Hello,

thank you for this nice platform. Unfortunately my first post is very negative.

since I've been doing the Heisig and SRS method I hit several points where the reviews become unbearable. Granted, they were mostly self-inflicted. So I started repeatedly from scratch. I do realize that the ideal way would be to study daily 20+ kanji and do the reviews. That way prevents you from relearning unnecessarily.

Right now I'm at the pinnacle kanji. Even if I finish the book I'm not determined to study with an SRS anymore. I accept the kanji reviews that will follow but thinking of numbly entering and reviewing sentences is very discouraging. "No pain, no gain" shouldn't be the motto doing AJATT. Time and fun is needed. I might pass on having fantastic fun but tiring SRSing is nothing I want to do. Basically, I like the idea of an SRS but 10.000 sentences, 2042 kanji and what not is sheer overwhelming.

I could finish the book. Then again, I don't see much sense in doing so because I don't want to follow up the SRS path. I really tried to become familiar with the SRS and invested many hours studying and reviewing kanji. It drains my energy and joy.

Learning a language is work. There's no way around that. All you can do is minimize the work you have to be doing by using effective and fun methods; such as an SRS. You could use some other way if you prefer it... like writing each kanji a thousand times in a row (yuk).

If you find an easier and more fun way to learn, go ahead and tell us. I doubt it will happen though.

Finish RTK and keep up with the reviews. It would be a shame and a waste of time to forget the stuff you've learned. But don't worry, you can learn Japanese without an SRS.
I mean, I have about 650 sentences for Japanese, but I'm JLPT2 level. Most of the stuff I learned outside an SRS.

Thanks for your replies. I didn't know what to expect by starting this thread. I read this forum, how-to-learn-any-language, ajatt but still haven't a clear plan. Anyways.

[ファブリス]

"Desire is the starting point of all achievement"

Do you want to write those dammed kanji? Do you like kanji? Do you like Japanese?

Don't force yourself doing something you don't like.

Learn to quit if you're not really into it, and invest your passion and energy into something you really want to do, don't lie to yourself or try to please anybody or any group or even your parents (including this very community/culture).

And if you DO like to write kanji and read Japanese, then remember a SRS is just a tool, and it's hardly necessary to use a SRS to learn Japanese, despite what all this AJATT zealotry may be saying. I learned the first 1000 kanji of RtK with weekly tests on random range of kanji, without any SRS scheduling, and did well over 90% remembered when I tested myself once on 1000 kanji.

You can have the best SRS in the world, at the end of the day it's not going to do the Japanese learning for you.

You don't have to learn all the RTK. How about doing RTK Lite, just learn the 1100 or so kanji and lock that in, and then move onto the more fun parts of japanese?

Here I think you're missing the trees for the forest. You're looking at the entire process, not realizing it's the small steps you take that are fun. The benefit of an SRS is you can take small steps and keep the progress you make with minimal effort after wards.

Consider, if you did 100 kanji a day for 20 days then went right into learning Japanese twelve hours a day, you wouldn't need an SRS. Your studying takes care of whatever you might forget. If you're like me, you take Japanese as a part of your day. I need an SRS so that those hour or two a day I spend are not lost after a month. They slowly add up to something that looks impossible after a year.

The SRS is not there to increase the work load, but to reduce it to a manageable level that still maintains what you already learned. Back off. Set yourself a definite time per day you'll review/add new stuff and then don't do anymore. You master your time and your SRS. Don't let the reverse happen. When you feel beholden to the reviews, it becomes a burden and something you want to drop. So back off before it becomes even heavier.

Sorry for all the metaphors.

Nukemarine makes great points. It's also worth noting that as you get better at Japanese, you can afford to slack off with your SRS a lot more. For example, some days I just don't feel like adding anything to my SRS. Instead, I spend a good 30 minutes reading a Japanese book. For a beginner, the actual gain from reading a book will be minimal compared to an SRS (since it's almost impossible to pick anything up from context or enjoy it) but as you get better and better, pure exposure becomes more and more of a viable way of learning. I think SRS are useful WAY beyond JLPT1 and basic fluency, but I do think that "adding 30 facts a day while managing several decks" is a problem for beginners who need to learn a lot to get started with exposure. SRSing becomes a lot less straining as you get better at Japanese, definitely.

Take more frequent SRS holidays (review, but don't add) - they're good for you. I wish I could go back in time and tame myself to take one day off and not add any kanji at least once a week. Really good for the brain.

tenricefieldsglue Wrote:Hello,
I accept the kanji reviews that will follow but thinking of numbly entering and reviewing sentences is very discouraging. "No pain, no gain" shouldn't be the motto doing AJATT. Time and fun is needed. I might pass on having fantastic fun but tiring SRSing is nothing I want to do. Basically, I like the idea of an SRS but 10.000 sentences, 2042 kanji and what not is sheer overwhelming.

I could finish the book. Then again, I don't see much sense in doing so because I don't want to follow up the SRS path. I really tried to become familiar with the SRS and invested many hours studying and reviewing kanji. It drains my energy and joy.

Dude, here's the deal. 10,000 sentences is not the goal. Japanese is the goal. Tell yourself that every. single. day. 10,000 sentences (in the words of so many other AJATTers before me) are merely a product of the goal of Japanese.

When you start out doing sentences, you don't look for sentences. You look for interesting Japanese. When you come across something that you *really enjoy* while reading interesting Japanese that stretches your knowledge a bit (and be selective) put it in your SRS to remember it.

If a majority of your sentence deck is built like this, reviews will be more fun. AND, on top of all that, you get to delete sentences when you get sick of them. And if you don't feel like doing reps, you have tools that others have made/discovered for you like timeboxing.

Dude. Worry not. You'll own this 日本語　thing like a piece of cake. After you finish RTK, suffer the reviews for a few months and you'll be home free.

AJATT is fun All The Time! You only have to review your SRS for like 4 hours a day (which is fun by the way). In Khatzumoto-land, that means you still have at least 20 hours to do all the fun things (and collect super fun sentences effortlessly at the same time)!

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go have fun spreading the good news about Khatzumoto to all those poor people who are not having fun right now. isn't life wonderful?

^Sorry Codexus, but that post reeks of sarcasm, but I can't be sure.

In retrospect my first post sounds pretty whiny and I'm grateful that your replied, anyhow.
I made a decision. I'm going to finish the book by Sunday, July 12. Till now I've made it up to frame 1315. That means there are 727 kanji left. I'm going to start all over again using RevTK as my SRS. Now.

Hey, looks like we're at about the same point. The last couple of hundred (as I've been getting back into it, since I deliberately stopped to write my dissertation) have been rough for me too, so I understand how you feel. I enjoy learning the Kanji, but reviews can be very tiring, though I think I would have struggled to remember without a SRS, so am grateful for and will continue with it. All I can suggest is making sure you don't let them pile up (self-bribery, such as chocolate in my case, is also good).

I'd like to finish by then, too, what say we encourage each other, doing a certain number each day, and reporting on progress (via email) every couple days or so? Understand if you don't want to, though.

I'm up to 1394. Number of daily reviews are getting a bit high, and I'm going to my summer home over the weekend, which will be a distraction, so I won't add anything for three days (Which will be the only days since I started that I do not add any cards).
My original plan was to finish by Thursday 16:th of July. Since my vacation starts in one week, I have decided that I want to take it a bit easy and postpone the end until Sunday the 19:th. That way the total time spent will be 60 days, though of course reviews will continue after that. Then I'll pick up RTK 3 at a much slower pace once I feel comfortable with it, possibly not until after vacation ends.

Just wanted to share, since we are at about the same point.

Good idea. This Sunday evening I'm going to report my progress in this thread. Feel free to join in.

igordesu Wrote:When you start out doing sentences, you don't look for sentences. You look for interesting Japanese. When you come across something that you *really enjoy* while reading interesting Japanese that stretches your knowledge a bit (and be selective) put it in your SRS to remember it.

As well, when you find just really practical sentence patterns, things that you know you'll need to use, SRS those even if they're not *fun* per se. There are lots of basic sentence patterns that we need for basic communication. SRS'ing those will get you well on the way to being able to have basic conversations without having to fully grasp the nuances of grammar first. I'm not saying parrot sentences, but by swapping nouns/verbs you can say a lot of things with some useful sentence patterns.

It is certainly a lot of work to learn a language, particularly one like Japanese where our own language doesn't share any roots with it linguistically or alphabetically. But as you learn and find yourself understanding more stuff "in the wild" it'll increasingly start rewarding you, making further effort more fun.

Ignore the AJATT zealots. There are parts about learning Japanese that suck balls. However all of that pays off if when you can suddenly read things that you couldn't before. Hell, you don't even have to like Japanese to learn it and master it (but it certainly helps).

I always hated kanji, I hate kanji, and I will always hate kanji. But I got the RTK1 done and I'm feeling good. I've always been annoyed by the people who complain when something is typed in roomaji, they think that its counter-productive. Then when you start typing in Kanji they start complaining because they can't read any of it.

Now I can proudly say "Type whatever you want, Nihonjin-san". It doesn't matter to me because roomaji is helpful (that's how speech comes out, PHONETICALLY, with pauses between word-partical pairs) and kanji is helpful too (for practicing reading, of course).

So, my advice is to stick with it even if it's hard. It's an achievable task (RTK) and you'll feel great about yourself when you'd finished.
What can you change to make it easier? You can go at a slower pace. You don't have to learn Japanese in 18 months. You can even, dare I say it, take breaks once in a while.

If it makes you feel any better: there were times where I went almost a month without learning any new kanji and had 600 reviews on my anki deck. Now, I know the RTK and I have all my reviews today done.

I think your minimum goal is to keep the SRS review count LOW and only add things when you feel like you could contribute more time to reviewing.



Well, that's just my 2 cents at least.

wio_dude: if it's such a bitter experience for you, then why are you studying Japanese??? For goodness' sake, just because you think some parts of Japanese "suck balls" (whatever that means...) doesn't mean that anybody else has to think that. Nobody asked you to rain on the parade of "hmm, let's actually try and have fun while we learn a language!"

Seriously. IT. IS. POSSIBLE. To be successful and spend a large majority of your time having fun while studying Japanese. It really is. Nobody said you have to have fun. Hey, if you wanna go bash your head against a wall while boring yourself to tears reading some random, retarded textbook, then go ahead. The whole point of AJATT is that the process does GO FASTER if you do it by having fun. Der.

igordesu Wrote:wio_dude: if it's such a bitter experience for you, then why are you studying Japanese??? For goodness' sake, just because you think some parts of Japanese "suck balls" (whatever that means...) doesn't mean that anybody else has to think that. Nobody asked you to rain on the parade of "hmm, let's actually try and have fun while we learn a language!"

Seriously. IT. IS. POSSIBLE. To be successful and spend a large majority of your time having fun while studying Japanese. It really is. Nobody said you have to have fun. Hey, if you wanna go bash your head against a wall while boring yourself to tears reading some random, retarded textbook, then go ahead. The whole point of AJATT is that the process does GO FASTER if you do it by having fun. Der.

Well if you convinced yourself daily SRS reps are fun, and stuff like Tae Kim (ok, technically a website)/KO2001/KiC/Genki. etc. aren't boring old textbooks, then good for you. To be blunt, while it works, I dread my daily SRS routine. If there are people who find flashcards fun, then you are very lucky and different from me. And as fun as you try to make it, there are parts of learning anything new that suck. Don't get me wrong, over all I like Japanese, but to pretend everything is a blast is monumentally disingenuous. Even going through the small things that I can read and enjoy still gives me a headache.

Basically just suck it up and do it, but don't act like everything is (or will be) sunshine and roses.

strugglebunny Wrote:

igordesu Wrote:wio_dude: if it's such a bitter experience for you, then why are you studying Japanese??? For goodness' sake, just because you think some parts of Japanese "suck balls" (whatever that means...) doesn't mean that anybody else has to think that. Nobody asked you to rain on the parade of "hmm, let's actually try and have fun while we learn a language!"

Seriously. IT. IS. POSSIBLE. To be successful and spend a large majority of your time having fun while studying Japanese. It really is. Nobody said you have to have fun. Hey, if you wanna go bash your head against a wall while boring yourself to tears reading some random, retarded textbook, then go ahead. The whole point of AJATT is that the process does GO FASTER if you do it by having fun. Der.

Well if you convinced yourself daily SRS reps are fun, and stuff like Tae Kim (ok, technically a website)/KO2001/KiC/Genki. etc. aren't boring old textbooks, then good for you. To be blunt, while it works, I dread my daily SRS routine. If there are people who find flashcards fun, then you are very lucky and different from me. And as fun as you try to make it, there are parts of learning anything new that suck. Don't get me wrong, over all I like Japanese, but to pretend everything is a blast is monumentally disingenuous. Even going through the small things that I can read and enjoy still gives me a headache.

Basically just suck it up and do it, but don't act like everything is (or will be) sunshine and roses.

Well, my own srs reps really are fun. And I didn't have to convince myself. I no longer do kanji reps (I realize most people actually do these though, so I understand that), I no longer write out my sentence reps, and I only add sentences that I really feel like adding and enjoy. I can blaze through my reps everyday and enjoy them. I delete sentences when I don't like them. Basically, I do what I feel like doing, and I seem to be making decent progress. The only writing I do now is writing out new sentences once before I add them.

This applies to reading, too. I only read stuff I really enjoy (this means high turnover rate), and I rarely ever finish a whole series. Now that I look back on it, I probably would have skipped beginner stuff like Tae Kim. It wasn't fun, and it really didn't help me read manga all that much.

If you don't do Kanji reps, nor write out your flashcards, don't you think your production will suffer? I mean, even native Japanese who can read well, sometimes can't write worth a damn.

And to be more on topic. I've had my own struggles with this method. I have a terrible imagination, which makes the Heisig method torture sometimes. Still its the best method I've come across so far, and after struggling with RTK 1 on and off for more than a year and a half, I decided to put my nose to the grind stone and I should be finished adding new kanji by Monday or Tuesday. After that, it's time to flesh out those stories (or god forbid, just rote memorize the ones that I can't seem to get any story to stuck for for any length of time.)

See, I thought writing out stuff would help my production, but...I don't really care about my production. I'm going to learn to read, and then I'll learn to write. Besides, I don't think I belong writing normal Japanese until I can read anyways. Plus, a benefit is that if I don't waste time by writing stuff everyday, I can learn more everyday.

And good luck with RTK

Don't get me wrong igordesu, I'm not saying that you must hate kanji, nor am I saying that everyone hates kanji. Some people love it and that's great for them.
But, if I allowed my hatred of kanji stop me from learning it, I could never have gotten this far in my Japanese studies. RTK has truley helped me.'

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is, just because you don't enjoy something doesn't mean you should give up on it, or that it's fruitless to continue. As I already said, the satisfaction of being able to read Japanese which I couldn't before made RTK worth it.

You don't have to "like" the method as long as you enjoy the results that come from it. It's that simple to me.