Hey,
I know this question is highly subjective but I was just wondering how much time you devote to language learning per day. In this time frame I am not really including the watching of films or playing of games etc although I know they are very useful tools. But on the more mundane stuff, the learning of the kanji and other similar vocab acqusition/ workbooks, reviewing, stuff like that. Not that it is mundane but in comparison to watching a film you feel like you are 'working' more

I ask this because I want to see what a deacent amount would be so that I can attempt to find my own balance around this . At the moment I do about an hour/ +half with short breaks inbetween around every half hour,, but can then flutter about doing random stuff sporadically. I just feel I need to contain this main section of my learning into a unit so as not to have it spilling out 1. decreasing productivity as I am not just fully concentrated for the 'set' time and 2. generally eating time into the other stuff I should be doing!

Hope to hear back from you.

I do about five hours of work on these damn kanji a day. I'm trying to finish in ten days, and I have six hundred to go, so it will be no sweat. My other Japanese learning has been put on hold as the card stacks grow and grow.

Not enough at the moment
I'm doing between 60 and 90 minutes at the moment, but I'm only just keeping on top of my expired cards... I'm thinking I'll have to just keep Anki open during the day and do a few sentences here and there.

I try to do about 3 hours on days that I have school and 6 hours on the days I don't. All with not too much blind focus.

I clear my RvTK deck every day. (Except for failed cards- I wait a day or two after I fail them to retest them before marking them learned.) That takes about an hour or two. Then I spend another hour learning a new stack. I usually do that right before bed to sort of wind down for the day. I also find it helps me to remember them. (No, not sure why.) I usually go through a stack 2-3 times before I'll add it to my decks. So... 3 hours a day just on RTK.

I've got about 600 sentences in Anki that I desperately need to review, but that comes second to RTK for the next 4-5 weeks or so. Once I'm through at least 2 reviews of all 2042 RTK kanji, then I'll start spending more time on Anki. Once I'm done, I plan on ~1 hour of RTK review, 1 hour of Anki review, and 1 hour of adding new stuff to Anki. Reality, of course, will differ.

Currently my schedule is very tight because I have to study for an exam, so I tend to do a little less Japanese.
I review all the kanji for the day on this site, and it takes something like 20 minutes these days. Then I review all the sentences I have on anki, and it takes around 45-60 minutes. Then I add new sentences (only if I have time, unfortunately), and it usually takes me another hour or so.
After that it's just anime/drama, japanese sites, manga and novels for the rest of the day.

2-3 hours per day at least 5 days per week shows good results. A lot depends on how many mnemonics you can stand to juice out ... plus lots of live practice to reinforce those neurons.

When I started it could be upwards of 2 hours a day or more if I had the time. That included reviewing about 100 cards, studying upto 30 new cards, studying about 30 missed cards and initial reviewing of upto 30 cards. Since I always wrote down the kanji during the review that took about 2 or 3 per minute (maybe even 1 or 2 per minute).

Very, very slow going but now that I'm done with RTK, I'm just upkeeping about 20 minutes a day (for now about 40 to 50 kanji reviews which will be getting less and less as more cards work into stack 8).

All things said and done, expect the RTK to be the equivalent of a 5 credit hour class where you actually do spend the extra 10 hours a week in additional study (come on, who seriously did the 2 for 1 studying for most their college courses?). So two hours a day should take you 4 four months. Guess that means if you can wing 4 hours a day that'll take it down to 2 months. And 8 hours a day (!!!) will do the magically and mystical 1 month time that we all go gah gah over when we hear someone do it.

I'll admit, I was approaching burn out at 2 hours a day (granted, full time job was part of the equation). Not sure how 8 hours a day would have hit me.

Nukemarine Wrote:So two hours a day should take you 4 four months. Guess that means if you can wing 4 hours a day that'll take it down to 2 months. And 8 hours a day (!!!) will do the magically and mystical 1 month time that we all go gah gah over when we hear someone do it.

Well, I think the more you do a day, the longer you have to review and do cards, it becomes more brute force to stuff it into your head. If you do twenty new cards a day, that is very relaxing and you can sleep on them before adding more, etc. I've been doing 60 to 100 new cards a day now for the last two weeks, and I really have to do a lot of work, they all get mixed up many times before they sort themselves out, and then the next day a new lot comes in.

And it's not just the quality or time taken to memorise which produces the memorability, to me it's mainly about sleeping on them. When I started I was doing thirty a day easily, and having eighty to ninety percent recall. Lately, I will struggle all day trying to cram the hundred stories and maybe twenty new radicals into my head as well as writing them and doing lots of card reviews of them as well as the old ones and still I'll be failing a lot. However when I get up the next day, kanji that have refused to stick just fall into my lap and I ace them the first time. Sleep and the rearrangement of info that it seems to bring is really important as far as I can tell.

I'll be finished in two months, hopefully, and I do five hours and sometimes more, especially during the weekends. I actually do Anki Heisig as well as the site's cards to manage it. Actually I have some to do now.

Yes, I honestly think it's fair to say you're not "done" with RTK merely by putting in the last story. You need to keep up the reviews after that. Personally, if you don't have 80% of the RTK in the 4th stack or higher, you're not done yet. You'll have a number of days still left to do reviews to confirm that the kanji are in your long term memory.

However, I think after you put the last story in you can start transferring time spent on RTK to time spent on putting it to use (ie learning to read, speak and write Japanese). Just remember that early on alot of that time is reviewing the RTK that will be coming up fairly frequently.

Thanks for all of your replies.

I will step up to the mark and increase my time. I fear that I would burn out though studying 3+ hours a day and as a result miss days and become tired. I will try and keep to an amount I can keep consistent at first and then try and increase.

Now that I've hit the 1300-mark (again), I'm only adding kanji to RvTK after I review them for a few days. If I can get them all right, then I'll add them. I do it by chunks, too, usually grouped by the new radical involved. So today I'll probably add the 40+ characters with "thread" in them, and then tomorrow I'll add the "cocoon" ones. Then I'll probably stop for a day or two and see how that goes before adding stuff from the next chapter. Yes, it's slower, but my recall rate is ~88-90%.

And yeah, my reviews take longer because I do them with a brush pen. (I love my Sailor brush pens!) If I can't draw the character correctly, I fail it.

Shingo Wrote:Thanks for all of your replies.

I will step up to the mark and increase my time. I fear that I would burn out though studying 3+ hours a day and as a result miss days and become tired. I will try and keep to an amount I can keep consistent at first and then try and increase.

Unfortunately you will need to put some serious time if you want to get fluent. To paraphrase Khaz from AJATT, you're learning a language after all.

I spend ~30 mins every morning and night reviewing. Learning new vocab is high on my list so I dedicate about an hour a day to that. Adding stuff to SRS could take another hour.

For leisure I'm on a schedule of reading 1 volume of a manga per night in bed. Wish I had time to read more!

Yes I agree. I am sorry when I typed 3+ what I really intended to say was something like "more than three hours" as in response to those who said they studied 5/6 hours. I think three if I can fit it in will be a nice number to attain for progression and stability.
Thanks again all .

my study times are somewhat irregular. I'm not reviewing RTK now, just sticking with Anki, playing Super Mario Galaxy in Japanese, and reading a little Detective Conan here and there.

The last few weeks, I've been pretty lazy. But I just cleared out my stack of expired cards in Anki, so hopefully I can learn some new stuff and start adding more stuff to my deck.