Out of interest, how many times have you stopped adding kanji completely for some reason or another? I had a complete deadlock at the 'lidded crock' primitive, but I've just started doing them again. I still did reviews without adding any kanji though.

I hit a deadlock twice (each about 2 weeks long). Once at ~700, and I just got out of a deadlock at ~1500. I stop doing kanji because I get bored. I took the advice of "not forcing yourself to do something that's not fun", and just let myself break.

I've already started sentences and grammar (~250 sentences)... Every time I cross a kanji I don't know, I feel the guilt, and that gives me a push to get back to the RTK.

I hit a big deadlock around 500 and 1000. I now realize that it was because I had built up those landmarks a little too much and when I got there... and I still couldn't do a lot, I was pretty bummed out. New primitives I disagree with have also put me off. In fact, I had a lot of trouble with lidded crock, myself. Truthfully though, just push on through. It will get easier as you go along. Just keep going some every day and the things that seem like they just won't fit into your mind will begin to seep in and the whole process will become much more pleasant.

Don't worry about being perfect the first time. You're going to keep reviewing kanji and seeing kanji in the real Japanese you'll soon be studying, so don't worry if you're not 100% every time. Just keep adding every day, do your reps, and soon you will have studied over 2,000 and your journey to Japanese fluency will be much much easier.

Or so I'm told

About a week ago I had raced ahead to 1100 but my failed pile had reached 400 (partly due to laziness, partly due to a fear of having forgotten them all). I've spent this past week sorting it all out, adding only 100 new cards and making sure as many cards as possible are in Box 2 or above. Currently I only have about 50 cards in Box 1 and no failed cards whatsoever. I feel so much better right now compared to seven days ago.

100 cards a week... wish I had the motivation to do that many. At the moment my average is 5 a day, but I'm trying to get it up to about 15. When I start doing them I can get loads done, but starting them is the problem!

Anyone else thought the title said "Dreadlocks?"

I'm severely disappointed.

mafried Wrote:Anyone else thought the title said "Dreadlocks?"

I'm severely disappointed.

yes I did



anyway, I'm kinda at a deadlock right now, I plan to start again when my new laptop arrives >.>

I stopped at 300 for a few weeks, then stopped at 800 for another few weeks, and then completely flew through the rest of them, finishing without any other problems whatsoever.

I'm at 700 and haven't added any more for four days, and probably won't until thursday either. My first 'gap' in learning. It's not because I'm burning out, I really want to keep learning them. But university work is killing me at the moment. I'm struggling to keep ontop of my review pile, let alone add more. But after thursday, I'll be free again to keep going.

When I did RTK, I hit a few of them. The biggest mistake I made was going to Japan in the middle of doing RTK. There was no way in hell I was going to make time to review while I was on vacation. I wound up restarting when I got back, even though I was around 1000-1100. But it wasn't too bad, because I already sort of knew the first 1000, so it went by pretty quickly.

I hit a brief slowdown at around 1500 or so, just because I was getting sick of it, then I managed to power through. I hit another one at 1900 or so, just because I felt so close to finishing. Again, you just have to will yourself to finish. Just do one. Then do another. Then another.

700 was my first one and now I've been stuck for 4 weeks just reviewing on 1350ish. On the plus side I'm down to like 20 reviews a day...

I've been working RTK for like 3 or 4 years now. This is the 4th time I have started. I've gotten really good at the first 100. I think the furthest I got was my first time at it, around 1500. Last time I got to around 700.

It's kind of funny, actually. RTK feels like such a badge of honor for some reason. I've passed JLPT2, but I still feel like I don't know anything because I haven't finished RTK. I've done a lot of other kanji study, though, and so my useable kanji knowledge is somewhere around 1300. The weeks before taking the JLPT2 it was probably at 1600+. I've forgotten a lot over the past semester because I just didn't have time to study.

Now that I'm done with University forever, I have time to study more Japanese. There's no reason I shouldn't pass JLPT 1 in December. My first task, though, learning RTK and reviewing all the JLPT 2 material.

I have never had any deadlocks or walls (I am almost to 1300). Mainly since I believe in failure is key to success. You get a block wrong, great! But you probably won't get them all wrong. The ones you fail will be seen again and again. Basically always add and always do reviews. You will succeed!

erlog Wrote:I think the furthest I got was my first time at it, around 1500. Last time I got to around 700.

Wow. I cannot imagine quitting after reaching the 3/4 mark. Heck, I can't imagine quitting after 1/2. I just would feel horrible about letting so much learning go up in smoke.

No "dreadlocks" yet (gotta admit my brain saw the subject line that way, too, on the first read), but there's always a possibility. That's one reason I poke along at a dozen a day or so -- I always have time to do the reviews and the input, so I never have even a second thought about stopping.

I'm way too terrified to stop.

Wally Wrote:

erlog Wrote:I think the furthest I got was my first time at it, around 1500. Last time I got to around 700.

Wow. I cannot imagine quitting after reaching the 3/4 mark. Heck, I can't imagine quitting after 1/2. I just would feel horrible about letting so much learning go up in smoke.

That's the thing, though. It didn't go up in smoke. RTK helped me out a lot despite the fact that I didn't finish. I still tended to have better kanji knowledge than all of my peers, even when I got to higher levels.

That last time I stopped RTK at 700 is a little misleading. I stopped RTK at that point because I couldn't finish it by the time the JLPT2 was rolling around. So, I decided to spend more time on conventional kanji and vocabulary study. Even though I stopped at 700 that time, my actual kanji knowledge was about double that in terms of what I could read. It's just that RTK is a long-term solution that I didn't have time for with the short term JLPT2 rolling around. There was vocabulary that I really needed to know that superseded the gentle approach that RTK provides.

The reason I quit at 1500 was because I became overwhelmed that I had 500 earlier kanji in my failed box.

Deadlocking or stopping is not a sign of any ability. It's simply a fact of study. Sometimes you get backlogged. Maybe that lesson's kanji are particularly obtuse, or you're not feeling well. People who are deadlocked or have stopped shouldn't feel like failures.

Stopping, obviously, will make you take longer to complete RTK, but if you come back to it from the beginning then you see really how much you have learned. I have done it so many times that I can add 100 kanji a day with almost perfect SRS results for the first 1000.

Until I get to around 1300, almost all of my failed kanji are ones I can read fine when they come up in sentences. I even have a general meaning for them in my head. It's just connecting them to the RTK meaning that is the trouble.

I'm intending to complete RTK at this point so that I can feel finished with it. I probably don't need to do it.

It took me a couple of months to get to 1000 and since about 700 I had been feeling burned out so after that landmark I decided that in order to decrease my daily amount of reviews I would not take on any more new kanji for a while. I would simply do my reviews every day until they decreased from about 250 per day down to around, say, 50. It's been about four months since then and despite being very diligent in keeping up with the reviews I can't seem to get them below 90 reps a day. I've been at the 90 mark for almost two months now. Currently, my deck statistics suggest that my average reps next week will be 80 cards/day but a couple of weeks ago I recall it being at 70 cards/day. I just don't know what I'm doing wrong. I get roughly 80% correct every day but the intervals seem pretty much the same every week. I imagine they are decreasing but I'm shocked that it is taking so damn long!

But since I'm really only working at it for about 20-25 minutes a day I'm thinking about starting to add new kanji and see what happens. The new imput might actually get my brain out of a freeze and I'm hoping to see an improvement. But what I don't want is to end up completing rtk1 and having the same thing happen again: Months and months of reviews and no real sign of long term retention.

Anyone else had this problem?

I have exactly that problem. People here quote 90%, 95% retention rates. I believe it, but I've never been able to achieve it myself. Put a little extra effort into your stories and you might be able to get it up to 85% though, and that'll make a big difference. Otherwise just continue adding kanji each day. Maybe even just 2 or 3 kanji, doesn't have to be a lot; some progress is better than no progress.

Also, which SRS are you using? I find that any Supermemo-derived SRS (like Anki) does a better job than RevTK at smoothing out and lowering reviews over time.

The retention rate of mature cards is the only thing that really matters. If you're reguarly forgetting, say, 30% of mature cards, then there's a problem. Otherwise, it's nothing to worry about, especially in the case of first-seen cards.

@mafried: Yup. I'm using Anki. I think the general feeling amongst most people here is that Anki is far and away the best srs out there at the moment. I do think you are probably right about giving an extra effort on the stories. After a month or so I fell into a habit of not repeating the stories in my head with each new card I'm reviewing and doing the reviews with almost by-rote memorization; maybe only ever recalling the primatives that make up the kanji rather than the whole story. That may have been a big mistake on my part.

@harhol: My correct answers on mature cards are at 76.7% which is above the 30% incorrect that you quoted. But the deck stats say that I only have 572 of mature cards. Which means that there are 428 young cards after at least four months of reviews.

I'm just getting impatient with the whole thing and want to start learning the actual language as soon as possible so I'm gonna start adding new cards fairly soon and get the hell on with it.

You almost forget sometimes that the whole point of this is to learn the Japanese language. :/

Po0py Wrote:It took me a couple of months to get to 1000 and since about 700 I had been feeling burned out so after that landmark I decided that in order to decrease my daily amount of reviews I would not take on any more new kanji for a while. I would simply do my reviews every day until they decreased from about 250 per day down to around, say, 50. It's been about four months since then and despite being very diligent in keeping up with the reviews I can't seem to get them below 90 reps a day. I've been at the 90 mark for almost two months now.
[...snip...]
Anyone else had this problem?

I am currently in the midst of exactly what you describe. However, after almost a month of only reviewing my reviews are finally down to below 50 a day. (It's been 6 months since I started) and I began new kanji again yesterday! Woo!@

mafried Wrote:I have exactly that problem. People here quote 90%, 95% retention rates. I believe it, but I've never been able to achieve it myself.

Keep in mind the selection bias in what people report. Delight at getting 95% inspires a post -- but people may be less likely to rush to the forum to report a dismal retention rate.

To cheer you up, I got behind in my reviews (over 400 due) and had worse than 50% retention on the first 50 I reviewed (seriously overdue first pile). But then as I progressed toward ones in later piles, the retention rate climbed to around 80-85%.

When I stay on top of reviews, my rates are better, but they were typically awful the first time I reviewed stuff -- that's how I discovered which stories were working great the first time, which might need some tweaking...

I've gotten 30% PASS rates (forgotten 70%) when they're in my first box. It never troubles me. Just make sure your fail box stays down (ie don't leave them there - get them back into the system asap). But three or four times, I've gotten 100% pass rates by the time they are in my mature box. Although even then, I've had bad sections when I get only a 50% pass rate for my mature box. I just don't let it bother me, failing them just means you'll see them more often, so it's a good thing. Just keep going at it!

And I definitely don't think it's a good idea to not add more kanji, until you get an 85% pass rate. As a wise person (I think it was khatzumoto) once said, it's better to have a 70% pass rate for 2000 kanji, than a 100% pass rate for 500 kanji.

Po0py Wrote:I'm just getting impatient with the whole thing and want to start learning the actual language as soon as possible so I'm gonna start adding new cards fairly soon and get the hell on with it.

Do you use the stories on RevTK, or stick with your own? Because I find some of the stories on here to be absolutely invaluable and I don't know how I'd have coped without them. For example, the story for dissolve (融):

"I have created the element "old camera" out of the left side of the kanji: from the subject's point of view, the light is captured by one MOUTH (the lens). The photographer is under a big HOOD, we only see his LEGS, and he is holding a SPIKE in his right hand, which is the shutter release. Now, at the time the photographer takes the photo, a little INSECT is flying near the flash. The flash is so powerful that the insect is burnt and dissolves in the air."

This was just insta-success for me: I haven't failed "dissolve" since I discovered this story. If you're failing the same ones over & over then you could try looking for a different story.

lagwagon555 Wrote:I've gotten 30% PASS rates (forgotten 70%) when they're in my first box. It never troubles me. Just make sure your fail box stays down (ie don't leave them there - get them back into the system asap). But three or four times, I've gotten 100% pass rates by the time they are in my mature box. Although even then, I've had bad sections when I get only a 50% pass rate for my mature box. I just don't let it bother me, failing them just means you'll see them more often, so it's a good thing. Just keep going at it!

And I definitely don't think it's a good idea to not add more kanji, until you get an 85% pass rate. As a wise person (I think it was khatzumoto) once said, it's better to have a 70% pass rate for 2000 kanji, than a 100% pass rate for 500 kanji.

I agree completely. I don't worry very much about my first-view pass rate; it can vary from 80 percent to 20 percent. But I have 750 mature cards in Anki now, and my stats say 91.4 percent correct on mature cards.

I think my biggest key is taking the advice I read here some time ago and just refusing to let my failed stack remain populated. I go after it, and I get them back into circulation almost immediately. That's another reason I don't try and get this done in 60 days -- the failed stack is going to be a daily chore, sometimes a really ugly one. But I add every day, and I review every day, and I clean up the failed every day. System works, there is no doubt about it.

I am bit of a slow one (full time job + part time college + learning Japanese = hard time) so I plan to work over a year on RTK1. Personally, when I suck at a review (<70% correct), it really gets me down, so I developed a rule of thumb:

If any box has more cards than the box to the right (especially fail and 1st review) I stop adding new cards and continue to review daily (and additionally go through the last two or three lessons as well just to reinforce) until the review chart looks "tidy" again. This helps keeping up my motivation.

As I said, I am quite slow (400 after three months), but the Kanji that I do know are very "stable". Slowly, I can replace my regular Japanese course vocabulary cards with Kanji ones, which is a huge motivation boost for me.