I finished RTK 1 a few months ago and recently looked a chart version of the Kanji, and it's not looking too good:


On mature cards, I'm getting an average of 76% correct, but on some days (like today) it's closer to 60%. Is there something I can do to fix this? I'm pretty sure most of the stories I use are good and most of the time, I don't have to go find my original story, I think, "Oh, yeah! That's the one where..." About half of my cards have stories on them.

No takers? I'd probably just keep practicing and let the SRS help me.

(Sorry, I was waiting to see if anyone would post before me.)

Can you maybe elaborate a bit more on your study methods? Like, are you /only/ studying the kanji with mnemonics? Do you hand write the characters at all? How high is your Japanese ability (how long have you studied)?

If you are trying to memorize all of the characters before even knowing how to write a sentence in Japanese, I don't think that will work very well. You need to have more than one method to remember what the kanji looks like and know vocab to remember the different readings.

You are forgetting the kanji on your list, because your brain has no good reason to remember them. It's like cramming for a test, kind of, then forgetting what you studied afterwards. If you had some meaningful vocab to back up all those kanji, then you would have context.

I think the more you read and write, the easier it is to remember the kanji (exposure to them). Why do you want to remember ALL of the 2,136 jouyou kanji immediately (as in a couple of months)? You want to see that chart completely green, don't you? That seems a bit extreme and unrealistic. Even Japanese people get kanji amnesia sometimes.

When I started, I studied "/only/ the kanji with mnemonics," deciding it would be best to get the characters down before starting on the more enjoyable stuff (real words, grammar). Now, my ability is still fairly weak; I have a bit of vocab under my belt (the kanji that appear in the vocab tend to be more easily remembered, hence your suggestion in paragraph 3 to get more context) and minimal grammar.

I did not learn the readings but learning them in context seems to work pretty well. I'm not into memorizing them with mnemonics or anything.

Anyway, your solution is more exposure before expecting that chart to be nice and green? I'll try it, but the reviews are still up in the 50s-60s and so, take away from the other reviews I need to go through. I do write the characters sometimes. Until I got to about 1800, every character was reviewed by writing it down. Since then, I realized I could use Anki on my phone, and I don't exactly always have a pen and paper (though I do hover my finger over the screen and move it around as if I was painting the character with my finger. I'm not at the point where I can just make it pop into my head... only reducing it to strokes allows me to see the whole thing).

Thank you.

I think Haley's advice is good. Each step you take with your Japanese will reinforce the previous steps which it builds upon, so although it's helpful to build a good base of understanding it's also important to recognise when you've reached a point of diminishing returns and it's time to move on.

Once you're studying a decent amount of vocab you'll be seeing these kanji more regularly, and perhaps more importantly you'll also be seeing them in different contexts, which is very helpful for memorisation. Even if you only have one vocab card for a kanji you're effectively doubling your reviews for free, since you're also moving on to something new.

Reading native material is even better (once you can). The extra context works wonders, and you'll also get a lot of repetition of some things. Looking through your red and orange marked kanji I see many that are used in common words that will really just take care of themselves. It might seem bad that you have common words that you find difficult, but the truth is that the only way you're not going to learn these is if you use "Japanese study" as a euphemism for heavy drinking.

So basically don't sweat it if you feel like you've stopped making progress with kanji. Keep moving forward with your Japanese and don't let learning the kanji inadvertently replace your goal of learning Japanese.

I've found that the more Japanese words I learn the more I fail the kanji flashcard when going from the English word. The problem has gotten so bad that I have started to add the reading(in kana) alongside the English word so I can correctly pick out the right kanji. Most of the stories I had learned are long gone now, so I get no help there.

The only reason why I still continue doing reviews 2 years later is that I fear that I could forget the kanji completely.

Kysen Wrote:I've found that the more Japanese words I learn the more I fail the kanji flashcard when going from the English word. The problem has gotten so bad that I have started to add the reading(in kana) alongside the English word so I can correctly pick out the right kanji. Most of the stories I had learned are long gone now, so I get no help there.

The only reason why I still continue doing reviews 2 years later is that I fear that I could forget the kanji completely.

I gather that this is a common problem, and it is why JALUP made their kanji mod deck http://japaneselevelup.com/japanese-leve...anki-deck/ and why erlog made his/her combined study deck http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=11444 (though this one might be most helpful for RTK3, less so for RTK1?). It has also inspired all-Japanese approaches to RTK: see https://sites.google.com/site/wrightak2/ and http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid189116 and http://kazemakase.ca/2013/08/03/remember...-keywords/ etc.

Also, have you thought about putting your story on the front? I read about this on AJATT where it was called the Kendo method. I tried it and it made reviewing fun again. If I need to glance at it at all, just the first three words suffice to immediately recall the entire story. It's "easier": correct rate for mature cards went from 86.5% to 93.1%, though now mistakes happen when I don't look at the story on the front and recall the wrong story for the keyword. The entire class of failures due to not recalling the story from an English keyword disappeared. (It also helps that I've started annotating keyword with additional meanings, kana readings if I know them, etc.) Here's what it looks like:



(Back of card here.)