I got through about 1200-1300 of Heisig's Kanji earlier this year after five or six months of study. Looking at other people's experiences, I'm not sure why it took me so long other than that I was writing each Kanji around five times when first encountering it and then again each time it came up in my Anki deck, which was set as Keyword -> Kanji + Story. Anyway, to make a long story short, I got frustrated with both how much time it was taking and some changes in my plans to visit Japan and gave up.

Four months later, it looks like I'm going to be able to spend some significant time in Japan starting this coming November, and I'm ready to get started studying Japanese again. Although I feel like I can probably re-memorize the Kanji I've already encountered fairly quickly with my RTK deck and the Heisig method, I'm considering switching over to the Movie Method instead to improve my retention and also keep me motivated (since I'll at least know the on-yomi and have that to help me connect the Korean I know with the Japanese I'm learning, I assume?).

Either way, I'm thinking of just doing Kanji -> Keyword to save time and get myself to a point where I can begin to recognize and memorize real words sooner. After writing the first 1200-1300 Kanji so many times, I feel like I have a basic understanding of stroke order, etc., and don't imagine I'll have any real need to write the Kanji for the most part.

Basically, I'm posting here because I'm wondering whether my plan makes sense and if anyone has any suggestions for how best to follow through with it. Also, is there much to be gained from tweaking my Anki settings in regard to review times; I notice that people here have a much better retention rate than me usually, and I don't know whether that's because 1) I'm naturally bad at languages, 2) my previous approach was flawed, or 3) I'm not using optimal Anki settings.

Thanks for reading and for any feedback you want to give!

Kanji to keyword is how I'm doing it as I'm (like you) not interested in writing Kanji so much as reading it.

I know a lot of people set extra learning steps so you see each new kanji 5 or 6 times the first day. That probably works pretty well, but I haven't tried it. However I use a filtered deck that shows me only the cards I got wrong in the last day or two. That way I'm only spending time on the cards that need extra study. I noticed that I remember the kanji pretty well until the intervals get up to a month or two, so when I get back to adding new kanji, I'll probably set the starting ease lower around 170 or something.

But I think you'll find things go a lot faster not having to write every kanji that you review.

Well, my card layout was Front = Keyword + Story // Back = Kanji.
It worked pretty well for me. Maybe you should give it a try?
Also don't bother writing the kanji more than once, or when reviewing.

Imo, your retention rate was bad because you made it somewhat hard for yourself, but I'm pretty sure it'd have made your production a lot better than most in the long term.

Thanks, I'm going to play around with different card layouts and see how it goes. Would switching over to the Movie Method now be a good idea, or should I wait until I finish the RTK first and then move on to something like Kanji in Context?

Quote:Basically, I'm posting here because I'm wondering whether my plan makes sense and if anyone has any suggestions for how best to follow through with it. Also, is there much to be gained from tweaking my Anki settings in regard to review times; I notice that people here have a much better retention rate than me usually, and I don't know whether that's because 1) I'm naturally bad at languages, 2) my previous approach was flawed, or 3) I'm not using optimal Anki settings.

4) Selection bias, meaning you don't actually have a worse retention rate than the average, you only have a worse retention rate than the people who post their retention rates. I'm sure people are more likely to post their retention rate if it's good than if it's bad.

My retention rate was around 80% when I did RtK. And my reviews were pretty slow, even though I didn't write all the Kanji. Is yours worse than that?

You could be right, but still, I find myself really struggling with long-term retention. I just checked and, for mature cards, I was getting 88% for cards I was learning, 84% for young cards, and 70% for mature cards. The last might be the result of my working much more slowly than others, but either way, I think I need to tweak some things this time around to make things a bit easier on myself.

If you are unhappy with your pass rate just make your reviews easier:

- In deck options, set 'steps' to something like 20 40 80 for new cards. Similar for lapses. Adjust according to taste. When adding new cards or dealing with lapses, think carefully about your mnemonic/story & recall it on every review. Don't just flick through them.

- Set 'starting ease' to something like 150% as Anki's default of 250% is ridiculously optimistic. A good choice would be something near the 'average ease' given in the stats for that deck.

- If your goal is reading, I would strongly advise reviewing kanji -> keyword (i.e. meaning) as you mentioned in your OP, as the advantages are immediately obvious. I switched to this way round about a year ago and never looked back. My kanji deck has 3197 cards now. Learning to write them all would be a massive waste of time vis-a-vis reading.

Thanks, I'm going to start reviewing again today and see how things go with the adjustments I've made (trying to make things easier on myself as you mentioned). The "steps" and "starting ease" adjustments are good ideas, especially. I'll see what I can do with them.