I'm an 18 year old college student who had nothing to do over the summer so I made a bet with my dad that I am already regretting.

The bet was whether I could learn 2000 kanji in 4 weeks(28 days).

If I win:

He buys me a new laptop and a bicycle --> $1.5k

If I lose:

I lose my gas card... permanently --> $$$$(I have a truck)


The Test will be given July 25 and the proponents are below:

100 random kanji are selected from RtK Volume 1.
There will be 5 kanji from 1-100, 5 from 100-200, etc.
I will be given the keyword and must draw out the kanji.
A 95% is required to pass.
Minor errors to the kanji are allowed. Unclear what minor means to my dad.

Day 1(6/27): 1-70 - 3 1/2 hours
Day 2(6/28): 71-100 - 4 1/2 hours
Day 3(6/29): 101-179 - 5 1/2 hours
Day 4(6/30): In progress --> Pumped today!!!

All advice is read and pondered thoroughly.

[Zgarbas]

Learning 2000 in 6 weeks is quite a task, that very few who try actually succeed. Also, by learn I assume you mean assigning a basic meaning to a word, RTK style?
There are ~2000 common kanjis in the Japanese language, with another ~1000 not-so-common but still encounterable (that's where RTK ends). I don't even know where you'd get a good list of 4000 kanjis to begin with (even if you do find lists of it, chances of them being in English or having an English equivalent are scarce). Just making up the list would take you a while, I think.

Good luck with your preposterous bet, though =/. I don't envy the poor brain cells that will die for this.

Why 4000 kanji..? And what do you mean by "learn"?
Even with 12 hours a day, 4000 will be rough just for the RTK "meanings" and writing. And there's not a lot of practical use past like.. 2500?
If you mean "learn" as in "can read" then.. goodbye gas card.. D:

Quite the gamblers. Your gonna need srs, mnemonics, and your gonna need to eat and breathe kanji. Like when your taking a break from using SRS ur gonna need to be doing more kanji on the side. 2000 is a lot, 4000 that's just...

I hope you set some specifics of this bet. If you have to remember the meanings and a reading also. That's gonna hell.

[s0apgun]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji

2,136 常用 Jouyou Kanji... the only Kanji you'll ever need to know IMHO.

Tell your dad you made a terrible mistake with that 4,000 number and you might have a chance at your bet. You could learn 50 Kanji a day which is totally doable. I did 42~ a day for quite some time with a retention rate of around 80%. Your 95% retention rate goal is incredibly high and you should shoot for around 85-90% to be reasonable.

I also don't know where you would get additional Kanji beyond the scope of RTK 1 & 2.

Besides trying to shoot down your goal... I would use Anki & Skritter in conjunction with each other. You will need to use a lot of memory "tricks" to create a context for each Kanji so they stick. This is much easier when you learn Japanese when you have the Kanji in a word or context and create multiple connections in your mind.

Edit: For your consideration... data from a computer algorithm a member here used.

173 kanji make up 50% all kanji in Wikipedia.
454 kanji cover 75% of all kanji in Wikipedia.
874 kanji cover 90%
1214 kanji cover 95%
2061 kanji cover 99%
2456 kanji cover 99.5%
3489 kanji cover 99.9%

I feel like a fool! You guys are totally right. That will make things... Interesting. I will try and talk him down considering there isn't that many practical Kanji to learn.

Just wondering, which course is this?

[Zgarbas]

Is this one of them "cure cancer in 3 minutes" things, but with Japanese learning?

s0apgun Wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji

2,136 常用 Jouyou Kanji... the only Kanji you'll ever need to know IMHO.

Tell your dad you made a terrible mistake with that 4,000 number and you might have a chance at your bet. You could learn 50 Kanji a day which is totally doable. I did 42~ a day for quite some time with a retention rate of around 80%. Your 95% retention rate goal is incredibly high and you should shoot for around 85-90% to be reasonable.

I also don't know where you would get additional Kanji beyond the scope of RTK 1 & 2.

Besides trying to shoot down your goal... I would use Anki & Skritter in conjunction with each other. You will need to use a lot of memory "tricks" to create a context for each Kanji so they stick. This is much easier when you learn Japanese when you have the Kanji in a word or context and create multiple connections in your mind.

Edit: For your consideration... data from a computer algorithm a member here used.

173 kanji make up 50% all kanji in Wikipedia.
454 kanji cover 75% of all kanji in Wikipedia.
874 kanji cover 90%
1214 kanji cover 95%
2061 kanji cover 99%
2456 kanji cover 99.5%
3489 kanji cover 99.9%

You have it right. As someone who only knows katakana and hiragana and is still quite new, but fascinated by, Japanese I cited an incorrect statistic. The bet has been modified if you would like to take a look.

blackbrich Wrote:Just wondering, which course is this?

RTK1 and RTK2.

I now only need to learn 2000 kanji(thank god) but in 4 weeks.

You will learn some kanji, but lose the bet. Should've asked here before making it;p
There are stories here for all the kanji(that someone made a story for) you can paste into search window. If your father gives you a test with something different than meaning->kanji you've lost, keep in mind that even most kanji have a few meanings, some several, heisig will give you only one.

Learning 4000 kanji with Heisig's method, so learning to only recognize them in 42 days means turning into a monk for 42 days, and 95% - nope. You may be able to add all those cards, but not 95% retention rate, unless you're trained in memorization techniques.


Edit. yeah, 2000 may be possible, it was done before. Still 95% retention rate is a lot.

blackbrich Wrote:Just wondering, which course is this?

RTK1 and RTK2

I have significant reasons for making this bet that I haven't gone into yet.

Ok that's more manageable. For the love of god ask him not to test the kunyomi. If he does your chances of winning are quite low.

You will probably still need to eat and breathe kanji though. To learn meaning and reading.

blackbrich Wrote:Ok that's more manageable. For the love of god ask him not to test the kunyomi. If he does your chances of winning are quite low.

You will probably still need to eat and breathe kanji though. To learn meaning and reading.

At least I am getting a few hopeful words here and there. I appreciate that.

Yeah I definitely hope you succeed. And hopefully it ends helps you advance faster later on down the road.

I've got some experience with this. I did RTK3 (1000+) in 10 days. It wasn't a painful experience. I was just motivated because I was thinking in terms of progress-- not time spent, and progress was going fast. If you think in terms of hours, and just say "I am going to study 12 hours a day for the next 4 weeks", that will turn into 12 hours of drudgery real fast. Instead, think of getting the most out of every hour. You need to timebox. Try to get the numbers up on a 5 minute window. Monitor how fast it takes for you to do 100 reviews and try to bring that time down. Set up a baseline of 60 new cards a day and do it AFTER your old reviews (because new card adding time varies more than review time). Do more if you feel up to it. If you're using anki, add new cards in batches of 20, and monitor the time for that too. With all this, I bet you could probably reach your goal in about 5 hours/day.

As for the stories, think about the KEYWORD first and find a story that uses it in an ACTIVE way. It is absolutely critical that just thinking of the keyword will evoke the story in your mind. The use of the primitives within the story is important, but less critical. Focus on highly visual stories rather than joke-y ones (unless you think the joke is especially memorable). Save time by using stories from the site as often as you can find good ones.

It's going to be harder for you because you don't know the primitives already. That might become a hindrance for you. RTK1 expects you to learn them by rote. If its a problem, I'd advise looking up a list of RTK primitives and doing a bit of practice with them on your downtime.

Also, you said that RTK2 is part of the deal, but no one really studies RTK2 by itself. The book is essentially a reference text. This site has recently included a common on-yomi reading with each kanji. I think learning that, and doing it as you go, is probably your safest bet. As for how to memorize them... I'd say just do it by rote unless you keep forgetting. In that case, include it in the story in some way. Honestly though, I think you might want to bargain with that portion of the bet. Learning on-yomi out of the context of vocab has limited benefits, since there are many of them per character, and with an unknown word, you don't know which should be used. Its still sort of a good thing to do, though. It will make the vocab-learning process a bit easier.

blackbrich Wrote:Quite the gamblers. Your gonna need srs, mnemonics, and your gonna need to eat and breathe kanji. Like when your taking a break from using SRS ur gonna need to be doing more kanji on the side. 2000 is a lot, 4000 that's just...

I hope you set some specifics of this bet. If you have to remember the meanings and a reading also. That's gonna hell.

He doesn't necessarily need mnemonics... they certainly didn't suit me.

I did a first run through of RTK in about 40 days, with around 2 hours a day of study, no mnemonics, 95% retention or so, but I guess I had a visual familiarity with about 700 before I started. OP will be fine if he has a decent memory and doesn't quit, provided the goal is just to memorise RTK1.

Calling it now, burnout by day 15.

Crawdaddycon Wrote:

blackbrich Wrote:Ok that's more manageable. For the love of god ask him not to test the kunyomi. If he does your chances of winning are quite low.

You will probably still need to eat and breathe kanji though. To learn meaning and reading.

At least I am getting a few hopeful words here and there. I appreciate that.

So how is your old man going to test you at the end? I mean, I started and finished the initial review for RtK1 in 14 days, but I didn't "know" any of them. I mean, I could write them all out, and with (from memory) about 80% retention, or so, using English keywords in Anki. Wouldn't be able to tell you their common readings, though. Well, maybe a few, but that was due to unrelated factors.

[RawToast]

The 95% retention part is what gets me. That is going to be incredibly difficult to achieve in such a short space of time.

As someone who took almost a year to complete RTK1, I don't envy you... but on the other hand... this insane challenge also sounds like a lot of fun (if you're a bit masochistic) and so I wish you a lot of luck and perseverance!! Keep us updated, please! Maybe we can cheer you on a bit.

I agree with Haych: "As for the stories, think about the KEYWORD first"

The most common trap I fell into, I think, was finding a great story to use as a mnemonic, but the sense the keyword was used in was different than my first impression I had when seeing the keyword. Such as... um... "pull." My first impression of the word was the action you do when you pull a door open, but the mnemonic I chose was more about pulling and stretching something. The subtle difference caused a lot of confusion during reviews.

So make sure you have the nuance of the story align with the nuance of the word in your head, and things will go a lot smoother. Bonus if you can align it with the true meaning of the Japanese counterpart, but since you're more focused on winning the bet than learning Japanese (I think?), don't worry about that too much because you can always sort it out later.

Also, it might help to plan out your entire study plan in advance on a calendar, such as how many kanji you'll study each day, when you'll hit halfway, when you'll complete RTK1, when you'll complete RTK2, where you should be and when, but for every single day (one day off can throw off your entire month, so be strict about it). I would advise trying to get the whole process complete with a few days to spare, so that you can use the extra days to refine your retention rate, because like others have said, 95% is REALLY high, so you'll probably need to work extra hard at the end to do sort of an all-encompassing review of the material to boost your retention chances as much as possible.

As for general advice... like others have said, timeboxing will really help with your endurance. When your motivation hits an all-time low, taking things in really small bites is essential. I personally prefer to take things in quantity-based chunks rather than time-based chunks, but just go with whatever works best for you. Deciding to sprint through 5 kanji really quick sounds miniscule in the face of the overall number, but doing that sprint is 900% better than moaning at your slow progress and doing nothing at all. Every tiny bit adds up, it really does.

頑張って！

RawToast Wrote:The 95% retention part is what gets me. That is going to be incredibly difficult to achieve in such a short space of time.

I agree. 80% I could see. Most people don't have 95% retention rate even weeks after they finish.

You could get through 2k in that time no problem, but the retention rate would not be 95%.

You should negotiate down the error rate to 90%. And then work your ass off, but don't spend ten hours a day on this. 5-6 hours max, and carefully follow the method. All the extra time will achieve is make you sick of reviewing Kanji, it won't help you remember better. Even if you spend 5-6 hours, you'll have to tweak the Anki settings, to make sure you review each card much more frequently than you would with the default settings. (Anki is set up for learning over a longer period of time, not just one month).

I think 160-170 hours, over 4 weeks, might be enough to get a 90% retention rate, right at the end (though it won't be permanent). But 95% is much, much more difficult. It doesn't look that way on paper, but it is.

I spent about that time over the course of almost six weeks, and I think I was just a little bit under 90% at the end.

P.S. There are also several other ways to tilt the test in your favor. For one, make sure there's no time limit. Second, you could (and this is only for the test, not the way you review them), do the test in reverse order (recognize the Kanji).

A third idea would be to do the test in the right order, but get the primitive names listed in the question. Then I think it would be a pretty easy test. Useless, as far as actually measuring your level of knowledge, but easy.

On second thought, maybe you shouldn't tweak the Anki settings. Instead, just look at which cards you're failing more often, and go over them separately a few times. This way you will probably keep the volume down, by studying extra only on the characters you need to.