Hello everyone.

In past few days after doing about 500 kanji I've encountered some problems (honestly I don't know If they really are problems, so I write it here).
First of all at the beggining of study maybe I've been using a little bit more of visual memory, or characters were that easy that I didn't have any problems recalling character's Keyword. I've seen 冒 - Risk, 則 - shellfish and saber, it must be this kind of Rule opening shellfishes with dagger on some beaches. But today when I turn on some games fully in japanese or any website just to look a little at kanji, and I encounter few kanji like ex. 全, 題 I look at the elements and can't recall anything at all!!! Of course I know every single element this kanji is made of, I've got a feeling I saw it. Then I look it up on this site and see the keyword and say to myself "How could I forget that. I remember every bit of that story, have image coming to my mind instantly".

Another, more addtional question is that - Is making failures in Anki considered as a Fail, it means you're doing everything wrong. You forgot it, how could you? Having high failure percentage is a shame...
Or maybe it means to help you, get more familiar with that little story that is giving you problems and takes care of that Kanji when you can safely go and conquer another set (my is 20, but I think I'm gonna speed up a little) of daily characters.

That's all.
Thank you for your help in advance

Your first question: It's natural that you'll have difficulty recognising (going kanji to keyword) the kanji since you've only been practicing going keyword to kanji. This isn't a problem because your laying good ground work for learning recognition later and producing keywords isn't ever going to a skill you'll need. You want to go kanji --> Japanese word, not kanji --> Semi arbitrary English keyword.

Second Question: Your going to forget stuff but I wouldn't worry too much about it. I had a terrible recall rate when I first started but with practice things got better. I would worry less about your recall rate and more about your number of daily reviews; you can keep adding new material so long as the required amount of reviews remains manageable.

If you're really dissatisfied with your failure rate you can mess with the review intervals so you're reviewing more often.

You're supposed to be failing cards. That's what practicing is.

Sztermel Wrote:...and I encounter few kanji like ex. 全, 題 I look at the elements and can't recall anything at all!!! Of course I know every single element this kanji is made of, I've got a feeling I saw it. Then I look it up on this site and see the keyword and say to myself "How could I forget that. I remember every bit of that story, have image coming to my mind instantly".

That's normal. Simple things like font, color and placement amongst other characters can frustrate your tenuous recognition of a character. When you are studying your deck, the simple fact that you know that you should know the next kanji will make it more likely that you recognize it. The solution is like everything else - practice reading in different situations. Fortunately you are doing the hard part first.

You realise that the spacing algorithm that Anki uses to schedule your reviews has a concept of a forgetting index built in?

There is a reason why that thing is called forgetting index...

Thanks for replies.
One another thing I'd like to ask is should I consider doing Kanji to keyword repetitions when my goal is mainly reading? I'm not going to write in Japanese too much, maybe only for educational purposes when doing textbooks or vocabulary. I'm not going to Japan in next few years.
I'm also quite confused If is doing RTK worth all the effort when I'm not gonna write anything at all practically. In last few days I'm quite irritated of the fact that my reviews keep stacking at 90 everyday because I accidently deleted all my progress (200 cards) and had to do everything in the deck from the scratch.
Now I'm about 610 and spending 2 hours on 20 kanji along with 50 reviews 20 cards to add is quite a hassle (I set limit of cards on 50, but when increase the limit how much is reviews in overall it's about 90 all the time).

Kanji to keyword is a way of doing it. Not the vanilla Heisig way, but some people have done that. I suggest trying it out for yourself. That's how I review my kanji deck now that I'm done with RTK.

RTK is worth the effort even if you don't write stuff. Stroke order is always useful, if only because it makes it easy to use draw-recognition dictionaries. It also helps in completely demystifying the big bad kanji roadblock. And the keywords, though sometimes a bit obscure, are still a big help when you start reading.

Keep at it, but why not doing something else on the side ? A vocabulary / sentence deck for instance ? Whatever tickles your fancy would work.

[RawToast]

Linval Wrote:Kanji to keyword is a way of doing it. Not the vanilla Heisig way, but some people have done that. I suggest trying it out for yourself. That's how I review my kanji deck now that I'm done with RTK.

Same. I recently completed RTK lite as Kanji to Keyword/Japanese word (which seems to come naturally after doing some vocab).

But maybe doing Kanji to keyword reviews will be better after completing RTK?
In book Heisig states to do keyword to kanji repetitions as reverse will take care of itself.
And one thing I'd like to ask that quite got my attention: Are the kun and on readings important at all? Their absence in the book we are all talking about was one of the criticism and few people state that it's an important aspect, when the others tell that it's natural to pick up reading of compounds naturally after you learn their Kanji.
Second opinion seems to be much more logical to me than learning readings which are (probably) randomly given to them. And for placement of kanji in a word - won't it be a problem when a word is made of one kanji like 今, then kanji and hiragana ご主人, or hiragana-kanji-hiragana お願い.
Doesn't it give you a problems, should I be confident about it?

Sztermel Wrote:And for placement of kanji in a word - won't it be a problem when a word is made of one kanji like 今, then kanji and hiragana ご主人, or hiragana-kanji-hiragana お願い.
Doesn't it give you a problems, should I be confident about it?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that. Why would it be a problem if a word is made of kanji + hiragana ? The hiragana bits are called Okurigana, and you'll quickly and naturally learn to recognize them as such when you start reading / learning vocab.

The whole "learning the readings while doing RTK" has been discussed to death, and the general consensus seems to be that it's better to learn the readings in context, after RTK. And it makes sense ; it's much easier to learn a reading in the context of a word / sentence rather than a random sound that might or might not be the most common reading associated to an obscure keyword

You seem to worry way too much about the method - take it easy, and just try things. Heisig is not God, and his method is not to be taken as absolute ; hell, RTK is all about NOT following the established, traditional rules. Heisig built his method by way of tweaking the existing useful bits, and pruning the tedium out, to fit HIM first - I suggest you do the same.

Kana before kanji is easy: the honorific prefix 御 (お/ご for kun/on) can go before just about any word, doesn't change the literal meaning, and is usually spelled in kana. You'll also sometimes see words with rare kanji spelled partly in kana: さ迷う (彷徨う: さまよう - the う is okurigana and marks the word as a verb), ねつ造 (捏造: ねつぞう), 団らん (団欒: だんらん)

Sztermel Wrote:But today when I turn on some games fully in japanese or any website just to look a little at kanji, and I encounter few kanji like ex. 全, 題 I look at the elements and can't recall anything at all!!!

That was exactly my problem. I was practicing only keyword-to-kanji like Heisig advocated, and waiting for the reverse to take care of itself, but it wasn't: I was tearing out my hair because my spouse was really good at recognizing kanji (as well as producing it): she was practicing mostly kanji-to-keyword on the RTK6 course at Memrise.com.

Thanks to others' replies here, I now understand that in the larger scheme of things, producing Heisig keywords is at best a half-way point to learning real Japanese words, but it was very, very discouraging to be at a Chinese or Japanese store, or watching anime, and not be able to identify the keyword, while my spouse was nailing them every time and getting the gist of what it meant. So I started doing Memrise too. Now I practice both ways and am a happy camper. I was recently watching Whisper of the Heart (Mimi o Sumaseba, the Studio Ghibli film) and saw "ふとん店" on a sign and was very pleased to sound out "futon store"---it's not a big deal really, but learning a language on one's own is all about the little pleasures that build up into an experience so fun that you cannot stop.

Sztermel Wrote:Is making failures in Anki considered as a Fail, it means you're doing everything wrong. You forgot it, how could you? Having high failure percentage is a shame...

I also had this problem. I hated declaring failure when I couldn't remember how to make a kanji so I'd spend minutes trying to jog my memory. (But I was very strict about marking things as failures even if I swapped a single pair of strokes.) I had to change my attitude towards failure.

Now, I sometimes might spend as much as 60 seconds trying to remember on some kanji, but usually mark it as failure if I cannot recall how to produce the kanji within 20 seconds without any rancor by acknowledging that if I'd been asked that question yesterday or tomorrow, or in another order, I might have gotten it right, and acknowledging that trying to minimize failures leads to bitterness and increased risk of abandoning RTK. The psychology literature seems to indicate that the harder you try to remember, and the more times you try to remember before seeing the answer, the better you'll remember it in the future (see Figure 1 in this paper from Purdue prof Jeff Karpicke), but this is not fun! And while the funnest method might not be the fastest, it's the most likely to get you to the end (paraphrasing Khatzumoto).

Also, after doing Anki for 1.5 years, I've found that I do well with a maximum spacing of 5 months on most cards. Unless it's very easy or unless I've been doing a lot of reading, I cannot reliably and perfectly produce rather simple kanji like 咽 (#627) beyond five months, for various confusing reasons. Recognizing this also makes it easier for me to hit "Fail" and reset the clock to zero on the next cycle to 5 months. I think if SRS was the first breakthrough in language learning (or the most recent one ), the next one will be a system that connects SRS with a word/kanji's natural frequency and estimates the probability that you've encountered it in the wild outside of SRS.

Sztermel Wrote:But maybe doing Kanji to keyword reviews will be better after completing RTK?
In book Heisig states to do keyword to kanji repetitions as reverse will take care of itself.

As I mentioned above, I have been doing both for a couple of months now and am quite happy. I have a Markdown text file that I compose my stories in after consulting Koohii and Memrise, then I "learn" them in Memrise and Anki. Since I average 5 a day, it's not much more total time.

Sztermel Wrote:In last few days I'm quite irritated of the fact that my reviews keep stacking at 90 everyday because I accidently deleted all my progress (200 cards) and had to do everything in the deck from the scratch.

You can select the cards you've already learned in the browser and go to edit > reschedule. Set it to something like 30 days or whatever and you won't see those cards for another month almost like you never lost your learning data. Set it to a range and you won't see them all on the same day.

aldebrn Wrote:The psychology literature seems to indicate that the harder you try to remember, and the more times you try to remember before seeing the answer, the better you'll remember it in the future (see Figure 1 in this paper from Purdue prof Jeff Karpicke)

Thanks for posting this research. From experience I can say that it's worked well for me to spend time trying to recall something. Although I usually give up after 30 seconds even if I know I'm going to fail the card. I don't look at it as failure, it's just a card I need to study more.

Sztermel Wrote:Now I'm about 610 and spending 2 hours on 20 kanji along with 50 reviews 20 cards to add is quite a hassle (I set limit of cards on 50, but when increase the limit how much is reviews in overall it's about 90 all the time).

Are you using shared stories to save time in learning the kanji?

Also for reviews I spend on average 10 seconds per kanji, so 50 reviews takes ~8 minutes. Is it taking much longer than that? I would say better to do your reviews so you don't forget more of what you learned.

My advise. . .

Finish RTK 1 with card format keyword to kanji. The after a month of reviewing switch to recognition. I realive that when doing doing production cards it became hard to recognize from kanji to keyword. But doing production at first is importaant so you can discriminate kanjis that almopst looks the same. Cirrently I'm still reviews my RTK 1 cards. . ..

After some reading I came up with information that knowing the Kanji meaning isn't the most important thing - the point of doing is using the characters that create a word - which you should see first than the meaning of characters that it's composed of.
Still I'm quite confused of all the opinions, but without having big vocabulary and without using Japanese too much in "wilderness" (I don't know if I used the correct word ) can't say too much.

vosmiura Wrote:Are you using shared stories to save time in learning the kanji?

Also for reviews I spend on average 10 seconds per kanji, so 50 reviews takes ~8 minutes. Is it taking much longer than that? I would say better to do your reviews so you don't forget more of what you learned.

Sure, I've been using a bunch of koohi stories, starting to make mine too as they seem to stick in memory much better.
At this moment when I look at the anki statistics I'm starting to have a lot of mature cards so reviews are going down - today 60, in next few days it should be around 30 I think?

So in overall are the keywords of the kanji really a big deal?
Do you use them in learning new words and it's something that makes them important?
Like I want to learn 吸血鬼 - vampire so I remember it by remembering it's written suck-blood-ghost? Or maybe even make up the story of it. (Well, honestly after doing all the RTK I'd be really exhausted by all this mnemonics )

Sztermel,

A lot of good information here, and I'm about to repeat what others have said/implied but within explicit advice.

1. Grab yourself a Japanese Book or printed Japanese story and a highlighter.
2. After you have done your review and new cards for the day sit down and relax with the materials above.
3. Go through and highlight the Kanji that you know and say their keyword.
4. If you don't remember the keyword, highlight it anyway but attempt to remember the keyword.

Hopefully you will enjoy seeing what you have learned in the wild and it will produce motivation. As a bonus, you will notice those kanji more and remember them with greater accuracy because your brain has tagged them as important. You can also see your knowledge grow as you flip through the pages from the beginning.

I believe the keywords have importance because as you gave as an example: "I want to learn 吸血鬼 - vampire so I remember it by remembering it's written suck-blood-ghost." The words you encounter more will lose these keywords, but the ones that you don't will retain them and allow you to use them.

One more thing. The material you choose does not matter. I am only 920 kanji in and Rashomon is almost all highlighter!

I hope this helps.

jeffberhow Wrote:1. Grab yourself a Japanese Book or printed Japanese story and a highlighter.
2. After you have done your review and new cards for the day sit down and relax with the materials above.
3. Go through and highlight the Kanji that you know and say their keyword.
4. If you don't remember the keyword, highlight it anyway but attempt to remember the keyword.

And here's a little web tool I made to do this online: http://fasiha.github.io/kanjiwild/

1. Enter the RTK (6th edition) number you're on
2. Paste some text into the box at the top
3. Enter as many unique kanji as you recognize, along with keywords if you want, it'll count how many you've got left (I think there's a minor bug in that the same keyword can be used for different kanji---I'll make an issue report...)
0. Click "Answer key (toggle)" to see an answer key.

At some point I'll get round to colorizing kanji that you've entered in the original text, so you don't have to keep scanning and re-scanning it to find that last kanji you're supposed to recognize

jeffberhow Wrote:The material you choose does not matter. I am only 920 kanji in and Rashomon is almost all highlighter!

Is this the subtitles? Screenplay? Novelization? Got it: http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000879/fil...15260.html (quoting Wikipedia: 'The film is based on two stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: "Rashomon", which provides the setting, and "In a Grove", which provides the characters and plot').

Very cool, aldebrn! I'm already having fun with it!

aldebrn Wrote:At some point I'll get round to colorizing kanji that you've entered in the original text, so you don't have to keep scanning and re-scanning it to find that last kanji you're supposed to recognize

Would it be possible to have a toggle check box that automatically puts the kanji below so one only has to enter the keyword?

jeffberhow Wrote:Would it be possible to have a toggle check box that automatically puts the kanji below so one only has to enter the keyword?

Done!: http://fasiha.github.io/kanjiwild/

There are many ways to improve this tool, and knowing someone else might be using it (plus doing some D3.js tutorials!) has motivated me to make it better. For example, when you paste text, your old kanji/keyword rows stay put, you can add kanji to the list of recognized ones by double-clicking them instead of copying-pasting or manually entering them, maybe a database backend... Stay tuned, and feel free to post suggestions/discussion on the github page: https://github.com/fasiha/kanjiwild/issues?state=open

This is really helpful. Thank you so much for adding that. I am going to incorporate this into my study method.

All right, I see that keywords are important thing after all.
Still I'm not totally convinced toward all this keyword thing (a lot of opinions I've seen, Heisig's too), but thanks for all the material you've sent.
I'm also practicing all that kanji -> keyword while playing games in japanese. Don't understand anything at all except some words, but try to look at the kanji and recall the meaning.
I think I'll switch to reviewing kanji - keyword, after I'll be done with RTK1 like kasugano wrote.

aldebrn Wrote:That was exactly my problem. I was practicing only keyword-to-kanji like Heisig advocated, and waiting for the reverse to take care of itself, but it wasn't:

Interesting how different people can be. In my experience, the "reverse" does "take care of itself" (as Heisig puts it), but the keyword-to-Kanji is far more difficult. Whereas when I see a Kanji I've already worked on a mnemonic or story for, many if not all of the ideas I came up with from back then come back to me. And generally they lead me to the key word I was trying to connect with when learning.

When looking at real Japanese (along with a translation), I'm often struck by how far removed "real usage" of Kanji can be from their supposed key word. (Even when that key word is the first word listed as an English translation in just about any Japanese dictionary.) Sometimes there's a rough similarity, like 願い having "petition" as the meaning often given first and "please" or "request" being two contexts the Kanji is often used in. But seeing the Kanji for "longevity" 寿as the first part of "sushi" was a little surprising, and there are quite a few of those surprises waiting when comparing "key meaning" to "every day usage" in Japanese. (To illustrate how extreme this can get: for some lessons on a well-know website for learning practical Japanese, the vocab lists sometimes contain *zero* meanings that match the way those Kanji were used in the conversation for that lesson. That's how far apart "key meaning" and "everyday meaning" can be...)

Eminem2 Wrote:"key meaning"

They're not meanings, they're only keywords. For many of them, the only reason Kanjidic lists them is because they appeared in RTK, not the other way around.

寿司 is ateji, that is, the kanji were chosen for their readings, without regard to meaning. 寿命 means "lifespan", as expected.