I've being using a basic system to deal with kanji:

Go through 20 new kanji in RTK1 while making full use of imagining the stories.
Review kanji in Anki along with the 20 new kanji (writing the kanji + keyword down on paper)
Note the kanji I failed and review them in RTK1 the next day before adding 20 more
once a day.

This doesn't take me very long to do but from what I've been reading it sounds like some people are spending 6 hours a day and such doing Anki till they cry. It's not taking me long at all and I only do Anki once in the morning and I believe that's right because Heisig's entire method is basically quality over quantity and not spending hours and hours grinding in Anki either way I'm still not sure am I wrong or what?

P.S While doing the Ajatt method roughly what should you do while not doing Kanji because it doesn't take me long to go through them and I have plenty of spare time to do more stuff.

That's also the way I've done it (exactly 20/day too!)
So, with a touch of bias, I'd say stick with what you're doing!

Yeah, some people write about learning like, 100 new kanjis a day and reviewing hours... to each its own lol. Don't let that trouble you. Although that being said, I'm now adding vocab (15 words/day) and reviews naturally pile up XD (horribly.) I don't know about AJATT... I thought he was interesting to read at first, but I realized this wasn't for me, I prefer my vocab raw. (but plenty of people do more or less his sentence method, so you should get plenty of advice about that!)

I think it's okay to have some spare time, it keeps you looking forward to tomorrow & to learning more. IMO, learning a language is such a long process that trying to get faster to the goal does more harm than good. Like starting off a marathon by running as fast as you can. Jogging is okay though ;P jkjk. Have a nice time and welcome on koohii hehe.

Thanks,

Damn 100 a day you'd be through them in 22 days but I imagine your accuracy would be incredibly bad.

subkulture Wrote:Thanks,

Damn 100 a day you'd be through them in 22 days but I imagine your accuracy would be incredibly bad.

The accuracy is effectively meaningless, as long as afterwards you continue to study and write actual Japanese. I finished RtK in 14 days, spent a week or two reviewing in Anki, along with actual Japanese study, and have stopped reviewing kanji since. After spending about 6 days not writing any Japanese, it took a good maybe half an hour to get back up to speed.

Accuracy vastly improves over time when using kanji in context, as the connections to objects, concepts and feelings become both meaningful and practical. RtK is incredible at providing the base for understanding the components of kanji, instead of having ot memorize stroke count. Though the faster one uses the tools he or she has been given, to strengthen those neural connections with real objects/concepts, the more it pays off.

Spending too much mental energy reviewing the kanji, when Japanese would be the focus, achieves less of the actual goal of expanding one's Japanese vocabulary and more or simply getting better at retaining RtK English Keywords.

...is one opinion from someone who has completed RtK volume one.

uisukii Wrote:The accuracy is effectively meaningless, as long as afterwards you continue to study and write actual Japanese. I finished RtK in 14 days, spent a week or two reviewing in Anki, along with actual Japanese study, and have stopped reviewing kanji since. After spending about 6 days not writing any Japanese, it took a good maybe half an hour to get back up to speed.

Are you not concerned with learning how to write the kanji? It seems silly to spend so much time on RTK without gaining the ability to write the kanji. (Unless you were just going for kanji->keyword...)

partner55083777 Wrote:

uisukii Wrote:The accuracy is effectively meaningless, as long as afterwards you continue to study and write actual Japanese. I finished RtK in 14 days, spent a week or two reviewing in Anki, along with actual Japanese study, and have stopped reviewing kanji since. After spending about 6 days not writing any Japanese, it took a good maybe half an hour to get back up to speed.

Are you not concerned with learning how to write the kanji? It seems silly to spend so much time on RTK without gaining the ability to write the kanji. (Unless you were just going for kanji->keyword...)

I'm not entirely sure I communicated my point properly. Finished RtK provided the neural pathways for kanji writing, and at the moment, there are very few kanji which I would struggle with writing, as even the most complex kanji are effectively merely a few "primitives" struck together in a rather predictable order. Every day I am studying and writing out actual Japanese, my kanji writing ability is increasing and, thanks to the help of RtK, aren't really an issue, unlike a lot of Japanese school students find them to commonly be.

I gained the ability to write kanji. Most definitely. Probably as good as many native Japanese who have been writing for a few years longer than I. As I said, after around 6 days of not writing any Japanese, it took only maybe half an hour of study to reach the same writing speed and stroke accuracy accrued during RtK.

You'll have to bare with me a little, I'm sorry, as I cannot make this point any clearer at the moment.

Could you explain what you've done in more depth because I could probably go through RTK 1 in 4 days if it will actually be effective I just thought that it'd forget it all if I did and personally I hate going slow I'd much rather go all out.

Could you explain
"as long as afterwards you continue to study and write actual Japanese."
"spent a week or two reviewing in Anki, along with actual Japanese study"
"Though the faster one uses the tools he or she has been given, to strengthen those neural connections with real objects/concepts, the more it pays off. "

By actual Japanese study do you mean something like going through light novels trying to make sense of what ever you can? or sentence mining/MCD

"Spending too much mental energy reviewing the kanji, when Japanese would be the focus, achieves less of the actual goal of expanding one's Japanese vocabulary and more or simply getting better at retaining RtK English Keywords."

I go from Keyword to kanji but I'm guessing you did as well? and do you mean go through RTK1 as quick as possible and instead of reviewing in Anki simply read and write as much Japanese as possible every day after finishing it to keep it locked in your head instead of reviewing in Anki as it's less effective in actually learning Japanese?

Also did you go through it in 14 days while adding stories to all the kanji past like 540 ithink it is when the stories are no longer done for you? or did you simply use the order heisig gives but not the imaginative memory side of it.

Don't listen to any one person. for uisukii maybe rushing through the kanji and then never touching them again works for him. But he also recently finished and doesn't know the long term effects of this. From this forum most people will tell you to take your time (myself included) to better retain all the information instead of cramming like you would for your college finals. I know classes I crammed for i don't remember a single thing from even 5 months down the line but classes i did all the work in I at least remember the foundation. Also nobody can tell you what works for you. you should do what you want read some grammar books or look up vocab for things you want to say.


TL;dr Please do not rush RTK based on one person's experience. this is the internet you can't trust anyone.

Actually I was planning to continue my method and use another deck to rush through and see how it worked out. I have 92.50% correct answer buttons currently on learning kanji though if I rush through the textbook and keep doing anki with the full 2200 I imagine i'd be at like 20% however if that 20% goes up to 70% in 2 weeks of reviewing it's a hell of a lot quicker than adding 20 a day.

subkulture Wrote:Could you explain what you've done in more depth

Certainly

subkulture Wrote:Could you explain
"as long as afterwards you continue to study and write actual Japanese."

After I finished RtK, I almost immediately went on to mining simple sentences from various sources such as Japanese-English dictionaries, both in hardcopy and online format, downloaded various anki decks involving sentence recognition and cloze deletions such as Nukemarine's Tae Kim Grammar deck; spent extensive time creating my own JtMW deck, etc. a lot of the study I do tends to at least be the first time I see a new word or sentence, it get's written out, then on subsequent reviews, the vocab term is written out, both in hiragana and kanji (if applicable). All in all a lot of pages worth of writtin in Japanese. Japanese which if read by a Japanese person would appear to be various vocabulary drill lists, simple sentences, fragments and simple notations. As opposed to context-less kanji written out from RtK reviews.

Quote:"spent a week or two reviewing in Anki, along with actual Japanese study"

As in I spent the next week or two after finishing adding kanji to Anki's RtK deck, completed daily reviews alongside the above mentioned various activities.

Quote:"Though the faster one uses the tools he or she has been given, to strengthen those neural connections with real objects/concepts, the more it pays off. "

This wasn't written altogether too well. Oh well. Essentially, the more you use the kanji you've learned, in their native contexts- as part of sentences, where their readings and such make sense, etc. -the stronger those initial neural connections created throughout RtK become, as they start to form links to concepts we already have in English or whatever native language, thus creating short-cuts in recalling the kanji, etc.

Quote:By actual Japanese study do you mean something like going through light novels trying to make sense of what ever you can? or sentence mining/MCD

By actual Japanese I am referring to phrases, sentences, grammar, etc. which directly relates to the Japanese language as an exercise of the Japanese language, as opposed to RtK, which is indirectly related to the Japanese language via English language neural connections, that is: English keywords which connect to symbolic knowledge and individual values, effectively acting as a filtering agent which directly impedes the progressive ability to be able to "think in Japanese", instead of writing Kanji while "thinking in English".

Quote:

Quote:"Spending too much mental energy reviewing the kanji, when Japanese would be the focus, achieves less of the actual goal of expanding one's Japanese vocabulary and more or simply getting better at retaining RtK English Keywords."

I go from Keyword to kanji but I'm guessing you did as well? and do you mean go through RTK1 as quick as possible and instead of reviewing in Anki simply read and write as much Japanese as possible every day after finishing it to keep it locked in your head instead of reviewing in Anki as it's less effective in actually learning Japanese?

I went from keyword to kanji. The process of my study was very simple. I sat down and read through the book, in order, writing down each new kanji I came across, tried to think of a story or phrase or some sort of connection for each one, then after a certain amount (usually between 40-70) I re-read and re-wrote that section, to provide a little more re-enforcement, then tested myself in Anki.

This was pretty much all I did, only at anywhere between 9 and 14 hours a day. Without Anki there would be no way I would have been able to remember them, as my memory is very poor.

Quote:Also did you go through it in 14 days while adding stories to all the kanji past like 540 ithink it is when the stories are no longer done for you? or did you simply use the order heisig gives but not the imaginative memory side of it.

The stories became simpler and simpler as I progressed, more often than not kanji were prescribed to a single term which I seemed to relate to the keyword in some way. Most of the primitives were repeated so often that the keyword was more often than not more than enough to remember the kanji, and the primitives didn't really need to become an essential part of the story. Some of those primitives, such as the web/string/spiderman one I don't think I'll ever forget, considering that even if you were only to write out each kanji once, you would end up writing out said primitive enough times to consider it rote memorization.

I've a history of rather "different" trains of thought compared to most of my peers, and tend to be creative with the English language throughout casual discussion- somewhat ruthlessly while chatting on Facebook, etc.- so a lot of the "imaginative memory" side of the process is more often than not how I tend to find similitude between concepts already. Saying that segue style recall in itself is already intuitive and flexible enough that a lot of the "stories" become entirely simplified and rearranged throughout the review process -"changed on the fly", if you will- leading to less initial time spent on learning the kanji and more time getting a "feel" for it throughout.

Possibly the RtK methodology in itself is rather suited to how I learn, and in so provided a slight edge allowing the process to become streamlined and progressed from without having to worry about forgetting everything I learned. Maybe. I don't know.

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:Don't listen to any one person. for uisukii maybe rushing through the kanji and then never touching them again works for him. But he also recently finished and doesn't know the long term effects of this. From this forum most people will tell you to take your time (myself included) to better retain all the information instead of cramming like you would for your college finals. I know classes I crammed for i don't remember a single thing from even 5 months down the line but classes i did all the work in I at least remember the foundation. Also nobody can tell you what works for you. you should do what you want read some grammar books or look up vocab for things you want to say.


TL;dr Please do not rush RTK based on one person's experience. this is the internet you can't trust anyone.

How many hours a day do you think the average RtK'er spends on learning and reviewing the kanji, say if they add 20 or 30 a day? Add up their total hours over the long term and my hours over the short term and there probably wouldn't be a great difference, considering I was doing between 9 and 14 hours a day.

The point I was trying to make is that it's not what's important how fast or how slow one goes through RtK, it's how one uses this newly imbedded ability and recall afterwards. If someone were to take a year to do the same thing essentially what someone complete in three months, then both individuals stopped writing, stopped involving their brains in recalling, recognizing and getting used to the physical space and shapes of the kanji, then they both wasted their time, only one wasted less.

Now, if they both proceed to continue using their new skill, daily, after they have finished, then it doesn't really matter how long it took them to finish reviewing all the kanji, because they will essentially be "reviewing the kanji", but writing, reading and recalling them in native contexts, where the "keywords" are actual Japanese vocabulary- thus creating a stronger neural connection with the kanji.


It's a little like kicking training for Aussie Rules Football. Training is excellent but it's how you use the training in the real game where you will receive real feedback and you will be able to adapt to your weaknesses far easier than simply training for longer and waiting to "master" those movements without getting your boots dirty.

Maybe that isn't a good comparison.

I wasn't criticizing you or the effectiveness of your kanji studies. I admire the dedication and willpower it takes to do all the kanji in a short amount of time. It's just my experience based on personal achievements that taking the time is better than rushing.


<3 NSTF

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:I wasn't criticizing you or the effectiveness of your kanji studies. I admire the dedication and willpower it takes to do all the kanji in a short amount of time. It's just my experience based on personal achievements that taking the time is better than rushing.


<3 NSTF

Oh, that's alright. I was trying to make myself clear on what I said. Call it lack of confidence but I often find the need to over explain things to make sure I'm not misleading someone. Kind of silly, but yeah.

Though I wouldn't call this rushing. There are at least another five years before my Japanese is going to be used as a reference point for learning and acquiring Korean, lol.

^_^

"I gained the ability to write kanji. Most definitely. Probably as good as many native Japanese who have been writing for a few years longer than I."

After 14 days.

I'm out of here XD
Trust your own judgement!
The RTK method is, as you said, quality over quantity and there are a lot of little hooks and strokes to be forgotten among those 2000/3000 kanjis. As NoSleepTillFluent says, a lot of people have done it "slowly" (which IMO is actually challenging enough! Reviews do accumulate ;P), they just don't keep proclaiming it on every thread. If it's already working well for you (and it is 92,5% is great!), don't be put off by the thought that some are going faster.

So you went through say frames 1 to 70 in the book wrote down the kanji with your own story but shorter than his to form a connection (Damn his stories are long and weird) You re-read the stories and re-wrote them all. (Improving the stories and just trying to make it stick?) then you added your frame 1 to 70 into Anki and tested yourself. repeated this process from frame 1 to 2200?

I'm assuming the next morning after waking up you didn't say start on frame 500 continuing your method. Instead you opened Anki and reviewed all the due kanji then continued your method?

comeauch Wrote:If it's already working well for you (and it is 92,5% is great!), don't be put off by the thought that some are going faster.

I want to the best kanji trainer in the world and catch all the kanji as fast as I can.

LOL. Why, go for it!

I don't understand why people go through RTK while this exists:

Yay, managed a way to save time reviewing stroke order
Since it's in a hand writing style as well I think it's pretty helpful for better recognition and reproducing.


http://japaneselevelup.com/2012/03/24/bo...-diagrams/

subkulture Wrote:So you went through say frames 1 to 70 in the book wrote down the kanji with your own story but shorter than his to form a connection (Damn his stories are long and weird)

I made a mental note of the stories and changed them to whatever made more sense to me. A little like how people often read aloud sentence and skip words which do not convey vital information.

Quote:You re-read the stories and re-wrote them all. (Improving the stories and just trying to make it stick?)

Re-wrote the kanji, not the stories. There were only about ten or so kanji in which I physically wrote out stories for, and these "stories" were more like highly abbreviated notations one may sketch in a page margin while studying from a high-school text-book.

Quote:then you added your frame 1 to 70 into Anki and tested yourself. repeated this process from frame 1 to 2200?

More or less. There were a few times when I picked a section I found myself a little unsure of and read back through it, looking at the keyword, writing out the kanji, quickly checking to see if it was incorrect or not, then moving on to the next one and/or if incorrect, seeing where I went wrong and quickly altering the image in my head which provided the mental link to the kanji shape. Although to be honest it was easier to just let Anki do it's job and be a little slave for me. Those kanji which I failed multiple times ended up sticking in my head more-so than the one which were easier earlier on.

Quote:I'm assuming the next morning after waking up you didn't say start on frame 500 continuing your method. Instead you opened Anki and reviewed all the due kanji then continued your method?

Sometimes starting straight from where I left off and learning a few more before the daily reviews but more often than not getting the reviews out of the way then progressing through the next kanji to learn.

Reviewing the kanji the next day then learning new kanji was part of "my method", which, as I've explained, is pretty much was the same as how most people did, only more hours over a shorter time period.

subkulture Wrote:Yay, managed a way to save time reviewing stroke order
Since it's in a hand writing style as well I think it's pretty helpful for better recognition and reproducing.
http://i.imgur.com/uQRGm.jpg

http://japaneselevelup.com/2012/03/24/bo...-diagrams/

Wow, wish I had that months ago. I'm having trouble finding out how to put it on Anki 2, though (instructions are for the original Anki). What did you do to get it on there? If you don't mind my asking. Probably something simple I'm missing.

Douments > Anki > User 1 > Collection.Media extract it here (I also moved all the SVG files out of the folder so they were in the latter folder not "kanji-colorized-spectrum")
In Anki click your deck > study now > edit > cards you past the code in there where you want the stroke order kanji to show.

Quote:I made a mental note of the stories and changed them to whatever made more sense to me. A little like how people often read aloud sentence and skip words which do not convey vital information.

So even on say frames 600 where no story is given you just made up your own little story in your head but didn't write it down and wrote the kanji once then a 2nd time again when you went back through it and then a 3rd time while doing it in anki?

Quote:mental link to the kanji shape

When you imagine the stories do you imagine them in the shape of the kanji? While I do imagine the primitives the kanji contains I've never imagined them into the shape of the kanji before.

subkulture Wrote:So even on say frames 600 where no story is given you just made up your own little story in your head but didn't write it down and wrote the kanji once then a 2nd time again when you went back through it and then a 3rd time while doing it in anki?

I only wrote out about ten stories for a few problem kanji (which, a few days later, became trivial) and those "stories" consisted of writing out the kanji, the english keyword above it, dot point of the primitives involved, and linking them together (as in drawing lines from the dots to a single point) and writing a short phrase or word which helped me relate to the keyword, which in turn helped me recall the shape of the kanji in my mind.

Quote:

Quote:mental link to the kanji shape

When you imagine the stories do you imagine them in the shape of the kanji?

I don't imagine the stories. I imagine the keywords. The stories fade away very fast, in my experience. Trying to recall the stories makes it confusing and usually the keyword is enough to recall the kanji. Though before I stopped reviewing I found myself making a lot of false-errors based on seeing keywords and recalling kanji which are actually closer in meaning, and getting it "wrong", even though the actual kanji I recalled was more accurate.

Quote:While I do imagine the primitives the kanji contains I've never imagined them into the shape of the kanji before.

The primitives are a non-issue and something I do not actively recall. For example, for the "fall" (kanji 落ちる) I do not think of "water, flowers, walking legs, mouth". When I see the keyword the image of the kanji comes to mind, with the primitives involved being on a conscious level below active awareness- probably very similar to how when an English speaking person writes the word "house", for example, they see the word in their head, or the image of a house, or some concept which relates to the term "house", and proceeds to simply write out the word, without having to think of the letters involved, or how to write each letter out.

The process becomes involved at a subconscious level, due to the vast amount of neural connections related to the term, and the often repeated usage of it.

Or to put it another way: I've written out the kanji for the keyword "fall", so many times, that it's harder to stop and think about it than it is to simply write it out. Like when a basketball player executes a deft pass through a tight gap: the individual has been playing on the court so often that he or she simply sees and opportunity and acts. They don't stop to think about the processes involved. They just do.

I don't understand how you expect to keep your 2000+ character writing ability without keeping up your anki reps (or being exposed to a very large amount of Japanese). If you don't plan on keeping up your writing ability for all 2000+ characters, then learning all the characters in the first place somewhat loses meaning.

I see that you're mining sentences and writing a lot, but it doesn't make sense for a beginner to read/mine/learn/write(?) sentences with a large percentage of those 2000+ kanji. That makes me think that you're either studying in an inefficient manner, or you're not getting reviews for a large portion of those 2000+ characters.