I started doing 50 a day and I was really pleased with myself but then I realised I really couldn't keep up. Sure, it was easy enough doing the 50 but the reviews... I'm struggling so hard to get through them. My aim was to get it mostly done before I start college (10th September) but I don't think I can do it.

One problem I'm having is that it's now extremely, extremely boring and tedious. Whereas before, it was slightly fun. I would like to know what's a good number a day to aim around. Some days I may be able to do more, but I'm not going to as I cannot handle the massive, massive reviews. I've been doing nothing but reviewing for the past few days and have been barely managing to get through that. Heisig is incredibly boring to me in comparison to actually studying Japanese grammar etc but I'd rather get it done first and I wouldn't be able to handle both at the same time. I don't know.

I'm finding it really hard to timebalance, also. I'm involved in quite a big project with friends and this means I have to learn some C and SDL to help out and I'm doing almost all of the artwork.

I finished at fifty a day. About halfway my reviews got up to around 200-250 a day. It's insane, but worth it if you finish fast. All I can say is, make a schedule and keep to it. I would wake up everyday, go swimming, eat breakfast/review, and get started at 11:30 on the dot. This let me get a good amount of reviewing done before I started learning. If I wasn't done by 2:30ish, I stopped.

Ouch. I'm not sure if I could manage that. My schedule currently:

1. Get up, 9AM latest
2. Watch an episode of something easy in Japanese whilst eating breakfast
3. Get dressed and clear all your reviews
4. Do Japanese stuff (studying, playing games, etc) until 12ish/1ish
5. Do whatever else you need to do
6. Learn 50 new at 5PM
7. Do whatever.

and this changed to just reviewing and the one at night if I'm going out. But I'm having trouble sticking to it and I feel really, really worn out and am having trouble finishing. Learning 50 new takes me over 2 hours. Reviewing in the morning can only leave me with an hour left for general Japanese things! It's madness.

AdamLeliel Wrote:Ouch. I'm not sure if I could manage that. My schedule currently:

1. Get up, 9AM latest
2. Watch an episode of something easy in Japanese whilst eating breakfast
3. Get dressed and clear all your reviews
4. Do Japanese stuff (studying, playing games, etc) until 12ish/1ish
5. Do whatever else you need to do
6. Learn 50 new at 5PM
7. Do whatever.

and this changed to just reviewing and the one at night if I'm going out. But I'm having trouble sticking to it and I feel really, really worn out and am having trouble finishing. Learning 50 new takes me over 2 hours. Reviewing in the morning can only leave me with an hour left for general Japanese things! It's madness.

I guess that is why most people suggest that you only concentrate on RtK1 and NOTHING else until you've finished it.

Seriously, do 20 a day and no more, you can through them in half an hour at most and they'll be fresh in your head, also try and do them just before going to sleep that way your mind processes them during the night.

Every have a dream about the last thing you were thinking about before you fell asleep? Take advantage of that.

As for doing 50 a day, I did that and failed, I collapsed under the pressure so very close to the end, I got up to 1860 and just had to stop and restart. Some may be able to do it but I would advise against it, this isn't a race.

I did my reviews first thing in the morning. Nothing and nobody to distract you. And I did have 200-300 reviews.

I didn't worry about trying to get through a set number every day after I was past the first week. I just didn't have it in me. I ended up just spending every day from lunchtime to dinner doing as much as possible, giving reviews higher priority than learning new material, and taking breaks whenever the sight of kanji started to annoy me. So, depending on how many cards I had to review, I added anywhere from 0 to 200 cards each day. It probably wasn't the most efficient way to finish, but it kept me from going too fast and pushing myself to burnout or going too slow and quitting because I felt like I wasn't making any progress.

Call it the "do whatever feels good, so long as what feels good is kanji" method or something, since it seems that everything anybody does is getting turned into a method these days.

Mcjon01 Wrote:"do whatever feels good, so long as what feels good is kanji"

Ditto.

If making too many reviews makes you feel bad about learning Japanese, then change your strategy. Remember, your goal is learning Japanese, this is not the SRS version of the Olympic Games, so you don't need to run the SRS marathon, do you?

I would advise you to change your daily quota from "X number of repetitions" to "X time/day". That way, you will always keep control of your schedule. Besides, with a fixed time to spend daily, probably you will improve your efficiency as a "side effect" even if you don't intend to.

Another little tip would be listening to music while making your reviews, specially something without lyrics. It has helped me at least, the lyrics distract me, but music makes me feel better and gives me the stamina I need sometimes.

頑張れ！

For me the only good amount to review each day is "all of it". Having an empty expired stack is good motivation, while leaving cards in the empty/failed stack was always discouraging (especially since it keeps growing unless you clear it out). For many people the growing failed/expired stack becomes so daunting that they eventually stop reviewing.

As for how many I added, I tried to do one chapter per day, regardless of length. Towards the end I had more free time and more drive to finish, so I tended to do 100-150 kanji per day.

It may be a bit extreme, but if you have lots of money

Cradlepoint PHS300 Router ($170)
Sprint EVDO service ($60/month)
Apple Ipod Touch ($200-$300)

With Sprint EVDO, you have internet access wherever you can use your
cell phone(which basically means everywhere).

The Cradlepoint PHS300 is a portable EVDO router with a rechargeable battery
that lasts 90 minutes. It converts EVDO into wireless internet. The battery is great for internet access while riding inside a bus, car, or anywhere that doesn't have an electrical outlet. Btw, there's even an optional car adapter. It's like carrying around your own personal wireless access point.

The Apple Ipod touch works with wireless internet and the multi-touch interface is especially great for reviewing flashcards from this site.

With those 3 items, you can review kanji cards anywhere on the go.

I find myself review cards during:
bathroom breaks
waiting for the bus
riding on the bus
lunch break
any cafe
while out on a leisurely walk
library
...basically anywhere you can imagine.

And the great part, is that these short little review
sessions add up to a lot of kanji each day.

It's expensive, but I find it allows me to review cards anytime and anywhere.
For typing my stories, I purchased an Acer Aspire One mini-laptop, installed Ubuntu, Anki. I also installed Comix(http://comix.sourceforge.net) for reading raw Japanese manga...... :-p


Anyway, Good luck with your studies.

chamcham Wrote:It may be a bit extreme, but if you have lots of money
Cradlepoint PHS300 Router ($170)
Sprint EVDO service ($60/month)
Apple Ipod Touch ($200-$300)

...anki ($0)

Just doing it, 0$.

I wasn't doing 50 kanji a day, but I almost cracked under all the reviews as well. It didn't start to get *really* bad on me until right up at the end though. I think I did around 400 reviews the day after I finished. Even now close to 2 months after finishing, I'm still seeing 50-80 reviews a day, which I'm really really hoping will start to drop some more soon. I'll get a few days of 50 or 60 reviews, and then it comes back with another 80 day.

I did manage to make it through though. Towards the end, I started watching movies during my reviews. I would watch about 3-5 minutes of movie, then go through about 10 cards, then watch a couple more minutes. This made the reviews take much much longer to complete, but it wasn't so tedious. Clearing 10 reviews is a simple task, so it doesn't feel as overwhelming I guess.

Actually, chamcham has a good point. If you're going to be serious about reviewing after you're finished with RTK, and you use Anki, the iPhone or other cell phones are great if you are somewhere where you have an all-you-can-eat data plan.

The keitai version of Anki through the server works really well with the iPhone's version of Safari. The basic interface is pretty fast, considering. (I hear that he's working on speeding up the server side.) So yeah, I can pretty much review anywhere, and I don't have any more excuses not to review. (Talking about sentences here. Doing RTK takes less than 20 minutes a day for me now.) 2G is a little slow, but it's more productive than solitaire.

On a slightly unrelated note, how about sentences? Anybody have huge review stacks for sentences? How many do you add a day? My theory is that sentences tend to be easier to remember, and are thus spaced back faster.

alyks Wrote:On a slightly unrelated note, how about sentences? Anybody have huge review stacks for sentences? How many do you add a day? My theory is that sentences tend to be easier to remember, and are thus spaced back faster.

I had 200 sentences built up in my due stack recently. Reason was I took ALL of my 450 UBJG sentences (ch1 and ch2), converted them to audio, and put them all in the rotation (30 to 60 day spread). They began popping up last week at 20 to 30 a day.

Anyway, took about 5 hours to go through them all I think. Still, that's good as now I'm caught up and can start adding my new sentences.

With reviewing, you have to know what time you have. You have to break up the review times also (1 hour chunks, or even 30 min chunks) with rest in between.

Just take the rule of thumb that every 10 to 15 cards added a day will take an hour of time if you include review of old cards, and studying of new ones. If you only have 2 hours a day, don't add more than 20 to 30 new cards a day to keep the workload balanced.

That's an interesting rule. One thing I found helped was using RLC plugin for anki, letting me put new cards in with my normal review. It let me add new material as I wanted, and motivated me to review my due cards.

2 days ago I put in the remainder of the JFE sentences (64 in one go)... Now my sentence reviews are usually around 80~90 sentences... Which takes me, about 20 minutes. (I read it, if I understand it and can pronounce is (I read it out loud) it's ok. No writing down, I use a different (kana-kanji) deck for that.)

It really surprised me how fast I can read it, say it out loud and understand it (most of it). I'm pretty harsh with failing though, any doubt? Just fail it *shrugs* No problem. The first time I had to do a review session of 92 cards I was overwhelmed, but I set my alarm at 20 minutes (thinking that if I didn't finish it by then, I'd just do another session later that day) but... I did finish it. (I have to say, I'm a fast reading in English and Dutch... And while my Japanese reading is still *very* slow compared to that... )

The kana-kanji cards always take ages though (15 minutes for 10-ish sentences). But it's worth it I guess.

Anyway, I usually did between 20~40 new cards a day (reading deck) and 5~10 new cards for the writing deck.

It's all a matter of how much time you have, how fast you can go through the cards (while still actually reading it) and what's practical for you. (I only work 4 hours a day when I have to work (4~6 days a week)... so I do have quite a bit of time to spend on Japanese.)

chamcham Wrote:It may be a bit extreme, but if you have lots of money

Cradlepoint PHS300 Router ($170)
Sprint EVDO service ($60/month)
Apple Ipod Touch ($200-$300)

Ouch, ouch, ouch. No, I really don't have that sort of money. Thank you anyway.

Thank you for all of the replies! I'm probably going to slow down to about 20 a day once my reviews have settled a bit, but I won't stick to 20-- I'll just do more or less depending. I'll carry on with my fixed times a day.

meolox Wrote:also try and do them just before going to sleep that way your mind processes them during the night.

I used to do this. But I've read somewhere that you are actually less likely to remember it if you do it right before bed. Even less if you are tired. There should be a spaced amount of time before doing it and sleeping. So I read.

AdamLeliel Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:It may be a bit extreme, but if you have lots of money

Cradlepoint PHS300 Router ($170)
Sprint EVDO service ($60/month)
Apple Ipod Touch ($200-$300)

Ouch, ouch, ouch. No, I really don't have that sort of money. Thank you anyway.

Thank you for all of the replies! I'm probably going to slow down to about 20 a day once my reviews have settled a bit, but I won't stick to 20-- I'll just do more or less depending. I'll carry on with my fixed times a day.

You could also try adding 75-100 every other day, and reviewing 25-35 a day. So long as you stick with a schedule it shouldn't be too hard to keep up with.

This is kind of a non-question as the most pertinent factor is how much time you have each day, of course each day you may have different amounts of time. Do as much as you can manage, if it feels too much then do less next time, or push harder if you feel strong. RTK is finite so it's just a matter of finishing it sooner or later. When you start to do the unending journey of sentences, then you might want to think about scheduling, but even then just do what you can.

you know all the functions of this website work on the iphone's browser. I dont use anki for RtK atm so on the train i just log on to this website and do whatever i would do as if it were my laptop or pc.

p.s. i just had a 652kanji review today lol. I stopped reviewing for one whole week due to lazyness/obon holiday i actually finished with a 72% recall rate..better than i thought but u don't wanna see my failed stack now lol..sigh.