First off I just wanted to say hi, I'm new here on these forums. I started my kanji studies on January 15th. So far I'm up to 135 kanji in my deck. I'm in college full time and work 30 hours a week so when I do homework I add cards in bunches of three, write them a couple times, look over their stories. Then I do some homework and return and see if I remember them 15 or 30 minutes later. I'm usually successful here but when they come up for the first time I usually forget a good chunk (maybe 40 or 50%).

I was wondering if this is normal, and if not how did you study them?

I've mastered kana, and now working on RTK. I know no grammar, vocab etc. Should I focus on solely RTK before doing any other study?

I also have the sixth edition of heisigs RTK and I've noticed that some of the kanji are nonexistent on the RevTK website. So far these kanji do not exist:
Elbow #30
Derision #54
Pop Song #57
Post a Bill #60
Sniff #129
Gland #141
None of these kanji seem really important, I kind of want elbow and sniff in my deck. Any way to add these? Or are these not in there for a reason??

Thanks!

40-50% failure rate sounds pretty high to be honest, though I'm not entirely sure about what the standard numbers are. Are you making sure that you really imagine the stories in front of you? It's really important that you not only read the story and try to remember the words, you have to visualize it in your head. Close your eyes for a minute and "see" the story, and you should be able to remember it much better. If you are already doing this sorry for the over explanation.

I personally would think it's a very good idea to try to complete RTK as fast as possible before further studies (unless you get so bored you risk quitting your studies completely), but I just recently finished RTK myself so I'm not as experienced as many other people here, but reasoning about it logically it seems like the best idea since you run into lots of kanji automatically when doing other Japanese studies, and having done RTK a lot of these kanji readings and compounds will get stuck in your head much easier.

The reason some Kanji doesn't exist is because they were introduced in a later version of the book, and this site follows the earlier version. You can still look up the kanjis in online dictionarys to copy them into whatever SRS system you're using. But, a lot of these kanjis appeared in RTK 3, and RTK 3 is covered by this website so a lot of them actually do exist on this site just with a number way over 2000 making them harder to locate. There is an RTK supplement PDF available online which you could probably find by searching a bit, and this supplement states exactly which kanji that appears only in the new version and their RTK3 frame number, which you can use to quickly look them up on this website.

AlgoRhythmic Wrote:40-50% failure rate sounds pretty high to be honest, though I'm not entirely sure about what the standard numbers are. Are you making sure that you really imagine the stories in front of you? It's really important that you not only read the story and try to remember the words, you have to visualize it in your head.

To be honest I did not really imagine the stories all that well. I definitely think that is the key.

I also think I'm going to just stick with it and just grind out the kanji before I do any further studying. It seems like it makes sense. I'm not too worried about getting bored or hitting a plateau, I have good discipline.

Thanks for the information I feel better about RTK!

ryanjmack Wrote:...I add cards in bunches of three, write them a couple times, look over their stories. Then I do some homework and return and see if I remember them 15 or 30 minutes later...I usually forget a good chunk (maybe 40 or 50%).

I was wondering if this is normal, and if not how did you study them?

I think you're waiting too long before initial review. When I was studying RtK, the method I settled into after the first few hundred was to learn about 10 at a time (slightly more or less if finishing a section for a new primitive)- that is, reading heisig's story and the ones recommend on this site until I came upon one I liked then do all the mental imaging (as AlgoRhythmic notes this is a very important part and is why I can remember a new kanji for half an hour after seeing it once but can't remember a phone number for more than a minute without memory tricks). After the 10th I'd take a break for ~10minutes, run a script which updated my Anki deck based on my stories on this site, then review the cards in Anki. I used non-daily scheduling which put my first real review at roughly 8hrs (which, in the worst case, would become around 14hrs if I couldn't do reps in the morning on the way to work and had to wait til lunch break).

Note I was averaging 50-75/weekday and 100-150/weekend-day (185+ towards the end, albeit spending all day) with ~15% fail rate, but it's worth noting that in the very early stages was closer to 15-20/day and 30-40% fail rate, so I think "getting used to it" is probably the biggest factor.

ryanjmack Wrote:I've mastered kana, and now working on RTK. I know no grammar, vocab etc. Should I focus on solely RTK before doing any other study?

In my case, the more kanji I learned per day, the more motivation I had to spend even more time learning and the better I performed, but if that's not the case for you, don't force yourself- staying motivated over a long period is your top priority. Thanks to Nukemarine et al there's pretty good resources for learning RtK in chunks while doing other learning concurrently, so my suggestion is 100% RtK, but only if it doesn't bore you.

overture2112 Wrote:) I think you're waiting too long before initial review. When I was studying RtK, the method I settled into after the first few hundred was to learn about 10 at a time (slightly more or less if finishing a section for a new primitive)- that is, reading heisig's story and the ones recommend on this site until I came upon one I liked then do all the mental imaging (as AlgoRhythmic notes this is a very important part and is why I can remember a new kanji for half an hour after seeing it once but can't remember a phone number for more than a minute without memory tricks). After the 10th I'd take a break for ~10minutes, run a script which updated my Anki deck based on my stories on this site, then review the cards in Anki. I used non-daily scheduling which put my first real review at roughly 8hrs (which, in the worst case, would become around 14hrs if I couldn't do reps in the morning on the way to work and had to wait til lunch break).

I definitely think the mental imaging is what i was lacking. There was little to 0 what so ever. My question is I've tried using anki before, but i do not know how to modify the settings too well. The options for feedback is bad (like 10 seconds), good (10 minutes) and well (10 days). How did you modify those settings?
I've found anki to be a bit frustrating if your new with it but I feel it is worth it since everyone has good things to say about it.

ryanjmack Wrote:The options for feedback is bad (like 10 seconds), good (10 minutes) and well (10 days). How did you modify those settings?

For Anki v1, the first time a card is answered, the initial interval is determined by the "initial button N interval" deck settings. Afterwards, intervals are determined by the previous interval and the card's ease factor instead, which can't be (easily) manipulated.

For Anki v2 there's a much more flexible system for handling new cards' initial due times until they're "promoted" from new->review cards. The official docs are good at explaining these in more detail.

And yes, Anki has a bit of a learning curve but any pain and time spent is well worth it.

Thanks both of you for your help. It is very much appreciated!

No problem. Good luck with the RTK studies.

ryanjmack Wrote:I definitely think the mental imaging is what i was lacking. There was little to 0 what so ever. My question is I've tried using anki before, but i do not know how to modify the settings too well. The options for feedback is bad (like 10 seconds), good (10 minutes) and well (10 days). How did you modify those settings?
I've found anki to be a bit frustrating if your new with it but I feel it is worth it since everyone has good things to say about it.

Well now that you're more aware of imagining the stories then it could be a good time to re-read the introduction, or at least the parts about imaginative memory. I don't mean to imply that you didn't read properly, just that going back and reviewing the instructions after having got into it a bit should make things clearer. It's a really fat introduction, and just like when you're supposed to read the manual for things like software - you can't really sit down and read carefully for ages and then start off just knowing everything clear as day :p You want to just get into it, try it, run into problems or questions, and then go back and see what you can do about it.

I did this with Anki. I made my own deck, played with the settings for a while and started reviewing, then when I wondered something I looked up the humongous documentation for it. As a result I've had to go through my entire deck and change tags and fields just to make it neater, but I never felt like it was daunting to learn the program. (Btw, I'd probably recommend downloading a pre-made RTK deck rather than making your own, if you haven't done so. You can customize it the way you want anyway).

About the "soon/10 minutes/4 days" intervals - those are the first intervals for new cards that haven't been reviewed yet, if you didn't know that. Unless you want longer initial intervals I don't think you should need to change those settings until you're familiar with the program. The intervals for a given card are always different depending on how you keep rating it. Easier cards will get longer and longer intervals with each correct guess, harder cards will keep having relatively short intervals as you fail them and rate them with the 'hard' option (which means that hard cards will show up more often and you don't have to spend as much time on those you know well).

ryanjmack Wrote:I also have the sixth edition of heisigs RTK and I've noticed that some of the kanji are nonexistent on the RevTK website. So far these kanji do not exist:
Elbow #30
Derision #54
Pop Song #57
Post a Bill #60
Sniff #129
Gland #141
None of these kanji seem really important, I kind of want elbow and sniff in my deck. Any way to add these? Or are these not in there for a reason??

Thanks!

Actually, elbow 肘 is #46 in the 6th edition but that's not what you were asking about. (I'm using the 6th edition too )

You can use this spreadsheet that compares the numbering of the kanji by different editions (or those kanji that was moved from RTK 3 into the 6th edition).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?k...3Z0NVRidnc

Or if you are using this site to do your reviews, you can use this "6th edition frame number converter".
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=8943

Hope this helps ^_^

Both tools are very useful for 6th edition book owners/readers

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:Well now that you're more aware of imagining the stories then it could be a good time to re-read the introduction, or at least the parts about imaginative memory. I don't mean to imply that you didn't read properly, just that going back and reviewing the instructions after having got into it a bit should make things clearer. It's a really fat introduction, and just like when you're supposed to read the manual for things like software - you can't really sit down and read carefully for ages and then start off just knowing everything clear as day :p You want to just get into it, try it, run into problems or questions, and then go back and see what you can do about it.

haha so true. thanks for the advice though

For me, the next day review is very important. What I do is prepare the stories and visualize. Then, learn it from Anki. Make sure to do the review the next day. I noticed that if I slack off and skip the review for those newly acquired kanji, I tend to forget them! Like "did I really learn these just recently? How come I cannot remember lol".

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:(Btw, I'd probably recommend downloading a pre-made RTK deck rather than making your own, if you haven't done so. You can customize it the way you want anyway).

I recommend this too. It saves more time for me.

My failure rate was at 40-60% around the middle part (1000-1400), but towards the end it quickly dwindled to 20%. Just hang in there.

And use a pre-made Anki deck, preferably for your edition; if not, just add new cards with the kanji that aren't in the original deck; just google a kanji recogniser and draw the kanji in question, and then copy it into the answer field.)

EDIT:
This one for instance: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/
You can also use the kanji-by-radical thingy at jisho.org

[RawToast]

There are a few Anki decks for the 6th edition which contain the top stories from this site.

I created this one back in September, when I couldn't find a stories based deck for Anki 2:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2756278936