I'm trying to plan out my JLPT2 Preparation, and more than concerned I wont have enough time! How long will it take to go through the sentences from the Kanzen Master 2kyuu Grammar Book, studying at an "average" pace?

Are you aiming for JLPT2 in December?

If you start now you should have time. Obviously it depends on how much you add per day. There's about ~750 sentences total I think.

How's your vocab?

Thats the problem. My vocab's nowhere near good enough. I want to work my way through the CosCom books first too- I think tactically speaking maybe I should not take the test this year.

CosCom @ 10 kanji per day (around 30 sentences added to Anki per day) will take 110 days, or around 4 months with potential interruptions.

I figure Kanzen will take another 3 months or so? Thats six months, then plugging the shortfalls in kanji.vocab from CosCom up to JLPT2 would be another 2 months I guess.

Finally listening practice and mock tests for a month.

Thats my very rough plan.

(EDIT) I should add I'm not a Nihongo newbie, am conversationally ok and passed JLPT3 the year before last.

Right. It could be tough.

I'm also aiming for JLPT2 in Dec. Currently I went through 1/3 of Reibun de Manabu Kanji to Kotoba 2Kyuu, and about 1/5 of KM.

I'm less advanced in KM, but that's because I feel I need to give more priority to the kanji and vocab.

RMKK2 progress is getting a bit faster as it's started to repeat a lot now.

I make take it anyway, just for a laugh. The text site in the UK is where I'll probably be studying next year anyway!

Vos, I sent u a message.

stevesayskanpai Wrote:Thats the problem. My vocab's nowhere near good enough. I want to work my way through the CosCom books first too- I think tactically speaking maybe I should not take the test this year.

CosCom @ 10 kanji per day (around 30 sentences added to Anki per day) will take 110 days, or around 4 months with potential interruptions.

I figure Kanzen will take another 3 months or so? Thats six months, then plugging the shortfalls in kanji.vocab from CosCom up to JLPT2 would be another 2 months I guess.

Finally listening practice and mock tests for a month.

Thats my very rough plan.

(EDIT) I should add I'm not a Nihongo newbie, am conversationally ok and passed JLPT3 the year before last.

Good luck. I'm kind of in the same boat with the same goal. I'm about 360 Kanji into KO2001 and I had planned to fly through it at 10 Kanji per day too but after going at it hard for about a month I started getting slammed with reviews and had to back off to 5 per day. 10 per day is definitely doable but it's going to require a lot of time and mental focus. My deck stats show my current average is 16 new cards added per day and I probably average 150 reviews per day. Not sure if that is a lot of reviews for you or not but I figured it could give you a general idea.

activeaero Wrote:

stevesayskanpai Wrote:Thats the problem. My vocab's nowhere near good enough. I want to work my way through the CosCom books first too- I think tactically speaking maybe I should not take the test this year.

CosCom @ 10 kanji per day (around 30 sentences added to Anki per day) will take 110 days, or around 4 months with potential interruptions.

I figure Kanzen will take another 3 months or so? Thats six months, then plugging the shortfalls in kanji.vocab from CosCom up to JLPT2 would be another 2 months I guess.

Finally listening practice and mock tests for a month.

Thats my very rough plan.

(EDIT) I should add I'm not a Nihongo newbie, am conversationally ok and passed JLPT3 the year before last.

Good luck. I'm kind of in the same boat with the same goal. I'm about 360 Kanji into KO2001 and I had planned to fly through it at 10 Kanji per day too but after going at it hard for about a month I started getting slammed with reviews and had to back off to 5 per day. 10 per day is definitely doable but it's going to require a lot of time and mental focus. My deck stats show my current average is 16 new cards added per day and I probably average 150 reviews per day. Not sure if that is a lot of reviews for you or not but I figured it could give you a general idea.

Sorry this isn't exactly on topic (although it may also be of benefit to steve, in figuring out how many reviews he is likely to be facing)- were you just doing KO2001 sentences? Eg. Was the ~150 reviews per day resulting from just KO2001 at 10/day or were you adding other stuff too? The reason I'm interested is that I'm on holiday as of today so I'm planning on going through the rest of KO2001.

I am just adding KO2001 sentences. And at 10 Kanji per day, which was about 30 sentences, the reviews per day were jumping up in the 250+ range if I remember correctly. Reviews are 150 per day now that I'm only doing 5 Kanji per day, aka 15 sentences.

activeaero Wrote:I am just adding KO2001 sentences. And at 10 Kanji per day, which was about 30 sentences, the reviews per day were jumping up in the 250+ range if I remember correctly. Reviews are 150 per day now that I'm only doing 5 Kanji per day, aka 15 sentences.

Ah ok, thanks :-) I'm planning on doing 20 kanji per day (~60 sentences) per day because I'm crazy like that, so I wanted to have a better idea of what I was getting into. I can handle ~250-350 reviews a day so I'll probably end up cutting back to 10 or 15 kanji/day towards the end.

Btw stevesayskanpai, whats your situation atm? Uni student, full time job, etc? It seems like you've got a few options: Sit the exam just for the fun of it and continue studying at average pace, give it a miss for another year (but keep studying of course!), or try and study your ass off to pass. If you're at uni or otherwise have a fairly relaxed schedule I think you would be surprised at how much you can do in a limited amount of time, provided you put the effort in. If you have other commitments that preclude this, then you're best bet is probably- as you said- keep up your studies and sit the exam just for laughs.

Hey guys. Sadly I'm not back in the giddy days of uni but quite busy with work, and next year with postgrad study. The reviews really are a bitch- I'm still getting a fair number of RtK cards coming up, so I think possibly even my 10 kanji a day plan might be a bit too much. I don't mind cutting back to 5 a day- any progress is good progress right? And if I take the test next year for real then I have the time.

Japanese study is most definitely a marathon rather than a sprint! Just wish I'd put more effort in while I was in Japan- spent two years there, got to JLPT3 and conversationally pretty good, but it took me a long time to see the light of the Heisig approach, and now I'm discovering the KO2001 books.

I have been adding about 15-30 new sentences a day, my reviews are around 100 per day including doing the new ones. Just thought i'd throw that in there for fun.

I have been adding 10 kanji KO2001 (30 sentences) weekly, plus 30 more sentences from yahoo dict and textbooks. That makes around 100 reviews daily, including 20/30 from RTK. So, It will take 2 years to complete KO2001. I am know at frame 380 (in 8 months).

Considering eliminated the RtK cards from my deck in a month or so. I mean, isn't the point of RtK to give you a strong familiarity with the kanji and a good idea of the keywords, but to phase this knowledge out with specific knowledge of the kanji as you go along?

Or how about this- as I add KO2001 kanji I delete the respective Heisig entries?

stevesayskanpai Wrote:Considering eliminated the RtK cards from my deck in a month or so. I mean, isn't the point of RtK to give you a strong familiarity with the kanji and a good idea of the keywords, but to phase this knowledge out with specific knowledge of the kanji as you go along?

Or how about this- as I add KO2001 kanji I delete the respective Heisig entries?

Unless you're doing kana -> kanji for the KO2001 sentences, I would recommend not deleting the Heisig cards.

Last year I stopped doing RTK about a month after finishing, and started doing KO2001. I've found that I've forgotten how to write a lot of Kanji, even if I can still recognise them in the KO2001 sentences. This could be because of the way I'm learning (I'm not studying the KO2001 book, just letting new sentences gradually show up in Anki), but I find recognising a Kanji and being able to write it are quite separate.

After a year off, I've had to start RTK again, basically from scratch (although it's much easier the second time).

It seems pretty straightforward to me...

There are like ~180 grammatical forms in the book. Go through the first one and measure how much time it takes you. Multiply by 180 and there's your answer....

stevesayskanpai Wrote:Considering eliminated the RtK cards from my deck in a month or so. I mean, isn't the point of RtK to give you a strong familiarity with the kanji and a good idea of the keywords, but to phase this knowledge out with specific knowledge of the kanji as you go along?

Or how about this- as I add KO2001 kanji I delete the respective Heisig entries?

Don't. I stopped reviewing RTK1 about 2-3 months after finishing it and now 5 months later I regret it tremendously to the point that I've started over again (that being said it is a freaking breeze this time around). If you keep your reviews up the SRS will take care of RTK1 to the point that you will hardly ever see them. If they ARE still coming up then you obviously don't know them all that well and need to keep reviewing them.

The stories "phasing out" over time will happen no matter what. Your other sources of Japanese input will dominate your Heisig reviews, especially once most of your RTK1 cards have advanced to long term SRS schedules.

The RTK cards will become less-and-less prevalent as time goes by anyway. If you really know them, then they should being disappearing over the horizon at a steady rate. If you don't really know them, then should they really be removed from the deck?

I'm another person that has stopped reviewing and has forgotten a lot (not enough to make me do it again though).

To be honest, I think the 3 months I spent only doing RTK was kind of... a waste. Or at least I went about it poorly. I think that time could have been better spent learning vocabulary and grammar and naturally learning the kanji as they came. My friend didn't do RTK and he really has come a long way just by using Anki, finding new input, etc.

To be honest, if I don't know how to write something I don't really care that much- I'm more concerned about reading, listening and speaking.

As an alternative to keeping RTK active in your decks, you could use the Brainspeed with Hashiriya's RTK lists over at smart.fm I think you could probably review 2000+ kanji in one hour. Do that once a month and you will at least be able to recognize the kanji super-fast, which is really what you want for reading.

Just one more depressing thing to keep in mind-- even if you ditch RTK from your review pile, the problem you're going to wind up with is an ever-increasing daily review pile, based on what you're trying to do by December.

Whenever I try to zerg-rush through something, I pay for it after a few weeks in an insane increase in Anki reviews.

I find that SRSing is almost like eating-- you need to avoid overeating, and you need to give yourself time to digest, unless you really like having 300+ reviews per day.

Now, if you don't mind doing 300+ reviews a day, then take the time to find *short* sentences for your kanji instead of those monsters in KO2001. (This would be a good time to check the ones on smart.fm, or online dictionaries, or wherever else you can think to look.) Long sentences really will add a bunch of time to your daily reviews.

I also found that there was a limit to brevity. Sentences or phrases that were too short didn't seem to spark very good recall rates, because there were too many possible homonyms, and not enough useful context. (I'm talking about kana->kanji cards... those are always the troublemakers.) So it's an irritatingly tricky line to walk.