So I'm halfway through day 3 and I know about 250 kanji, I can recall nearly every character from its English keyword, some of them nearly instantly. However, I'm having trouble reading the Kanji first then thinking of the English keyword - it takes almost twice as long. Plus I have trouble distinguishing different fonts and sizes (especially small ones like on websites)... When will I get better at doing those things? When I start doing sentences? Or does it come before that? Or am I just doing something wrong?

Other than that though everything is fine and dandy.. It helps my motivation tremendously to have a purpose when doing this. Hopefully I'll be finished with RTK volume 1 within the next 17 days but I have a feeling things will get harder...

It comes as you get more exposure to Japanese, sentences or otherwise. You're not really supposed to think of the English keyword when you see the kanji "for real" anyway. You're supposed to see the the word, think of the reading and the japanese meaning.

I mean, if you're going break every word you see down into english keywords when you read Japanese, you'll never be able to read fast. If you ever NEED the english keywords, it won't matter if it takes you a while to remember it. Focus on learning Japanese words and you'll see that it won't be a problem.

That's great, thanks. I guess it was a stupid question - I just saw a couple of times that you should always practice with the English keyword first when doing RTK but with no real explanation as to why. I'll keep going now...

Also, it might help you to know that doing keyword -> kanji is 10 times more painful than doing kanji -> japanese.

kanji-> japanese takes much more time, because there are simply so many words and readings, but its pure fun.

Hang on with the 100 kanji/day, that in under a month, you'll be able to experience what you really want.

Thanks for the advice, mentat. I do look forward to that stage because I'm holding off on any sort of Japanese learning other than RtK at the moment.

My thoughts right now are that if you're compatible with Heisig's method of learning then you should do as many Kanji per day as possible. Of course I'm only on day 3 so I'll reserve final judgement for when I finish.

I'm currently doing the Kanji in batches of 25 by writing the keyword and character a few times on paper (writing really helps IMO) - when I've finished 25 I then write up the story I processed in my mind into Anki. I do reviews at irregular times. I'm thinking about reviewing every character previous every three days and reviewing the newly acquired (and semi-newly acquired) characters in the mean time.

KanjiMood

Could you explain to me the process of doing 100 kanji a day? Wouldn't that take like 3-5 hours not counting reviews?

ryuudou: I guess I'm probably only actually working on them for like 5 to 7 hours a day (I can still be a lot more efficient lol), which I guess is only a few minutes for each character. Sometimes I need to develop my vision of certain characters further the next day in review if there's a problem with remembering one. But its working pretty good so far.. 300 finished now. I'll review some tonight then continue onto 400 tomorrow..

Props, 5-7 hours of work is amazing. Do you use any dedication tricks? I wish I could picture myself doing that but I can't.

Kanjimood, I'm glad you posted this. I also wondered why the heck we're not supposed to bother with kanji-->keyword, and was frustrated when I'd cruise through the keyword-->kanji, but would mess up the other way around.

Tobberoth's explanation helped. I get that. Maybe RTK1 is just to give us a familiar foundation for the kanji, and then the sentences provide the rest (reading and comprehension).

Kudos on 100/day. I don't know how you stay "in-the-zone" for that long. I'm too distracted. Your system sounds like mine, though. I spend a few days learning new kanji, and then review EVERYTHING I've learned every few days. But it's getting overwhelming. I need to start letting go of the first 750, and start SRSing. Sunday, I hit 1293 kanji (took five weeks), and finally starting just putting them on the website for SRS. It's Wednesday, I've reviewed them all, and now I'm about to chug through the next 250.

Keep at it. You're doing great! Maybe we'll finish at the same time!

The results of my review last night were not as good as I had hoped... around 260 correct and 40 remembered incorrectly. I think I did a little less study on day 3 compared to the other days but hopefully today will be better. 200-300 starts to go into more "in-depth" concepts but this shouldn't be a problem if the primitives are learnt correctly I guess - I had some trouble with 'revelation', 'create', 'sort of thing' and 'before' so I had to relearn them with better stories.. I think I'll start writing characters down during a review with pen and paper.

Congrats on hitting 1293 in 5 weeks, Thunk. Are you remembering them well?

It's hard not to be distracted sometimes, yesterday more than ever I found myself walking around after each new Kanji. But again, I'll try and improve on that today.. And ryuudou I guess it helps if you have a lot of free time - just try and make the most of it. Having a purpose helps more than anything.

You know, once I got to part III, I enjoyed it a lot more. It was just more fun to create my own nonsensical stories than to remember someone else's. We all have our own memories and experiences that automatically will make something more memorable when associated with them.

I'm reviewing well, but I review too much, I think. My rate is 95-100% on anything learned up until two weeks ago. (I give myself two weeks of reviewing the kanji manually, before using this site to review - something I started this week. Too many to do the old fashioned way. @_@)

I tuckered out today, too! I only made it through like 25 of my 60. doh! Hope I can pick my momentum back up. I really need to be done by the end of April...or my family will disown me. I can only flake for so long...

That's a nice rate, how often do you review? I review some of the characters once a day and then all of them every three days. But I'm not sure if that's enough..

KanjiMood if you use this site for your stories the spacing of the reviews takes care of itself and you will actually learn better by NOT reviewing everything too frequently. The SRS method puts any fails back into the queue for immediate review but if you remember the kanji than you get a longer delay before you review it again, and so on as long as you remember it. This is a scientific appllication of cognitive research into memory.. the goal is to transition from short term to long term memory. Going through everything every day (apart from the monstrous pile of work) is actually LESS effective as supporting this transition.

Apologies if you already knew all this... but your comments suggest maybe you didn't know the SRS logic... which states that you are probably reviewing TOO frequently for those that you remember.

Thunk Wrote:You know, once I got to part III, I enjoyed it a lot more. It was just more fun to create my own nonsensical stories than to remember someone else's.

My question is: What is the purpose of learning somebody's stories, if you can make your own, which are 万 times better? First characters are pretty easy, so it should be used to get familiar with the method...

KanjiMood Wrote:That's a nice rate, how often do you review? I review some of the characters once a day and then all of them every three days. But I'm not sure if that's enough..

You're reviewing WAY too much. Read the "Learn More" page here on kanji.koohii.com. Every time you remember a kanji you should increase the reviewing interval, otherwise you're simply over-exposing your memory which isn't beneficial and might even be detrimental in the long run. An optimal scheme is something like:
day 1: Learn the kanji and review it once successfully.
day 3-4: Review successfully.
day 7-10: Review successfully.
day 30: review successfully
etc etc etc

You should only start reviewing a kanji often when you fail it, as long as you know it it's a waste to review it too often, it's bad for your long term memory.

Because stuff like this is boring to keep track of (like, kanji 192 i reviewed yesterday and that was my 4th successful review so my next review of that kanji should be....) we have these kinds of SRS systems like this site and Anki. They automatically makes sure that you only review kanji exactly as often as you need.

If you review all your kanji every 3 days, that means you review a kanji 10 times in a month.... I haven't even reviewed the first kanji that many times, and I've had them in the system for more than 4 months and I remember them perfectly.

Good points, everyone. My line of thinking is that because I'm going through the book at a rate of 100 Kanji a day I may need to review more times than usual due to the massive amounts of characters. I understand that this may put the Kanji more in my short-term memory, but if I keep the level of exposure I have now while doing my sentences I think it will work rather nicely in the long term.

I find myself using the SRS system here more than Anki. Its nicely set up and I love the story section. I guess I can tone down the every three days thing though and wait for the cards to expire a little more naturally (I did this at the beginning).

I'm on 325 Kanji now, I got teenage mutant samurai turtles for "robust". Not sure if its in the stories section here but I thought it was a good one..

KanjiMood Wrote:Good points, everyone. My line of thinking is that because I'm going through the book at a rate of 100 Kanji a day I may need to review more times than usual due to the massive amounts of characters.

I would say it's the very opposite. If you do 100 kanji a day, your daily workload will be insane if you're not "smart" about your reviews. Every extra review you do when you have 10 kanji is just an extra 10 kanji... but with a 100 kanji, everytime you review them needlessly, you get a HUGE workload over nothing.

The amount of characters shouldn't impact your reviews as long as you memorized them properly in the first place and as long as you follow a good SRS algoritm (such as the one in Anki or the one at this site).

I really think you should try moving over to the SRS as much as possible, you will probably not notice any big drop in retention yet you will notice an enormous drop in workload. The drop you find in retention will possibly be because you're forced to rely on long-term memory (but that's a good thing, and with the huge drop in workload, you will have no problem reviewing some extra failed kanji. That's the wonder of SRSing )

That does makes sense if your on a tight schedule, yes. However, if you had all the time in the world, would it not be better to immerse one's self completely in Japanese characters? Of course this would ultimately mean reviewing more frequently.. Would doing this have no benefit at all or perhaps even put you at a disadvantage?

KanjiMood Wrote:That does makes sense if your on a tight schedule, yes. However, if you had all the time in the world, would it not be better to immerse one's self completely in Japanese characters? Of course this would ultimately mean reviewing more frequently.. Would doing this have no benefit at all or perhaps even put you at a disadvantage?

Depends on who you're asking. According to the professors working on Supermemo, it's detrimental to review too often (that is enforcing memories the brain is already perfectly fine with). That it's a waste of time to review to often I think we can all agree on, why review 5 times when 2 is enough? The goal is to remember and as long as you do that, it's not worth the time.

What is debated is whether or not it's actually detrimental. The two reasons I've heard is that:

1. If you don't increase the interval, you won't stretch your long term memory. What this means is that if you study kanji for 1 year, reviewing them every 3 days and then stop for a few months, you will start to forget them. Someone who studied for 1 year using an SRS can stop and will still remember most of them over a year later since they have trained their long-term memory to deal with long intervals of non-exposure.
2. Overexposing is dangerous. I personally don't believe this, but some researchers claim that when you learn something the brain already knows, some chemicals are released in the brain. Do this too much and you damage your brain.

Tobberoth Wrote:2. Overexposing is dangerous. I personally don't believe this, but some researchers claim that when you learn something the brain already knows, some chemicals are released in the brain. Do this too much and you damage your brain.

This can be easily counteracted with a voodoo doll made out of six garlic cloves and a virgin's heart.

Number 1. is much more difficult to deal with and requires you to fail many kanji and be humiliated and frustrated constantly by your lazy brain and silly stories.

I think I'll let the SRS apps decide the intervals, though I'll still do a few reviews of my own for the most recent Kanji, once after a batch of 25 then again before the end of day, I think that works best for me. I'll scrap the three day thing, not because its inefficient but because its unnecessary. I was just worried I wouldn't be able to harvest everything I grow on the rice field

Currently on frame 375.

KanjiMood Wrote:I think I'll let the SRS apps decide the intervals, though I'll still do a few reviews of my own for the most recent Kanji, once after a batch of 25 then again before the end of day, I think that works best for me. I'll scrap the three day thing, not because its inefficient but because its unnecessary. I was just worried I wouldn't be able to harvest everything I grow on the rice field

Currently on frame 375.

Sounds good to me. I personally do something similar for my failed cards. When I was still adding kanji, I ALWAYS put all failed cars back into the system every evening so it could never build up. Now that I'm finished though, I find it kinda useless to enter the failed kanji right away since it's so few... I fail at most 3 kanji a day, often I don't fail a single one. Therefor, I nowadays horde them up so I have 10 kanji in the failed pile and THEN input them all again. I still check the study page once a day and makes sure I remember them... that means most kanji get an extra boost before they are entered again where I review them once a day for 2-3 days.

Finished reviewing up to frame 400 in Anki. It went a lot better than yesterday I got around 90% correct. The only problems I had were with the last 30 Kanji or so (similar to yesterday). I guess they don't settle in properly till the next day. The last four Kanji today were garment, tailor etc.. not the kinda Kanji you wanna finish the day with!

I liked the "say" primitive, its so damn easy. I got some good stories going too.. For recitation I have something like "Recite words and its on the public record for eternity.", that seems to stick easily.

Here's some of my crappy handwriting (English and Japanese) Still, its not too bad for four days I guess.

oooh pretty kanjis!
I like people sharing pictures. Very motivational.

welldone101 Wrote:oooh pretty kanjis!
I like people sharing pictures. Very motivational.

Yes, indeed it's also motivational for me to track my progress here. So you can ban me if I stop posting

I'm on frame 450 now. I'm beginning to wonder if its worth starting sentences after RtK1, after frame 1500 or after RtK3 even (which I'll do after RtK1). It seems some people start doing sentences around frame 1500, anyone have ideas about this? Or should I only do RtK1 even though I have time for supplemental learning?