I highly recommend graph paper. I use a pad meant for Japanese kids. It's Doraemon themed and is just a notepad full of squares. It cost about £1 and works much better than standard graph paper. Lasts for a while too. Been using it every day for a month, and I'm only 5 pages in to the 30.

I don't know where you can get them, apart from some Japanese bookshops I went to in London. Going to buy a few next time I go, since they're cheap and very useful.

nicksan Wrote:I highly recommend graph paper. I use a pad meant for Japanese kids. It's Doraemon themed and is just a notepad full of squares. It cost about £1 and works much better than standard graph paper. Lasts for a while too. Been using it every day for a month, and I'm only 5 pages in to the 30.

You sure love that Doraemon notepad eh?

nicksan Wrote:I don't know where you can get them, apart from some Japanese bookshops I went to in London. Going to buy a few next time I go, since they're cheap and very useful.

You might wanna try looking in Chinatown or Chinese bookshops since chinese kids also use the same squared notebooks during their saturday-Chinese-school and is definitely cheaper than £1. I'm sure you can find lots there.

Everyone should own one! They even come with stickers, which sweetens the deal.

Thanks for the Chinatown tip by the way

KaitouJS Wrote:I got a question about my reviews: When trying to recall a kanji for a certain keyword, I sometimes find that it may sometimes be disproportionate/odd-looking but still in the same form. I still do proper stroke order, though.

I still mark these kanji as correct.. but should I? I'm not sure if I'm learning proper form if I'm letting myself get off that easily.

Definitely mark them as correct. RtK teaches you to recognize kanji, not calligraphy. If you can see that the kanji are odd-looking, you already know that, they will start to look better as you use them more. Writing kanji isn't hard as long as you know the primitives, so that's definitely what's important.

Tobberoth Wrote:

KaitouJS Wrote:I got a question about my reviews: When trying to recall a kanji for a certain keyword, I sometimes find that it may sometimes be disproportionate/odd-looking but still in the same form. I still do proper stroke order, though.

I still mark these kanji as correct.. but should I? I'm not sure if I'm learning proper form if I'm letting myself get off that easily.

Definitely mark them as correct. RtK teaches you to recognize kanji, not calligraphy. If you can see that the kanji are odd-looking, you already know that, they will start to look better as you use them more. Writing kanji isn't hard as long as you know the primitives, so that's definitely what's important.

Alright, I'll do just that, then.

I've just cleared Part II and I'm now into Part III, having just finished Chapter 20. I can finally say, whew, it's either gonna be tough or easy for me in the future pages. Now I'm really thankful that RevTK exists.

Well, I thought I'd be finished asking questions, but I'm not.

I recently just got to 575 and pretty much noticed that I've been reading everyone else's stories instead of making up my own. Some of them seem to work for me, so I guess that's fine. But I've seen a trend in how I memorize these stories (not to mention the ones right from the start), and it's not imaginative memory - I'm practically just picking up these stories, recognizing each primitive for each keyword, and building up the story each time I see a keyword for a kanji.

Is this alright? It's difficult for me to build vivid images, but so far these methods have been working just fine.

KaitouJS Wrote:I recently just got to 575 and pretty much noticed that I've been reading everyone else's stories instead of making up my own. Some of them seem to work for me, so I guess that's fine. But I've seen a trend in how I memorize these stories (not to mention the ones right from the start), and it's not imaginative memory - I'm practically just picking up these stories, recognizing each primitive for each keyword, and building up the story each time I see a keyword for a kanji.

Is this alright? It's difficult for me to build vivid images, but so far these methods have been working just fine.

First, if it's working it's fine, I'd say.

Second, sounds to me as if what you describe _is_ imaginative memory. What part of what you describe seems to you not to be? If you recognize each primitive for each key word and 'build up the story each time' you see the key word, that 'building' is going on in your imagination, no?

Third, I also mainly did a quick-pick of favourite stories from the site from Part III forward and it worked fine. Occasionally something with deeply personal associations would pop to mind, and then I'd use that, but most of the time one of the top favourites seemed good, I'd cut and paste into my story box and also into an offline file of stories, and that was that.

Would only worry about it and either change or fine-tune if I found myself missing the card several times.

depending on how complicated an idea/keyword is (ie. if it's too vague a concept) I will sit and try to imagine a scene being enacted based on the story. To be honest, I only made 50 stories or so from scratch myself. 100s of times, though, I added to stories that people wrote by signally concepts that seemed personally intuitive. Most of the time I used other people stories and tried to imagine an entire scene being acted out in my mind.

If I notice a struggle with a particular keyword (usually successive failures), I remember the first thing that comes to mind with the keyword and somehow work that into the story I took from someone else or rewrite my own story.

dewick Wrote:

KaitouJS Wrote:I recently just got to 575 and pretty much noticed that I've been reading everyone else's stories instead of making up my own. Some of them seem to work for me, so I guess that's fine. But I've seen a trend in how I memorize these stories (not to mention the ones right from the start), and it's not imaginative memory - I'm practically just picking up these stories, recognizing each primitive for each keyword, and building up the story each time I see a keyword for a kanji.

Is this alright? It's difficult for me to build vivid images, but so far these methods have been working just fine.

First, if it's working it's fine, I'd say.

Second, sounds to me as if what you describe _is_ imaginative memory. What part of what you describe seems to you not to be? If you recognize each primitive for each key word and 'build up the story each time' you see the key word, that 'building' is going on in your imagination, no?

Third, I also mainly did a quick-pick of favourite stories from the site from Part III forward and it worked fine. Occasionally something with deeply personal associations would pop to mind, and then I'd use that, but most of the time one of the top favourites seemed good, I'd cut and paste into my story box and also into an offline file of stories, and that was that.

Would only worry about it and either change or fine-tune if I found myself missing the card several times.

Ah. I dunno, I was just thinking "if you don't deeply visualize it, you're probably not studying the kanji's story hard enough" - imagination, to me, sorta fits into that.

(Speaking of offline story files, I should really start doing that since I'm almost near Chapter 22 and I rely on the site for stories most of the time..)

dewick Wrote:Third, I also mainly did a quick-pick of favourite stories from the site from Part III forward and it worked fine. Occasionally something with deeply personal associations would pop to mind, and then I'd use that, but most of the time one of the top favourites seemed good, I'd cut and paste into my story box and also into an offline file of stories, and that was that.

Would only worry about it and either change or fine-tune if I found myself missing the card several times.

Maybe I should add that I only varied from that substantially with the 'person' primitive, as I'm blissfully unaware of the exploits of Mr. T, but he obviously worked for many on the site & so good for him, and them.

KaitouJS Wrote:Ah. I dunno, I was just thinking "if you don't deeply visualize it, you're probably not studying the kanji's story hard enough" - imagination, to me, sorta fits into that.

I also felt occasionally that I wasn't doing enough imaginative 'work' with the stories, particularly after a day of bad reviews, and tried several tricks that others have recommended on the forum. Even had an egg timer on my desk at one point to be sure I kept my eyes closed and focused on fixing the story for a full two minutes. Found myself one-eye peeking at and thinking more about the egg timer than the story.

In the end I stopped worrying about it. Again, the SRS will do its work. Stories will solidify if you miss a card a few times, and finally, as Heisig says and many others have reported, the story itself just sort of melts away, leaving the Kanji itself behind.

KaitouJS Wrote:(Speaking of offline story files, I should really start doing that since I'm almost near Chapter 22 and I rely on the site for stories most of the time..)

Sorry for multiple posts. First day in ages I've had much free time on my hands. . . .

For those who use this site for reviewing, keeping stories offline is good for the obvious reasons, to have a backup, etc., but also because, as far as I know (someone correct, please, if I'm wrong), there is no easy way or perhaps no way at all to do a universal search of one's own stories on the site.

Sometimes I can't fully recall a particular Kanji I want to bring to mind for one reason or another, don't know either on or kun reading, and can't come up with the key word. If I recall any single bit of my story, that a particular friend appears in it, for example, can search the offline cache of stories for friend's name, for example, and voila!

dewick Wrote:

KaitouJS Wrote:(Speaking of offline story files, I should really start doing that since I'm almost near Chapter 22 and I rely on the site for stories most of the time..)

Sorry for multiple posts. First day in ages I've had much free time on my hands. . . .

For those who use this site for reviewing, keeping stories offline is good for the obvious reasons, to have a backup, etc., but also because, as far as I know (someone correct, please, if I'm wrong), there is no easy way or perhaps no way at all to do a universal search of one's own stories on the site.

Sometimes I can't fully recall a particular Kanji I want to bring to mind for one reason or another, don't know either on or kun reading, and can't come up with the key word. If I recall any single bit of my story, that a particular friend appears in it, for example, can search the offline cache of stories for friend's name, for example, and voila!

Well, there is http://kanji.koohii.com/study/my-stories.php, but it's so darned easy to find that you probably knew it existed.

(EDIT: Though, you can't search that, so it's quite unfortunate.. but you can use the find button on your browser to quickly pull up a story.)

KaitouJS Wrote:

dewick Wrote:

KaitouJS Wrote:(Speaking of offline story files, I should really start doing that since I'm almost near Chapter 22 and I rely on the site for stories most of the time..)

Sorry for multiple posts. First day in ages I've had much free time on my hands. . . .

For those who use this site for reviewing, keeping stories offline is good for the obvious reasons, to have a backup, etc., but also because, as far as I know (someone correct, please, if I'm wrong), there is no easy way or perhaps no way at all to do a universal search of one's own stories on the site.

Sometimes I can't fully recall a particular Kanji I want to bring to mind for one reason or another, don't know either on or kun reading, and can't come up with the key word. If I recall any single bit of my story, that a particular friend appears in it, for example, can search the offline cache of stories for friend's name, for example, and voila!

Well, there is http://kanji.koohii.com/study/my-stories.php, but it's so darned easy to find that you probably knew it existed.

(EDIT: Though, you can't search that, so it's quite unfortunate.. but you can use the find button on your browser to quickly pull up a story.)

Yeah, trouble is that it's not easily searchable. A 'search' button there would be a good feature, seems to me.

I guess I only really need to search stories this way when I've confused one Kanji for another somehow and want to call up the other for clear disambiguation but can't recall the other key word. Stories offline come in handy in this case if one can remember a part of the story for searching.

Also, I keep intending to try to get a searchable version of all stories onto my iPhone. Anyone have a recommendation for that? It would be useful for reading something on a train or otherwise away from computer and hitting a Kanji you know you know but don't know on or kun and can't recall key word.

Of course a Kanji dictionary works for this, also, if you can count strokes or know the radical, but it would be good occasionally just to pop into a list of stories and find the thing by recalling a part of the story.

dewick Wrote:

KaitouJS Wrote:

dewick Wrote:Sorry for multiple posts. First day in ages I've had much free time on my hands. . . .

For those who use this site for reviewing, keeping stories offline is good for the obvious reasons, to have a backup, etc., but also because, as far as I know (someone correct, please, if I'm wrong), there is no easy way or perhaps no way at all to do a universal search of one's own stories on the site.

Sometimes I can't fully recall a particular Kanji I want to bring to mind for one reason or another, don't know either on or kun reading, and can't come up with the key word. If I recall any single bit of my story, that a particular friend appears in it, for example, can search the offline cache of stories for friend's name, for example, and voila!

Well, there is http://kanji.koohii.com/study/my-stories.php, but it's so darned easy to find that you probably knew it existed.

(EDIT: Though, you can't search that, so it's quite unfortunate.. but you can use the find button on your browser to quickly pull up a story.)

Yeah, trouble is that it's not easily searchable. A 'search' button there would be a good feature, seems to me.

I guess I only really need to search stories this way when I've confused one Kanji for another somehow and want to call up the other for clear disambiguation but can't recall the other key word. Stories offline come in handy in this case if one can remember a part of the story for searching.

Also, I keep intending to try to get a searchable version of all stories onto my iPhone. Anyone have a recommendation for that? It would be useful for reading something on a train or otherwise away from computer and hitting a Kanji you know you know but don't know on or kun and can't recall key word.

Of course a Kanji dictionary works for this, also, if you can count strokes or know the radical, but it would be good occasionally just to pop into a list of stories and find the thing by recalling a part of the story.

While I'd like to see those things as well, I'd personally like to see an expanded statistics page where you can get things like 'how many cards reviewed today' and maybe something like 'time spent on reviewing' (though that might be too ambitious of a project for ファブリス). I always plan on writing things like this down in my progress journal, but of course, when it's late in the night and the ZzzZzzs are calling, I never get around to it. u_u

Well, I just got to Lesson 23 today (just barely past the intro at #640) and the idea of doing 130 kanji in this chapter is intimidating. Knowing that some people progress at 100/day (which I'd like to progress at too, but I have my limitations), it'd actually take them a day and a half to get through one chapter.

So far my retention rate for stuff after 400 seems to be 74% or so, so that's not bad.

Though.. My old methods of revolving between 10 minutes of games and 10 minutes of studying prove to be somewhat inefficient for trying to review expired/failed cards and trying to do 50 new ones a day - it really shouldn't, but I do find myself browsing through the study section quite a bit, and that can take up quite a bit of time. Last night, it wasn't until 7PM that I could finally do some new cards (I had about 211 reviews to do!).. perhaps I'll have more potential to do new cards as I start knocking down the amount of reviews I get a day. I only got 77 today and I got 'em finished an hour and a half ago.

Despite the thought that learning new ones will get easier as I keep up my reviews, I still need some reassurance or some tips. How did you guys manage your study time?

Just keep plugging away at it. Don't overthink it. As long as you keep up with your reviews and adding cards regularly, you will get there.

My retention rate the second half of RTK was pretty low - probably 75%, because I was trying to it as quick as i could, so you'll be OK like that, though if you up your retention, you'll save yourself a lot of unnecessary reviews.

Now I am doing reviews, pushing the stragglers through towards the 4th box. I tried to do a lesson a day for the last 1000 characters, but sometimes I had to take a day off. Some days I did 2 lessons. If the reviews got overwhelming, I just took a day off from adding, or just added 5 or 10 cards.

Well, I'm glad I took everyone's advice. Today I am approaching the end of Chapter 23 and have steadied out my progress to 50 a day which I deeply feel is do-able. I think Chapter 23 itself is quite a milestone since it's the longest chapter in the book. There's still going to be long chapters ahead too, I know. But it's a relief to know that I'm not gonna have anything more than 90 or so kanji in a chapter now, .

How did you guys feel when you finished Chapter 23?

*necro*

I just reached 1100, I still have to review them but I've got somewhere around an 80-90% retention rate for those new kanji.

I've figured out how to do a hundred a day without sacrificing much time! These methods might or might not work for you.

My Method
=====
[1] Pick up a certain amount of kanji from the book. 25 for me, so I'm going to use this in the future examples. It usually takes me ten minutes to do this (the exact time it takes for one work session).

[2] Study these 25 kanji using RvTK or whatever you use for story sources. Again, this can take me about 10 minutes, though shorter if I'm more familiar with the stories. Don't review them yet.

[3] Pick up another 25 (or whatever number) kanji from the book. Another ten minutes.

[4] Now, when you go back to studying again, start studying from the first amount that you picked up. Keep on studying until you get to the last kanji that you picked up in step 3. Depending on how meticulous you are, you can choose to spend lots of effort on the stories that you've already studied or not. This part takes longer than normal anyway, so it takes about fifteen minutes.

[6] Now, REVIEW the first set of kanji that you picked up. Only add the flashcards for those ones, don't worry about the next set.

[7] Go into the book, pick up another 25 (or whatever number), another ten minutes.

[8] Go back to step 4. Only this time, you'll do the second set that you picked up instead of the first. Rinse and repeat - you should sort of understand the pattern by now.

I figured that this works well for learning kanji in Part III - because the book contains little story material in Pt. III, you can move a little faster and pick up large groups of kanji in a short period of time. Well, unless you're meticulous and would rather make up your own stories than grab ones from RvTK. I'm lazy and have no need to write my own stories and thus this site suffices rather well.

Anyone who dares to challenge my ridiculous or perhaps ambitious method, do so now. In all seriousness, I'd like to hear what you guys think about it, anyway.

Interesting method. Thanks for that. I end up doing something similar. The RTK "day" ends at 10PM for me. That's when new reviews come in.

So, after 10PM, I study the ones that I want to add ( from the book ). Then I add them. Then I go to previously failed and learned Kanji. After this, I then do the orange cards in the to review box.

Then I go back to the new kanji and review them. This has given me time before essentially a quick review of new kanji after 10 minutes or so of studying the new ones. After I do the NEW reviews, I'll go to the failed pile and review those ones. trying to remember before clicking, and trying to remember the next kanji before putting it back in the learned pile.

I'm going to try to work something like your review method into my study during longer study sessions. Makes sense. (Unlike this post, which I'm sure makes little sense )

nicksan Wrote:I highly recommend graph paper. I use a pad meant for Japanese kids. It's Doraemon themed and is just a notepad full of squares. It cost about £1 and works much better than standard graph paper. Lasts for a while too. Been using it every day for a month, and I'm only 5 pages in to the 30.

I don't know where you can get them, apart from some Japanese bookshops I went to in London. Going to buy a few next time I go, since they're cheap and very useful.

You can also use unlined paper and make your own grid lines with a pencil and a ruler.

I use maths paper. I always assumed it's used all over the world, but so few people here seem to know it (I'm from Holland). It's just a notepad full of paper with 1x1 cm squares, just big enough to draw a kanji nicely. You can buy it at any stationery shop here and it's quite cheap.