Hey all. I've started the Heisig twice before, got pretty far both times, but both times I ran into situations where I had five-day-a-week;all-day-long commitments, which sort of took me out of the habit enough to derail the effort. With something like RTK, my constitution is much more inclined to take it as a SPRINT rather than a marathon. I've got a month or so of free days in front of me, so I decided to just finally hew down the RTK once and for all. I'm doing 200/day for 10~11 days!

My method is that I run through the new 200 in Anki, failing ones that I'm just now learning, then just carrying on with reviews until the deck is cleared. Then I CTRL-Z and undo all of that, resetting all 200 as new, then run through it one more time. Takes about 3 hours. 

I'm posting here for accountability purposes. I just finished DAY 2, so 400 kanji are down (including many that use the hated "parade" and associated primitives). 

Wish me luck, folks (or chastise me, whichever you prefer)!

がんばれよ！

Interesting approach. What is the difference between your multi-pass method instead of just inserting more revision steps for new cards on deck options?

I've never done more than 20 new cards in one day. Even that takes me a little under 2 hours. I've wondered about people who do 30 or more, each and every day. 200 new cards in 3 hours sounds super fast. It's 54 seconds for each card, and that's assuming no breaks at all. Are you writing a new story for each, or picking from existing? How many seconds would you say each card takes you?

DAY 3: 600 down! What is everyone's opinion of when the worst stretch will occur, breaking it up into chunks of 200 like this?

ReneSac: The difference there is primarily my ignorance of all the options Anki has to offer. I guess I just like the feeling of blasting through and getting 95-100% of them right the "first time" after the undo. I'll check out adding more revision steps and see if it makes it easier or more effective, tho, thanks!

(2016-01-08, 4:57 pm)kfharlock Wrote: DAY 3: 600 down! What is everyone's opinion of when the worst stretch will occur, breaking it up into chunks of 200 like this?

ReneSac: The difference there is primarily my ignorance of all the options Anki has to offer. I guess I just like the feeling of blasting through and getting 95-100% of them right the "first time" after the undo. I'll check out adding more revision steps and see if it makes it easier or more effective, tho, thanks!

More steps should result in the same outcome for new cards without having to manually reset them, since 'learning period' cards don't change at all in their ease or anything. I'm not sure but i don't think they even count as 'actual' pass and fail for stats purposes, not that it matters.

On the other hand it sounds like you're resetting your daily reviews too. With steps, you'll get extra reviews of failed cards in review, but not extra steps of passed cards. Which should be better than reviewing cards you already know an extra time, I think. Over-reviewing known cards is a waste of your efforts, and having 'reset' your results, you're also going to get false passes - cards that you failed on the first run, but pass on the second run. But you didn't actually remember the card today, so it should've been queued up as a failed card, not a passed card. That'll totally mess up the anki scheduling algorithm.

You could also set the steps so that they have actual time spacing in them and break your new card study into 2 or 3 sessions over the day, which is probably better for setting up long term retention than cramming them all at once.

Your hard stretch is probably going to be 800-1400. I forget exactly where 'person / mister T' and 'thread / spiderman' are at, but I think it's in there. A lot of 'RTK is hard I don't know if I can go on' posts are from people in that area.

Although, I think a lot of that has to do also with reviews - a lot of people crank out 40-50 new a day, and then find that they can't keep up with the reviews and feel bad about slowing down on new cards. Your approach is actually going to plateau very quickly because your timeframe is so short - it's only a few reviews before many of these cards won't be scheduled for review again until after your learning period, if you stick it out. You are going to have a -lot- of scheduled reviews every day for quite awhile past the learning period though.

DAY 4: 800 completed! I think this is officially the furthest I made it in Heisig, getting interrupted in the mid-700s the first two times I undertook it. 

I'll give the extra reviews a go, but to be clear, I'm only "resetting" the new cards for the day. I do my reviews first, then for the new cards, I go through them in Anki having never looked at them before (so each one "fails"), then I just press on until the deck is clear (such that I end up seeing each of the new cards and remembering them about 3-4 times. Then I reset just to the point of the 200 cards being new again, and go back through them. More often than not, I remember 99% of them, so I end up seeing most of them 2-3 times on this pass, which, because they're new, should just cause them to re-appear the next day (which is what it says above "good" on both the 1st and 2nd passes through the new material). I think it would only mess up the scheduling if I reset when doing review cards from previous days, right?

I don't mind having a ton of reviews; those never take me as long as learning new cards.

And yeah, I meant to ask everyone what the "hard stretch" is for RTK. I guess it's the next 3 days for me, then. WISH ME LUCK

(2016-01-09, 7:41 pm)kfharlock Wrote: I think it would only mess up the scheduling if I reset when doing review cards from previous days, right?

Right, I thought you were resetting reviewed cards too, that was my concern about messing up scheduling.
In that case, using more steps should just save you the trouble of a manual reset.

Quote:And yeah, I meant to ask everyone what the "hard stretch" is for RTK. I guess it's the next 3 days for me, then. WISH ME LUCK

Good luck!

DAY 5: 1000 KANJI :Oo 

An arbitrary distinction, sure, but it really does feel like a landmark. 70 more til I'm "halfway there," but this *feels* like halfway, which is pretty important. 

The real problem with today was that I spent way too long on this, procrastinating by taking breaks every few kanji, such that way too much of the day was devoted to it. Retention on the first 800 is still pretty great though, 99.75%, so -- so far, so good.

(2016-01-10, 11:50 pm)kfharlock Wrote: DAY 5: 1000 KANJI :Oo 

An arbitrary distinction, sure, but it really does feel like a landmark. 70 more til I'm "halfway there," but this *feels* like halfway, which is pretty important. 

The real problem with today was that I spent way too long on this, procrastinating by taking breaks every few kanji, such that way too much of the day was devoted to it. Retention on the first 800 is still pretty great though, 99.75%, so -- so far, so good.

You mate are a legend. I am on 1300, and Im now gonna aim to do 100 a day. Im doing the 6th edition so Ive got till 2200 so Ill see you at the finish line in a bit!

(2016-01-11, 12:38 am)rokpuru Wrote: You mate are a legend. I am on 1300, and Im now gonna aim to do 100 a day. Im doing the 6th edition so Ive got till 2200 so Ill see you at the finish line in a bit!

Take your time! No need to increase your limit to race another user

(2016-01-12, 4:50 pm)r3ftch Wrote:

(2016-01-11, 12:38 am)rokpuru Wrote: You mate are a legend. I am on 1300, and Im now gonna aim to do 100 a day. Im doing the 6th edition so Ive got till 2200 so Ill see you at the finish line in a bit!

Take your time! No need to increase your limit to race another user

Yup so I've realised that with work, 100 a day is not quite feasible!  I'll try 50 lol.

DAY 7: 1200. Yesterday was a wash for me, so I didn't get much of anything done. Thanks for the votes of confidence tho!

The last few days have been taking consecutively longer (especially today with the person/Mr. T radical...) so I'm considering bumping this down to 100/day, primarily because I'm officially Neglecting a Thesis at this point, and it's hard for me to "switch modes" in one day between two strenuous tasks that are so different from one another as learning 200 kanji and writing a thesis.

I hope that doesn't have to happen because I don't want to sacrifice momentum now that I'm past the halfway point... but we'll see! Worst case, I might cut it down to 100/day until this thesis chapter in done in 4-5 days, then go back to 200 to finish it out.

hmmmm. I've been meaning to redo Heisig. I properly completed twice but you know life and i felt i didn't really need them anymore. I can read kanji now fine but writing has again lapsed. I hope you the best. If you succeed within 14 days, I'll do this challenge next.

(2016-01-12, 7:56 pm)kfharlock Wrote: I hope that doesn't have to happen because I don't want to sacrifice momentum now that I'm past the halfway point...

I wouldn't normally suggest this, but in your case you could probably cut down on or entirely skip your reviews. If you keep going at 200 a day, it's not going to be -that- long before you're reviewing again anyway. Still you'd probably fail a good chunk when you got back to reviewing, with a week to go yet so that definitely has its downsides.

Slowing down at all does mean that those reviews are going to start catching up with you before you cross the finish line, which is likely to slow you down even more. That's how most 'rush' approaches to RTK end up fizzling out and turning into a more normal rate.

(2016-01-13, 4:09 pm)SomeCallMeChris Wrote: Slowing down at all does mean that those reviews are going to start catching up with you before you cross the finish line, which is likely to slow you down even more. That's how most 'rush' approaches to RTK end up fizzling out and turning into a more normal rate.

The next bump of reviews is going to be on day 12, when he sees the cards he added on day 1 for the fifth time (1 day + 3 days + 7 days at default ease). Cutting down to 100/day right now would pretty much completely smoothen the bump (100 fewer from day 8, 100 fewer from day 11)

I hate to point out the obvious, but adding cards is the easy part. Reviewing for a few months afterwards is the hard part. I'm guessing you'll be spending a few hours a day for months until the reviews space out and cards mature so you can say you "know RTK".

(2016-01-19, 7:40 pm)yogert909 Wrote: I hate to point out the obvious, but adding cards is the easy part.  Reviewing for a few months afterwards is the hard part.  I'm guessing you'll be spending a few hours a day for months until the reviews space out and cards mature so you can say you "know RTK".

This. I could easily add and learn 100 new cards a day in Anki, but then after a week of that my reviews will triple and I'll get buried in a pile of reviews. Slow n' steady wins the race and all that.

At my max I was adding about 60 cards a day and had a review load of about 1000 cards a day before adding anything new. It was insane. 8 hours of study a day, every day, for almost 6 months.

200 new cards a day? I'm sure you can finish, but have fun with the reviews that come after.

(2016-01-19, 7:40 pm)yogert909 Wrote: I hate to point out the obvious, but adding cards is the easy part.  Reviewing for a few months afterwards is the hard part.  I'm guessing you'll be spending a few hours a day for months until the reviews space out and cards mature so you can say you "know RTK".

I spent a total of two hours reviewing the week after I added over 1700 cards in one day (shortly after completing RTK, kanji-to-keyword, in about a month on Memrise). The review load dropped below 50/day after 4 weeks. My experience was similar when I added over 3000 Swedish cards in 3 weeks .

The hard part is if you never stop adding.