Tayfinch Wrote:Re: Sebastian - Oh, I guess I forgot to put that above! I love the site and am going to use it along with anki. : )

Tayfinch Wrote:Re: Fallacy - I know that, but as with many things I find I better absorb and appreciate the material I generate myself. : ) It took me years in college before I learned that about myself.

What do you mean by "material I generate myself"? If you mean the stories for each kanji, you can enter them into this site and check them when needed.

Do you review both here AND with Anki? Unless you have unlimited time and are burnout-proof, I would advise you against that. It will probably "work", but you'll be spending lots of time for a marginal gain.

Re: Sebastian -- Yes, I'm reviewing both here and on anki. Time isn't the biggest issue for me, and I've set anki's time tables up with custom ranges so that I won't be reviewing as much or as often there as I am on RevTK. So far it's seemed a very nice balance. I decided to do both as several people on this thread did so as well with good results.


Day 3: 135 Kanji! Finally up to an even 300 : ). I'm looking forward to just 100 a day from here on out.

Stick with anki or RevTK alone, with 100 kanji a day reviews will take much more time later, and most important in reviewing is to do it daily. And that time could be better spent on learning more kanji than 100(someone claims that he did 200).

Thanks a ton for all the great advice! You've each saved me a lot of time (now and especially in the future) with your suggestions regarding using pre-existing decks, sticking with one SRS, etc.

This weekend has been a tough one for studying: the guide in lesson 11 really made an impression on me and caused me to go back and re-learn the kanji I'd mastered with "images" instead of "word associations." This has been a huge change in how I've approached it, and I think it's for the best. That said, I focused on reviewing/re-learning with images, and am starting fresh from 300 today.

The 100/day pace isn't overwhelming, but I can see very clearly now how much time I'll have to set aside in the AM for reviewing.

Thanks again for your support and allowing me to post so much on this topic.

Hi Tayfinch, good to see you take up the challenge!

I would highly recommend this method if you have the time to spare, even if you don't I would recommend it anyway, spending a lot of time on how to learn these characters will help your thinking and learning towards Japanese and other subjects in the future.

Now that I have a good foundation in this kind of learning, I can add to my knowledge of Japanese so efficiently even when I don't have the time (still need that ol' willpower though!). Sentences require a bit of time to get used to at the beginning like RTK, but they also become second nature after awhile.

Good luck!

I'm not doing so well. Once I hit the chapter with the states of mind, I confused a lot of them. I think it's because they're intangible. I'm 6 days behind schedule. :-(

You will only learn them by moving on, that's when RtK does its magic and it gets stuck in your brain.. otherwise you will be forever stuck on them.

Also yeah, make sure your learning them as a story and not as an image association or anything. Just make up a story like your thinking up a lie or something, its the same method..

For state of mind, helps a lot to use Data as the primitive too..

Thanks, Kanjimood, for the encouragement and advice.

In the spirit of full disclosure, this last week hasn't been very good for Kanji Quest 2012 at all. If I learned anything, it's that for as long as I plan on doing 100/day, I need to maintain a strict morning routine, otherwise my studying gets thrown off.

Events in the real world have kept my studying at a pretty low level, but that's going to change today! I'm determined to work on a regular morning study schedule.

100 left to do today. Lots of reviews. Thanks for listening.

Are you reviewing keyword to kanji by writing it down too?

This means writing down the kanji every time you get a "keyword to kanji" review card.
In my own deck, I'll have both keyword to kanji, and kanji to keyword cards.

Is this recommended? (I start RTK tomorrow!)

Doctorate Wrote:Are you reviewing keyword to kanji by writing it down too?

This means writing down the kanji every time you get a "keyword to kanji" review card.
In my own deck, I'll have both keyword to kanji, and kanji to keyword cards.

Is this recommended? (I start RTK tomorrow!)

The author of the book recommends only reviewing keyword->kanji, and does recommend writing them down. That's how I do it. After the first pass through RTK, you'll have plenty of reviews of kanji->actual japanese word (assuming you use an SRS for vocabulary building).

He also wrote the book before there were SRS programs, though, and there are people that go kanji->keyword anyway, with apparently some success. Naturally, they don't learn to write doing that.

Very few people do both directions. I wouldn't, it seems to me like doubling the number of reviews you need to do can only slow down clearing RTK and getting on to ''the good stuff".

(I do recommend reading forward, introduction, and all the other advice Heisig put in the book. You don't have to follow it to the letter but it tells you how the system is -meant- to work, which means your adaptations of it will be more on-target.)

(Also, this was a really odd choice of an old topic to bump to ask that question...)