erlog Wrote:

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.

I just prefered to do it once, and do it quickly, I don't plan to ever forget them though, I don't like redoing things.

I slowed down a lot and I'm only at 640 but I just couldn't keep up with all the reviews. If I don't have time to review at work I spend most of my time after work sorting them out

Well, instead of starting on the 4th, I had to wait until today to start my 100 kanji a day journey. Unfortunately, since I can only do this for another 9 days, I won't quite complete RTK, but I'll complete the last 300 or so I'll have remaining over the next couple of weeks.

I did four sets of 25, as reccomnded by most. Since I didn't have any reviews to do today (took care of that yesterday), I actually ended up having an hour or more break in between the sets. It was actually incredibly easy, and totally doable. However, the main test was at the end of the day, when I had to review the 100 cards through RevTK. I forgot the first six. I was terrified that the whole day was a waste of time, but I ended up with this:



Which I was incredibly pleased with. I'm going to quickly empty my fail box of those 17 (all that are in there), then do the same thing tomorrow. Needless to say, tomorrow will be a bit more challenging as I will probably have a huge slog of reviews to get through, and the process will probably get harder as the days go by. But, I wasn't exactly struggling for time today, so it's all good news really. Boosting from 35% completed to 40% completed in one day is incredibly satisfying.

Let's wait to see tomorrow, to see if it's just beginners luck! But I definietely intend to keep going at 100 a day as long as I can.

I found pace to be really crucial to my success... when I started I did 20 a day but it was always so irregular, I had no set amount i'd do every day... sometimes i'd break for like a month cos i'd let reviews pile up to 300+ and felt snowed under/burned out... but after I sat down with my kanji poster and hatched a plan to do one line (32 kanji) a day, things felt much more stable... I upped it to 2 lines per day, then 1 then next... Anyways the last 3 weeks saw me complete the remaining 730 kanji... I started about 10 months ago with no clue what I was getting in for.

I only really found the groove of this method towards the end which is a shame cos I could have completed it in 2 - 3 months easy if i'd have done that from the start.

My advice would be go hard and fast for as long as you can until you feel like you needa cut back a bit and then just relax it to a comfortable but decent pace until you're finished. Dont let it get on top of you. Good luck.

(edit) my retention rates at the end of it all are as follows...

Correct answers
Mature cards: 90.8% 1660 of 1829
Young cards: 89.5% 7384 of 8254
First-seen cards: 93.6% 1912 of 2042

Congratulations on your first day of 100 kanji! You seem to be doing pretty well so far

Reviews shouldn't hit too hard for a while, but if/once they do you could try the alternate focus SRS'ing I talked about in the "Re-examining your SRS workflow" thread. A few people posted in there saying that it made doing 100/day a lot more manageable.

Good luck, and let us know how you go!

Just a quick suggestion that may help with 100 a day, i tend to add them in blocks of primitives instead of just learning them in blocks of 25. I look up the kanji then either make up a story and put it into this site or steal one, write it out and move onto the next. Once i have learn the last kanji with the current primitive i add the cards up to that point then review. I get a really good first time retention rate like this, i have had a break from it recently because of life but im eager to get back up to this pace.

Just mix it up so you dont drive yourself mad, learn a small block then clear your failed stack or do some reviews. Obviously 100 a day requires a lot of time in a day, especially once the big reviews roll in and that wont take long. Dont let it get to you and just push through

I effectively stopped my 100 kanji/day experiment, its just too much for me and I don't have a lot of time.

With about 50 a day I'm still moving at a decent pace and I've found my retention rate to skyrocket to about 85% which is a big confidence boost.

I also changed my approach to learning/reviewing, I think its like 5th time I've changed it already . Now I first view the cards I want to learn on this site, create/copy/modify the stories and add them to my kanji so that I have a 'learning base' here. I study a little bit and after I'm quite comfortable with the new set I start SRSing.

So basically I'm back to square one, everyone was right and I was wrong. You want to learn kanji quickly and effectively: use stories

I'm at this moment downloading Anki (despite my PC beign really slow) and I just thought of something. Waht do you think about reviewing RTK kanji in sentences? I creaste a sentence for each (since i'm still around kanji 600) and then would start reviewing for real.

Btw, does anki need internet to work? I have limited access

Thurd, Whatever works, keep up the good work. 100/day is a big commitment particularly someone who works. I know, my job kicked my bum. What you need to do is not stop. I stopped twice before finally biting the bullet and finishing. I regret how I could be so much farther ahead of my current understanding if I had just finished a year ago.

CCG, internet is not required for Anki to work. If you constantly update your online decks, then yes you need it for syncing, but that's about it.

*edit
Also, your sentence idea may be a great boost to your reading and comprehension, but you will effectively be learning two things at once which will slow you down. Keep us updated about how your experiment works if you follow through with it.

My job and the birth of my lovely daughter have also slowed me down, even to a full stop for a couple months. I also tried doing 50+ kanji a day, but than retention dropped big time. Now I'm redoing the 1100 kanji I already did, moving ahead at a rate of 50-100 kanji per day is pretty normal now, with a rather good retention rate of 90-95%. However, when I hit the final 100 of that stack I will slow down again. From then on I'll be very happy when I can stick with 25kanji a day or even 15.

The trick is indeed not to stop. But if you need to, try keeping up with the reviews. I would be also a lot further if I just kept up with those darn reviews . Anyway, I just want this rtk story to get over as fast as possible; so I can move on - like the rest of us - with sentence mining.

If I went to my work using a train or so, I could be doing more rtk, but in a car... that's asking for problems unless someone else drives the car. I must say those jp101 podcasts are a good way to kill the time in the car and learn some new words / phrases. It distracts me a bit from the "rtk stress". But that's rather off topic now.

I think I'm stopping doing 100 kanji per day. My pass rates have compltely dropped. For the first day review, I usually get around 70 to 90 percent. However, as soon as the box 2 reviews come around, I just can't remember the stories at all. I usually get a pass rate of 25% or lower. I just can't take in all this knowledge at once, anything I learned 2 days ago seems so long away. While I admire those who can do this, I think the cost/benefit ratio is significantly lower than if I do 50 a day, which I can cope with normally. And in any case, at least I got a few hundred down in a few days. Although keeping the failed pile empty is a huge drag, when it consists of 75% of your cards.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you.

Although it sounds like you use this site to review and not Anki? If you mark a card 'hard' in Anki you see it again in 8 hours, which would probably help your retention because the spacing seems to be too far apart for you (when you add 100/day) on this site. Also Anki lets you put stories on your question side which again helps with the retention issues (as long as you remove them after finishing RtK, and you mark a kanji as 'hard' if you need the story, so you don't damage long term recall).

I have a feeling those changes would go a long way to solving your problem, but I wish you good luck whether you decide to keep doing 100/day or not

blackmacros Wrote:Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you.

Although it sounds like you use this site to review and not Anki? If you mark a card 'hard' in Anki you see it again in 8 hours, which would probably help your retention because the spacing seems to be too far apart for you (when you add 100/day) on this site. Also Anki lets you put stories on your question side which again helps with the retention issues (as long as you remove them after finishing RtK, and you mark a kanji as 'hard' if you need the story, so you don't damage long term recall).

I have a feeling those changes would go a long way to solving your problem, but I wish you good luck whether you decide to keep doing 100/day or not

I think if you added in the extra work (time) of manipulating stories in anki along with all the extra reviews you do from marking lots and lots of cards as "hard" then you might find out that 100 kanji a day with your method, or 20 cards a day with a different method ends up to the same amount of time spent studying finally. Either way the end point where all the cards are mature hardly moves at all if you are doing 50 or 100.

Thanks Macros, great post as always!

Using Anki definitely is a possibility. But I've been a bit skeptical about keeping stories on the same side. I think I've explained how I use both Anki and RevTK, and I put my stories on my anki flashcards. But I don't look at them, they're just there so I can get the story fully into my head (typing always helps). And, when I review them in anki the first (and only time, before going to RevTK), if I fail any I can quickly look at the story, and test myself again soon. If I actually used the stories to review the kanji, then I'd end up just compltely relying on looking at the stories. Of course, my pass rate would be very high, but I'd fear I'd become dependant upon the stories.

But then again, maybe you're right, and after being exposed to them heaps of times before you remove the story, maybe you can just assimilate the stories. I'll complete my RevTK reviews for today, and then see if I should keep going on.

Then again, I only have three days of holiday left, and due to circumstances I haven't been able to add cards on lots of days. So I'm only at 1000, where I planned to be at 1400 by now. And I'll definitely only be able to add 50 at maximum when university kicks back in. I'm not sure wether I should go hard, using Anki at 100 a day, for the last few days, or just bob along at 50 a day. 1300 certainly sounds a lot more enticing than 1150, although I don't know if I'll just end up having to review them all again, if I become dependant on stories.

welldone101 Wrote:

blackmacros Wrote:Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you.

Although it sounds like you use this site to review and not Anki? If you mark a card 'hard' in Anki you see it again in 8 hours, which would probably help your retention because the spacing seems to be too far apart for you (when you add 100/day) on this site. Also Anki lets you put stories on your question side which again helps with the retention issues (as long as you remove them after finishing RtK, and you mark a kanji as 'hard' if you need the story, so you don't damage long term recall).

I have a feeling those changes would go a long way to solving your problem, but I wish you good luck whether you decide to keep doing 100/day or not

I think if you added in the extra work (time) of manipulating stories in anki along with all the extra reviews you do from marking lots and lots of cards as "hard" then you might find out that 100 kanji a day with your method, or 20 cards a day with a different method ends up to the same amount of time spent studying finally. Either way the end point where all the cards are mature hardly moves at all if you are doing 50 or 100.

Its not all that much extra time manipulating stories. I either copy + paste a story I liked from this site or typed up my own, both of which take all of 5 seconds. The people who use this site also write their stories out, and I assume lagwagon does as well, so this wouldn't actually be adding any time at all to his process.

Marking hard to lots and lots of cards will of course result in a lot of extra reviews. But I think this is balanced out by including the stories. Until 3/4 of the way through (and probably further) I marked cards normally even if I looked at the story. The whole point of including the story was to control reviews after all. Afterwards when I removed the stories my retention dropped by around 10% and now I don't have any trouble remembering my stories or kanji and its now 2 months later. So its really a personal preference about whether to mark lots of cards "hard" or not- I recommended it because it sounded like he was having some trouble with retention. It will of course have drawbacks in terms of extra reviews but, like everything in life, its a decision you have to weigh up and decide whether its beneficial or not.

lagwagon555 Wrote:Then again, I only have three days of holiday left, and due to circumstances I haven't been able to add cards on lots of days. So I'm only at 1000, where I planned to be at 1400 by now. And I'll definitely only be able to add 50 at maximum when university kicks back in. I'm not sure wether I should go hard, using Anki at 100 a day, for the last few days, or just bob along at 50 a day. 1300 certainly sounds a lot more enticing than 1150, although I don't know if I'll just end up having to review them all again, if I become dependant on stories.

In 3 days you're not really cutting that much off your total time to completion. The reason I did 100/day was because I was doing a Japanese course in Uni and couldn't afford to ignore the other components of the language for much longer. If you don't have a pressing reason to get it done that little bit quicker you're probably better off sticking to a pace you know you can sustain.

EDIT: Oops I meant to include this in my previous post, but accidentally did a new post instead. Oh well.

Thank you for making this topic! I have only just started 3 days ago and was really unsure on how many to do each day, I started on 50, but found this took hardly any time and was really easy. I thought about doing 100+ Kanji and thought that maybe my brain wouldn't be able to handle them as well and I would get overloaded and forget them all and now after reading this thread I have the inspiration to do 100+ a day. I'm going to start tomorrow and try and do at least 100. I am having good results with 50-80 but would like to get the 2000 out the way quickly so I can focus on getting them into the LTM with reviewing.

Kewickviper Wrote:I started on 50, but found this took hardly any time and was really easy.

When you get a little further into the book your opinion might change on that.

Kewickviper Wrote:Thank you for making this topic! I have only just started 3 days ago and was really unsure on how many to do each day, I started on 50, but found this took hardly any time and was really easy. I thought about doing 100+ Kanji and thought that maybe my brain wouldn't be able to handle them as well and I would get overloaded and forget them all and now after reading this thread I have the inspiration to do 100+ a day. I'm going to start tomorrow and try and do at least 100. I am having good results with 50-80 but would like to get the 2000 out the way quickly so I can focus on getting them into the LTM with reviewing.

I've had exactly the same experience, first days it was really easy to add 100 per day but after that reviews kick in and if you have some other commitments you'll probably drop a bit. If you can maintain this pace good for you, in about 20 days you will be done

Had a good day yesterday and managed to add 100 instead of the usual 50, if I could have a couple more days like this I would finish in about 7-10 days

Despite my retention falling I feel really motivated. I guess its sight of the finish line that makes me switch to another gear. Also I occasionally see kanji here and there and I'm really happy that I can identify more and more of them.

My rates been dropping recently since I've been busy However I have a very set pattern that seems to be working perfectly! I think the key to RTK1 is having a set routine or pattern to stick to.

The strategy I now use is I'll start in the morning by doing any expired reviews and the new reviews I haven't done yet from yesterday (will get to that). I will then do my learning in lots of 25 and after each 25 I put them into Anki and do a review, If i fail any I just do them over and over until i get them right. I then enter them into the koohii system ready for tomorrows review. Then finally at the end of the day I will study any that I have failed throughout the day and enter them into Anki with the stories on the answer side and really hammer them home until I can remember them all without mistakes.

This seems to be working really well and since I have a free day tomorrow I am going to do 100 and see how my retention rate the next day is.

This is an awful lot of work though and unless you have the time I wouldn't recommend using Anki and Koohii as doing reviews for both can take over an hour even though I'm only on 400.

Still haven't had time to do 100, but I had a terrible time this morning.
Had the lowest retention rate ever since I completely forgot all the primitives in lesson 18 meaning I had a huge fail pile to deal with earlier.

However, just a few minutes ago I had a random review of well over a hundred Kanji in Anki (including the 50 I forgot yesterday and 50 new ones) and only got two wrong (had the primitives the wrong way round). This is completely unexpected and though I have good days and bad days remembering its never been this quick.

I don't know what caused my brain to become so active (maybe drinking coffee earlier), but somehow every Kanji just appeared in my head without any thought, especially the first 200 and even the new ones and the ones I forgot earlier just came after a second or twos thought.

Has anyone else had any experiences like this where randomly one day the Kanji just appear in your head with no thought required to remember the stories.

I'm going to sit down and keep trying as many Kanji as I can in steps of 25 until the retention rate drops! I'll probably regret it tomorrow when I see my review number, but I'll worry about that later!

Kewickviper Wrote:Still haven't had time to do 100, but I had a terrible time this morning.
Had the lowest retention rate ever since I completely forgot all the primitives in lesson 18 meaning I had a huge fail pile to deal with earlier.

However, just a few minutes ago I had a random review of well over a hundred Kanji in Anki (including the 50 I forgot yesterday and 50 new ones) and only got two wrong (had the primitives the wrong way round). This is completely unexpected and though I have good days and bad days remembering its never been this quick.

I don't know what caused my brain to become so active (maybe drinking coffee earlier), but somehow every Kanji just appeared in my head without any thought, especially the first 200 and even the new ones and the ones I forgot earlier just came after a second or twos thought.

Has anyone else had any experiences like this where randomly one day the Kanji just appear in your head with no thought required to remember the stories.

I'm going to sit down and keep trying as many Kanji as I can in steps of 25 until the retention rate drops! I'll probably regret it tomorrow when I see my review number, but I'll worry about that later!

Yeah, it happens for me (nowadays, anyhow). Sometimes rest and sleep consolidates memories (I read that somewhere else on this forum, maybe this topic. Dunno) and make kanji easier to remember the following morning, while at other points in the day, you can suddenly recall kanji you were sure you wouldn't remember out of nowhere. It's too bad that didn't happen with kanji #400-#500 for me. X_X

I too have jumped on the bandwagon of doing 100 kanji a day. I did the first 800 or so at about 40 a day, with the occasional 50 to 60 here and there, and then realized I was running out of summer, and wanted to get a solid foundation in japanese before I go back into college and can't dedicate so much time on it.

I just finished up to 1226 today, so that's 4 days of doing 100 a day, and I have to say if you really manage your time well (and have a lot of free time) it's definitely possible. Well, maybe I shouldn't say that just yet, but I'm far enough along that I've started getting review from the first day I did 100, and I was able to recall them just as well as I had been able to recall when I did 40 a day, low 90%. And a bunch of those were just misplacing primitives (usually side to side when it should be top to bottom).

I don't really expect to be able to keep up 90% for the rest of the ride, but I imagine that once I finish learning them, the SRS will bring me back up to an acceptable success rate.

During that time period where I'm still swamped with reviews cause I've just finished, is jumping into KO2001 right away a good idea, or should i just review for a couple days to cement everything in a little? Which would you guys recommend?

Depends on what your reviews are like by the end, and how fast you plan to go through KO2001. If you're not coping well with the reviews, its best to give yourself a break. Similarly, be aware that reviews are likely to peak a few days after you finish adding 100/day before they start going down. And they will only go down slowly and gradually. If you're only adding at a moderate pace in KO this might be ok, but be careful not to start adding too many, too fast from KO before you get back to Uni and realise you can't keep up the pace when you have other commitments.