Tobberoth Wrote:What you're doing is called rote memorization. It's not a good idea because it will take you a LOT more time than a structured approach using stories/word play/other mnemonics.

Well the whole point in doint RTK1 is not remembering the story or even the keyword but just the kanji itself and thats exactly what I'm doing Also I do use mnemonics just not in the form of stories (well sometimes you could call them stories like seven swords/samurai for cut) but whatever works for me in that particular kanji.

Tobberoth Wrote:You might be able to finish the book at that pace, but the reviews will kill you.

Also, remember that each time you fail a kanji or press "hard", you increase the difficulty of that kanji, meaning it will show up more often. With decreased intervals, that amount of kanji and rote memorization (which means you will fail a lot), you will get an insanely high amount of reviews compared to a "normal user".

Why would they kill me? I extend the lenght on those that I know well and review only those that seem to cause trouble. How it would be any different if I used the stories or learn kanji first and then "review" in SRS?

Of course I could be wrong about it and fail miserably but thats for me to find out

Tzadeck Wrote:I don't think it'll work nearly as quickly as with stories, but I'm pretty interested to see the results. How far can an SRS go on its own with just kanji and keywords?

My random guess is that it will be pretty doable for about 700 kanji and then get increasingly difficult, only to become almost impossible around 1300.

I'm curious about it too

thurd Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:What you're doing is called rote memorization. It's not a good idea because it will take you a LOT more time than a structured approach using stories/word play/other mnemonics.

Well the whole point in doint RTK1 is not remembering the story or even the keyword but just the kanji itself and thats exactly what I'm doing

Sure you are, but so are people using stories. The stories are tools to let you remember the kanji without overexposing to it (overexposure = exposure, only with more time wasted). Just because the point is to remember a kanji doesn't make it better to remember a kanji without a story, especially when it takes less time than the other options.

thurd Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:You might be able to finish the book at that pace, but the reviews will kill you.

Also, remember that each time you fail a kanji or press "hard", you increase the difficulty of that kanji, meaning it will show up more often. With decreased intervals, that amount of kanji and rote memorization (which means you will fail a lot), you will get an insanely high amount of reviews compared to a "normal user".

Why would they kill me? I extend the lenght on those that I know well and review only those that seem to cause trouble. How it would be any different if I used the stories or learn kanji first and then "review" in SRS?

Of course I could be wrong about it and fail miserably but thats for me to find out

It will kill you because where a normal user (using stories) gets around 500 reviews each day when going at 100 kanji a day, you'll be failing and extending kanji a LOT more often than such people. Therefor, you will probably get over 800 reviews a day. Add to that fact that you generally just have rote memorization to go by, and you will fail a lot more often simply because of the heavy load (that isn't an issue when you have proper stories since it's much harder to mix up stories than it is to mix up visual memory of kanji shapes). It might be easy now, but you've only added the first few kanji (which are much less complex that the kanji in later chapters) and you only have a few of them.

Not saying you should stop, just warning you that what you're calling "taking a personalized approach" is just ignoring the tools we have at hand and using the old-fashioned way. It might work, but there's no way it's going to be even close to as effective.

Well I think the greatest tool in RTK method isn't the stories but rather the approach, dividing remembering kanji and its reading, order in which they appear, SRS and finally mnemonics.
It shouldn't be a problem if its a story, two/three words describing primitives that make the kanji or a picture/sound in my mind.

It's all rote memorization anyway, you see a keyword associate it with a story which brings up kanji. I just do keyword -> whatever works for me -> kanji...

Either way its cramming kanji into your brain, you're either fine with it or not. We are just being smart about it and thats it.

thurd, we've all been down that path. it's a common failure to make your stories/mnemonics too simple. usually people who do this fail somewhere between frames 300 and 700 (for me it was about frame 450). for you it might be a little longer because at 100/day it will take longer for the kanji to come up again in reviews.

the reason is because simple stories are easier to confuse. you dont notice this when there's only a few dozen or a few hundred kanji. but as you get close to a 1000 kanji you'll notice your fail rate grow incredibly fast.

thurd, we've been down that road before and there's a reason we recommend against it. but you are free to find out on your own, if you so desire.

I think people are being too harsh on thurd. It'd be good for him to do it just as an experiment. Heisig made 2 changes to the process with his book. There's the divide and conquer method for kanji that we all know and love, but then he's also an advocate of SRS. So at a certain level, it's unclear why Heisig is working so well. I think that there definitely could be benefits to the speed of it if you didn't have to make a story for every single kanji.

I'm one of the oddballs like thurd. I don't make a story for every kanji. I only make a story if I notice I'm failing the same card over and over again. So far, I've really only had to make like 5 stories, and I'm up near 900 kanji. My typical correct percentage in reviews is 80%. That's probably lower than a lot of you, but I spend very little time on Heisig every day.

Sure it might take me just a little longer to go through the book, but it's not like I'm moving at a snail's pace. I'm mostly on track to finish in the next 5 weeks, and I've only been at it for around 4 weeks so far.

Now, the thing that makes me a really bad example to use for this method is that this is my 4th attempt at Heisig, and I already know about 1500 kanji outside of Heisig. So I'm already familiar with a lot of the characters. There's also the fact that I'm a much more visual learner. Stories didn't work well for me when I first started Heisig. What did work was using my imagination to create an image for the kanji in my head, and I can usually create that image in a few seconds rather than taking the time to verbalize it by writing it down. I find the mental imagery method to stick a lot better for me, and so that kind of already puts me as an outlier as users of Heisig go.

I think we should see how things go for thurd, and if what you all say is true then he should be coming back in about a week with his tail between his legs. I mean he is doing 100 a day, and a lot of you are saying things are going to explode at around 1000 kanji.

erlog Wrote:There's also the fact that I'm a much more visual learner. Stories didn't work well for me when I first started Heisig. What did work was using my imagination to create an image for the kanji in my head, and I can usually create that image in a few seconds rather than taking the time to verbalize it by writing it down. I find the mental imagery method to stick a lot better for me, and so that kind of already puts me as an outlier as users of Heisig go.

Um, but isn't that exactly what Heisig meant by making stories? Actually I think of myself as 'making stories', but I pretty much find a story I like from the user-contributed ones (usually the top one suffices), make up a picture on that story and then go to the next kanji.
I'm currently doing from 60 to 120 kanji a day, and I'm up to 1000 kanji with retention rates of about 90%.

Just a sec.

Do you create stories or vivid images? Or both? I think I remember the stories better, rather than the images, even though thei're supposed to be the same. I see a keyword and I remember the sentence I made with it.

I usually make a sentence and a vivid image.

Lionel Wrote:Um, but isn't that exactly what Heisig meant by making stories?

The difference between the story and the vivid image is that stories are verbal while vivid images are more visual. When I see the keyword for a kanji that I've made a vivid image for the first thing that pops into my head is a feeling. At no point am I thinking of words. The pieces of the image are what prompts the primitives, and sometimes their placement.

Like for 湖 I see a serene setting of a lake at night with a bright full moon in the sky, lots of pine trees, etc. So when I recall the kanji I never think of the word moon or water. I think of the image in my head, and I draw the kanji from my feelings of that image. Like, in my mental image there's nothing that tells me the lake is old or that it's in olden times besides the fact that there are no people or towns or cities in my image. I just get this feeling that it's old like I do when I'm in a dream. Nobody really tells you the premise of your dreams, your dream starts with you just sort of understanding certain things no matter how wacky they are. My mental images are like that.

Stories on the other hand are a chain of words that lead you to the primitives. I think there's some crossover between the two methods, but they are different. One is verbal while the other is not. I also never write my images down because there's no real need to, and verbalizing it doesn't help me at all. I find that the words really bog down my images, and make them really hard to remember. It leads to confusion over synonyms or ideas. I find myself having to memorize the story so that I can then memorize the kanji.

I just cut out the middle man, and do mental imagery. I probably could do stories if I spent more time on it to make better ones, but mental imagery is just so much easier to come up with.

Sounds and images work better as mnemonics than stories.
Stories take longer to recall, images are instantaneous.

erlog, what you describe is exactly Heisig's stories. A story is not "a chain of words that lead you to the primitives". In fact, Heisig explicitly mentions in the book that if your doing it that way your doing it wrong (see the opening paragraphs of lesson 11).

Tzadeck Wrote:I don't think it'll work nearly as quickly as with stories, but I'm pretty interested to see the results. How far can an SRS go on its own with just kanji and keywords?

My random guess is that it will be pretty doable for about 700 kanji and then get increasingly difficult, only to become almost impossible around 1300.

I finished a in 22 days, reviews were kind of harsh, but they die like 2 weeks after, so I think overall it is easily worth it and getting through rtk1 so quickly is a big confidence boost...Just wait until you hit the wall and Have to study 2500 more Hanzi(In my case I am studying Japanese and Chinese) and then try to keep up with reviews and adding new sentences for for both languages! That's a fun juggling act even for the most organized!

Like Mafried is saying, stories, when it comes to Heisig, shouldn't be thought of as word-chains. Stories in this case is much broader, it's about connecting primitives together in a meaningful way and connecting it to a keyword. While it's good to write it down (so it can be remembered if forgotten), that isn't the goal, or even A goal. What's important to tie as much as possible into it. Sometimes, it's enough to make a short rhyme and sometimes it's enough to simply imagine the primitives together, other times you want it all.. a short story which is a play on words together with a vivid image together with a a feeling, maybe even a sense of smell. The more the merrier, if a kanji is hard enough to remember.

Yonosa Wrote:I finished a in 22 days, reviews were kind of harsh, but they die like 2 weeks after, so I think overall it is easily worth it and getting through rtk1 so quickly is a big confidence boost...Just wait until you hit the wall and Have to study 2500 more Hanzi(In my case I am studying Japanese and Chinese) and then try to keep up with reviews and adding new sentences for for both languages! That's a fun juggling act even for the most organized!

That's just too extreme, keep us posted about your progress.

I did 120 yesterday and I'm now at 460. My correct percentage is very low (around 70%) but I see it as normal under these circumstances. Most of my reviews are from very recent (24-48h) kanji and these new kanji make almost 25% of my deck so it's only natural that I fail quite a lot.

thurd Wrote:

Yonosa Wrote:I finished a in 22 days, reviews were kind of harsh, but they die like 2 weeks after, so I think overall it is easily worth it and getting through rtk1 so quickly is a big confidence boost...Just wait until you hit the wall and Have to study 2500 more Hanzi(In my case I am studying Japanese and Chinese) and then try to keep up with reviews and adding new sentences for for both languages! That's a fun juggling act even for the most organized!

That's just too extreme, keep us posted about your progress.

I did 120 yesterday and I'm now at 460. My correct percentage is very low (around 70%) but I see it as normal under these circumstances. Most of my reviews are from very recent (24-48h) kanji and these new kanji make almost 25% of my deck so it's only natural that I fail quite a lot.

Thurd, just keep it up, do you realize that 70% of 120 is 84? That means you are easily outperforming the majority of other in the RTK in terms of raw completed characters per day. I see a lot of others doing 20 a day and that slow and steady crap, personally I could not wait that long to dive into the actual language! I mean come on!? Who wants to ...sit on the sidelines for over 3 months! Then what should we do only 1 sentence a day thereafter!? I mean let's get this done and become fluent and show others that the Asian language mystique is just mythology.

Also, yeah at first you will fail a lot, but if one day is particularly difficult or something take a nap halfway through, then get back to it. Yeah my percentanges were around 80% then but don't worry about what you fail. Even now when I fail something I don't really care I just try to focus of what I am passing, and focus on getting better each day. My RTK deck is not at some 93% I probably only miss like 10 cards in a week if that, So I expect that to further improve.

Yonosa Wrote:Thurd, just keep it up, do you realize that 70% of 120 is 84? That means you are easily outperforming the majority of other in the RTK in terms of raw completed characters per day. I see a lot of others doing 20 a day and that slow and steady crap, personally I could not wait that long to dive into the actual language! I mean come on!? Who wants to ...sit on the sidelines for over 3 months! Then what should we do only 1 sentence a day thereafter!? I mean let's get this done and become fluent and show others that the Asian language mystique is just mythology.

Also, yeah at first you will fail a lot, but if one day is particularly difficult or something take a nap halfway through, then get back to it. Yeah my percentanges were around 80% then but don't worry about what you fail. Even now when I fail something I don't really care I just try to focus of what I am passing, and focus on getting better each day. My RTK deck is not at some 93% I probably only miss like 10 cards in a week if that, So I expect that to further improve.

Thanks for the encouragement, but I have to admit I chickened out a bit and started putting stories for kanji I fail on the second pass (ie. I get a kanji for review and fail it, then when it returns from the failed pile I fail it again). After yesterdays review session about 10% of my deck has stories, so its not that bad.

I had a bit rough day at work yesterday so I couldn't review anything and all that piled up for the evening, thats why I only added 40 new facts. But still I reached 500 and I'm on track for 100/day

thurd Wrote:

Yonosa Wrote:Thurd, just keep it up, do you realize that 70% of 120 is 84? That means you are easily outperforming the majority of other in the RTK in terms of raw completed characters per day. I see a lot of others doing 20 a day and that slow and steady crap, personally I could not wait that long to dive into the actual language! I mean come on!? Who wants to ...sit on the sidelines for over 3 months! Then what should we do only 1 sentence a day thereafter!? I mean let's get this done and become fluent and show others that the Asian language mystique is just mythology.

Also, yeah at first you will fail a lot, but if one day is particularly difficult or something take a nap halfway through, then get back to it. Yeah my percentanges were around 80% then but don't worry about what you fail. Even now when I fail something I don't really care I just try to focus of what I am passing, and focus on getting better each day. My RTK deck is not at some 93% I probably only miss like 10 cards in a week if that, So I expect that to further improve.

Thanks for the encouragement, but I have to admit I chickened out a bit and started putting stories for kanji I fail on the second pass (ie. I get a kanji for review and fail it, then when it returns from the failed pile I fail it again). After yesterdays review session about 10% of my deck has stories, so its not that bad.

I had a bit rough day at work yesterday so I couldn't review anything and all that piled up for the evening, thats why I only added 40 new facts. But still I reached 500 and I'm on track for 100/day

The major benefit of Heisig is, imo, breaking kanji up into primitive elements, and you've kept that bit so I'm sure you'll do ok. Stories/Images/Mnemonics just help you remember them easier. I'm not sure why you wouldn't make use of them from the beginning; they don't take all that long to come up with. All the best with your attempt though!

thurd, you don't have to write down stories/imaginative mnemonics--that was never part of the Heisig method. People just do it here because how else would we share particularly effective stories? Just make sure you're using your imaginative memory to remember the primitives and their placement and you'll do fine.

Yonosa Wrote:I see a lot of others doing 20 a day and that slow and steady crap, personally I could not wait that long to dive into the actual language! I mean come on!? Who wants to ...sit on the sidelines for over 3 months! Then what should we do only 1 sentence a day thereafter!? ...

Some of us have real-life commitments.

mafried Wrote:thurd, you don't have to write down stories/imaginative mnemonics--that was never part of the Heisig method. People just do it here because how else would we share particularly effective stories? Just make sure you're using your imaginative memory to remember the primitives and their placement and you'll do fine.

Yonosa Wrote:I see a lot of others doing 20 a day and that slow and steady crap, personally I could not wait that long to dive into the actual language! I mean come on!? Who wants to ...sit on the sidelines for over 3 months! Then what should we do only 1 sentence a day thereafter!? ...

Some of us have real-life commitments.

Real life's are for losers

No but seriously, while I don't regret doing 100/day (not a bit) it is not realistically possible for many people. And there's nothing wrong with that.

blackmacros Wrote:No but seriously, while I don't regret doing 100/day (not a bit) it is not realistically possible for many people. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I'll be honest when I started RTK last summer, I did 100/day until ~800 when I got hit by a bomb at work (not particularly far from literal). This completely burned me out and I gave up on RTK until March when I decided to finally do it. I suppose doing 100/day can cause an unstable decline in will power. To those who decide to press on, I have nothing but respect for your abilities.

Yonosa Wrote:Thurd, just keep it up, do you realize that 70% of 120 is 84? That means you are easily outperforming the majority of other in the RTK in terms of raw completed characters per day. I see a lot of others doing 20 a day and that slow and steady crap, personally I could not wait that long to dive into the actual language! I mean come on!? Who wants to ...sit on the sidelines for over 3 months! Then what should we do only 1 sentence a day thereafter!? I mean let's get this done and become fluent and show others that the Asian language mystique is just mythology.

You do know that it's perfectly fine to dive into the language long before you finish RtK right? Hell, I passed JLPT2 before even starting RtK.

Tobberoth Wrote:

Yonosa Wrote:Thurd, just keep it up, do you realize that 70% of 120 is 84? That means you are easily outperforming the majority of other in the RTK in terms of raw completed characters per day. I see a lot of others doing 20 a day and that slow and steady crap, personally I could not wait that long to dive into the actual language! I mean come on!? Who wants to ...sit on the sidelines for over 3 months! Then what should we do only 1 sentence a day thereafter!? I mean let's get this done and become fluent and show others that the Asian language mystique is just mythology.

You do know that it's perfectly fine to dive into the language long before you finish RtK right? Hell, I passed JLPT2 before even starting RtK.

RtK has been a stable part of my study since my 2nd year of college 4 years ago. I've never completed it. Furthest I've ever gotten was ~1600. Even though I didn't finish, RtK gave me a lot of wisdom about the kanji. It was definitely a factor in my passing JLPT2. I also tended to have better kanji knowledge than my peers in classes.

To the disheartened, please do plug away at it. RtK works very well, and you will eventually complete it. It just might take you longer with the restarting. I've found that with every single restart my progress has gotten faster and faster for those first 600 kanji that I still remember from before. So even if you've been away from it for a few months, try to come back and restart. You'll see the proof of the method by how you're able to blaze through most of the ones you learned from before.

Yeah, not saying one should stop doing it, just saying that if you want to start mining sentences, listening to Japanese and such things, one can do it at the same time. It takes time away from RtK, but one shouldn't let RtK be some form of stopping block.

erlog Wrote:I'm one of the oddballs like thurd. I don't make a story for every kanji. I only make a story if I notice I'm failing the same card over and over again. So far, I've really only had to make like 5 stories, and I'm up near 900 kanji. My typical correct percentage in reviews is 80%. That's probably lower than a lot of you, but I spend very little time on Heisig every day.

I wonder though, how much longer you will spend reviewing. I mean you save time on making stories but you forget more and review more. Review time can soon get higher than the time for making the stories, especially if you don't get a high retention rate.

vosmiura Wrote:

erlog Wrote:I'm one of the oddballs like thurd. I don't make a story for every kanji. I only make a story if I notice I'm failing the same card over and over again. So far, I've really only had to make like 5 stories, and I'm up near 900 kanji. My typical correct percentage in reviews is 80%. That's probably lower than a lot of you, but I spend very little time on Heisig every day.

I wonder though, how much longer you will spend reviewing. I mean you save time on making stories but you forget more and review more. Review time can soon get higher than the time for making the stories, especially if you don't get a high retention rate.

I'm not spending that much more time reviewing than most people. Like I said, my pass percentage is around 80% whether I add new cards or not. I don't know what other people's average pass percentages are like, but I can't imagine they would be too much higher.

Tobberoth Wrote:Yeah, not saying one should stop doing it, just saying that if you want to start mining sentences, listening to Japanese and such things, one can do it at the same time. It takes time away from RtK, but one shouldn't let RtK be some form of stopping block.

My post was agreeing with you.

erlog Wrote:I'm not spending that much more time reviewing than most people. Like I said, my pass percentage is around 80% whether I add new cards or not. I don't know what other people's average pass percentages are like, but I can't imagine they would be too much higher.

Lower retention is normal for young cards, and going up to 90~95% for mature cards I'd say.

Actually I had let my RTK reviews expire for over a year, then I reset my deck and started reviewing again from zero. I'm just going through 50~100 at a time whenever I feel like it as there's no pressure to finish quickly now. Half way through these are my stats:

- Mature cards: 98.1%
- Young cards: 95.0%
- First-seen cards: 79.6%

In other words I could still remember close to 80% without reviewing for over a year. I don't know how good long term retention would have been without stories. For the 20% that I had forgotten, a quick glance back over those stories was enough to get back up to 95%+.