I'm finding it hard now to learn kanji based on the stories when adding new ones.

When I remember ones pre 200 Frame, it comes automatically, for most up to 500, I remember vauge bits of the story and remember the kanji. For up to 700 or so, I remember the elements,(like when I just remembered Ambition, I thought of "dead" "flesh" and "king". Learning new kanji using the story method just seems harder as I go along, even when I tweak the stories on the site and spend time with them. I believe this is what happened on my last attempt, was it normal for you guys?

And yeah, adding new cards has dwindled as my failed cards have piled up. I'm now at 10-15 new kanji for now, though I have other hobbies like drawing I'd like to not nelglect so maybe it's why I'm slacking.

At 988 now. If I keep adding 30+ a day I can be finished in a month.

From the starting date of the original thread topic post to today averages at around 23 kanji a day. What happened to the blitz, man? Anyways, 頑張ってねよ ^_^



(Didn't read through thread so sorry If i missed something)

Ironically I started to take it slow not even 10 posts in the topic,lol. I actually stopped adding some days due to my Orange box getting too many reviews and not adding any on the days I spent at MegaCon 2013 but I've spent almost everyday reviewing at least. Still haven't touched Anki in quite awhile, I'll find out if it was worth it soon enough.

[ファブリス]

The second half of the book is more difficult. Don't rush through it, it's a waste of time. 20+ a day is a really good pace. If you rush through it you'll just end up doing more reviews.

I just spent 4 hours(more or less) clearing my Review List from 140 to about 40 and was thinking about still adding more Kanji later on today. Is this type of action wise?

What I did was break each review into 30 Kanji chunks. Review the stories, write out all the kanji, and review in chunks of 30 using the site, hitting about 64-90 retention, take a break, and repeat. I have 40 Kanji left, which are ones I added and made stories for just yesterday.

In this type of situation should I focus on clearing the newest 40 or adding 30? Reviews are about 70 or so a day right now.

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:I just spent 4 hours(more or less) clearing my Review List from 140 to about 40 and was thinking about still adding more Kanji later on today. Is this type of action wise?

What I did was break each review into 30 Kanji chunks. Review the stories, write out all the kanji, and review in chunks of 30 using the site, hitting about 64-90 retention, take a break, and repeat. I have 40 Kanji left, which are ones I added and made stories for just yesterday.

In this type of situation should I focus on clearing the newest 40 or adding 30? Reviews are about 70 or so a day right now.

Hmmm I think something is going wrong when it takes 4 hours to review 100 kanji.

I think what you should do is really try to have a strong *image* for each kanji. The story is the scaffolding that holds the image up, but the image is the most important. Remember, Heisig's method relies on your imaginative memory (what you use when you dream, or day dream) to remember the kanji.

As a previous poster said, when you fail a kanji, before hitting "no" take a few moments to re-read your story, and fix the images in your mind. Focus on the image. A minute spent re-doing that when you fail a kanji will help you so much when it next comes up for review.

For me, I added kanji 15 characters at a time, in order. So I'd add the cards, then study them and add stories, then go to review and review them. 15 cards was pretty much the limit for me each day. There were days when I was motivated to add more (particularly when I got down to the last 100), but what ended up happening is I would get too c*ck-sure, and wouldn't spend enough time on the image, resulting in me having to spend time after failing the cards re-imagining etc...

For what it's worth, I took about a month off over xmas, and ended up with 1300+ reviews due. It wasn't pretty, but I ploughed through, and now I'm out the other side^^.

Good luck!

Normally I'd agree with taking 4 hours to review 100 kanji, but I'm not using Anki. I'm using the site, making up/repairing stories, and reviewing them in the SRS on site. That's quite a difference than just clicking Hard/Easy every 7 seconds.

I feel that the review the day after you learn a new character is probably the single most important review there is for cementing a character in your mind. It's pretty important that you'll finish your reviews for the end of the day if you have 40 new characters. OTOH, it sucks to make no progress. If it were me, I'd add 10 characters, finish my reviews, and see if I felt like adding more characters then.

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:Normally I'd agree with taking 4 hours to review 100 kanji, but I'm not using Anki. I'm using the site, making up/repairing stories, and reviewing them in the SRS on site. That's quite a difference than just clicking Hard/Easy every 7 seconds.

Ah, I see what you mean... Yeah, it takes a while at first to add stories on this site, but once you've done that, it's a breeze^^

Even my 2nd time through it took me about 45 days so 15 is really ambitious and above the 100 a day. But keeping with it and slow and steady is a good way to 'blitz' to high comprehension.

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:I just spent 4 hours(more or less) clearing my Review List from 140 to about 40 and was thinking about still adding more Kanji later on today. Is this type of action wise?

What I did was break each review into 30 Kanji chunks. Review the stories, write out all the kanji, and review in chunks of 30 using the site, hitting about 64-90 retention, take a break, and repeat. I have 40 Kanji left, which are ones I added and made stories for just yesterday.

In this type of situation should I focus on clearing the newest 40 or adding 30? Reviews are about 70 or so a day right now.

I think you should clear out all the remaining reviews first before adding new cards. IMO that should be your top priority.

I do the same thing as Chris, review the new cards the next day. I do not add new cards unless I am done with my reviews for the day.

What I did before when adding Kanji may be the reason I kept getting bogged down in reviews. I would go through the book and add in all the kanji to the site, fail them, and then do the stories, after my reviews.

On Kanji 1013, almost halfway there.

Just gonna ask this now. After I finish with getting to all the Kanji in the book, would it hurt at all to switch my SRS to an Anki Deck instead of using the site? I hear that doing Anki and using the site skews results after awhile.......

Also, I plan on doing grammar after this. So far, I've been focusing on listening to Tokyo MX News and games for immersion. I have the Textbook Introduction to Modern Japanese which I assume would take care of grammar if I go through it. At any rate, do I go through an Anki grammar deck and RTK deck while doing that, or should I skip the grammar deck, and focus on the textbook and an RTK deck?

There's also the possibility of starting up my Core decks again.....

If you're going to self-teach with Intro to Modern Japanese, you're going to almost certainly want to quickly add a vocabulary deck just for that book.

I do like the grammar explanations in the book, but it's not designed for self-teaching; if you have the workbook, you can get the readings from that; apparently the exercises in the workbook are kind of useless without an instructor to correct them, so that's a lot of money just for a list of readings. Without the workbook, you can get most of the readings by flipping to the romaji at the end of the chapter and matching them to the dialogue. Unfortunately, there will be some terms that appear in example sentences that didn't appear in the dialogue, and you'll simply have to look those up. (At least having done RTK you should be able to write the characters, and your IME should have a handwriting interface.)

I hate to slam the book, I think it provides very clear and insightful grammar explanations. It's just got weaknesses that normally would be covered over easily by any competent instructor, but are troublesome when self-teaching.

Well, I planned on SRSing the vocab in the book anyway to help with the readings, and I got the workbook, so I could just use Lang8 Journal entries for corrections if need be. God knows I need to start using it again.

I pretty much just cleared 87 reviews and 35 new/expired cards using the tips you guys gave me yesterday. In under an hour. Thanks so much. I should have been imputting the stories first instead of adding the kanji and inputting the stories in when review time came. I'm such an idiot.<_< I'm pretty sure I started off doing that though not sure where I made that switch in order at.

I hit a point where I added 30 a day last week and my retention took a nose dive. 50 a day reviews turned into a 100, and I seemed to be forgetting cards in Pile 4, about 40% of them. I'm almost halfway caught up with my reviews now so I can restudy my cards again, but I don't know why I forgot kanji like "property" and "upright". I mixed up "utmost" with "take" as well, don't know where things are going awry in my memory.

On Kanji 1241. Haven't added anything in 2 days.

[Zgarbas]

Are you sure you remember the stories, rather than just store them in your visual short-term memory? It would explain how a card quickly gets mature (because you see it so often you remember the shape) only to be forgotten once you don't encounter it daily.

Zgarbas Wrote:Are you sure you remember the stories, rather than just store them in your visual short-term memory? It would explain how a card quickly gets mature (because you see it so often you remember the shape) only to be forgotten once you don't encounter it daily.

I was sure I did, especially for those I failed in the 4 Reviews+ pile. I might have to go back and retweak EVERY SINGLE STORY because this is just wierd.

On some kanji, I remember my story fine, but the alignmentment is messed up.

I'm seeing some Radical Decks on Anki, would it be a good idea to use one while RTKing?

I wouldn't learn the radicals -while- RTKing. It will only mess you up by creating multiple associations with the same components. It would be okay to learn them -before- RTK and use that knowledge to select more radical-compatible associations if you wanted, or to learn them -after- RTK - essentially just learning new names for known components at that point.

I mean, you -can- learn them during RTK if you are dying to do so, but the extraneous associations are going to cause some amount of extra failures.

The radicals have somewhat limited usefulness, but the names can be used to search electronic dictionaries, to verbally describe characters, and are likely to come up in character etymology.

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:

Zgarbas Wrote:Are you sure you remember the stories, rather than just store them in your visual short-term memory? It would explain how a card quickly gets mature (because you see it so often you remember the shape) only to be forgotten once you don't encounter it daily.

I was sure I did, especially for those I failed in the 4 Reviews+ pile. I might have to go back and retweak EVERY SINGLE STORY because this is just wierd.

On some kanji, I remember my story fine, but the alignmentment is messed up.

I think what you may be forgetting (and apologies if I'm wrong), is make sure you really imagine the items in you story. Not just repeating the words over and over to yourself, but really imagine it happening in a day dream kind of way. For every kanji I keep forgetting, this is 100% what I forgot to do. It's the keyword which should trigger an image that comes up in your mind, which leads you to the primitives, which leads you to the kanji.

It's pretty much what I try to do with every one. I'll go through the story, spend 30 secs to 1 min on visualization, write it out and move on. I'm messing up somewhere and not seeing where.

I just did a review of 50 and 95% it, failing the ones I didn't remember the story at all, even though I knew the stroke order. About 2 of them I legitimately had no idea of the story and writing.

Gonna clear out these reviews and probably not add anything for a week until I get these stories solidfied. I have a game guide coming in the mail tommorrow so maybe direct immersion will help.

If you can recreate the character in correct stroke order from the keyword, you definitely should -not- fail the card, whether or not you remember anything about the story. Having the stories fade and the characters remain is a natural part of the process (as is having the keywords fade in favor of actual Japanese vocabulary in the next phase.)

Also, you should only expect 80-90% success in recollection. Given that, a day with 60% success is not good, but it's not as bad as if you're expecting 100% success. If you reduce your intervals, you could of course get close to 100% success at the cost of extra reviews, but I don't think you have a lot of timing controls on the site's SRS, nor do I think it's a good idea to do that.

80-90% success is a good balance for minimizing the time spent reviewing rather than over-reviewing known cards or forgetting cards by not reviewing them soon enough.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:If you can recreate the character in correct stroke order from the keyword, you definitely should -not- fail the card, whether or not you remember anything about the story. Having the stories fade and the characters remain is a natural part of the process (as is having the keywords fade in favor of actual Japanese vocabulary in the next phase.)

Also, you should only expect 80-90% success in recollection. Given that, a day with 60% success is not good, but it's not as bad as if you're expecting 100% success. If you reduce your intervals, you could of course get close to 100% success at the cost of extra reviews, but I don't think you have a lot of timing controls on the site's SRS, nor do I think it's a good idea to do that.

80-90% success is a good balance for minimizing the time spent reviewing rather than over-reviewing known cards or forgetting cards by not reviewing them soon enough.

I tend to review cards like this more or less:

30 cards after Study: 10-30 minutes later

20 cards after Study: 15 mins later

50 cards after study: 10 mins later

Sometimes I review almost a day later, but those are days I get off work at night. The retention remains about 75-90 on most reviews.