Whenever I try to focus heavily on images, I usually end up failing the kanji. Like for the kanji for II, my image was a gladiator with two arrows in his quiver, fighting off a horde of nekkid cougars...And I can always remember the image but not write the kanji. But I generally just come up with a sentence that has a vague image associated with it, which works pretty well.

I always have a nagging doubt that I'm doing it wrong, though, because trying to go kanji to keyword is very difficult. It takes me 20-30 seconds.

shamano Wrote:Hey Dakoina, I wish you luck! I took a long break from learning new kanji, but now I'm almost there (100 to go). I bet you can do it!

Thanks I do want to get to the finish!

皆さんありがとう。 I've since whittled that 180 down to all of five that I mostly mixed up with similar kanji. I should be ready to continue my progress by tomorrow!

Almost up to 750, with a good 400 of those in the 4+ reviews box. Really looking forward to reaching 1000! I'm so glad I decided to give RTK a try. I'm not exactly new to Japanese - I've studied it for several years, and I'm going to take a crack at JLPT ikkyuu this Christmas. Writing kanji, though, has always been extremely difficult for me. I can read the vast majority of the ones in RTK1 without a problem, but I picked them up naturally via reading, and never put any effort into learning how to write them. It's so frustrating to not be able to use even half of your vocabulary because you can't visualise the kanji in your head clearly enough to replicate them on paper. And considering I started studying Chinese at university recently, where you don't have kana to fall back on, I figured I really needed to get my act together.

At the risk of sounding like a TV commercial, I'm amazed at how easy RTK has made it! Every day I feel less and less crippled by my poor writing skills, and at the rate I'm going I think I can finish up well before the end of summer. Thanks so much to everyone here. I never posted, but came and read the forums whenever I got discouraged. Which happened...sort of a lot to begin with, as I was basically having to relearn kanji I already knew using a method I had my doubts about. Thanks also for the neat flashcard system on the site, and for all the fun stories. They've been saving me a lot of time and hassle.

Man, I could really use some encouragement or some help with getting this done. I've been stuck at 950 kanji for the last 2 months now. I did about 150 in 4 days over x-mas break and it really hurt me -- I was getting way too many wrong and so I went into this spiral of reviews then restudying then reviewing, then restudying. I then let reviewing lapse for 2-3 weeks and now I'm at 300 to be reviewed, 130 to be restudied.

I've got about 300 cards in box 6, 150 in 5, 100 in 4 with the rest waiting around to be reviewed. Ugh. I don't know what to do about it since it's just discouraging to even look at the site.

How about this Courage Wolf?

sdntx Wrote:Man, I could really use some encouragement or some help with getting this done. I've been stuck at 950 kanji for the last 2 months now. I did about 150 in 4 days over x-mas break and it really hurt me -- I was getting way too many wrong and so I went into this spiral of reviews then restudying then reviewing, then restudying. I then let reviewing lapse for 2-3 weeks and now I'm at 300 to be reviewed, 130 to be restudied.

I've got about 300 cards in box 6, 150 in 5, 100 in 4 with the rest waiting around to be reviewed. Ugh. I don't know what to do about it since it's just discouraging to even look at the site.

I'd say take it slow. Also try to make it enjoyable. Or watch enjoyable japanese stuff. I am assume that's why you want to learn japanese. To be able to enjoy the things in japanese as oppose to english things. I remeber when i did 100 per day kanji. Made me go crazy at times. So i took it slow. If you do 30 daily, in 3 months you will reach 2042 kanji on problem. No stress, no fatigue,nothing. It's easier that way. So definitely try to decrease the load if you can't handle the load.

Blank Wrote:How about this Courage Wolf?

http://i45.tinypic.com/6p2bn8.jpg

Haha! COURAGE WOLF IS AWESOME

Yay Courage wolf =P

Well, I plowed through all of the cards that were up for review and ended up with this =/



That's always a discouraging sight!

Blank Wrote:How about this Courage Wolf?

Heck yes!

@sdbtx. Looks like the Courage Wolf worked! If you reviewed 300 and only added 54 to the restudy list, you knew over 80%, which I personally consider a good review. I got out of sync recently and found myself with 101 study cards (my most ever) but I just did them a third at a time and it was simple. A little time-consuming, but simple. 頑張ってね！

Yes, it works best to divide them up into time or number of cards. For example: 10 minutes at a time, or 30 cards at a time. You can divide your day that way and do other things in between. That way, you can get those 184 out of the way in a day and have a normal amount of reviews tomorrow.

579 restudy cards and 250 cards right up near 7+ reviews.

I wish it was the other way around

Well, I just started RTK (Lite using KO2001 order), and I managed to get 150 in a few days. It was disheartening at first, since I failed 24/36 in my new card stack. However, I did 21 reviews this morning from my first stack, and I was worried that I forgot everything. Turns out I got 25/26 =D. I'm thinking that this won't be as hard as I thought. Still hard, but maybe now not impossible.

smartazjb0y Wrote:Well, I just started RTK (Lite using KO2001 order), and I managed to get 150 in a few days. It was disheartening at first, since I failed 24/36 in my new card stack. However, I did 21 reviews this morning from my first stack, and I was worried that I forgot everything. Turns out I got 25/26 =D. I'm thinking that this won't be as hard as I thought. Still hard, but maybe now not impossible.

Sure, you can do it. You are in the right path, RTK lite and then KO2001, that's the way to go. It doesn't really matter how many you do each day, as long as you keep on doing, without skipping days.
Later on , you can migrate to Anki and begin your KO2001 deck.

Quote:you knew over 80%, which I personally consider a good review.

I generally get a little over 80% right as well, and I was wondering whether this was good or bad. Half of my wrong answers are very close -- I might have put one element in the wrong place, or added an extra line to "two hands," or used "cloak" instead of "altar" as a radical on the left side. But half of my wrong answers are more fundamental mistakes: forgetting the story entirely, or using the wrong story. Is 80% a reasonable "correct" rate?

Groot: I find that it is.
I finished RTK1 on January 31st. I do my reviews every day and I find that my pass rate can be anywhere between 75% and 98%. It really differs so much every day, also depending on whether I get many cards that I haven't reviewed in a while, or many cards that I've reviewed more recently, whether I'm tired or not, whether I have things on my mind or not.

I also find that most of my mistakes are missing one stroke or putting an element in the wrong place, simple things like that. Sometimes I also replace an element with one that is similar. So I think that's normal. Sounds to me like you're going in the right direction.

Thanks for your reply, Koos83. That's encouraging.

I'm curious: How much time do you spend reviewing RTK1 now that you've finished RTK1? How many kanji a day does RevTK give you?

I'm also curious what you decided to do after RTK1. I have RTK2, but I've heard mixed things about it; and many people seem to recommend KO2001 or maybe Kanji Town. I've already worked through Genki 1 and Human Japanese, so I have some understanding of the basics of grammar, but I am sure I have far more to learn; for example, I don't really know how to form a conditional sentence. Beyond that, I obviously need to expand my vocabulary, and to learn readings. Anyway, I don't have to decide now, but I'm curious what path you took.

I'm at 1271 still. I've done nothing the last three days. Reviewed a little, I still have 20 failed cards(but 20 out of almost 300) I don't feel like looking at. I just want to be done with RTK already.

Part of what's keeping me from doing it is they way I learn and enter my cards. First I go through RTK, write out the name, elements, story, and the kanji twice, and then later I go into Anki and type the story in. This makes me have really good retention but it's kind of a boring pain in the ass doing all of that. But if I don't do it my retention rate will drop and it will become even more discouraging.

I used to balk at people who quit around this number because the bulk of it is behind you but...I kind of get it now.

Groot: I usually get between 30 and 70 cards a day. I don't know why the number differs so much; my retention rate is usually in the high 80s/low 90s so it can't be that.

As for what I'm doing now: I am working more than fulltime, so at the moment I am not doing much. Just don't have the energy. However, in a few weeks I'll be done with a lot of work so I'll have more time and energy. I've decided to work my way through RTK2, and I'm doing Pimsleur, as I'm going to Japan in August and I want to know at least some vocabulary and sentences. I've found I learn better when listening and repeating than when reading and writing, so hence Pimsleur.
As for grammar: I've got Japanese in Mangaland, which I want to work through, and for vocabulary I will just do that and the compound words in RTK2.

xquio Wrote:I'm at 1271 still. I've done nothing the last three days. Reviewed a little, I still have 20 failed cards(but 20 out of almost 300) I don't feel like looking at. I just want to be done with RTK already.

Part of what's keeping me from doing it is they way I learn and enter my cards. First I go through RTK, write out the name, elements, story, and the kanji twice, and then later I go into Anki and type the story in. This makes me have really good retention but it's kind of a boring pain in the ass doing all of that. But if I don't do it my retention rate will drop and it will become even more discouraging.

I used to balk at people who quit around this number because the bulk of it is behind you but...I kind of get it now.

There were plenty of days where I didn't study any new cards. I think as long as you keep up the reviews it isn't a problem. It wasn't until the last 200 or so that I was studying new ones every day, and it was a struggle. So keep a pace that is ok for you, that will keep you doing it. Ganbatte.

Desperately needing some encouragement here. Until today, I hadn't done kanji reviews for several months - I think I burned myself out, learning too many too fast, and I HATED the review process. I knew I would have an enormous pile of reviews waiting for me when I decided to start again - and lo and behold, I log in today to 800+ expired cards. I plow through the first 100, and am extremely discouraged by a retention rate of 37%. I know most of you will say this is my own fault for not keeping up reviews, and it is, but at the same time I'm thinking, isn't the point of RtK to retain the kanji and their meanings over the long term? I can't do kanji reviews every day of my waking life - there has to come a point when I just know them. Many kanji I do know like that - and it's because I've used them daily, written them a lot, seen them a lot. However, ones I've just learned from RtK... they don't stick. And I don't know how to make them.

Sorry for the long post, but I'm seriously contemplating another way of learning kanji. I just don't know if this method is working for me. Problem is, I don't know of any other way...

I was in exactly the same position as you, about 2 days ago. And I had 800+ cards in the FAILED stack after I reviewed all the expired ones.

Go through that failed stack at your own pace. Eat at it. I've beat it down to 189, and now my old "friends" have come back to haunt me - kanji like "thick" and "accustomed" and "dreadful", ones which refused to stick the first time around, and aren't sticking this time around, but you know what, with enough tweaking eventually even the worst will stick. All it takes is time.

julz6453 Wrote:Desperately needing some encouragement here. Until today, I hadn't done kanji reviews for several months - I think I burned myself out, learning too many too fast, and I HATED the review process. I knew I would have an enormous pile of reviews waiting for me when I decided to start again - and lo and behold, I log in today to 800+ expired cards. I plow through the first 100, and am extremely discouraged by a retention rate of 37%. I know most of you will say this is my own fault for not keeping up reviews, and it is, but at the same time I'm thinking, isn't the point of RtK to retain the kanji and their meanings over the long term? I can't do kanji reviews every day of my waking life - there has to come a point when I just know them. Many kanji I do know like that - and it's because I've used them daily, written them a lot, seen them a lot. However, ones I've just learned from RtK... they don't stick. And I don't know how to make them.

Sorry for the long post, but I'm seriously contemplating another way of learning kanji. I just don't know if this method is working for me. Problem is, I don't know of any other way...

Just time-box a certain amount of time per day and slowly chip away at your reviews. Also to keep the motivation high, I never have my FAILED stack go higher than 10 cards because that stack is the one that sucks the most time out you ^^.

As for your retention rate, just let the SRS do its job because It will get better.

julz6453, I wonder how mature your cards were when you stopped reviewing for several months. Cards not in higher stacks are likely to be forgotten quite easily. I recall Nestor posting a link to research showing that relearning forgotten things is easier than learning new information. I've certainly found that to be the case. So if can find the time to resume daily reviews, and chip away at the failed stack as vinniram and wulfgar suggest, the pass rate should creep back up again.

You spoke of possible burnout. Personally, I only did 20-30 new cards/day and some days did no new cards but always tried to keep up the daily reviews. My retention rate averaged 70-90% but if I was tired it could drop to below 60% - that was with daily reviews so a score of 37% are several months gap sounds pretty respectable to me!

You mention not wanting to do kanji reviews everyday of your waking life. You're right. Some posters have described RTK/RevTk as a process to allow you to simultaneously juggle several thousand kanji in the air at the same time - compared to English where you have only 52 letters to recognise (upper and lower case). Look on it as a kind of holding pattern to keep all those characters in your memory. Ultimately the real retention and familiarity with the kanji comes with repeated exposure to them through reading input. Doing RTK and keeping on top of the reviews will make the process of reading Japanese much easier and more enjoyable.

I finished RTK1+3 about a month ago and so haven't been adding any new cards since then. When I first finished I had over a hundred reviews each day. It has now fallen to about 60 with a retention of around 90%. I don't know what it will finally bottom out at but after a few months it's not going to be taking up much of my time. As cards move into higher stacks and you begin to encounter them in the wild,the stories begin to fall away and recogising or reproducing the kanji gradually becomes automatic. Think of RTK like a temporary crutch or stabiliser wheels. Ultimately, if you do enough reading I imagine you could stop reviews altogether.

Judging from the size of your failed stack you must have reached somewhere around the halfway point of RTK1. It would be a shame not to see it through. It still a lot of work but I can't think of a better way either.

がんばれ！