I remember reading one of his posts earlier but can't find it.... he said he memorizes 100 kanji a day and doesn't take one bit of Heisig's advice... In my opinion, it sounds like he was lieing to get attention, but hopefully he sees this and elaborates

Anyone remember seeing this somewhere in a thread? Plz link

I didn't see the post but the thing is, lots of people say they can learn a ton but it doesn't mean jack if you can't retain it the next day.

Also, he's probably studying a similar way. Learning radicals to learn kanji makes it lot easier than school methods. Personally I think heisig has an amazing idea he just does it poorly because the book is filled with mistakes, his stories are truly garbage, and he chooses stupid names for the stuff he makes up making it harder for us to learn it.

100 a day to 'learn' Kanji is nigh impossible with any method, as far as learning readings and everything else go. For assigning keywords, Heisig is probably the quickest way to do it in terms of amount of hours it takes, though everyones mind works differently.

Yeah, and I learn 500 new kanji every day before breakfast

raseru Wrote:I didn't see the post but the thing is, lots of people say they can learn a ton but it doesn't mean jack if you can't retain it the next day.

Also, he's probably studying a similar way. Learning radicals to learn kanji makes a lot easier than school methods. Personally I think heisig has an amazing idea he just does it poorly because it book is filled with mistakes, his stories are truly garbage, and he chooses stupid names for the stuff he makes up making it harder for us to learn it.

You really think Heisig's stories are garbage? Personally, I think he is unusually talented at making stories. For me, so many of them stick instantly and are amusing as well.

Yo, I might be one of these guys that try to learn a lot of kanji/day with bad stories.
I'm adding about ~100 / week. Is that too much?
My stories in the past were much weaker, but they are getting better now because I'm finally grasping the meaning and the strenght of visual memory.
Well, at least the SRS system punishes me acordingly ^_^ with a hundred of cards to review every day.

Not at all. I'm adding 300-400 kanji a week, and I'm not struggling.

Well, I had one stint of 3 days where my review dropped into the 60's, and I didn't clear out my fail pile until it had grown to epic kanji binge (completed) porportions. However, now my reviews are always over 90%, and my fail pile is less than 5% of my total kanji learned.

Good luck then, I already have my share of troubles.

How fast you study new kanji is not so strictly related to your retention rates, imho.

It took me 10 months to do the first ~1400 characters, but then for various reasons last summer I decided I wanted to speed things up, and did the last 600 in 10 days. Well, I haven't noticed the slightest difference in retention between the two groups of kanji. I can remember those last 600 just as well as the rest.
I think that doing reps diligently even after you've finished the book is what really matters.

For those reasons, looking back, I'd suggest doing as many kanji a day as you can, without worrying too much about making your stories perfect. Amazingly, a good balance is the best thing.

I'm doing 140 a week. My problem isn't retaining the new stuff, it's making time for the reviews the next day. I'd love to go faster, but I just don't have time for that monster review that follows. My worst review so far has been about 125 cards. I don't think I could handle reviews much bigger than that. Or, at least, I don't *want* to handle then much bigger. 4 weeks left till I'm done, hopefully my reviews stay manageable till the end of this month!

This thread has a lot to do with the 'Thinks you're crazy thread' IMO. If someone says they learnt 200 kanji in a day we should be slapping them on the back and high fiving them, not hassling them and calling them liars. If someone is trying hard then I salute them. Doing them fast is admirable, not deplorable. Wan Zafran did Heisig in twenty days, didn't he? A hundred a day. Awesome. Good job.

Who knows what some people can do? If you skip over to the 'how to learn any languages' forum you can meet a guy who knows dozens of languages. As in more than thirty. He can speak olde Nordic, hit it up on youtube some time, it sounds incredible. He knows Chinese, and Korean, and Japanese, and Hindi, and Arabic, and Persian, and Sanskrit, and he can write in all of them.

Absolutely. And I second what nac_est said about the speed: last summer I had the opportunity to do kanji full-time for a few lucky days, adding up to 150 one day, and my retention rate after a few reviews was just as good as when I'm strapped for time and only add a few. Being focused and seeing progress is a huge help for memory.

(Too bad that not long after that the uni year stalled me... )

NightSky Wrote:100 a day to 'learn' Kanji is nigh impossible with any method, as far as learning readings and everything else go. For assigning keywords, Heisig is probably the quickest way to do it in terms of amount of hours it takes, though everyones mind works differently.

Mmmm.... I was learning about 100-200 kanji(just meanings) a day using that cheesy game Slime Forest Adventure(the Kanji Dream version). I didn't really play the game so much as walk back and forth to make kanji pop up. I had good retention rates too, except that after I finished the kanji, I stopped reviewing. I think it only took a couple hours each day too, so it was really fast and I could do each day in one sitting. The game has plenty of flaws, but at the time it was totally worth it... anyway, this is why I can't say I actually finished RTK, because I switched to SFA part way through.

raseru Wrote:I didn't see the post but the thing is, lots of people say they can learn a ton but it doesn't mean jack if you can't retain it the next day.

Also, he's probably studying a similar way. Learning radicals to learn kanji makes it lot easier than school methods. Personally I think heisig has an amazing idea he just does it poorly because the book is filled with mistakes, his stories are truly garbage, and he chooses stupid names for the stuff he makes up making it harder for us to learn it.

His stories are pretty good, silly- but the point is to make them stick in your head. Like the kanji for pillar, a candle instead of a wooden pillar really stuck in my head. Sure, some stories are bad, but he tried writing something anyways so people wouldn't cry about him being lazy- and in that case, you can just look up the stories people write on these forums, their a great substitute.

And yeah, when he said he 'learned' 100 kanji a day without using Heisigs methods, I assumed he meant he retained the meaning the next day.... I can't stand when people shoot off large numbers and then talk about their huge failure rates. Personally, I do 1 chapter a day, 2 if the first chapter was too small, and I should be done in about 45 days give or take

The problem with doing too many kanji a day is that the number of daily revisions can quickly skyrocket to something unmanageable. It's not that hard to study 100 kanji a day for about a week but then you'll have to review the kanji from the week before and after that those you reviewed two weeks before and so on.

My estimation for the SRS system of this site, based on my experience is that you should expect daily revisions to peak at about 5 times the number of kanji you add daily so plan accordingly.

Also while it's easy to conclude that there is little impact on retention rate after a revision or two, what really matters is the retention rate once those kanji are moved to the long term stacks. And then your results could be different.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't go fast, I think going fast is important with Heisig, once you have seen a kanji even once it's much easier to reinforce your knowledge through reading. But be careful, don't bite more than you can chew.

reviews 'max' 5 times as many kanji as you add? I only have a 'few' kanji left... But my daily reviews are around 150~170 now... I hope to keep them that way, though I'm sure I'd cope with a few 200-ish review days if need be. Reviews should soon decrease in size after finishing the book... right? (How fast, though?)

The amount of revisions will decrease but not that fast and after finishing the book it's harder to stay motivated. Personally, I just stopped reviewing after a while and let expired cards accumulate up to ~1500. Now I went through all my expired cards quickly and I have a huge failed pile that I'll need to slowly reintroduce into the SRS. But that's OK as I don't have the pressure to finish the book. I have already seen all those kanji, if I don't remember them all perfectly it doesn't matter I'll slowly revise everything.

yukamina Wrote:

NightSky Wrote:100 a day to 'learn' Kanji is nigh impossible with any method, as far as learning readings and everything else go. For assigning keywords, Heisig is probably the quickest way to do it in terms of amount of hours it takes, though everyones mind works differently.

Mmmm.... I was learning about 100-200 kanji(just meanings) a day using that cheesy game Slime Forest Adventure(the Kanji Dream version). I didn't really play the game so much as walk back and forth to make kanji pop up. I had good retention rates too, except that after I finished the kanji, I stopped reviewing. I think it only took a couple hours each day too, so it was really fast and I could do each day in one sitting. The game has plenty of flaws, but at the time it was totally worth it... anyway, this is why I can't say I actually finished RTK, because I switched to SFA part way through.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, that Heisig isn't the best way to learn english keywords for Japanese Kanji? That your game does it better?

Honestly ... I don't actually use Heisig myself. I find the idea quite fascinating though, which is why I find myself reading the posts on this board so often. I learn Kanji another way, where I don't actually learn 'meanings' at all (only readings). I don't really invest any time actually studying Kanji though, I just pick it up with the new vocabulary i'm studying.

I enjoy contrasting my own results/problems with those I read about on here, but I definitely don't think Heisig is for me. Spending the time actually studying Japanese is just too important...

Codexus Wrote:My estimation for the SRS system of this site, based on my experience is that you should expect daily revisions to peak at about 5 times the number of kanji you add daily so plan accordingly.

When does this happen?

I've been going at about 40-50 a day for 2 and a half weeks, and the reviews have never gone over about 105.

Well I guess it also (mostly?) depends on your failed cards... If you fail a lot, it adds up to the cards you add that day, of course..

After 54 days in theory as that should be the time it takes for the first kanji you studied to expire on the 5th pile. At that point you have the blue pile of the first review of the new kanji (which I used to review the kanji I added the day before), you have to review the second pile of 3 days ago and the other piles after 7, 14 and 30 days so that's 5 revisions in total.

And that's if you never forget a kanji. In reality you're going to see some kanji more often than that so the number of revisions is going to increase more quickly and you'll get to that number without even counting the blue pile

2040 kanji / 40(kanji/day) = 51 days.

Thus, I will be finished. Not that I'm going to stop reviewing! But I'm only starting to get the simple ones (forest, ten, five, etc.) into last box. It actually seems a little fast when I look back at it. Perhaps it's because they were just on the low end of the spread-out.

I'm doing close to 120 or so if you count the cards I added the night before.

I usually add ten or so at a time, focus on other things for a good while, and then review(so they're not fresh in my head - the memorable ones stick, and the bad ones drop).

NightSky Wrote:I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, that Heisig isn't the best way to learn english keywords for Japanese Kanji? That your game does it better?

I'm saying RTK isn't the only method one can use to learn kanji quickly. The game was faster than RTK, but like I said it had problems in many areas.

yukamina Wrote:

NightSky Wrote:I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, that Heisig isn't the best way to learn english keywords for Japanese Kanji? That your game does it better?

I'm saying RTK isn't the only method one can use to learn kanji quickly. The game was faster than RTK, but like I said it had problems in many areas.

Of course the huge problem both had is that you weren't learning how to read any of those characters. It's not difficult to learn at least 20 kanji a day including readings if you spend as much time as people here spend on Heisig.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but weren't you posting on TJP a while back, singing Heisig's praises and getting a bit of a hard time for it? The only reason I bring it up is that it was quite a long time ago, and if Heisig is as effective as you were saying you should have had it all finished quite some time ago The fact that you are still trying to get the keywords down (I say keywords, since it seems you haven't actually started learning to read Kanji yet) is quite interesting :]

NightSky Wrote:Forgive me if I'm wrong, but weren't you posting on TJP a while back, singing Heisig's praises and getting a bit of a hard time for it? The only reason I bring it up is that it was quite a long time ago, and if Heisig is as effective as you were saying you should have had it all finished quite some time ago The fact that you are still trying to get the keywords down (I say keywords, since it seems you haven't actually started learning to read Kanji yet) is quite interesting :]

I don't understand how attaching words to kanji after learning their form is in any way inferior to attaching words to kanji while learning their form. In both cases, you are learning kanji and learning words, so what's the big deal? I happen to feel that splitting things up and spending a month or two upfront learning how to write the general use kanji is a worthwhile endeavor, since it makes it so much easier for me to acquire vocabulary later, but as long as you're learning Japanese and spending time with the language, I say more power to you.

I really don't get all this Heisig/Anti-Heisig infighting. People have reached fluency with Heisig's methods as a start, and people have also reached fluency without them. Arguing about how one way is better or worse than the other seems like a terrible waste of time.