same forum.

EDIT: beaten to it.

rich_f Wrote:I'm also taking notes on "Confusing Keywords" as mentioned in that thread. If I get a kanji wrong because I get a keyword confused, I make a note of it, too.

In some of those cases, I found the problem was in the chosen keyword. Using a more accurate one (when available) solves a lot of problem. Additional keywords also work for kanji with many meanings.

It's totally just about how much time you have to devote and how much your brain can handle at one time.

That being said, I personally moved through the beginning lessons of the book at a much quicker pace than I'm moving now, simply because many of them were already familiar to me. So I was doing a lesson or two a day to start... but I sort of hit a wall when I got to the mid 300s (around where you learn the parade, fiesta, arrow, etc. primitives). And then again when I hit the one lesson with 130 kanji in it... that one took me forever to get through.

Now I'm doing in the neighborhood of 30-40 a day.. which is about right for me. If I do anymore than that my brain goes to mush and nothing sticks. But you'll definitely know when you've hit that point.

I would say go as fast as you can, especially at the start. If you don't feel like you at your limit the push it up some more. As you get further along in the book it takes longer to review, but as long as you review you won't forget them. later on your will easily be able to notice the right amount when your fails are low and the pace is comfortable. its all well and good setting daily targets. but make sure you are flexible some lessons are easier than others. 1000-1200 I just flew through then 1200-1400 felt like a nightmare in comparison. when you feel you can go fast do it, when you need to go slow it will be obvious.

You'll find your own pace based on how much time per day you devote to RTK. Think of it like this:

Per hour/per day

Develop story/study new cards: 10
Review due cards: 40
Study missed cards: 20
Test new cards: 10

This is very rough and you make your own flow. I found that when I went in this order: Initial Review on new cards (read story, write down kanji, then ADD it to the new stack), review the due cards (writing each one down), studying missed cards (revising story if needed, writing down kanji from memory), finally testing the newly added cards (again, writing it down).

I think it's important to constantly be doing all 4 steps. Just adding in cards but not reviewing due or studying missed cards creates a huge backlog. Sweating having no cards in the missed stack means your not adding new (and often times easier to remember) kanji.

In my opinion, you're not "done" with RTK just because you put the last kanji story in and added it to the deck. I think you're "done" when about 80% of your cards are finally in the 4th stack or higher. Regardless of how fast your adding cards, it's gonna take a little bit longer for you to get it into long term memory.

PS: early on, yes, many of us can go faster, but the pace will naturally slow as the cards get added meaning more reviewed every day (and missed cards in need of studying). I think we all benefitted from the initial Heisig stories. We stumble when it came time for the stories on the later cards. Many of us only used mnemonics and not visual cues/stories. Hence, the recall suffered. Be wary of that as you hit the 1000 mark.

I aimed for 30 a day, at first I did more but then it became much harder to keep up with all the revisions and still add 30 kanji. I managed to finish the book with an average of 26.9 kanji/day.

This is a great thread, and one I wish was around when I started. The ranges offered by everyone here are sensible, 20-30 a day, but depending on how much time is available for you play it by ear. If things are going well and you hit a group of kanji that you can grasp quickly, feel free to speed up. Don't worry, there will be patches to slow you down. The key is to make sure you maintain a good rate of recall, whether that's 85 or 90 percent, or higher. As long as you are recalling the kanji, you are going at a proper speed. You may even try pick up your pace. If your recall rate drops, and you start making too many mistakes, slow down. There's a good discussion on recall rates here. As someone who went through parts of the book too quickly, it will catch up with you, and when large chunks come up for review at once it can be difficult to keep up. Slow and steady wins it.

Yeah, whenever I took shortcuts, I got burned. Even if you find a kanji you don't "like," (and there are plenty that annoy me), take the extra time to find a way to get it into your head.

I did the 2,042 index card method, which really helped me, since I broke the pile into manageable chunks of 20-60 kanji per pile. I'd break a pile at either a chapter end, or at a character group end.

Then I'd drill a pile (inorder) 1-2 times a day, going from keyword to writing out the kanji, and I'd do that until I could get 90% of the pile. I'd do this with 2-3 piles at a time, and whenever a pile hit 90%, I'd add it to the RvTK website.

I found this helps keep my retention rate around 90% or so overall. Even so, there are patches that will slow me down, and some days I won't add any new kanji to the site. But then there are other days I'll either add 20, or sometimes 80. It totally varies, depending on how well I'm learning, but I figure it still averages out to 20-30 a day. It's kind of frustrating to be close to finishing, but still have about 300 to go. And they seem to keep getting harder.

Oh, and the best advice is to personify really frequent radicals. Fingers became "Fingers the Thief" for me. Person became "Mr.T," because I grew up when he was popular (and he sticks in my memory.) Thread is another good one to personify, and Pinnacle became the evil golf resort, "The Pinnacle," bent on world domination through golf. Also, the left-hand radical for heart can work well if you personify it, too. (It's that 3-stroke thing.) The only rule of RTK is "If it works for you, use it. If it doesn't, toss it."

rich_f Wrote:Then I'd drill a pile (inorder) 1-2 times a day, going from keyword to writing out the kanji, and I'd do that until I could get 90% of the pile. I'd do this with 2-3 piles at a time, and whenever a pile hit 90%, I'd add it to the RvTK website.

Wow, you put way more work into it than I do. I just read through the chapter I'm doing for the day (I do RTK in 1 chapter chunks), making up stories as I go along (but not writing anything down on paper). When I'm done the chapter I add it into RevTK right away, but leave actually doing the cards until the next day. If I'm bored I might quiz myself once a few hours later, but not change anything on RevTK.

When I review, I normally quiz myself on whatever is on my failed stack, then quiz the expired cards, and finally the new cards. I then go over the stories for whatever kanji I failed (if any) but leave them in the failed stack in order to quiz the next day. Finally, I go back to the book to do another chapter (time permitting).

Even without careful review and cramming before adding onto RevTK, my recall rate is in the high 90s. The whole Heisig+SRS system is meant to avoid rote memorization, not supplement it. You might want to put more effort into your stories instead of paper card rote memorization. Or just try not doing your paper card system for awhile and see how it changes your recall rate.

It seems one mistake a lot of people make is letting their failed stacks grow. I see people talking about "finishing" RTK but still having hundreds of cards in their failed stack. I treat a failed card the same as a kanji that I'm learning for the first time, and not add any new kanji from the book until I've handled all the failed cards. It keeps my failed stack nice and small at ~10 characters.

As for personifying primitives or giving them alternative meanings, that is something that I've really tried to avoid. I've tried to make my stories use the actual meanings of the radicals & kanji wherever possible. On some harder kanji I have resorted to using personification (fingers the pirate) but those have been pretty few. For fingers the thief/pirate at least it has the word fingers in it though. I see some stories where every primitive has been renamed to something else with no clear (bidirectional) connection and I can't help but think that it'll backfire after awhile. (Shrek, Mr.T, Plato, Data, etc etc)

Actually, I already have stories on the cards. I made them like Heisig suggests in Chapter 5. I don't drill a stack 800 times before I put it in, either. It usually only takes a couple of days. I'll drill it, then set it aside for 12-20 hours, then drill it again, depending on how busy I am. I'm usually doing this with 2-3 diffferent stacks at a time. Some days things stick better than others, so I don't stick an arbitrary "it must go into RvTK by X number of days" rule on them, either. As I put a new stack (or two) into RvTK, I go to my box, grab another stack or two and put them on the bottom of whatever it is I'm reviewing now. It's not really that hard to do.

Granted, the cards are more work initally, but I can carry them with me if I feel like it, and I can use them for RTK2 if I decide to go that route. And of course, I have a nice physical representation of my progress-- finished cards go into another box, to save until I decide on RTK2.

I don't have to put a whole lot of stress on my memory to get them down, either. I just use spaced repetitions to get them in in the first place, then let RvTK take over as my long-term SRS. The main reason I use RvTK long-term is because I don't want to have a repeat of what happened to me when my PDA with all of my Twinkle data died in Japan, and I prefer RvTK to Anki for RTK.

I use personifiers selectively (for maybe 10 radicals total) because they work for me. I don't use them for everything, but when faced with 50+ kanji with "person" over and over again, my eyes glazed over, and one story started to sound like another. I found it worked faster and easier to just use Mr.T as a crutch. (It's not like Mr.T isn't a person, either.)

Heisig himself said "The abstract notion of person so often has a relation to the meaning of kanji that confusion readily sets in. So many of the previous stories have included people in them that simply to use person for a primitive meaning would be risky." He then said to just use a memorable person of your own.

Cylons worked to differentiate the vertical eye from the horizontal one. I know it's still an eye, because the old Cylons in the original BG from the 1970s had the red LED eyes that went back and forth. So it's a strong image that leads me back to 'eye' anyway. It's not like I'm going to forget that one. What it does do is give me a strong cue as to how to write the 'eye' we're talking about, and it gives me ready-made characters.

Spider-man for thread works, too. The thought of 60-70 stories about "thread" didn't do much to inspire my creativity. 60-70 stories about Spider-man, who shoots thread and fights criminals, work just fine. And if you want to, you can even use that basic view of Spider-man and just make it all weird for mnemonic effect.

I'm not saying to do it with all of the radicals. It's just a tool people can use if they're not "feeling it" creativity-wise. I didn't see the point in trying to make stories work with some of these radicals until blood starts gushing out of my forehead.

I also agree with you that personified primitives should bear at least a tangential relationship to the actual one, but you shouldn't be afraid to use a tool simply because it feels like a cheat. RTK itself is one big linguistic cheat, if you want to look at it that way. I'm just trying to find new ways to make my old brain work.

EDIT: Come to think of it, Heisig does the same thing with RICE FIELD and BRAIN. Brains have no relationship to rice fields whatsoever, but they're more fun to use in stories than rice fields... with some exceptions of course.

I've actually ignored most of the primitives that Heisig has given arbitrary meanings, such as "baseball" and "brain". There are surely some that have slipped by me though. "Rice field" is actually a lot easier to make stories with (for me anyways) than brain anyways.

Particularly for the primitives that serve as meaning indicators, giving them arbitrary or alternative meanings is a bad idea imo. If you rename ⺡ to koolaid or something, you lose the immediate association that the kanji has with water. The meaning becomes abstracted by one (or more) potentially non-obvious levels. Primitives that serve as sound markers are less dangerous I think since they don't lend anything to the actual meaning of the character.

For me, using some unnamed "person" in my stories works just fine without renaming it to Mr.T. If I see "Mr.T" it could evoke any number of thoughts from mohawks to gold chains to suped up black vans. The first thought isn't "person". Similarly when I see the word "person" the first thing to come to mind isn't Mr.T. The Heisig method definetly works, but I think it's not necessary to abstract it as much as Heisig suggests in the book (and people here take it even further).

While yes, abstracting it in this way is a linguistic cheat like you say, the Heisig method (aka component analysis) isn't in my opinion. It is how the characters were originally created (combining meaning primitives and pronunciation marking primitives etc). Children in Japan and Chinese speaking countries may now-days just learn through rote memorization, but due to immersion they do get a feel for the meaning and sound primitives (thats how they can manage to guess meanings and readings for characters they've never seen). The big failure of Japanese as a second language education is that there is no strong focus on kanji, so students don't reach the point where they can discover primitives for themselves.

My biggest complaint with RTK is how he arbitrarily changes the meanings of things. It doesn't make things easier in the short term and it makes it harder in the long term since you need to unlearn what was in RTK and then relearn the correct information. It's a legacy of the fact that Heisig created the system while he was still learning Japanese himself. A good example is the ⺢ primitive, which Heisig says is rice grains I believe, but is actually a variant of the water radical. I have no idea why he changed that since it looks more like water than rice anyways. If simply being able to read the kanji is your goal then I guess that's fine. However if you want to understand the kanji themselves (and are aiming for kanken1 etc), I think a more exacting approach is necessary.

Jarvik7, did you finish RTK and then face difficulties because of the arbitrary choices of primitives, or did you just decide that they were inappropriate from the get go?

I followed the primitives in the book, and used things like Mr. T and Spiderman and plenty of other things that helped to memorize the writings. Now granted I've only been studying post RTK for 2 months but I have been working intensively on kanji readings, and I've yet to regret the use of any particular arbitrary primitive in RTK for even one second.

vosmiura Wrote:Jarvik7, did you finish RTK1 and then face difficulties because of the arbitrary choices of primitives?

That is intriguing. I'm facing difficulties right now because many arbitrary primitives 'break the mood' of my kanji study and the resulting stories feel forced and wrong, which I don't enjoy too much (I started looking at etymology sites to solve this problem). But I'm curious about how does this affect you after you have learned them. Maybe the problem is in learning non-t?y? kanji?

DrJones Wrote:That is intriguing. I'm facing difficulties right now because many arbitrary primitives 'break the mood' of my kanji study and the resulting stories feel forced and wrong, which I don't enjoy too much (I started looking at etymology sites to solve this problem). But I'm curious about how does this affect you after you have learned them. Maybe the problem is in learning non-t?y? kanji?

I know you mentioned before that there were some primitives you didn't like. I can't help but think that if you never looked at the etymology sites in the first place you would have been more content and had fewer of these difficulties in the first place .

But anyway, I think you're in the last quarter of the book right? It starts to become arbitrary primitive overload for several chapters, so it does get harder to make stories and remember what's what.

Though there are many arbitrary primitives (especially towards the end of the book) they did make it possible for many of us to finish the kanji in the book. There are not many (or perhaps any) other kanji books that can be done from 1 through to 2000+ and actually work.

I'll see how it goes long term, but in two months after RTK I focused on readings and vocab and I'm pretty content. I don't have all that much to complain about what RTK taught; for the time invested. I'd be interested to see comments from others who finished RTK and how their study progressed after that.

Jarvik7 mentioned it may be a problem if you aim for Kanken 1. Umm... most Japanese people can't even do Kanken 1 so I think that's not something that bothers me greatly. I'll be content if I can pass Kanken 2 within a couple of years. Post RTK1 I think it's largely a matter of vocab, not of kanji themselves.