When I finally get a chance to get back into Kanji, I will be away from it for a week and a half.

I have loads of crap going on right now. I have zero time for kanji until the summer break, which starts saturday. I do mean ZERO time. Like, I've been up 49 hours at this point, and the only reason I've taken a small, 5 hour break to myself is because it's my birthday.

So, I expect a massive review pile, and a massive fail pile. Anyone ever have to do this, and had any tips for getting back into the swing of things?

Maybe hover around your computer all day and set a goal of ten or so to do every time you have a minute, or need a break from your other activities. Often I promise myself to do ten sentences between reading any of the articles or news that I look at daily on the Internet. Just spread out the reviews throughout the day.

Perhaps I should promise to do ten cards between each RTK forum posting?

Your break doesn't seem that long. Just hack away at the stacks when you get back. You might find something useful in this old thread:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=318

I know what you're going through. Although I finished RTK 1 a year ago, my reviews since then have been on-again-off-again. I currently have some 300 expired cards, and another 400 failed cards.

My advice is to just chip away at those piles bit by bit. Orange piles are more urgent than the red one, I think. Don't stress it too much, or else it'll turn into a chore and not a source of enjoyment.

I did up to around 545 kanji before taking a 3 month break and just picked it up at the end of last month, I don't know how much I remembered at all, because I just worked a little each day reviewing them all, probably took me about 3-4 days to get back on top of it and march on with the kanji. It was painful the first day getting back into it completely forgetting some of them!

I think a week or two is nothing really... but then again I don't how much kanji you have in your stack...

Grit your teeth and get through it. If necessary, don't deal with any failed cards until your orange stacks are all gone. Adding a small number of new cards (5 or so) per day helped keep me motivated. Also, take a look over at http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1545 - don't agonize over failed cards, just push through and give yourself all the help you need.

So, even though I'm still rushed to an extreme, I have slightly more time, so I'm starting up again today.

I barely remember ANYTHING. A lot of them it's "REALLY close but not quite", but still not 100%. This is going to hurt, bad.

Triddy Wrote:This is going to hurt, bad.

Don't be so negative. Think of it as a chance to learn it better. I've had to go through piles of 1000+ expired cards multiple times due to long hiatuses. Each time I go through it, I get better.

I say just dive right back in.

I went to Japan for 16 days and didn't learn a single new kanji that whole period (using Heisig). However, I did keep up with my reviews.

When I got back, I just dove back in... started the first day by doing 25, then did 50 the next.

Averaging 94% retention, so not too shabby. I think just diving in is the best way.

Good advice radical.

Remember the point of all this is to learn the kanji, not to get to 2042 and celebrate finishing. 2042 is the start... so those massive piles of expired cards that most of us face at one point or another are an opportunity to get better.

I tend to think of the goal- almost to 2042, almost to 2042, and not the purpose. A couple times I've had piles of about 400, and I rushed through them so I could add more cards! How silly is that? Remember... we are trying to REMEMBER 2042 kanji! This also applies to creating stories- taking two minutes to create a lasting story is so much better and more efficient than taking 30 seconds to copy someone else's. In the long run the two minutes will save you a lot more than two minutes, but I often forget that rule too.

One thing I do, if my failed stack gets too big, is to just purge it. There's unfortunately no good way that I've found to do it all at once, but it doesn't take all that long. The idea is that even if I don't actually remember it now, if it's back on stack 1 I'll see it again soon (and then it'll go back to the failed pile), whereas if it rots on the failed pile I won't see it until I make time to do that full review, and as the failed pile grows that time moves farther and farther into the future.

Plus, you don't have that monstrously huge failed pile glaring at you every time you hit the review page.

~J

I started over from scratch. Removed all the cards above frame 150 or so and then just went through them all over again. Granted, it went a lot faster than the first time around (because it was, after all, review).

However, I had gotten away from formal Kanji study for at least eight months, so you might not need to do something so extreme; then again, this is a lot cleaner than figuring out how to approach an enormous stack of failed cards.

You should consider anki or mnemosyne, as they manage this kind of situation automaticaly.

Alright, 3 days to clear my review stack.

I went slightly lenient on myself, I passed some cards where I would have usually failed them. I don't mean that I was wrong, but something like misshaping a single stroke, or some 'Duh!' moments. I figure that this serves as a re-introduction, and I'll go back to failing them normally starting tomorrow.

Still, out of the 850 in my review stack, there were only about 100 that I truly did not know; that I wasn't even close with. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

These past few days, I have not devoted as much time as I usually do each day. On the first day, I devoted 30 minutes, yesterday, an hour. Today, slightly more. Going to increase until I am used to the 2 - 3 hour/day kanji study I was at before.

Woodwojr, I'm seriously considering doing that. Just reading through all 200 of my total fails once or twice, purging the whole thing, and if I don't know them, well, they'll be back in the fail pile soon enough. Anyone have any thoughts on his methods?