Don't slow down!

Around the 800 mark I slowed down and I am having huge amounts of difficulty getting going again. By the time I clear out my review lists I am too tired to try and study new kanjis... rinse and repeat. The last 40 or so kanjis refuse to stick even with good stories cos I am not doing it correctly.

If you wanna succeed, be sure to make a story, then review it immediately, and keep reveiwing it as soon as it expires. It's the only way to succeed.

Don't slow down or let your piles build up!

I am desperately trying to get back on the learning train.

Lately I'm suffering a "SRS backlog": Mnemosyne is scheduling too many cards for daily review. If I get through those fast enough to have time to attack my 0 pile (new cards + failed cards), that will in turn add new things for review in the next few days. Generally for about every 2 cards I clear from the 0-pile, one of them is scheduled for review the next day. So I can't make much work on my 0-pile without dooming myself to even more reviews the next day. Meanwhile, my scheduled reviews have about a 10% fail rate, so if I totally neglect the 0 pile it'll grow and grow.

It's not a long term problem, it'll eventually get unclogged but it'll take a week or so without adding new cards. It's kind of making me question the Mnemosyne algorithms. It's almost like the program needs an additional "6" button to space a card out even further than the "5" button.

And it's pissing me off because Mnemosyne should be the servant of language training, not vice versa. SNISPILBOR SMASH!

Edit: Here are Mnemosyne's statistics right now for me:

Scheduled cards for the next days:

In 0 day(s) : 0
In 1 day(s) : 282
In 2 day(s) : 287
In 3 day(s) : 256
In 4 day(s) : 191
In 5 day(s) : 156
In 6 day(s) : 138
In 7 day(s) : 137

Number of cards with the following grades:

Grade 0 : 167 (1.9 %)
Grade 1 : 54 (0.6 %)
Grade 2 : 39 (0.4 %)
Grade 3 : 295 (3.3 %)
Grade 4 : 301 (3.4 %)
Grade 5 : 8071 (90.4 %)

How about taking a break and just review for a week or two without adding any new cards. It gives you time to regain energy and just review those old characters so they'll be solid in your head. Also lets the review workload come down as you get the majority of the cards to the last stacks.

I took good break around the halfway as adding new cards was becoming harder and harder. It really gave me a boost for the latter part of the book.

A month ago I didn't think I'd be finishing the task this summer.


Ps. This was an answer to the first post. It was the only one when I started writing..

Yep!

The thing which bugs me is the fact that I've been bogged down reviewing for ages, and the results are, almost no cards left in the first two columns (only 8 and 57) compared to 403 and 324 in the last two columns (oh, and 24 in the fail pile)

The system is designed to combine review and learning new kanjis, but if you stop learning new kanjis it seems you end up having to completely clear everything out of the first two columns to give yourself time to catch up. I want to ease myself back in without doing that really...

I dunno.

I would say that the most important thing in this studying is the reviews.
This is actually my third time trying to go through the book and it seems that I finally about to succeed! (91 to go!)

First time I stopped (all Japanese study) around 400-500 due to some major changes in life and it took me a while before I started again. By the time I started again I had forgotten about 80% of the characters I had studied before.
The next time it just got too difficult around where you are now and I stopped again. Interestingly though I still retained about 80% of the characters when I started again half a year later and got on with it.
In May I didn't add any card for long while but kept reviewing and now that I later had the energy to continue again, I hadn't fallen back at all.

Adding cards can go but never stop reviewing. That is when all you have worked for start slipping away.

Or you could go for the "atleast add one a day" -approach!

Man. I just push through. I like pain, I suppose.

Snispilbor, I feel you. Yesterday, today, and the next couple of days will have over two hundred. Just work through it...

My Victory board is very helpful too:

Edit: I like to change the phrase on the bottom. Now it says "Totally f*** up your Japanese teacher's world view. How? Keep going!"

Here's my deck:
The 1046 seen cards in this deck contain:
1042 total unique kanji.
Jouyou: 1018 of 1945 (52.3%).
Jinmeiyou: 15 of 287 (5.2%).
9 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 50 of 80 (62.5%).
Grade 2: 92 of 160 (57.5%).
Grade 3: 111 of 200 (55.5%).
Grade 4: 113 of 200 (56.5%).
Grade 5: 110 of 185 (59.5%).
Grade 6: 94 of 181 (51.9%).
JuniorHS: 448 of 939 (47.7%).

This is the reason why I like using this site-- I love Anki, don't get me wrong, but reviews constantly pile up with it. This site is nice, in that reviews only come up once a day, so you know how many reviews you have to do for the day, and you can pick your time to do them, unlike Anki, where you wake up with 100 things to review, you may review 40-50, go off to work, come back, and it's back up to 100 again, which makes it impossible to add new content, and it gets disheartening at times.

So I stopped using Anki for RTK, and now I only use it for sentences. But even then, reviews can pile up out of nowhere.

rich_f Wrote:This is the reason why I like using this site-- I love Anki, don't get me wrong, but reviews constantly pile up with it. This site is nice, in that reviews only come up once a day, so you know how many reviews you have to do for the day, and you can pick your time to do them, unlike Anki, where you wake up with 100 things to review, you may review 40-50, go off to work, come back, and it's back up to 100 again, which makes it impossible to add new content, and it gets disheartening at times.

So I stopped using Anki for RTK, and now I only use it for sentences. But even then, reviews can pile up out of nowhere.

It's funny, since those are the exact reasons that I prefer Anki. I'm on break from college, I've got no job, and I hardly ever sleep, so I can pretty much spend all my time reviewing and studying, without ever having to see more than a few expired cards at a time.

I kinda understand what snips said. Sometimes mnemosynes jolts a lot of old expired cards for the same week. It needs a better random algorithm, to splash them trough the whole month.

lol @ victory board! Cute.

Oh man your victory board is awesome! I totally have to get one!

I am gonna use my calender to do that now, write how many new kanjis I learned each day. I like your message at the bottom!

Yo, I think too you victory board is awesome. But I already said it in another post. I should not spam but this was for a noble cause.

I had a goal to finish RTK1 before I left Australia at the end of June- I only had about a month left, papers to finish, finals to take and 700 something kanji left! So I printed out my google calendar and decided which days would be heavy days (60 kanji), medium (30), light (10) and none. While these days didn't go exactly as planned, it really helped me realize that if I wanted to meet my goal, I had to buckle down and work really hard on the days I wasn't studying for finals or writing papers.

The last couple hundred are some of the hardest kanji, but for me it was the time when I had the most motivation because the end was in sight... I ended up finishing with a week and a half to spare In some twisted way, it actually helped that I had finals going on because it became "well I should really study for finals, but I could study kanji..." because kanji was the preferable of the two. Now that I am at home it is usually "I should do my reviews but I could watch some anime..."

I really sacrificed studying grammar/sentences/etc to work on kanji, but I hope it is worth it in the end. Anki says my overall retention is about 90%, but that isn't realistic as I'll give myself a '2' if I can get the kanji with my memory sentence. I'd say I have at least half pretty well cemented, and I'm hoping the others will get better with time (and doing sentences).

Yo, captal. I have my masters deadline in 2 months. Altought schedule is tight, all is going well. And today I got some great news. I'll be able to quit my job and only do my masters. With my masters off my free time, there will be a lot of kanji time! Hurray!

Good luck! Be sure to study