So I'm ashamed to say this...but when college started I got too distracted and my reviews just piled up more and more, eventually they reached over 500 and I'm now looking at a 650 pile of reviews! It was always something in the back of my mind but I never got to actually doing it. After a lot of thinking I really want to give this another shot and actually get it done. My question is after a few weeks of no reviews of my over 1000 kanji already done would it be better to try and save what I can or start from scratch again?

Dragonslayer131 Wrote:My question is after a few weeks of no reviews of my over 1000 kanji already done would it be better to try and save what I can or start from scratch again?

Personally, when I got around the middle of RTK1, I almost completely stopped doing reviews. Worked well for me.

Currently, I only review RTK1 when I encounter a kanji in the wild, and find I can't recognize it anymore, but would like to recall it to help with reading.

Keep in mind that Mushi is a speaker of Japanese which gives him (her?) an advantage.

I'd suggest keeping your reviews up. At least until the cards become mature and the distance becomes 1.0 months +

Don't be ashamed! I had to start over 2-3 times before I finished. It took me to frame 500 to understand how RTK worked. Starting over from 500 isn't that difficult but you could always just sop ading new cards and review the massive pile of red cards. Yeah it's boring -- listening to music helps me stay focused and motivated.

がんばってください！

Dragonslayer131 Wrote:So I'm ashamed to say this...but when college started I got too distracted and my reviews just piled up more and more, eventually they reached over 500 and I'm now looking at a 650 pile of reviews! It was always something in the back of my mind but I never got to actually doing it. After a lot of thinking I really want to give this another shot and actually get it done. My question is after a few weeks of no reviews of my over 1000 kanji already done would it be better to try and save what I can or start from scratch again?

When I was in your situation, I kind of did both...

I wrote this out in another thread, so I'll just link here: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid113742

Hmm that sounds interesting Korvar I might try that.

Having done this several times, what worked best for me was to sort-of restart.

Do one pass on all of the failed cards -- you'll probably remember more than you suspect. Anything still failed after that point, reset, and then start fresh.

Even the ones you failed in that initial pass will likely come back rather easy and getting back to where you were before should be fairly smooth.

Of course, as I finish this, I realize this only really works if you're using Anki since that kind of manipulation isn't possible via RTK.

All that said, I've done a full restart, a not-restart where I dug myself out of a large review pile, so and and so forth. Much like gyuujuice, except for me it was more like 4-5 times. I've been done for a while, so I can't say for sure which one 'worked' (I caught back up in all cases), but the route I found smoothest was the one described above.

zachandhobbes Wrote:Keep in mind that Mushi is a speaker of Japanese which gives him (her?) an advantage.

When it comes to Heisig, it only gives me or her just a *slight* advantage. Probably an English speaker living in Japan (the whole world is made of kanji flashcards!) would have an advantage over me, a Japanese living in the U.S.

As for you, you have no chance. Just kidding. Even though I sometimes relegate it to a supporting role in studying Japanese, I'd say that Heisig is the single best thing I've done.

I've done a couple restarts too, but you'll certainly go faster now, with those xxx first kanji. Once a kanji becomes mature, it'll flow into your brain like... (fill something in here).

Or if you prefer, do/restart with the "kanji lite" version. You'll get to a(n important) milestone faster just like me and other people on this site, for example. It's been some months since I did that, and I haven't done much reviews since then. I had to do some other things that were more important than my japanese, but now I printed out all the other stories (actually the whole 2000+ mumbo jumbo) for RTK1 kanji that I hadn't already done. Once I'm on vacation (that's pretty soon) I'll start learning those non-lite-rtk1 kanji. Brr, a 16hour flight is sooo long. anyway, I've got a printed list of mined sentences en surplus

So I spent hours reviewing them all and eventually got them all done. I think I'm going to spend a week reviewing just to be safe (and to get my review #'s down....) then I'll start adding new ones again. Feels good to have the guilt off my shoulders. Thanks for the ideas and support guys this is something I feel is really worth pursuing.