Is it bad that i'm only 276 kanji in and I'm already overwhelmed...? i got a little backlogged on some kanji the past few days and it's starting to build up... I try to keep my studying during the week and take weekends off. But I think I need to start studying on the weekends too.

Anyone else ever go through this this early in... I've heard it after 500 or 1000 but never this early into the book :-S

That is pretty early in the book to be getting overwhelmed. Make sure you are making good stories, and review with an SRS EVERY day. If you skip one day, that means your next day has twice as much to review, and that the kanji have been left expired for too long. Skipping a whole weekend means that you have three times as much to review come monday.

You don't have to add new cards on the weekend, but at least review what is expired and maybe your failed cards too. It shouldn't take more than 30 minutes.

Ideally, you want to review every day so as you have no expired kanji. Try not to skip days, they will catch up to you real quick.

Does anyone know if it is detrimental to your studies if you take a break from learning new kanji for a few days; however, you do keep up with reviews and failed kanji?

Ryuujin-> Shouldn't hurt you at all.... I've had many a day where I sit down and say "My brain just can't handle any new stories right now." As long as you stay on top of your reviews, you'll be fine. The new stuff can come when you're ready.



I guess the main point is to not let yourself get too down about having large piles of stuff hanging around. Just do what you can for the day and leave the rest for later... The point is to make a regular habit out of reviewing and to move at your own pace, not to kill yourself over trying to do a huge chunk of stuff in one sitting.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:Does anyone know if it is detrimental to your studies if you take a break from learning new kanji for a few days; however, you do keep up with reviews and failed kanji?

It will be harder to get back into studying at a good pace, but I don't think there will be any other impact.

btw in regards to your mail, my avatar is a Chinese-only character pronounced "biang" and it's a type of noodle. It's not the character with the highest stroke count, but it is the most complex character found in dictionaries (the ones with the highest stroke count are just simpler characters repeated several times).

Ahh, to both shneen and Jarvik7, thank you for the replies.

I guess I'll just have to work extra hard to get back into my kanji studies once some free time finally frees up (weird wording). Either way, I'll just try to go slow at like 5-10 a day or so.

P.S. - Jarvik - Ahh, thanks for telling me. I've been dying to know what it was. I'll have to write it out and show it to my Chinese teacher now, see if she knows it.

I've been overwhelmed many a day myself.. Jarvik hit the nail on the head though.. Get into a good SRS routine, work on the stories, and it'll all calm down. I do my reviews first thing every morning, when I wake up. I have good days and bad days, and I think everyone does. However, if you use the SRS religiously, the ones you know well will slowly get to that longer review cycle, and constant repetition of the ones you have trouble with will eventually cure you of the troubles as well. Whenever I get down, I just look at my stacks of cards, and how many are in box 6. It makes me happy, and I look forward to things going in box 7 some day. I'm still too new for that box to be opened yet. ^^;

Not talking about reviews but remembering new stories... I started out (after the first 100~150 which I already sorta knew) doing 5 new kanji a day. It was horrible, I couldn't remember them and the next day I surely had forgotten 3/4 of the 5 new ones... Now I set a goal of at least 18 a day (so I can finish somewhere in July (I'm at 500-something now)) and... to my surprise, I only forget 1 or 2 out of 20~30 new kanji. It actually sticks better, and it takes me less time per kanji to make stories in the first place.

I do 'cheat' because I review them myself in the evening so I can get back to stories that didn't stick in the first place... But for some reason it seems to work better to do more new kanji a day.

On topic, I think skipping a day or two of adding new cards won't hurt, well maybe you have to get back into it when you do add new cards. But just _do_ those reviews, no excuses

(This is what is starting to scare me, because I've been adding 20~30 kanji each day, for the past 4~5 days... I have to review over 50 kanji a day now. It's not that much but... where will it end? If I keep up this pace, how much will the max count of reviews become? ... It should stabilize at some point... right? (If... I don't fail too many kanji.))

Don't worry too much. At most I got around 140 reviews on one day, but right now it's reclining again and I'm more or less going towards the end. Most of the time I kinda cheat myself, cause I'm using mnemosyne complimentary to this site - the interval in mnemosyne seems to be another one than here, so I get to review different cards. Double repetition seems to help reinforcing the information a lot. At least I can't see a problem with my older Kanji, they still stick and I tend to get the newer ones down faster.

So most of the time I do around 300 Reviews per day, which is still manageable. Sometimes of course, it can be tough, but most of the time you can speed through the reviews, if you know the Kanji well enough.

To contribute to the general topic: I never got really overwhelmed - I almost got, when I hit Part 3 of the Book, since making own stories is different from the first part of the book, so that slowed me down for 2 days. I would recommend to reduce the Kanji you do every day, 20-30 should be more manageable (although I don't know what amount you did before that). After some time you can try doing more again, just to see how well it sticks.

In my opinion, I just have to keep the expiring kanji number under control. If that number get's too high, then I can't finish that days reviews in a day. That did happen to me. Then what happened is that it would be more than the required "forgetting interval" before I got to the review, so I was failing more (not so much because of a bad story).

If you let the failed kanji pile up, then you *really* have a re-learning challenge that you'll have to face sometime.

So, I set the goal of *always* finishing the expired kanji. Next, I set a goal of *all* the failed kanji, but if I cannot do all, then at least x. That way, I was continuosly getting the missed ones back into the review rotations, or at least whittling down that stack and making progress towards an empty failed kanji stack. Once I've got all the reviews done, and all the failed kanji worked out, then (if there's time/energy remaining) then I can look at totally new kanji.

So, for me, the idea is only add new kanji such that you can complete the next day's reviews in a reasonable period of study. Each of us will have a different tolerance there, so it could be a different number.

I think of juggling. I have to keep the number of items "in the air" to a manageable size.