i'm at something around 1300 kanji now, less than 1000 to go, my recognition rates are not bad, but somehow my motivation has gone down the drain.
my reps are all right with below 100 now (83 today) after 5 days without adding new kanji, but somehow i feel like i'm not progressing it all.
doing my reviews eats all of my energy, even tho it's a relatively quick process, and i don't feel the hunger for more kanji anymore.

anyone else with this kind of experience? how did you get over it?

It might be a good time to keep practicing but pull back from your rigors and objectives, since that's what's getting you down and it's compounding your stress about it. Explore the kanji in some other way, tatoeba keep up with reviews and focus on stroke order and making the characters/movements look nice; you will appreciate the forms and build muscle memory. In a week you can start adding new cards again at a less aggressive pace as long as you're still enjoying the kanji (and perhaps the stories, but they go away).
Your reviews still space out naturally in SRS if you don't do them for a few days, so as long as you don't let the sheer number of reviews get to you you'll be good. I've been forcing myself not to go over 100 reviews because I have a tendency to do 400 in one day and then I miss a day here and there because I'm burnt out. oh, and, uh, gambatte下さい。

I usually feel a strong lack of motivation with reviews, like saying to myself right before I get into it "Oh man, not this again."

Then I just remind myself that if I don't review I might forget what I've learned, so I just go ahead and go through the reviews anyway, with or without motivation, because once the review is done, it's done and afterwards it didn't seem that bad.

But in regards to adding new content to the reviews, if I don't feel motivated to add anything new, then I don't. I'll pretty much keep on reviewing what I've already learned until I feel motivated again. Even though it's not necessarily progressing with learning anything new, over time it'll help decrease the review time and help better reinforce what you've already learned. That way the quick process will become even quicker.

Yea, I'm doing all my reviews every day. Sometimes I do quick sessions where I try to fly through it and hit fail when it takes more than around 5 seconds, sometimes I take my time, sometimes I write them down and fail if I didn't get it.

Then I tried to hit "hard" instead of fail for Kanji I didn't come up with, but when I flipped the card I felt like "oh man, this again, and how could I fail it again?".

But now, I totally can't get anything new in, and when I try, I seem to have a blockade - as if I'd have gone too fast, which can't be the case, as I feel pretty comfortable with my learned stuff so far.

It's a bit that lacking progress makes me feel demotivated, and demotivation hinders my progress. I need to break out of this circle somehow, but I wonder how.

You live in Japan. You're angling for a spouse visa, so I take it you intend to stay here. If you ever hope to be a functioning adult, you'll stick it out and get it done. It's like a Japanese person learning their ABC's and stopping at "M" because they just don't feel motivated.

You're not learning Japanese to watch anime or to read manga. It's not a hobby for you. This is real life--it seems to me you don't really have a choice. So man up.

I wouldn't stop adding cards. Add your XX cards a day and get it over with it. Think about how you will be finished with it soon. Assuming you have some extra time, do the basics of grammar at the same time to keep you interested. I went through Genki I and II while doing RTK.

My Japanese is all right, it's just the Kanji that I lack.
Maybe I should just power through these last ~900 and then battle the reviews while starting to read stuff with Furigana. Wish I had a week off to do that..

I hit the same slump in RTK. I had already finished Core2k, I already had a sentence deck with 3000 mature sentences, I had already finished all of Rosetta Stone Japanese 1-3, I was used to making a return on my time investment.

Studying RTK didn't give me the same sense of value for the time because I wasn't learning any Japanese. I started to sense that my progress was slowing drastically, that I was seriously hurting my progress.

But I knew how important it was to get those kanji under my belt, and I kept at it despite feeling like crap about it.

Now I'm back to slamming the vocabulary and I'm learning twice as fast as I was before because half the work (recognition) has been taken care of for me. What felt like a waste of time then has turned into a massive time-saver now, and it will continue to be a boon for as long as I keep on studying.

I know your spoken Japanese is alright, but if you go to buy a car or change your mobile phone contract or read a menu or look for a certain sort of store or any number of everyday things you're going to need the reading proficiency. So as I said, If you ever hope to be a functioning adult, man up. There's 120 million Japanese people who are pretty sure no foreigner could ever learn their secret writing system--learn it just to prove them wrong, if nothing else!

If I could, I'd swallow the 900 in one day, just to be done with it. 100 take me 4-5 hours to learn, I did that on some days, and the retention didn't suffer from it - but my time was too limited, so I went with 20 a day.. which again feels so slow now. After you got the 50% mark done, the next milestone would be 100%, right?

But you're right, there's no way around this, and I know very well how incredibly useful they are. Gotta fight. Maybe I will return to 100 a day and then somehow manage. I feel I slacked off a bit lately, spending more time with useless stuff than I should.

Can't be 100% productive 100% of the time, that's for sure. Hell I got up an hour ago hoping to add 200 cards in Core this morning before the girlfriend wakes up and... Nope, here I am.

Once you hit about 1600-1700 it gets really easy. Suddenly 20 kanji per day goes from feeling unbearably slow to being a good-sized chunk of what you have left to do. It's also super-motivating. I went from 20-25 a day (your rate it seems) to 50 a day purely because the thought of finishing in a week or two was enough to drive me on.

In English we call Wednesday "hump day" because it's like a big hill--you work your way up the hill from Monday and by Wednesday you're tired and unhappy and you wonder how long this week could possibly drag on. Then Thursday comes and Friday is right around the corner, it's all down-hill from there. Right now you're in RTK's hump day.

You're right. I had a ton of fun learning Kanji and was amazed at how well it turns out, even tho I keep forgetting some all the time - but in the overall picture of 2200, what's 30 Kanji you're having trouble with?

I still can't trust ANKI, and I don't know why. But I long for what comes after Heisig.

You helped me a lot here, thank you I'll do 100 a day till my head hurts, then do a little consolidation break to bring the out-of-control reps down, and then finish it. Or just finish it and then see how long it takes to be able to breathe again.

Lacking time.. wish I had more. And I gotta stay away from Facebook for a few days

Every morning I wake up, make coffee (5 minutes), check email (5 minutes), check Facebook (15 minutes), check BBC news (20 minutes), check these forums (5 to 20 minutes), and then, finally, start studying. If you find a way to commit 100% of your free time to study, please, please, tell me your secret! I just can't bring myself to crawl out of bed and immediately face down my 1000+ daily reviews. I have to like... prepare myself mentally

Anyway, yeah, if this were a hobby of yours I'd say don't bother. Manga isn't worth it. But living here? You don't get a choice!

1000+ reviews a day? You must have balls of steel if you can keep that up. It'd kill me. It's not that I have a short attention span, but 1000 would take me forever to finish.
I'd rather like to break it up. An hour of this, an hour of that. Sitting in front of ANKI all day long is a scary thought ^^

500-600 Core2k/6k reviews
150-200 sentence deck reviews
100 RTK reviews

100 new cards in Core6k = 300 reviews (custom stepping, each card is seen three times)

So 1000-1200 reviews a day, total time spent 5-8 hours depending on how motivated I am

I may also spend another hour adding sentence cards at night before bed.

Been hitting the books this hard for 4 months now, we'll see once spring gets here. I bought a new convertible sports car--from your country actually--in September so once we get some nice weather it'll be hard to stay inside

5-8 hours! I can barely get 1-2 for studies, when I'm not tired

Well, let's see how fast I can get this done now.

I always like to make sure I do 10 new cards per day, no matter what (maybe give a day off if I have some enormous exam the next day). And I never do that 10 in more than 5 kanji chunks.

With that, it's fairly difficult for me to find a reason to not do kanji, because even by my lazy standards that's not a lot of work. Just doing 10 a day, from right where you are, would have you finished in 3 months no matter what. 20 a day would be 1.5 months.

Basically, find a minimum amount that doesn't compete with your lack of motivation, and stick with it no matter what. It might take longer if you only stick to that amount, but you definitely will finish

I'm not sure that approaching this kind of problem in terms of "buckling up" is always fair to yourself. Sub-consciously or semi-consciously your mind may have extremely valid objections to the study method that you're forcing yourself to use. If that's the case, then realizing what those objections are and trying to find solutions for them may be more effective than simply "buckling up" and continuing down the path that has caused your motivation to waver in the first place.

To name some examples that really frustrated me when going through the "adding new cards while reviewing old cards" phase in RTK1:
- new cards often reviewed so well the first two times and then often went wrong 90+% after about a week or two, after which I have to re-conquer them (and that's nobody's fault but my own);
- some associations / stories looked so good when seeing them next to the Kanji in question and then completely fail to activate when encountering the key meaning during old card reviews (again, nobody's fault but my own, but still frustrating);
- many Heisig key words for primitives are chosen for their superficial visual resemblance and not for any link to their real meaning, which can make it really hard to build useful stories/associations. Far too often, someone posting what they found in a Kanji dictionary about such a primitive provides a way out, but that's not how it should work. (And I blame Heisig for that)
- not only are many Heisig primitives named based on a superficial visual resemblance, but too often these names only allow a fairly narrow range of stories or associations. Examples are words like "cornstalk", "baseball team", "bonsai", "bushel basket", "cabbage", the infamous "crotch", "flying horse" or "grass skirt". Unless you're deeply into agriculture, baseball (or crotches...), chances are that trying to work these key meanings into useful stories means a hell of an effort just because Heisig chose these words poorly. And at some level, be it consciously or subconsciously, your mind is aware of this, thus eroding your motivation. I wound up re-defining no fewer than 76 primitive meanings in RTK1 to escape this trap and I'm glad I did, because working with bad primitives was proving too much of a time waster.
- key meanings that are very close to other key meaning are often pointed out by Heisig, but far from always (excepting the final lessons where he claims to leave this out intentionally). For me, this meant that I often mixed these up. And it can sometimes take quite a while to come up with that *one* adjacent meaning that is on the tip of your tongue. And until I did, I was getting both of them wrong (not always during the same session, making it harder to identify the problem) just because Heisig couldn't be bothered to always point to adjacent meanings.
- sometimes primitives are used in Kanji *before* they have been defined as primitives, leaving you to wonder "hey, didn't I see this one before somewhere? Or is it just me? Man, what was that other one called again?". Examples are "armor" treated well after "tortoise" and "hole" well after "window", but there are quite a few others.

Anyhow, there is plenty wrong with RTK1 that can really destroy your motivation. The only way around it I could find, was to adapt each and every point that didn't work for me into something that did. And I don't mean that as another "buckle up speech" at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Being honest about what's not working for you is the first step towards finding what *does* work for you.

There are Kanji and primitives I do have problems with, and some of the things you listed there sound familiar, but I got here, so there's no reason I couldn't go all the way to the end I think. Restructuring all the primitives also means some pretty cool stories from REVTK in my deck will cease to work..

However, I added 20 new ones yesterday and I plan to do at least 5 today.. probably more than one time over the day. I wouldn't say I'm back on track, but I started to move a bit again.

It's good to hear that you're moving forward again. BTW, I certainly didn't mean to suggest that all Heisig primitives should be redefined. Just the ones that seem unhelpful when first encountered, when all the Kanji that use it are neatly lined up immediately after the primitive.

I'm in the exact same situatuion, but with 300 less Kanji than where you are. I decided to have a break and let my reviews come down a bit. I didn't have much time last week nor this or next week, so I decided to only do reviews. 8 days in, I am much more motivated again and I think once I have a little more time again, I'll be moving on with a very good motivation. So my advice is just to have a week or two of "review holidays". After that it will be much more motivated again and you have more time to add new cards as your reviews will have dwindled

I added new kanji in little sessions over the day and the new ones were pretty easy, which gave me a small boost. Guess I can get over it this way.

I'm at almost the same place as the OP too and given my many past failures I think these two pieces of advice are very important:

mc962 Wrote:Basically, find a minimum amount that doesn't compete with your lack of motivation, and stick with it no matter what. It might take longer if you only stick to that amount, but you definitely will finish

Eminem2 Wrote:I'm not sure that approaching this kind of problem in terms of "buckling up" is always fair to yourself. Sub-consciously or semi-consciously your mind may have extremely valid objections to the study method that you're forcing yourself to use. If that's the case, then realizing what those objections are and trying to find solutions for them may be more effective than simply "buckling up" and continuing down the path that has caused your motivation to waver in the first place.

1. finding a minimum amount of new cards to add that doesn't compete with your lack of motivation gives you a set date to accomplish your goal. While it may seems slower, you get a clear and easy path to reach your goal. Also you never end up stopping adding new cards for weeks or months which is usually what happens when you start adding huge amounts of cards, your motivation dry up and you end up taking a bitter break until the motivation comes again. Because it's not clear when your motivation is going to show up again, being slower but with constancy may get you to your goal faster. (it also eliminates the option of being so disappointed because you couldn't keep the high pace that you stop altogether and don't try again)

2. telling yourself to "man up" is important sometimes, but to take that as the single answer to your problem is a bad idea. As Eminem2 said, in only telling yourself to man up you basically are doing nothing different, only putting more pressure on yourself, increasing the disappointment when you fail again.

This is a good article about the burn out problem:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...-and-hares

I changed my method. Before, I'd add 20 a day. Now I do one primitive a day, sometimes two. This is actually much easier, because I don't have to switch stuff around in my head and don't get confused so fast anymore.