Ok, so I'm doing remembering the kanji, I'm up to around 450. I'm using Anki for flashcards.

When I go through them I seem to get a pass rate of around 50% (old and new cards mixed together). Is there cause to be alarmed?

The one I pass I always seem to be too easy, like I've known them forever. The ones I generally seem to be complete blanks or getting primitives in the wrong place. Just now I had a complete blank something like 10 times in a row for the kanji for 'all'. The problem is the word 'all' conjures up nothing for me. No mental image, no story, there's no 'hook' to link my brain in to the beginning of any story, so it just turns blank. I find Heisigs stories are generally pretty bad for me (totally different assumptions about words, use words in an odd linguistic sort of a way), so I usually make up mental pictures instead.

Is it even worth worrying about this stuff? 50% of 2000 is still 1000, that's a helluva lot.

I think I might try using song lyrics for the more abstract ones, link them in to the singer of the song and then put that singer in my mental picture.

If certain keywords aren't immediatly bringing up mental images, then you should change your story / mental picture.

When I was going through Heisig, I wouldn't look at any story; just the keyworld. Then I would immediately write down the first few thoughts that fire through my brain when I see a certain word.

Song lyrics work wonderfully for me. The first thing I thought of for all right now is the song "All the Small Things" by Blink 182, with Tom's whiney vocals crooning "say it ain't so, I will not go".

Go with what is most natural to your own brain, and don't worry too much about sticking to Heisig's stories.

This is an old topic - please do a search:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2056
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1939
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1941

For your particular case, I highly suggest that you either continue making your own stories (whatever pops to mind immediately when you see a keyword) or use the stories posted by users of this website.

For example, for your troubled keyword all 皆, I use the American detergent All, and I envision a housewife COMPARING sheets to see which one is WHITER. Is it All or Cheer or some other brand? Story courtesy of some kind user of this website.

IMHO, a 50% pass-rate is insufficient - you should slow down and nail down some of those Kanji. I fail any Kanji that takes me longer than 8 or 9 seconds to recall.

I think I'm just gonna try and keep thinking up better stories. Song lyrics for more abstract ones definitely helps. The All one doesn't work because I've never heard of All before.

I'm worried that if I slow down I'll lose momentum and then get sick of the whole thing. Keeping the pace up keeps me motivated.

steelmole Wrote:I think I'm just gonna try and keep thinking up better stories. Song lyrics for more abstract ones definitely helps. The All one doesn't work because I've never heard of All before.

I'm worried that if I slow down I'll lose momentum and then get sick of the whole thing. Keeping the pace up keeps me motivated.

If you have not heard of All detergent, that's fine - what you do is look on the website for other ideas or come up with your own.

Yeah, but rushing it has its own problems:
1. Your review stacks are going to be huge
2. Your retention rate is lower so you will have to spend more time during reviews

You may think you are learning the Kanji now, but they won't go into long-term memory unless you do the reviews - I would say about 1/3 of the work is learning the Kanji - the rest is in reviews.

My suggestion is: don't rush and pay attention to your stories, or it will come back and bite you. Use your pass rate as an indicator of whether you are going too fast or too slow.

You should be motivated by getting them right/not forgetting - not by how many new Kanji you did in one day. Better to ignore those posters that say they've completed Heisig in 2 months...

Well, I finished in 3 months, but for sure it could be done faster. My public opinion in this forum is that the faster, the better. If you manage to learn the 2000 kanji in a month. Perfect. It means you'll have less work in the end.

But the work is not over after entering the 2000 kanji. You'll have to keep reviewing them forever (or at least until you can review them some other way, like using real japanese).

I found I had the same problem as you. Once I hit around 500, I would learn some kanji and when it came to the day after when I would do the first review for new kanji I would have forgotten at least 50% of them.

I really think this is down to not spending enough time on the individual kanji. I have noticed, ones where I come up with a really elaborate story which takes several minutes instead of several seconds, this is much more likely to stick.

However don't be put off. If you keep doing the reviews, then you will learn them - even if it takes 10 reviews. Once it's in your memory proper, it's a lot easier to recall. Best of luck.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Well, I finished in 3 months, but for sure it could be done faster.

It can also be done slower :-) I've just finished putting in new cards and am aiming to get the last 150 cards out of my 'failed' pile before the one-year mark rolls around in late January.

(Not that I'm recommending going that slowly -- events intervened back in August/Septemberish and I did very little RTK for ages, and then I had a huge backlog to clear, is my excuse. But I thought it worth saying that RTK is worth doing and persevering with even if you can't seem to do it at the kind of rate that would let you complete it in three months.)

Embrace the low pass rates. The lower the better. Seriously. If I look back on the kanji I was reviewing/learning 2 months ago, the ones I was constantly failing, etc. are the ones that are the best in my mind now. That's probably because I just saw those more. The more you fail 'em, the more you see 'em. Just be honest to the SRS, and, at some point, you'll thank the SRS for ingraining them in your brain. Besides, you can just get all of it done as fast as you can, even if all the stories suck and you're failing a lot, and then worry about actually learning them all well after you've got all the kanji in the system at the end of RTK. You have forever to actually learn the kanji after they're in the system (you know?).

Personally I like to feel like I know a set of kanji pretty well before I put them into my Anki deck; but this is because I find it fairly depressing to get a high fail rate on a new bunch of kanji which I have told myself that I know.

I like to use handwritten flashcards for the learning process; so I have a stack of maybe 30-50 kanji for the day, then I go for a walk and flick through each one in my pocket trying to make a story up, once I'm happy with a story I move on to the next. Honestly, once you get into the habit of making up your own stories isn't really any harder than using other people's, maybe it makes the process more fun. After going through the flashcards once, I go through them again to solidify my stories and then if I have time I go though a third time; the third time is usually very fast, because by then the stories are fairly well cemented. If I do this I find that my first review pass percentage is generally pretty high (90%+); if I sit and grind out stories in front of my computer, then it is lower (more like 75% - 80%).

Occasionally I come across a kanji that I find a total swine, 皆 for example was definitely one of those, in which case I usually look on this site for a story; for 皆 there was nothing that worked for me so I had to work with the first thought that came into my head, which I thought I could rely on to come back to me each time I heard "all," this was "all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put humpty together again." I then visualised the kanji as humpty sitting on a white wall and some evil guy behind him pushing him off. That eventually stuck, but along with particularly = 殊 I think that was one of the hardest kanji for me so far.

As igordesu says, to some extent, if you are using an SRS then it doesn't matter if you are failing young cards, but if it takes 10 goes to get most of them right, then the review process will be a fairly depressing affair (と思う). My personal opinion is that it is best to learn them well before you put them into the deck, rather than expecting your SRS to magically make you remember them, because although Anki is great, it isn't that great.

I agree that it's best to have your stories solidified before they get into the SRS, but a lot of times it's hard to actually know which stories are going to give you trouble. For instance, there's a lot of stories that seem during the initial learning to be great, but which slip my mind during review.

Even you have low review rates, I think it's important to keep adding at least some new kanji (even if it's far below what you had hoped to do that day). Don't let the low pass rate kick you down. Instead, see the stories you're failing as opportunities to learn how your memory works and profit from it immediately with the new kanji you are going to learn. I have 75 failed kanji that I need to review, but once I'm done going over them, I plan on learning a lesson's worth of kanji. As long as I'm moving forward, the effort will pay off.

TheSlakey Wrote:I agree that it's best to have your stories solidified before they get into the SRS, but a lot of times it's hard to actually know which stories are going to give you trouble. For instance, there's a lot of stories that seem during the initial learning to be great, but which slip my mind during review.

Even you have low review rates, I think it's important to keep adding at least some new kanji (even if it's far below what you had hoped to do that day). Don't let the low pass rate kick you down. Instead, see the stories you're failing as opportunities to learn how your memory works and profit from it immediately with the new kanji you are going to learn. I have 75 failed kanji that I need to review, but once I'm done going over them, I plan on learning a lesson's worth of kanji. As long as I'm moving forward, the effort will pay off.

Yeah, it is definitely important to keep up the momentum, I completely agree that it is better to be failing older kanji but still learning new ones than it is to decide to not learn anything new and solidify what you already know. As I remember reading somewhere else on this forum; it is almost always easier to relearn a kanji than to learn it from scratch.

I suppose the point of what I was saying is that perhaps your current study style might not suit you that well, and if you changed it then for the same amount of time spent on the task, you might be able to get better results. Even something like varying the time of day, or the place might help a lot. And don't be afraid to deviate from Heisig's stories, or even change the names of some of the primitives; personally I like to give some of them characters, that way I can put them in scenes.

I totally agree with you bandwidth! Even as you continue on, it's important to look at how you're studying and adjust it to try and increase your pass percentage. I tried for a hundred a day all this week to finish off the book before New Years and didn't get there (1827 and counting!), but I learned a lot about what kinds of stories work for me and what stories just won't stick at all. Everyone learns differently, but if you give yourself a chance you will find a system that works for you.

Hi, maybe you need a bit more motivation for doing your mnemonics better.

Try watching this video!

TheSlakey Wrote:I totally agree with you bandwidth! Even as you continue on, it's important to look at how you're studying and adjust it to try and increase your pass percentage. I tried for a hundred a day all this week to finish off the book before New Years and didn't get there (1827 and counting!), but I learned a lot about what kinds of stories work for me and what stories just won't stick at all. Everyone learns differently, but if you give yourself a chance you will find a system that works for you.

100 a day is really steaming it! I've managed it once, but it really fries my brain. Personally I think that 50 kanji well learned is a great day and for me it is just about sustainable from one day to the next. My biggest problem is getting drunk then not being able to do anything the next day.

がんばって with the final push!

Ok, so I've refined my technique a little bit.

When a word pops up in anki I either write the kanji (great! mental high five!) or if I draw a blank on a kanji, think of a location the word seems to bring about for me. Then I look at the kanji in anki and put the primitives in that location. Also, I've changed some primitives to be a bit more object like, but basically the same thing. Somtimes the object isn't really related to the keyword, but I don't think that matters a whole lot. I make up my own location-stories for everything now. I find that I can often use the location to help arrange the primitives too.

It's early days yet. For the last few days I haven't added any more kanji, but today I will, even if it's just one or two.

I've used mnemonics quite a bit before (linking, loci, pegs for numbers) but I just find Heisigs linking of abstract words to primitives too easy to miss. What if I remember 'transform' instead of 'turn into' when describing a story in my head? Perhaps this works for him and not me. Credit where credit's due for sorting out all the primitives and kanji into a good order to learn.

Sounds like you are making really good progress. Probably the most important step in dealing with RtK is breaking free of the constraints that Heisig puts on you when you start (I don't thing he meant to write a rigid and dogmatic book, that is just the way people perceive it now). When you start to say to yourself "hang on a minute, the name of that primitive is awful," or "are you sure that is the right way to look at this kanji?" (I'm not saying that you should do that all the time, but don't be afraid to question things). Then you really starting to get somewhere. Good luck!

"Transform" instead of "turn into" is fine.

If you have problem with some keyword, use a dictionary and find another keyword for yourself.

samesong Wrote:If certain keywords aren't immediatly bringing up mental images, then you should change your story / mental picture.

When I was going through Heisig, I wouldn't look at any story; just the keyworld. Then I would immediately write down the first few thoughts that fire through my brain when I see a certain word.

Song lyrics work wonderfully for me. The first thing I thought of for all right now is the song "All the Small Things" by Blink 182, with Tom's whiney vocals crooning "say it ain't so, I will not go".

Go with what is most natural to your own brain, and don't worry too much about sticking to Heisig's stories.

This advice here totally saved my life. I'm at 400 and have had 100 in my failed deck. And I only move things out of my failed deck if I can remember them. This is a huge bucket of time, going through not remembering, then going through the next day. So I've changed my stories. I look at the English word first and the first thing that's in my head I write down. Then I weave a story of the elements around that. My pass rate is way up and now the only things I'm not passing on for the most part are placement issues.

I have lots of weird stories now, but they're great for remembering. Thanks!