I've been plowing through both the RTK and Genki series for about 5-6 weeks whenever I'm free. Initially, I had a vague plan but no idea how things were going to turn out.

Right now, I'm starting unit 9 in Genki 1 (out of 12 units) and I've just reached the 1000th kanji on the website. Now that I have some experience, I'm not sure if some of the things I've been doing or thought would be a good idea are the right way to go.

Questions
(1) I have 100+ kanji reviews daily. I spend 20 seconds per kanji on average. That includes the time I spend imagining stories, briefly reading stories again when I fail, editing if I need to add clues, etc. Sometimes, I write down them too, but I haven't been doing that much lately.

Spending about 1 hour reviewing cards - let alone adding new ones - takes too much time away from learning new stuff. If I keep adding kanji regularly, it'll take even longer. Tried taking a break and just doing Anki reviews for 2 days or so... didn't help lower my reviews much. I'm afraid I'll either take too long to finish the RTK - at least for someone who wants to finish it fast and get past this beginner stage asap - or be forced to spend way too much time on anki reviews.

Should I spend more time imagining stories only during my first and second reviews and speed things up later?
Should I just start hitting easy more often, speed up the review process, and leave the rest up to my daily Japanese studies (i.e. textbooks)?

(2) Is it worth taking a break to finish the RTK before starting Genki 2? At first, I thought this would be a good idea, but now I don't know if the benefits of immediately recognizing every single new kanji could ever justify a 2+ week break.

Is putting off Genki 2 a good idea at all? Is the kanji found there common enough that I won't have to worry about it once I move on to an intermediate level book?

(1) Well you're reaching that stage (a thousand) where reviews become overwhelming (the absolute worst being around 1500). Imho reviewing is essential, and when I was doing RTK I always took care of reviews before learning anything (because of the reuse of kanji as radicals notably). But I'm confused, if you don't write them down while reviewing, do you just vizualize them? I understand being tired of production, but in that case start doing the deck the recognition way, not sure stop writing kanji when doing production is a good idea half way through (because the first half is like the crucial half).

But yes, production takes a lot of time, indeed you should hit easy as often as you can, and I dare say not even hit fail for very small mistakes but hard because I'm not convinced cycling through short term memory is that beneficial.
And of course you won't see a reduction of reviews after a couple of days: if you have 100+ daily reviews, for a total of 1000 kanji, that would be after 10 days.

So my advice here is either switch to recognition or stop adding new kanji (for as long as you want, even 1-6 months), because I know you want to be done with kanji, but kanji is a long term thing, and now you've done half of RTK (congrats!) you should really solidify what you've learned instead of craming and burning out. There is no rush to learn kanji when you've not started extensive reading (that will be after Genki 2, maybe even after your intermediate book).

(2) I don't think Genki 1+2 cover the 2200 jouyou kanji, so you don't need to do the full RTK. The kanji you'll encounter in Genki 2 you haven't learned yet, you'll decompose/learn and that'll be time gained for RTK later.

So the advice here, imo, Genki 2 is more important that RTK, you should finish it first and pause RTK (see answer (1)). Why not finish RTK between Genki 2 and your intermediate book? Have a change of pace is important to get rid of the boredom routine may induce.

Anyway, hoped that helped.

I mostly agree with EratiK, Genki is more important at your stage, and the few kanjis that you will have to learn to recognize in a less efficient way won't be a big deal, and will latter be easier in RTK. Unlike native literature, textbooks usually introduce kanjis in a gentle way.

Swiching to recognition-only in the middle of the way is bad IMHO, as you already trained your memory in reverse so you would have difficulties at the switch, and would also lose most of the effort put into production.

I concur in stopping (or just drastically reduce, if you crave for the feeling of learning new kanji) adding new cards while your daily reviews drop to a manageable amount. Then try to find a pace that you can keep up. If you continue like now it would probably only grow.

If you are burning out because your fail rate is too high, you may want to pass trough a few ranges of kanji that you fell you have more difficulty using the the heisig order. You can do that in Anki's cram mode to keep the SRS informed of your review. The extra context from the order makes reviews easier and you will fail less. Yes, it is cheating a little, but that is how I successfully recovered from a 1k+ review backlog after stopping RTK for a few months (maybe I should do a post about this). It may be useful for your situation too, but probably unecessary.

I also made two phases for the failed cards: 10 and 180 minutes, with the new interval being at least 1 day or 20% of the previous one. I found this helping in some cards I failed over and over.

Hi Flame,

That is pretty good progress so don't get discouraged.

At this stage of your Anki reviews, I personally think you should be writing down all the kanji, at least with your finger.

I think you should also try to speed up your review time per card to below 10s (including writing).

Some people on this site completed RTK in a few short weeks. Others took over a year by adding a few kanji per day. As you progress in RTK, the reviews pile up, some kanji get more complicated, some stories get more esoteric, and some keywords blend together. Consequently, you have a choice: add fewer cards per day or dedicate more time per day. Regardless, make sure to do your reviews every day.

Genki I & II do not cover the 2,200 kanji, but it does cover a significant number of the later kanji in RTK for obvious reasons. I agree with Erati in that you don't have to worry about missing a few RTK at this point.

I would try to do Genki & RTK at the same time if possible, but that is time consuming and takes a lot of effort!

Thanks a lot for the replies! I'll definitely take them into considerations. Also, sorry for the huge wall of text below, I wish I could spoiler tag stuff here to organize it a little better for you guys.

Note: yesterday, I was able to 4.8 kanji per minute by cutting down on time spent visualizing the stories. Not sure if it's a good idea... but at least I know I can do this faster than 3 kanji per minute if need be.

EratiK Wrote:But I'm confused, if you don't write them down while reviewing, do you just vizualize them? I understand being tired of production, but in that case start doing the deck the recognition way, not sure stop writing kanji when doing production is a good idea half way through (because the first half is like the crucial half).

I did write the kanji most of the time until reaching 900 kanji or so on the site. I think I'd already stopped writing some of the kanji a little earlier though. The reason behind this is twofold. The main reason is to see if I can keep reviews shorter. The other reason would be to put more effort on improving my handwriting a little later, but that's pretty a questionable reason and not that important imo.

Not so important reason
You see, I've never cared much about stroke order. I don't think it's that important as long as you know the gist of it and do most of it right anyway. Generally, I take a quick glance and write the new kanji I learn, but don't pay much attention to it and end up doing it slightly different at times. But I thought it might be benefitial to go through the RTK quickly at one point in the future to polish my writing a little. After all, proportion is important, otherwise your kanji will end up looking like a compound.

So perhaps I should do that once I finish the RTK, or maybe even now? Not sure. Let me know what you guys think. I can also let Genki take care of that to a certain extent, since I used as many kanji as I can when I do the workbook activities.

The main reason
The more important reason is to see if that could make my reviews less time consuming. I started just mentally going over the stories again 1 or 2 days ago as quickly as I can as opposed to spend visualizing it for a few seconds every time, unless I need to. I've also started skipping the visualization process when I don't need it to remember the primitives, even if I don't remember the primitives right away. Despite not writing down the kanji, I mentally ask myself where each primitive goes, but I've heard some people don't even worry about the position of the primitives much, so I guess I'm fine in that regard. Once again, please let me know what you guys think about this.

Something I've been doing
One important thing to mention, I've recently started using a lot of clues to help me remember my stories. I've noticed that keywords can be a pain because sometimes you have a story, but it’s not easy to remember the story when you see them, unless you’re story is incredibly remarkable or is connected to something unique, like the first or second thing that comes to your mind when you see the keyword.

These clues can be:
(1) Extra words that clear up in the meaning of the keyword or make it more specific.
(2) Questions or incomplete like “Who? Where?” or “This person did… and as a result…”. Usually in the “show: clue!” field I made.
(3) The beginning of the story, the actual location, the character, the action, etc… but not including any of the primitives. This usually gives away the story unless I don’t remember it at all. Obviously, my stories are always connected to the keyword, but this pretty much bypasses the process of having to recall the story based on the keyword itself, which can be pretty vague at times.
Yet, I still have to remember the primitives, so it’s like going “(slightly/somewhat/very obvious hints -->) story --> kanji” rather than “vague keyword --> ‘subkeyword’/context (main elements/location of story based on keyword) --> the actual story --> kanji”.

This third kind of clue is probably the most controversial. I guess the second kind can be a little controversial too, so I don’t know. I made a thread about this recently by the way. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing. It may not help me remember the story much, but I think that might be ok since you can work on remembering the story itself upon seeing the actual Japanese word once you learn it. But let me know if you think there’s something wrong in doing any of these things.

ReneSac Wrote:If you are burning out because your fail rate is too high, you may want to pass trough a few ranges of kanji that you fell you have more difficulty using the the heisig order. You can do that in Anki's cram mode to keep the SRS informed of your review. The extra context from the order makes reviews easier and you will fail less. Yes, it is cheating a little, but that is how I successfully recovered from a 1k+ review backlog after stopping RTK for a few months (maybe I should do a post about this). It may be useful for your situation too, but probably unecessary

My current fail rate isn't a problem at all imo. I'm not sure how Anki calculates this exactly, but I was constantly pressing again until a couple of days ago when I first added words (on the same day, not later), just to drill the stories a bit.

Currently, I'm at 75.62% with learning cards and 93.26% with young ones. That's probably a high retention rate for young cards, isn't it? I guess the whole clue thing I mentioned above might be considered "cheating" for some people, but I don't think that matters as long as it aids my learning. Sometimes, I just check the clue briefly after recalling the kanji, just to make sure I'm not getting the wrong one because the keyword is too vague or something.

FlameseeK Wrote:You see, I've never cared much about stroke order. I don't think it's that important as long as you know the gist of it and do most of it right anyway.

Stroke order is important. I don't think you are doing yourself any favors by ignoring stroke order. If you are serious about writing kanji, learn the correct way the first time. Otherwise, you'll be doing RTK again.

If you aren't as interested in writing, I second the suggestion about reversing cards doing recognition (kanji > keyword). It goes much faster, will get you reading sooner, and I'm convinced writing comes easier once you are can recognize kanji when you see them.

I'm going over stroke order again right now because I'm a systematic guy, but it's mostly because I think my kanji could look a little better in general. If I'm going to keep on writing them during reviews, they might as well look very good. This is mostly about aesthetics than anything else.

Let me illustrate what I mean by slightly different stroke order. Anything with the primitive "road" seems to start with whats "on" the road, then the last thing you do is write the primitive road. But "road" was a remarkable primitive to me and since Heisig separates kanji by order, I naturally started writing them first because that's what would always come to my mind first whenever I recalled the story. Holding myself back until I'm able to recall the other primitive just feels very unintuitive, so there's that.

There are some other cases that seemed completely ridiculous (i.e. didn't make any sense to me), like も having a different stroke order from モ. The umbrella primitive is another one I writing with an incorrect stroke, in that I'd always start writing it from the left rather than starting from the middle and writing it with 2 separate strokes. But honestly, that's utterly irrelevant because it still looks the same and I don't see myself writing it any faster now either.

I don't know if I'll ever change my opinion, but I think as long as your stroke order isn't inefficient and your kanji looks good, it doesn't really matter much at all. But that's usually an intuitive thing and in most cases your stroke order will be similar to the "correct" one if your kanji looks good, otherwise it'd most likely be inefficient anyway.

It's more than how the kanji looks. There are at least 2 reasons why stroke order is important:

1. handwriting recognition software (for dictionaries etc) doesn't understand kanji unless written with the correct stroke order.

2. japanese people will call you out on it.

Ohhh okay, now that's a much better reason. I don't really use that kind of software now, but it could come in handy in the future. That being said, I find it odd that certain software won't recognize it if you mess up the stroke order slightly. It should be pretty easy to figure out where you "messed up" anyway, but I won't have that problem very often at all.

Not sure if reason 2 matters though. The person would have to be watching your handwriting closely while you're still writing to notice that, unless you're writing on a board. Besides, it'd be pretty damn rude to call a person out on something like that, especially if the kanji looks good. If anything, I'm more willing to believe most Japanese would avoid saying that kind of thing to save face. Has that ever actually happened to you or somebody you know?

I think I'm doing well in that regard for now, so I'm not worried. In spite of my skeptical point of view, I generally follow the correct stroke order, so I'm good. The other questions I brought up are a much bigger problem, so if you any have thoughts on that, I'd be glad to hear them.


EDIT: This whole stroke order talk reminds me of a post I saw (I believe it was here). Somebody said his Japanese girlfriend didn't follow the stroke order when writing certain kanji, sometimes stuff as simple as 目, because she could do it more efficiently the way to do now. And that several Japanese actually do the same.

FlameseeK Wrote:I find it odd that certain software won't recognize it if you mess up the stroke order slightly.

I've heard of software where it can deal with a stroke or two in the wrong order and I'm sure software just gets better over time. So it might not be much of an issue in the future.

FlameseeK Wrote:If anything, I'm more willing to believe most Japanese would avoid saying that kind of thing to save face. Has that ever actually happened to you or somebody you know?

I haven't had it happen to me, but pointing out someone's non-japaneseness seems to be a national sport in Japan. I have been called out for my unorthodox chopstick usage. They don't say it straightforward like "you're doing it all wrong". They'll say something like "I never saw someone do it like that before", but the implication is clear.

There are a few more reasons I didn't think about here. I agree, they're not huge reasons, but I don't understand why you wouldn't want to learn them the right way from the beginning. Little annoyances add up over time.

It's not like I didn't check them, it's just that very few of them didn't quite stick because they're just kind of... meaningless.

Like the one I just saw for "mama". You could write that just like "rice fields" instead of starting with an "L" stroke, but it looks kind of messy, so whatever. Now, the following kanji is "pierce" - the top primitive looks much more like "rice fields" than "mama" in that it's not messy, except for the larger stroke at the end. But no, let's start with an L-shaped stroke just for the hell of it. That's going a little too far, so I'm not sure if I'll remember that later (lol).

I can see people making comments about unusual things foreigners do that way, yeah. I think pointing something out like that doesn't always sound rude depending on how you say it, so I get it now.

As for cursive writing, yeah I've heard about it before... and it looks pretty crazy. I don't think I'd be interested in reading that sort of stuff anytime soon, and I most likely whenever write Japanese in that style...


EDIT: I guess the writing on your hand thing might be helpful. It could be confusing to write it in a very different order, but I never do that, it's mostly smaller details. Kind of interesting.

FlameseeK Wrote:Not sure if reason 2 matters though. The person would have to be watching your handwriting closely while you're still writing to notice that, unless you're writing on a board. Besides, it'd be pretty damn rude to call a person out on something like that, especially if the kanji looks good. If anything, I'm more willing to believe most Japanese would avoid saying that kind of thing to save face. Has that ever actually happened to you or somebody you know?

Tell them to go shove it up their a** if they say anything about your handwriting!

john555 Wrote:

FlameseeK Wrote:Not sure if reason 2 matters though. The person would have to be watching your handwriting closely while you're still writing to notice that, unless you're writing on a board. Besides, it'd be pretty damn rude to call a person out on something like that, especially if the kanji looks good. If anything, I'm more willing to believe most Japanese would avoid saying that kind of thing to save face. Has that ever actually happened to you or somebody you know?

Tell them to go shove it up their a** if they say anything about your handwriting!

Hahaha I don't I'd be able to say that at my deplorable Genki 1 level Japanese if somebody made a truly rude comment about my handwriting, but a simple 「お前。。。」 would probably do the job just fine.

Don't mess with the review process, just don't add any new cards for three or four weeks - I got to 1512 in about one month and now I'm down to ~35-40 reviews a day. If I don't fail that many cards I should be getting around 20 next week.

Also, by all means finish Genki!
ps. if you work a bit on your vocabulary, Genki 1 level isn't that deplorable at all - really basic but it's enough to communicate somewhat. when your reviews get down and you know a bit more grammar, try finishing RTK, learning some vocabulary and getting a Japanese friend/language exchange partner.

yogert909 Wrote:I haven't had it happen to me, but pointing out someone's non-japaneseness seems to be a national sport in Japan. I have been called out for my unorthodox chopstick usage. They don't say it straightforward like "you're doing it all wrong". They'll say something like "I never saw someone do it like that before", but the implication is clear.

There are a few more reasons I didn't think about here. I agree, they're not huge reasons, but I don't understand why you wouldn't want to learn them the right way from the beginning. Little annoyances add up over time.

Stroke order dictionaries and having people point out stroke order issues are not really sufficient reasons to get all nuts over stroke over.

1: As was pointed out in a deleted part of this post, in the future things will probably get better, I'd also guess there are alternatives. Hell they say Japanese people are forgetting how to write some of the Kanji because they use electronics to write everything out. Surely there are dictionaries that use the same basis aren't there?

2: As for Japan's national sport. I always thought it was cheering on anything a foreigner can do in a patronizing manner. "Oh my god Gaijin can walk and chew gum at the same time.... ohhhh" I mean hell, if you can speak Japanese and write the standard 2100+ Kanji, I figure that would impress them more than using chopsticks. If you do get attitude, ask them about their English.

I was talking to a Chinese girl about that on Sunday when she pointed out my stroke order being wrong. Being 48 and from the PRC I am sure they were very strict back in her day. However I pointed out that there are 2200 of them and it is hard enough to learn them all in months instead of 12 years so I look over little details as long as don't result in two looking alike [mama and field for example, sayith and day for another]. Also sometimes I write a Kanji, I know I am doing the stroke order wrong but it just feels natural. Other times I write primitives in the order I remember them. Also there are some Kanji where the stroke order is different then in Hanzi, she called me out on wrong stroke order for one character and I checked RTK and it was different. So obviously in many cases it isn't as if stroke order *must* be one way or another, it is a cultural thing. She seemed to understand. I thick I could have gone for the hug at the end of the evening but alas I am a socially awkward penguin, but she wants to meet again so huzzah!.

You have never seen it done that way? Is it wrong? There. Anyhow it is stroke order for Kanjeh, it's how we roll in Canada eh, if the Chinese can do some of them different so can I, have a donut.

2a: How often will someone actually see you write something. Filling out a few forms maybe *if* you happen to ever make it to Japan? I almost never ever write in English, I can't see that changing for Japanese expect for learning purposes.

3: As I understand it, in RTK they don't cover readings and the like to keep it simple. I figure the same for stroke order. I'll write it out the first few times properly unless it gives me difficulty but when doing my reviews if my stroke order goes off and I know it, or if I can't remember the stroke order I am not going to clutter my mind with the extra details.



Reasons stroke order can be important.

Sometimes it looks better. Some people are into that.
Some characters would be I suspect hard to keep seperate without proper stroke order. Woman/walking legs/Taskmaster. I can't imagine doing those three in wrong stroke order.
If you want to do those Kanji Tests.
Doing things perfect happens to be your thing.

If I finish opening by going right to left at the bottom, I don't think it will cause a zombie apocalypse.
Likewise my Kanji don't fit in squares. I don't have very good skill in drawing [yes drawing =/=writing, I know]. Again I am not going to slow my progress by beating myself up over it. Maybe in the future I'll get some resources and work on making it better should I need to or if it bothers me. As for now I want to get over the RTK and move on to Genki et al ASAP.

yogert909 Wrote:I've heard of software where it can deal with a stroke or two in the wrong order and I'm sure software just gets better over time. So it might not be much of an issue in the future.

There are some dictionaries that can use OCR for the kanji/hanzi recognition, relying then on the final result and not on stroke order to find a match, but at least for now that method is usually much slower and less accurate. In some years though, with more processing power and better AI, who knows what can happen.

you make it sound as if ignoring stroke order made things easier, which in my experience is not true - it helps you break the kanji down, develop muscle memory and gives you yet another clue to remember the kanji. and besides, if you're used to write following the proper stroke orders, you can immediately figure out the correct order for almost any kanji so it's not like it's an extra burden. there are few kanji with messed up stroke order, although occasionally Heisig makes things more difficult by mixing two different radicals up, but it's a rare occurrence.

Yeah, I feel like most of them are super easy to follow and recall later. But some of them are not very intuitive, so I don't worry much about following these ones down to a tee. This doesn't happen often though. Anyway, I'll eventually go over the stroke order of all kanji I've learned one more time to practice my handwriting, so the "important" ones will be fine.

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Edit: So much for correct stroke order. Just noticed that the primitive "gate" in the RTK shows a different from 間 in Genki 1. Jisho.org shows the same stroke order as in Genki. So basically, you can't entirely trust the stroke order suggested in the RTK and should look it up if it looks a little unusual, right?