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KanjiMood Wrote:When I first see a character in RTK I move onto the next as soon as a story clicks into place. I don't think I need to spend more time than that when first viewing the character as I can develop the story further when I review all 100 characters from my notepad at the end of the day. It also gives your mind time to build a more solid story for the character over time.

I guess this is kinda like using spaced repetition itself for the actual developing of the story, once when I first see the character, another time after a batch of 25 characters and then again at the end of the day.

Do you think you could expand on that? Are you using other kanji stories to expand on older ones?

Although I do support you in your method I, myself, couldn't imagine doing 100 a day. When I learned by 1 lesson a day until I realized that I couldn't write kanji (didn't know about koohii or anki yet) so I was just using flash cards and doing Kanji->keyword. I did that up until about 600 and realized my mistake, when I started doing koohii I also realized that I was going way too fast with these adding and could barely keep up. Now I add a few cards each day and I'm loving it so far, sure I'll finish a bit later but I'll have better retention since the more time it takes, the more reviews you actually do.

Artemisk Wrote:Although I do support you in your method I, myself, couldn't imagine doing 100 a day. When I learned by 1 lesson a day until I realized that I couldn't write kanji (didn't know about koohii or anki yet) so I was just using flash cards and doing Kanji->keyword. I did that up until about 600 and realized my mistake, when I started doing koohii I also realized that I was going way too fast with these adding and could barely keep up. Now I add a few cards each day and I'm loving it so far, sure I'll finish a bit later but I'll have better retention since the more time it takes, the more reviews you actually do.

That's not true because you don't stop doing reviews just because you've added all the cards. I finished adding RtK1 several months ago and I still have more than 20 reviews every day.

Artemisk Wrote:Now I add a few cards each day and I'm loving it so far, sure I'll finish a bit later but I'll have better retention since the more time it takes, the more reviews you actually do.

It's true that the only reason you would do more reviews of a card is if you failed it a lot - otherwise, you do the same amount of reviews for each card, no matter how quickly you add them.

I do agree with you though in the sense that I like going slower. Although many times it's aggravating because so many others are speeding through the book like there's no tomorrow, everyone learns differently and going slowly works for me.

Let's just be logical here, 100 Kanji a day is insane and excruciating (if even possible). 50 Kanji a day is already crazy but I think is doable under extreme conditions of awareness and lucidity.

Now if you tell me you do 40 Kanji a day every day I would say that's amazing but not unrealistic. Heisig suggests 25 and even though I find hard enough keeping up with it *every day* I have done 30 and even 40 (I can count those few days with my hands though) but it was too painful.

What I find excruciating is learning all the Kanji, this has nothing to do with the reviews and failed stack management which is already time consuming.

I think that KanjiMood will eventually and invariably face a serious problem to remember the Kanji if he is actually doing 100 as he says. Although I don't argue he can learn Japanese or not (or already knows), it is my personal opinion that 100 Kanji a day is not realistic.

Now call me envious well hell yeah! I wish I could do 100 a day but let's face it folks that is bullshit.

I can remember two days that I did 100 that was 500-600 and 1150-1250 but I could never do it every day, the reviews would kill me, still I did finish the book in two an a half months and almost never got below 90% on first reviews.

I think that is human nature to bullshit everyone and ourselves. Is just the way most people are and get around. Like when you go play some sport with your friends there is always the guy that tells you that he is got a pain on his foot, yeah it can happen but not every time you go to play. Or like when you fail you try to give an excuse. Or even when you win you try to make it sound better.

I think people simply will magnify everything they do. Now, don't feel like someone is pointing a finger at you, that'd be too egocentric, you are absolutely nothing compared to human civilizations that wrote the history to their own convenience.

I know I do it sometimes but when I am aware I try to be as plain as possible, even if I sound rather inferior to some I feel better because I know I am being 100% honest so when I happen to outwin someone and their stories I know I most probably did and I am probably even better because they are probably bullshitting you anyway.

Machine_Gun_Cat: 100 Kanji two days, yeah that's realistic.

Well, if you had said to me a few years ago "you know, its possible to learn 100 Kanji a day" I would of said "no way" but since I found out about SRS I've realized anything is possible if you have the time. I'm doing the same thing you're doing, only at an increased rate and when you do something quicker you will often become more efficient at doing that thing.

The primitives reinforce themselves throughout the entire book, there's no reason you won't learn them as your seeing them repeatedly (along with their stories), I'm sure I'm not the only one that has done 100 Kanji a day for an extended period of time.

I apologize for not posting as much as I should have but I was ill for two days. I decided to use the third rest day for reviewing (mainly the previous 200 characters plus another 150 or so older characters). It was difficult, whoever said its more difficult to get into the groove than the start the groove is right. I'm back on track now and I can safely say I remember at least 85% of the 700 characters with the real figure in between 85~90% (not to mention I can recognise more avatars now ). Actually I feel I could be a lot better than that but its good enough to finish RtK and move onto something else (while still reviewing here of course). I'm currently on frame 725 and hope to finish RTK by April 28th for a grand total of 23 days.

ryuudou: To answer your question, when I review the characters at the end of the day I see how quickly I can remember the story, if its not almost instantly then I reimagine all the parts of the story and make it more effective. There were a few times (not often mind you) when I would completely forget the story of a character, I would need to go back to RtK or RevTk to check it again. It's those ones I learn the best though. I also find characters like length and or again/again more tricky than the bigger ones (at least so far) like melancholy.

Much Power to you KanjiMood! Started January 2nd....I pushed hard up until about 1100-1200 (not 100 a day though). I crammed 156 one day but the whole thing took about 15 hours...kanji and meals....that was all I did that day. The reality of some massive reviews, and a melt down (as in a few reviews of 200+ with only a 65%ish pass rate=big fail piles) showed me that my speed was inefficient. I could almost feel the kanji disintegrating in my brain. That lead to some burn out and for most of March I mostly just did damage control (only added 144 kanji) and really got a handle on things. I found I needed to slow it down a bit so the primitive sets didn't start to blur together so much. I also realized, that no matter how "fast" I wanted to go, the true learning would happen on a deep level that came over time, not through "finishing" RTK. Now I'm pretty close (1615) and want to finish "fast", but for me that means doing 30-40 every day. Having come this far, I now know what that entails, how the reviews will be, etc. I think RTK is a marathon, it may not work to sprint the whole thing. And things change as you get deeper in. But by pushing this hard you will learn a great deal about your own process, and will find a rhythm that works best for you!

jorgebucaran Wrote:Let's just be logical here, 100 Kanji a day is insane and excruciating (if even possible). 50 Kanji a day is already crazy but I think is doable under extreme conditions of awareness and lucidity.

I don't really think that 50 is that hard under certain conditions. I spent a month stuck in a Japanese teacher's office while the kids were on spring break, while under conditions of extreme boredom combined with social pressure to be doing something useful. I starting doing RTK at the end of the month and when I got into it I was doing 70 kanji a day (hence getting up to 300-something in just the first 5 weekdays).

After that classes started, and I went to Thailand for a bit, so I've slowed down to twenty or so a day. But, at the time, I didn't find 70 a day to be particularly hard, and my reviews were actually always quite good. It might have gotten hard if I had kept up that pace later in the book, but I have no idea without trying it.

TaylorSan Wrote:Much Power to you KanjiMood! Started January 2nd....I pushed hard up until about 1100-1200 (not 100 a day though). I crammed 156 one day but the whole thing took about 15 hours...kanji and meals....that was all I did that day. The reality of some massive reviews, and a melt down (as in a few reviews of 200+ with only a 65%ish pass rate=big fail piles) showed me that my speed was inefficient. I could almost feel the kanji disintegrating in my brain. That lead to some burn out and for most of March I mostly just did damage control (only added 144 kanji) and really got a handle on things. I found I needed to slow it down a bit so the primitive sets didn't start to blur together so much. I also realized, that no matter how "fast" I wanted to go, the true learning would happen on a deep level that came over time, not through "finishing" RTK. Now I'm pretty close (1615) and want to finish "fast", but for me that means doing 30-40 every day. Having come this far, I now know what that entails, how the reviews will be, etc. I think RTK is a marathon, it may not work to sprint the whole thing. And things change as you get deeper in. But by pushing this hard you will learn a great deal about your own process, and will find a rhythm that works best for you!

Thanks TaylorSan. When I first started I thought about doing either 100 or 150 characters a day (as I had read about others doing that amount) I decided to go with 100 as it would give me more room to breathe. The first day was fine and the second day it worked even better, it just felt right for me. I don't know how long it will continue for but it still feels right for me - people say it gets more difficult after 1000 but I'll see.

I think what helps the most in doing so many is having an organised schedule. I do my first set before breakfast, the second set after breakfast and the third and fourth sets in the afternoon. This means all sets are broken up properly into different times of the day - with one recap session in the evening. I couldn't do it continously nor would I want to. I have to do other stuff throughout the day as well. The reviews aren't too hard to fit in unless I miss a day or two.

It's not that difficult to "finish" the book at a very high pace.

The reviews on this site are spaced after 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 120 and 240 days. If you go at 100 kanji a day, you're done with new kanji in only 20 days so you only get reviews from the first two steps.

This means you can get to the end quickly, without doing too many revisions. But the effort will need to continue at a high pace for a much longer time after the book is completed.

Even assuming that you learn just as efficiently at that pace (you get the same failure percentage), by the time you finish the book, you'll have only done approximately 30% of the work that somebody finishing at 20 kanji/day would have already done).

So be prepared this isn't a 3 weeks sprint. The hard part is coming *after* you finish the book.

Since I am an exchange student in Japan I had every day free time from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. So was able to push the book really hard with usually 60/day and sometimes 80 (and once 100!).
But it's true... That's 3 weeks ago and still not 90% is in my stack #4... I still have no feeling of completing the book because there is sooo much reviewing to go through after it.
But it's definitely fun!
And now instead of writing english posts with no reason at all, I am going back to reading manga!

-Mesqueeb

jorgebucaran Wrote:Heisig suggests 25

Heisig himself said he has done it in a month. 2042 in 30 days is 70/day.

Codexus Wrote:It's not that difficult to "finish" the book at a very high pace.

The reviews on this site are spaced after 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 120 and 240 days. If you go at 100 kanji a day, you're done with new kanji in only 20 days so you only get reviews from the first two steps.

This means you can get to the end quickly, without doing too many revisions. But the effort will need to continue at a high pace for a much longer time after the book is completed.

Even assuming that you learn just as efficiently at that pace (you get the same failure percentage), by the time you finish the book, you'll have only done approximately 30% of the work that somebody finishing at 20 kanji/day would have already done).

So be prepared this isn't a 3 weeks sprint. The hard part is coming *after* you finish the book.

If you finish RtK "quickly" yet effectively, which means getting a good retention rate on all characters previous, then you would be in a much better position than someone who took longer to do it as you can move onto more advanced things while having more or less the same knowledge.

The people doing 20 kanji a day have only done more reviews because it takes ages to finish the book doing that amount. They have more or less just returned to a different system of rote learning. I believe the brain can handle almost as much input as you give it. Hitler didn't read 20 chapters and call it a night, he read two whole books a night and summarised them the next morning in extensive detail. RtK is kinda like reading a book, you understand more about the story and concept the further you progress which in turn gives you more knowledge regarding previous events in the book.

You are 100% right I would need to continue at a high pace, but thats what learning languages is all about, right?

30% of the work doing it this way? I'm not sure about that, actually I use both RevTk and Anki at the same time which gives a lot more reviews. Perhaps you meant those doing it quickly have completed approximately 30% of the work that others have done and got to the same stage? It's like you are trying to say to get to a certain point everybody needs to spend a fixed amount of time to get there.

I'm at about 1540 doing 70-100 with a few days of just reviews thrown in there as my days allow. My retention rate of my initial next day review is abysmal, about 30%. I take the 70% failed and break them into manageable chunks of 5-20 and do sessions throughout the day to cement the stories. I keep them in my failed stack, get a night's sleep and review them the next day, I find that this second review is over 90%, usually 100%. At this point I just let the SRS take over. My daily reviews of the other stacks are around 85%.

I was initially troubled by this poor first review rate and slowed down to 20-30, spending much more time on them. My results were still pretty bad for second day reviews.

I'm not really knowledgeable to comment on why this is, or what I might be doing 'wrong', but I have found a parallel with my piano studies (something that I am competent enough to comment on) which is this: pretty much no matter what difficulty of the music (from elementary material all the way to virtuoso Bach/Beethoven/Liszt) I never remember (play it perfectly from memory) it the next day, but this process of learning and then forgetting is crucial to cementing it in my long term memory. So, while I might not be able to play XYZ bars that I learned yesterday, I can play the Liszt study that I learned two years ago and haven't touched in six months from memory with high to perfect accuracy. I'm taking this same approach to Kanji. Of course, there's always the possibility for improvement and I am always on the lookout for better learning strategies. (As an aside, I've started breaking down my repertoire into small-ish chunks and entering them into my SRS... I'm really excited to see how this turns out.)

I think that the people who are doing less and having a much higher next day retention rate are obviously doing what fits for them. At the end of the day, you take the tools and tweak them to fit your own brain style, which is always changing as well.

That sounds very similar to what I'm doing zer0range. When I review the last 25 characters I do in a day I get really bad results but eventually they settle in just fine after a few days and then they're your best buds!

mentat_kgs Wrote:

jorgebucaran Wrote:Heisig suggests 25

Heisig himself said he has done it in a month. 2042 in 30 days is 70/day.

And he had to deal with finding and organizing the characters into the Heisig-order we recognize today. As someone who is paving my own way I can attest to that difficulty. And it's not reflected in those numbers.

100/day is certainly doable... if you a) have oodles of free time, or b) are very good at managing your time.

Maybe I am retarded and should be mocked up publicly for having such inferior capacities or maybe I am just envious and stubborn and can't deal with people that do better than me or maybe I just can't stand bullshit. Nevermind, I hope you don't screw up later for trying to push so hard.

You don't need to be so hard on yourself just because of a little of envy.
I'm envious too.
I did the best I could and even so, RTK took me 3 months.

mentat_kgs Wrote:You don't need to be so hard on yourself just because of a little of envy.
I'm envious too.
I did the best I could and even so, RTK took me 3 months.

I am a villain I can't resist it

Man, seeing all these people with so much crazy progress really makes me feel like I've been wasting so much time... You guys have forced my hand. Now I must add 100 kanji today. Thanks a lot.... jerks.

I didn't consider before that doing 100 Kanji a day does not mean learning 100 Kanji a day, but merely jamming all of them into your head and later suffer the consequences and struggle through. That's more likely the case but seriously that only means you can complete the course in a month not learn the Kanji in a month. Obviously after you finish you will review a lot for a long time so at the end you will end up spending as much time as other people who didn't do 100 Kanji a day. Which method is more effective? Definitely not 100 a day, after all, less is more are words of wisdom and not a brain teaser,

jorgebucaran Wrote:I didn't consider before that doing 100 Kanji a day does not mean learning 100 Kanji a day, but merely jamming all of them into your head and later suffer the consequences and struggle through. That's more likely the case but seriously that only means you can complete the course in a month not learn the Kanji in a month. Obviously after you finish you will review a lot for a long time so at the end you will end up spending as much time as other people who didn't do 100 Kanji a day. Which method is more effective? Definitely not 100 a day, after all, less is more are words of wisdom and not a brain teaser,

Why do you assume this? Let's say you spend about a minute to learn each kanji. Are you really saying it's possible to spend 50 minutes learning kanji each day but not 100 minutes?

Face it: Learning 100 kanji is just as possible as learning 50, you just have to spend more time on it each day. There's no difference in learning. (In fact, learning 100 each day is better since there's more reinforcement going around.)

If you have the time and determination to do it, learning 100 kanji each day is superior to learning 50 kanji each day. I personally didn't have the time nor the willpower for the massive amounts of reviews so I stuck with 20 kanji each day (except for some periods where I did 40). My goal, from the very beginning, was to finish in 4 months. I did it in 3½.