I've completed RTK 1 and have been reviewing on the site for most of the time.

I have a due stack of 737 cards over the past week and am just now getting to the last of my Restudy cards, since I failed alot of cards near the end of the book.

What I'm doing now is doing reviews in batches of 100 a day, and spending time on relearning and focusing on the cards I've failed, especially the ones towards the end of the book I didn't cement before. I am focusing on getting 75% retention on those cards, then going on to add more to my reviews, since I feel like I have no connection to most of those kanji. The thing is, I don't want to do this at the cost of losing connections with other more rooted kanji.

This morning I got 46% retention on those cards. Not fun that I just spent most of my day re-REviewing 84 cards again that I did yesterday.

I'm looking at my graph charts on the site on Piles 1-4.

I have 265 expired in Pile 1.
164 expired in Pile 2.
204 expired in Pile 3.
104 expired in Pile 4.

I am unsure how to handle this work load. I can knockout 2/3/4 in about 2-3 days, but Pile 1 is a two day job, maybe adding 2 more days if it is a case of needing to relearn the cards all over again. I didn't think I'd run into this situation after finishing the book. Not so soon anyway.

Why card pile should I go after clearing first?

Go for the random order.

Congratulations on finishing RTK1! Remind yourself that you've really achieved something, even if you don't feel you did so well towards the end. You kept going and that's what matters.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed when there are so many to review. I would chunk it down and try just 10 at a time from each stack. I'd do that a few times. Getting 7, 8 or 9 out of 10 feels good - and helps me see which stack I'm best at, so then I'd complete the whole of that stack first. It might be the most recent ones, or it might be the oldest ones... but whichever it is, I'd do those because it would give me a confidence boost to see that I do actually know quite a lot of kanji. Then accept that your percentages aren't going to be as high from the other stacks, and don't worry about it.

Also, try to allow yourself time to do something "fun" in your Japanese study this week, to break up the hard slog. There are times when reviews pile up - for any number of reasons - but try not to get into: "I've got to get through these before I can do anything else!" (They'll wait for you.)

EratiK Wrote:Go for the random order.

+1

Don't be too hard on yourself. I know it seems like a lot of people on this site whip through the kanji in no time at all and remember them with no trouble, but trust me, just as many people need longer to build up to a good success rate^^
Gambappe!

EratiK:

No, I don't wanna, lol. Glad I took the advice though.

scarby dancer:

That's exactly the thought process I was getting into. This whole week I'd review in the morning, go to work, listen to 1 1/2 hours of Japanese, and read for 15 mins on break. Yesterday though, I wasted too much time on reviews, trying to do it all at once. Been doing 15 kanji chunks all day, and got that whole relearn pile down and my due cards from 737 to 642 in like a fraction of the time. Any kanji I missed I plugged it into Denshi Jisho and looked up other meanings and stroke order to make sure it sticks, I'll find out tomorrow if it works. Man this place is helpful. I would have kept stupidly kept trying to do it in 50 kanji chunks and been struggling like an idiot to get it all into circulation again.More importantly, it keeps it fun now, so I want to do more.

ktcgx:

Yeah, after reading most people's stories on retention and reps, I was feeling like I had been doing something wrong all this time. Thanks.

I'll second the fact that 100 card chunks is too much. The way I did much of RTK1 was through the 15-20 card chunks that I then reviewed again at the end of the day. You'll need to use Anki and some smart card management to do it, but it's certainly possible.

The thing is that not all kanji are created equal. There's some kanji that will come very easily to you, and others will be more stubborn. Moving forward is the key because kanji knowledge is very cumulative. The more you know, the easier it is to learn. New kanji help reinforce old kanji.

Another key thing is not to think of reviewing as a kind of test. Getting below 70% or whatever doesn't mean you've failed. Reviewing is about sorting and resorting the cards so you can find out systematically which ones are most difficult for you. So by reviewing them you're going through one by one to see whether or not you should review them tomorrow or at some point further in the future.

I almost wish that the Anki documentation would talk less about failures or lapses. It places a value judgement on not being as familiar with certain cards that isn't really warranted.

I'm currently at 225 words in the Core Anki deck and my RTK reviews on site are piling up again. Gonna go through them tommorrow. Been reading and listening to stuff with texts in the meantime. I really don't worry anymore, but I know I need to do them now and again.

I have the RTK deck in Anki and I'm wondering at what point should I just jump off the stories and focus on the kanji and meaning themselves. Or if there is something else I could do to help solidfy the kanji I've covered in RTK 1.

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:I'm currently at 225 words in the Core Anki deck and my RTK reviews on site are piling up again. Gonna go through them tommorrow. Been reading and listening to stuff with texts in the meantime. I really don't worry anymore, but I know I need to do them now and again.

I have the RTK deck in Anki and I'm wondering at what point should I just jump off the stories and focus on the kanji and meaning themselves. Or if there is something else I could do to help solidfy the kanji I've covered in RTK 1.

If you write out your vocab reviews you probably don't need to worry about RTK reviews all that much. I mean, you've already remembered them and now you're using them in real Japanese, でしょう. With enough focus on writing, you're not going to forget the kanji anytime soon. At least for the kanji covered in Core.

IMO

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:I have the RTK deck in Anki and I'm wondering at what point should I just jump off the stories and focus on the kanji and meaning themselves.

You shouldn't need to run through the stories every time you review a kanji, just when it doesn't pop into your head immediately... The stories are there to create an imaginative memory pathway, and once that's done, your imaginative memory should take over...

uisukii, yes, I'm writing out all my reviews in Anki. Pretty much what Nukemarine did. Write out the Kanji, kana, whole sentence on initial learning, and only focus on the vocab word tested on the reviews. I just fear that I'll forget some kanji before I get to them in Core.

ktcgx, that sounds better than what I was doing. I REALLY just want to focus on kanji now and don't want to mix the two methods up. Actually, I rather spend all my study time in Anki, then juggling between Anki and the site, so I think I'm just going to do that and work on the RTK deck as well as Core. If I have a problem with the kanji, I can just look the story on this site.

For some reason I can't get my stories to show up in Anki and I used the Importer plugin. If anyone has any tips I'd be glad to hear them, though I dunno if discussion of that is allowed?