Yo,

This was suposed to be a suggestion on how to do your japanese studies but it became somewhat of a blog registering my path trought RTK.

If you are doing great on RTK, I hope this thread amuses you, but it wont have anything of much interest for you.

If you are having bad review rates, please endure while trying to find out why.
I'm still not finished with RTK, as for today I still have ~700 kanji to go. But I had a lot of hardships and I tried to share them all here.

Dont ever think you cant learn kanji. You can do it.
If you are having trouble remembering them, the problem is not you.
It is what you are doing. You must be doing some kind of mistake.
Work your way trought learning how to learn kanji.

Good luck.

The original post:
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Hey guys. I'm posting here my experinces with this site and japanese learning.

I've been watching anime for about ~7 years now. And for a few years I've already studied japanese. Maybe ~4 years. But it did not worked. I could not learn japanese. Specially all those weird symbols. Kanji.

Then I was presented to RTK an this site. And supermemo, and anki, and mnemosyne. And everything started to change.

About a month ago I started to review kanji. As for today, I'm at 577. Cheers for me.

Still, I was having trouble with the first review.
That is, until 2 weeks ago, when I started to read about Pimsleur language courses. And learned about pimsleur srs interval. 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, 2 years.

I adopted the 5, 25 secs and 2 minutes intervals to my first pass throught kanji. So I take about 3-5 minutes for each kanji before clicking on "learned". The nice thing is pimsleur requires you to distract yourself in the intervals, so I do my job while while learning the kanji (I work with computer programming). Alt + tab is quite nice.

This way I take about all the afternoon for 40 kanjis. It is not much effort. It does not wear me off. And first review retention rate is about 90%.

Before yesterday I got myself pimsleur basic course. It is really basic, but it is nice. I heard it in the bus, in the barber shop and the bank line. I recomend it for those who lack a good base, like me.
The great thing about this audio course in that it doesnt messes up with the SRS of the RTK.
As reviewing kanji before time ruins your recall rate the audio course is quite an interesting choice.

At night I reward miself watching doramas. Currently trick, recomended by Katzu. At http://www.mysoju.com

I guess it is working quite well. Feel free to critisize or copy my method. Please help me to find a better way to learn japanese.

Update. Today I only had a 63% retention rate from the kanjis of friday. But I felt I relied too much on the above cited timing so my stories were not enought.
I will now try putting more effort on mnemonics.

Your approach sounds pretty similar to my process thus far. I've learned about 1500 kanji, and am currently around lesson 12 of Pimsleur II. It's taken me 20 months or so to get this far, but I'm pretty casual about the whole thing - there'll be weeks or months where I just barely keep up with my reviews and don't learn any new kanji at all, and don't pick up the iPod.

I knew a tiny bit of Japanese before I started (mostly ちょっと待ってください) while I frantically urged my Japanese-speaking wife to come bail me out). I've found that Pimsleur helps me feel like I'm actually learning the language, while RTK feels like building a real foundation for long-term learning.

I'm now at the point where I'm starting to review sentences. Pimsleur is a good place for me to start (since I know how to pronounce them, what they mean), but it's sometimes hard to figure out how to write them properly. There's a list on the web: http://www.epochrypha.com/japanese/phras...tences.txt for Pimsleur I, but it doesn't have much beyond that, and I can't vouch for it's accuracy. My longer term plan is to type in some sentences, make some educated guesses about the appropriate kanji, and send off to some of my Japanese friends for proofreading.

I don't have much to add on timing and strategies for remembering - I study at night, try to make my stories as vivid as possible, and then review in the morning. I'm usually somewhere between 65 and 85 percent most of the time, which I'm satisfied with as long as I keep moving kanji out of my failed stack with some frequency.

Yeah. Tks for sharing your experience. I feel better hearing from someone who is ahead of me doing something similar. Ps, I might be beggining to understand how "vivid stories" help.

I suggest you just listen to Japanesepod101, use their sentences and then put it into your SRS. I used to listen to Pimsleur too, a while ago. But, it's just too easy. It seems to me that Pimsleur is good for 'getting your feet wet' but with all that kanji that you know, you should just dive right in. But if you still want to do Pimsleur, I suggest that you think of it as ONE of the many things you are doing to learn Japanese. Hope that helps

Tks, hans. You are right. I am feeling that way. Pimsleur audio lessons are too easy. And by the SRS way, I should only do one a day.
So, I'll try for a few days to keep listening it, to make sure I get whole basic gramar done and besides that, hear japanesepod101. Soon I'll post my impressions here.

I've just examined japanesepod101 and listened to the first begginer, intermediate and advanced lesson. I found out that intermediate level was made exacly for me.
Tks again, hans.

Today, my recall rate was 45 of 60 kanji: 75%. I did ~40 kanjis saturday.
I need to work better on the mnemonics.

Hey Hans, I've been working my way through Pimsleur slowly over the past 6 months. While I agree that Pimsleur I is fairly easy, I think the difficulty does increase over time. I'm on lesson 55 of 90 at the moment. How far did you get in Pimsleur? My plan is to get through the 90 lessons in Pims and then move to jpod101.
(edit: typo ~_~)

I plan to keep doing pimsleur too. I really like it. I'm gaining a strong base from it. The problem of pimsleur is that it is only 30 minutes/day.

I think I stopped around lesson 55. You should try japanesepod101 even though you have yet to finish pimsleur. Jpod will help you reinforce what you learn in pimsleur. Anyways, pimsleur takes you only 30 minutes a day. That should be one of the many ways you study Japanese. Just don't be afraid to move forward, even though you don't yet feel comfortable.

Today, my recall rate was 43 of 70 kanji: 61%.
I still need to work better on the mnemonics. Maybe the spaced discraction method is not working anymore, or I was doing something that was more important than the repetition.

Today: 44 of 80: 55%
It is getting lower and lower. I'm getting really confused on what should I do.

"The nice thing is pimsleur requires you to distract yourself in the intervals, so I do my job while while learning the kanji (I work with computer programming). Alt + tab is quite nice."

I would recommend stopping the alt + tab process and concentrate on one thing at a time. If you are working: work. If you are learning: learn. If you try to combine these two things, my guess is that you won't be able to fully concentrate yourself on either one of them, which might not be too disastrous for your work, but I can't imagine it to have any good effects on your kanji learning. This of course does not explain why your spaced repetition method a la Pimsleur did work a few days ago and does not anymore nowadays, but it's the best piece of advice I can offer.

Yeah, thinking more on that, the "discracting" idea worked great in the weekend. My job environment is kinda different. The problem is I have a lot of free time during weekdays too, but the slices are short. I'm reducing the number of kanji to 20/day and examine better the results.
Another thing I'm noticing is that the quality of my sleep influences the quality of my review.

I'm doing 20 per day right now, I've been doing it for almost 2 weeks and it's been working well.. I was doing one chapter a week for 6 months and then I got impatient and bumped it up.. So far, so good.. Remember, though, it's not a race. Go at the pace you're comfortable with. I prefer my reviews to stay above 80% recall and have promised myself that if they're consistently lower than that, I'll slow my pace back down until my recall rate is where I'm comfortable. My goal was to finish by thanksgiving (a year after I started) and I'm still on pace for that, so it's all good. Sleep is important, and I think consistency is important too. I do my reviews at the same time every day and I force myself to go to bed at the same time, which is earlier than I'd like, but allows me enough sleep so my brain actually *works* the next day.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding you right, but it sounds like you are putting too much emphasis on the SRS and not enough on imaginative memory. Using an SRS is good (I use Pimsleur too--and I use a similar schedule when I learn new vocabulary). But it sounds to me like you are missing on one of the main points of Heisig if you rely on the SRS so much that you are not using your imaginative memory.
Many Japanese kids learn kanji by writing them over and over again. If they used a good SRS they could learn them more quickly, but they would still be writing them over and over again.
When I was learning kanji, I would write (or pick) a story. Then I would wait at least until the next day before quizzing myself the first time. If I couldn't remember the kanji after one day, it was a BIG flag to me that my story wasn't good enough or that I need to spend more time imagining it.
I find that the kanji with the more vivid the story, the easier it is to remember it. On the other hand, the ones that I just pump through my SRS, end up easily forgotten after they get to the third, fourth, etc, stack.
So by taking time in the begining to make a good story, you can save time in the end.

Sorry for the double post.

roderik Wrote:I would recommend stopping the alt + tab process and concentrate on one thing at a time. If you are working: work. If you are learning: learn. If you try to combine these two things, my guess is that you won't be able to fully concentrate yourself on either one of them, which might not be too disastrous for your work, but I can't imagine it to have any good effects on your kanji learning. This of course does not explain why your spaced repetition method a la Pimsleur did work a few days ago and does not anymore nowadays, but it's the best piece of advice I can offer.

You might find this aricle interesting:Max Your Mind's Performance by Distracting Yourself (from this thread)

Thanks Laner36, though I had already read it. My advice was based on the fact that mentat was combining work and kanji, and not 'something similar to kanji' and kanji as the article suggests one to do.

Apart from that, great advice about putting more emphasis on imaginative memory.

Today my review was 50 of 90: 56%

Tks guys for all the help.
laner36: you made me remember a book I bought long ago that at that time proved to be useless: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?in...62813702-1

Today on I'll try to use this book to help with my mnemonics. I kinda lack imaginative memory because I try building a logical story for each kanji. And that I have been proving to be bad.

BTW. I'm having a lot of trouble with the sheep radical. The heart radical kanji ones are going fine.

Roderik, I'm sorry for not following your advice, but I have a hard deadline for learning japanese. I study at work, at home, everywhere. AJATT ftw!

Be careful with hard deadlines. Give yourself some wiggle room so you don't get too disappointed if for whatever reason you're not where you wanted to be at X date. I seem to be saying this a lot lately, but make sure you take the time to enjoy the journey of learning Japanese, lest you never reach your destination, or find that the destination is not what you expected. If you're not enjoying your self study, you will eventually move to something else that you do enjoy, leaving japanese behind and taking regret with you.
(edit: typo ~_~)

Don't feel bad about using the more outrageous stories on the site. The more outrageous, the better. Logic helps some, but nothing helps like a basic emotional appeal to your primal instincts.

Also, for some primitives, don't hesitate to turn them into favorite characters from whatever. I did that with "State of Mind," "Fingers," "Person," and "Thread," because otherwise I would have thrown myself off of a cliff. I also did it to the sideways "Eye" radical... that became a Cylon for me. Other people use cyclops. Is it "pure?" Hell no. But RTK isn't about being pure. It's about being effective. I didn't do it as much as I went on with the book, but for that stretch of about 800 or so kanji, that saved my butt.

Yo rich. Because of you, Sheep just became Captain Sheep: The next to became Kaizoku Oo.
I hope Eichiro Oda wont mind.
Shibo: I'm enjoying my japanese studies. And I'm enjoying it much more now because I might use it in a practical situation besides animes, doramas and manga.
Ty for worrying, guys.

Edit: it is hope, not hove.

Today, saturday: 54 of 72. 75% remembered.
huhul!