Hi everyone. This is my first post here, but I've been visiting for a while, reading about learning Japanese while I could have been actually learning Japanese. This seems like a good community of learners so I think I'm in the right place.

I'll be starting the book tomorrow, and I'm wondering how best to go about actually making it to the end. I'm aware of how crucial keeping up with SRS reviews is, because if you don't then the chances are good that you will just forget what you have learned. But how much importance would one place on learning new kanji daily? Anyone who has ever done any serious research into learning any new skill surely knows that we are told to go at our own pace. Well from what I've read, it almost seems like RtK can be as much about developing good learning habits as it is about learning kanji, so what if there isn't much consistency involved? If I learn a stack of new kanji over the course of a weekend, then use the next five days to only focus on reviews, might this be a hindrance to my learning in the future?

By the way, I'm sure there are no hard and fast rules regarding this, I'm pretty much just looking to learn from the experiences of others.

Thanks!

JKS87 Wrote:But how much importance would one place on learning new kanji daily?

In my experience there is an economy of scale to be had adding new material in bulk in a single session, rather than the same amount in dribs and drabs over a few days, because it allows you to take advantage of coincidental relationships between the new cards as an aid to learning.

This is particularly true of decks sorted into some logical order (e.g. the i+1 Core decks, RTK decks, etc).

Of course, this does cause an initial spike in reviews, which may or may not concord with your schedule.

JKS87 Wrote:I'm aware of how crucial keeping up with SRS reviews is, because if you don't then the chances are good that you will just forget what you have learned.

It's not so much the forgetting, but the mercilessly accumulating review burden that gets you. Miss one day and your burden for the next day is pretty much doubled.

JKS87 Wrote:actually making it to the end.

There is no end, the cake is a lie.
But seriously you know yourself the best. For me at least, consistency is not only about studying when you don't want to, but also restricting yourself the days you feel like learning a lot. Just so that you end up looking forward to learning more. I couldn't "just review" for a few days (at least I couldn't have done it at first) without losing interest. Whatever you do, maintaining motivation is the only thing that matters in the long run.

If you're not having enough time, maybe consider learning and reviewing in the morning, before life happens? ;P

Nice, thanks for the replies.

The plan is certainly to keep it as consistent as I can, ideally getting something new into my brain on a daily basis. That said, I've read more than a few horror stories involving people opening up Anki and finding that an obscene amount of reviews are due. I just want to be ready so that if that happens to me, I can put RtK down for a few days and focus on really learning my failed cards.

Regarding time, I have a lot of it. My GP has declared me unfit for work and my health issues have left me without much in the way of a social life. It had occurred to me that if I put my mind to it I could get through the first book in a couple of weeks, get the kanji out of the way quickly so I could move on and start learning Japanese. I pretty quickly realised that I'm just not ready for the kind of SRS commitment. I want to get done as soon as I can, but I haven't even decided what I want to move onto after RtK anyway, so rushing through it seems pretty pointless.

There are no rules about adding cards really. However since this is over 2000 items it's a long process, so you'll want to go steady and target small milestones like finishing chapters.

So, I finished the first two lessons yesterday, and got through the following two this afternoon. I just got done with my reviews for today, failed 唄 and 負, not sure why because as soon as I flipped the card I recognised them. Overall I'm pretty happy, two failed cards doesn't seem like a lot. I know it's only 74 kanji and that the early chapters are naturally going to pose a smaller challenge than the rest of the book, but I feel like I might be able to get somewhere with RtK. I want to try to keep this pace up but if I start failing a lot of cards I'll be ready to put the book down for a few days.

JKS87 Wrote:So, I finished the first two lessons yesterday, and got through the following two this afternoon. I just got done with my reviews for today, failed 唄 and 負, not sure why because as soon as I flipped the card I recognised them. Overall I'm pretty happy, two failed cards doesn't seem like a lot. I know it's only 74 kanji and that the early chapters are naturally going to pose a smaller challenge than the rest of the book, but I feel like I might be able to get somewhere with RtK. I want to try to keep this pace up but if I start failing a lot of cards I'll be ready to put the book down for a few days.

You Will start failing a lot of cards. Everybody does. A 10-15% failure rate is still not reason enough to worry about it.

That seems like a reasonable amount. Honestly, if after reaching the end of the book and keeping up the daily reviews for a few months I knew half or more of the official list well, I would be happy.

JKS87 Wrote:But how much importance would one place on learning new kanji daily? Anyone who has ever done any serious research into learning any new skill surely knows that we are told to go at our own pace. Well from what I've read, it almost seems like RtK can be as much about developing good learning habits as it is about learning kanji, so what if there isn't much consistency involved? If I learn a stack of new kanji over the course of a weekend, then use the next five days to only focus on reviews, might this be a hindrance to my learning in the future?

I don't see why it would be a hindrance other than maybe introducing large bumps into your anki review workload. And you could study too many new kanji and end up with more reviews than you an handle.

Personally I prefer to have a bit of a daily routine where I don't have to think too much about what I am going to study that day. Doing it the same every day just makes it easier for me to get started because I don't have to spend time thinking about what I feel like studying.

Agreed, routine is really important to me. The whole reason I picked up RtK in the first place was that I felt like it offered the best chance of helping me to get used to doing the same activity every day, and preferably at the same time of day. I'll temporarily break the routine if I must but the idea of doing RtK every day from start to finish is really attractive to me. My life doesn't have a whole lot of structure and I'm hoping that language learning can help rectify that a little.

It sounds to me as though your approach is pretty sound. As others have mentioned, the biggest burden can often be an unwelcoming number of kanji piled up in the review stacks. I don't think that there's any harm in occasionally taking a break from adding new kanji to focus on reviews--and the study pile--rather than relentlessly adding new kanji in a bid to drive yourself forward at any cost.

Indeed, as has been said, "there is no end". Even when you've added all the cards in the first book (let's leave to one side the question of progressing through the entirety of volume 3), you'll likely want to keep up with your reviews at least until you've got the overwhelming majority of cards into the last few columns. I think it's better to be comfortable with the cards you've already added, barring the odd intransigent, than to add new cards just for the sake of it.

To address a point made in the first post, I reckon that RTK can certainly be seen as being as much about developing good study habits as anything else, particularly as self-study represents, for a great many of us, somewhat uncharted waters. Building up good habits with RTK can help you discover how best to study by yourself, a lesson that will help you as you move forward with learning Japanese (and indeed other endeavours).

Good luck!

Thanks for the advice. I've actually hit a bit of a wall so I'm not currently progressing further into the book. Instead I'm concentrating on really mastering what I should already know before moving on. I'll probably start adding new kanji again once I've got all my cards past the third box.

Initially my plan was to get through the book, then move on to grammar and vocab, but at this point I'm seriously considering whether or not this is my best option. I mentioned before that I have more or less the whole day to do whatever I want with, and that's great. But if I restrict myself to kanji I'm also putting serious limitations on how well I can make use of my time. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and start learning some basic Japanese now? I have access to a stack of reading material, plus an audio CD which I'm told is excellent for beginners. The temptation is real.

Others may argue with me, but I don't see any reason that you need to get through RTK before you start learning other things. I've always been a big proponent of a blended approach where you learn a little kanji, a little vocabulary, a little grammar. I feel that doing it this way, the separate skills tend to reinforce each other. If you are focusing solely on kanji, you presumably are spending a lot of time learning things that do not seem immediately useful. Not to mention that spending hours studying anything in isolation isn't likely to be much fun.

Keeping up with reviews is the most important thing by far. The order you learn things makes a lot less difference, especially if it's making things feel uninteresting.

I'm assuming that you know your kana by now? Why don't you keep up with your kanji reviews and set up a core deck for learning some vocabulary(kanji w/furigana on the front, english word and example sentence on the back.) and see how you like that. Or/and maybe start going through a textbook to make things interesting.

I've had the kana down for a long time now. I can actually read at a surprisingly good pace, I just have no idea what any of it means. I might start looking at some vocab options. The Core thing is something I looked at before I found out about RtK, but there are just so many decks out there that it's difficult to know where to begin. I wouldn't mind testing sentence recognition using the audio from Kodansha's phrase book, but I have to wonder how useful it would be without first having a deep understanding of all the basic grammar points. Really I just want something that I can work on a little each day, and that's not going to interfere with RtK.

I think this is the core deck I'm using. Most of the decks' content is pretty much the same, it's only the sorting and card layout that's different.

I suggest reformatting the cards to do vocabulary recognition (front: kanji w/furigana | back: english word & example sentence for context.) After a few hundred vocab cards, you'll have enough vocab to understand sentence cards. So, keep doing vocab, but add sentences (front:japanese sentence clozed & English word | back: japanese word, japanese sentence, english sentence).

Grammar is pretty easy to figure out for basic sentences if you know the meaning of all the words and you have the english sentence. That's why i recommend getting through a few hundred vocabulary before starting sentences. You could also start browsing tae kim's basic grammar.

Btw, what I'm recommending is basically this. That's the best curriculum I've found for the self learner and gives some structure to your studies.

Thanks, that deck looks really good, it seems like there are a lot of different ways you can set the cards up. It seems to be missing one note though, but that's not a big deal. I'm definitely interested in Core now, I'll seriously consider giving it a shot.