Just wanted to know what people think about these 2 approaches.

1) [SLOW]Do 25 kanji a day everyday. Study 25 new kanji at night. In the morning, review the 25 kanji learned the night before. Kanji reviews are done everyday. Do this until you finish the book. Start reading books/manga/etc when you're done. Do failed kanji only on the weekends.

2)[QUICK] Rush through the book very quickly. Think about the first thing that comes to your mind when you see a keyword. If a good story comes up to your head within the first minute write it down and move on. If not, find a story from someone else that you find funny/useful/interesting. Do 100 kanji a day with no reviews until you finish the book. When you're done, you have 2042 good stories. From then on, Quiz yourself on 50 random kanji via SRS every morning from Monday- Friday. Don't study any failed kanji during these quizzes. On the weekend, go over the failed kanji (from the 250 kanji you studied that week). Do this every week. Meanwhile read books,manga, etc, as time permits.

The SLOW method is basically you methodically learn everything at a slow even pace. You learn less kanji per day, but you learn them better since you spend more time on each one.

The QUICK method first emphasizes building the list of stories as quickly as possible. Learning the kanji isn't important until you have good stories for the complete set of kanji. From them on, you use those stories as a reference and start to really study the kanji. 250 kanji/week amounts to 1000 kanji/month. So you'll be reviewing half of the kanji in the book(at random) every month for as long as it takes to get better. It has the advantage of requiring less effort during the work week, since you're only reviewing 50 flashcards a day. Studying failed cards are for the weekend.

LOL, I'd call that "fast" and "faster," since I couldn't possibly keep up with either.

Same here

Check out the threads "100 Kanji A Day Project -- the report." and ""Quick and dirty" method?".

It's doable.

My personal belief is that the second one requires significantly less effort.

I did the first 800 at 50/day and the second 1200 at 100/day. The second way was significantly easier and less stressful, and I was adding them to anki and reviewing at the same time. Partly I was just better at it but I think mostly a) you don't break your kanji learning groove b) you feel your progress every day and c) you don't spend more time on the easy ones than is absolutely necessary.

So yeah, the second one I think. But if you weren't doing any reviews you could reasonably do more than 100 a day. 150 maybe. Otherwise after 20 days I think you would definitely have forgotten a large percentage of the early ones.

Actually I should add d) you start reading real Japanese faster. I remember constantly failing 頑 and 題 which are two of the most common kanji in existence and now I couldn't forget them if I tried.

I've been doing the "FAST" approach, but one difference:

I have split the book into 4 parts (with the help of calculating 2042 / 4 calculation).

So I make up approx 500 stories, then quiz myself on them all. But as one will soon find, you have forgotten all the stories. Because of this, what I do is try (out of the 500 chunk) to do approx 40 or 50. I usually fail about 95% of those. Then, I REDO those ones I failed ( http://kanji.koohii.com/review/review.ph...ed=1&box=1 ), and I find I can remember after doing this. Then I move on, until the 500 kanji chunk is done. This usually takes me a couple of weeks as I work fulltime so I can't devote more than 3 hours to this a day. Then I start over again with the next 500 kanji chunk. I'm up to 1530 right now and currently reviewing. 1530 is (according to me), the mark of the end of the 3rd quarter of the entire book.

I'd like to think I'm doing it the "quick way," although some days I only get like 10-20 new ones done. Now that winter break is here though, I'll be doing a lot more per day. Basically, I just add the new Kanji and spend a few seconds creating a story (or finding one) and writing it once or twice. After that, the Kanji is officially "in the system." I end up failing a lot (almost all) of them at first, but they always "move on" eventually. It's smooth sailing from there. As long as you're honest with your reviews and you don't get irritated by high failure rates, they all end up sticking eventually. Although this varies A LOT because of the spastic rate at which I learn new Kanji, I'm typically 200-ish Kanji ahead in adding new Kanji from the point at which I'm really comfortable with the Kanji. Okay, that explanation sucked. Basically, if I have 700 Kanji officially "in the system," I'm really only reasonably/reliably "comfortable" with the first 500. For me, the quick and dirty way creates that 200 Kanji gap.

Oh yeah, I know this is a bit of a deviation from the quick and dirty method, but I don't let the failed box build up. EVER. I don't know why people do that. To me it just seems a bit baka...

At no point did I ever feel like the amount of Kanji I worked on per day hampered my ability to recall stories (as long as they were all crafted with the same amount of detail). That's the power of your imaginative memory at work.

I'd say the best way is this: Set an amount of kanji to be your "low water mark". Then decide on a system for reviewing them as review is the most important part of this process, I think.

Always do your reviews, always meet your low water mark goal, then do as many extras as you can find the time to do while being mindful of the need to review those kanji in the future.

If you set your mark around 25 Kanji a day, while being willing to go over this limit, this'll put you at about 2-3 hours of study work a day spread throughout the day and you'll complete Heisig in around 2 months. I suggest doing all of your "adding" Kanji in one big lump, though, as you become very inefficient if you spread it throughout the day.

As far as stories go, I've found no real difference between ones I've created and good ones picked from this site (probably, to be honest, advantage goes to this site. heh) Being creative usually takes time, time which is better spent learning more Kanji. Though also, after the initial story my mind often runs away with it through the course of the reviews and they usually undergo some changes.

After that, keep up your reviews to help you retain the knowledge and begin reading.

ALWAYS keep up on those reviews. I'd go a day or so on occasion without reviews and I could REALLY feel the difficulty in recalling stories creep in. Heisig's method builds and the key to successful SRS'ing is following a steady pattern. Consistency wins the day here.

So.. I vote for the "CONSISTENT" and "FAIRLY SPEEDY" approach. Sorry for not following your guidelines

EDIT: I also really don't like the "failed box" on this site.. it seems just an excuse to avoid Kanji you're having trouble with. I like how other SRSs just lump them together and (at least, Anki) gives you the option of hiding intervals. It keeps you away from choosing to avoid Kanji as they'll all get thrown back at you.

Chamcham, I'm just joking with you but, you've been registered over 3 years so I hope you didn't spend 3 years planning which will be better: finishing in 3 months or in 20 days.

not a problem, vosmiura. I read that other comment before it was edited.
no hard feelings.

Like many people, Heisig has happened off an on. Study for a few months, only to give up and start over. I've restarted countless times. If it helps at all, today I FINALLY finished RTK1 for the second time today(about 2 minutes ago).

I chose the quick method and will see what happens.

I do ultra slow then
But i did do ~100 once. It was kinda like chucking flour in a sift then letting most things come out, then continually re-sifting until i got all 100 down pat.

I think your fast approach sound a bit odd... You're basically saying that the slow approach is to do it properly, the fast approach is to add too much and then do too few reviews each day. If you have 200 reviews for that day but have decided to only do 50 each day, you will mess up the SPACE part of SPACED repetition system. Anki tells you to review cards when you need to review them, if you don't because you've already reached your limit, you will wait too long and risk forgetting them.

My guess is that the fast method will take just as long as the slow method because of the massive failing you will do in the start.

Here's how I would do a speed method: Early in the day (before 16:00) make sure you add 20 kanji (or more if you want even more speed). At 20:00, review those 20 from the blue pile and add learn 20 new kanji (or more). At morning the next day, review those kanji from the blue pile.

This basically means you do twice the amount of kanji everyday. The effort might be double, but it doesn't feel even close to as bad as adding 40-60 cards in one go and then review ALL of it from the blue pile the next day. If you add 50 new kanji a day or more, you should be finished with the book so fast that reviews won't have time to build up.

The ONLY negative part of my fast approach is that it's sorta hard to combine with fulltime work because you need time early in the day to add and review kanji.

In my opinion its what ever you feel comfortable with i really dont see why some people say it takes ages to do 25-50 a day etc, i averaged 25 a day when i was doing them some days up to 60 and they never took any longer than hour and half to make up a story add the story to RevTK and then review it the only time it took longer is when i did something stupid like sit in front of the TV while trying to do them having distractions litteraly triples the time for me, my advice to anybody that finds it hard to do 25 in a day is to try it without any distractions you will soon see how quick and easy it is to do 25 or more every day.

Like at the moment i still get over 100 reviews each day aswell as 20-40 failed pile daily but on average without distractions take me less than an hour.

So from my personal experiance its just as easy to remember 60 in a day as it is to remember 10 and with not much more effort its just the keeping focus thats difficult when doing more.

tibul Wrote:In my opinion its what ever you feel comfortable with i really dont see why some people say it takes ages to do 25-50 a day etc, i averaged 25 a day when i was doing them some days up to 60 and they never took any longer than hour and half to make up a story add the story to RevTK and then review it the only time it took longer is when i did something stupid like sit in front of the TV while trying to do them having distractions litteraly triples the time for me, my advice to anybody that finds it hard to do 25 in a day is to try it without any distractions you will soon see how quick and easy it is to do 25 or more every day.

Like at the moment i still get over 100 reviews each day aswell as 20-40 failed pile daily but on average without distractions take me less than an hour.

So from my personal experiance its just as easy to remember 60 in a day as it is to remember 10 and with not much more effort its just the keeping focus thats difficult when doing more.

I don't know if I can agree with you on that. I've completed RtK and I never had more than 10 cards in the failed pile. Besides, learning new kanji for 1½h every day will by many be considered a lot of time, distractions or not.

Tobberoth Wrote:I don't know if I can agree with you on that. I've completed RtK and I never had more than 10 cards in the failed pile. Besides, learning new kanji for 1½h every day will by many be considered a lot of time, distractions or not.

The larger failed pile is more than likely down to my bad memory/bad storys at work, well the hour and a half is more of a rough estimate on how long it took for me to do more than my average of 25.

I suggest you to follow a slow one, because most people I've seen that "finished" the book "fast" had around 700 kanji on their failed list, which is pretty horrible.

Unless you have a reason to finish the book fast, you don't lose anything by taking five months to learn it, instead of two, and the kanji will stick much better that way.

When I did it, I averaged about 21 a day or so. It took enough time each to upset my other half, put it that way.

Reviews take a significant share of the whole learning time, and whether you add new kanji slowly or quickly the review workload will be the same (in time spent), or perhaps longer if you are trying to go too quickly and forgetting a lot.

If you finish very quickly, you'll still be busy doing loads of daily reviews for months. If you finish a little slower, you'll have less daily reviews after.

I'm doing the "slow" method, except with 100 kanji per day. I'm currently on frame 426.

I did both fast and slow methods - the first half of the book at about 20/day, and the last half in a sprint over about 10 days, or about 100/day, when I had Christmas vacations.

Both methods work, but if you are to keep up with your reviews, as you should, going quickly not only requires a lot of time to memorize, it also means your reviews come fast and furious for the next couple of months, especially if you are getting a lot of fails.

I didn't find that learning faster or slower changed the quality of the stories, or how well I remembered them - learning faster did, however, mean I was reviewing more intensely for a month or two after finishing.

Tobberoth Wrote:

tibul Wrote:...

I don't know if I can agree with you on that. I've completed RtK and I never had more than 10 cards in the failed pile. Besides, learning new kanji for 1½h every day will by many be considered a lot of time, distractions or not.

I did it at fifty a day and maintained about an 85% daily retention throughout the whole time. I also found that it there weren't any limits to how many I could do in a single day. Basically what I did was I sat down everyday and did fifty over a set period of time. Then I did my reviews (I used Anki) throughout the rest of the day and the kanji I added were mixed in with my reviews. This meant that my failed cards would come up every 10 minutes. If I recall correctly, I had around 75% retention on newly added cards.

Basically, as long as I did my reviews I never had to worry about failed kanji because they would eventually be taken care of.