I've just started studying Remembering the Kanji last week. It has probably been less than a week actually. In that time, I've gone through 172 kanji. Now, I did know about 30 of those already because I've been studying Japanese for 3 years already, but I was really surprised at how quickly I could acquire the kanji when I set my mind to it.

Yesterday was a Sunday and so I had a bit more time to devote to studying, and I burned through 56 new kanji and remembered all of them perfectly the next morning. I'm using this site to keep track of overall progress through the book, and from moment to moment studying I'm using iFlash.

Should I expect this pace to drop as I get to the more complex kanji later on? I notice that early primitives are starting to group into more complex primitives. This means you don't completely have to break down each kanji into all of its disparate parts. You only need to break it down into enough pieces to make a mnemonic and then move to the next.

I've noticed that even though there are stories for the first 400 some odd kanji in the book, I've stopped using them in the past lesson or so because I can connect the primitives to the keywords myself and then move along. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't, but I always remember the kanji.

I do that and study them in batches of 12 or so, and then I drill through all the newer ones from the last few lessons along with the new new ones.

Really, my question is, will this pace drop off? Or is the quickness of picking up new kanji a function of the method employed in RTK that is consistent across learning any new kanji?

I think your pace will slow down, and here's why. As you get more kanji into your boxes, more of them will start to expire. Then, in addition to burning thru new kanji, you'll need to take some time to review the old ones. Ones that you haven't reviewed for a month. You're not going to remember all of those perfectly. So, they'll be back in the first box again, and you'll have to review them in 1 or 3 days. So, just the nature of the beast, the nature of memory in general, you'll have more "work" to do with maintaining what you've learned, and for that reason alone, you won't be able to maintain such a fast pace in adding new kanji. Of course, your mileage may vary. And you might not forget many. They'll just move from the first box right up to the 5th box and stay there. But it's still going to be tough to review 200 expired kanji and still have some time to add another 20 new ones that same day. What do you think will happen?

To me top speed killers are lack of ready working stories (selection of story doesn't really matter, they just have to be generally reasonable, like Heisig's) and distinguishing similar keywords.

Your pace might get slower later in the book also because the kanji tend to get more complicated.

My pace through the book actually sped up as I neared the end of the book. I started off shooting for 40/day, and by the end I was doing about 88/day. That's not to say I was retaining all of them perfectly, but I found that if I reviewed right away, my retention rate didn't decrease much. If you keep plugging, I think you can get through without slowing down much, and creating all the stories is a big barrier to break.

[ファブリス]

Keep trucking while you can, when things get more difficult, you will have several hundreds kanji under your belt, which will give you confidence to keep at it. That's one of the advantages of Heisig's ordering of the kanji, with the less complex ones coming first. Anything from 10 kanji a day is good. But if you can do 20-30 until chapter 3 (around kanji #500), go for it!

Just an update for those who care, my high acquisition rate is staying pretty high. I've done 75 over a day for the past few days, 50 a day before that. Today I'm taking a bit of break and only doing about 30. The reviews every morning are eating into a good bit of my study time, but they aren't that bad. I drill through iFlash a zillion times a day anyway, and so having one of those drills be on this site isn't much of a pain.

Because I drill with iFlash so much, I'm attempting to make sure that I get accurate results on the reviewing drills here. I don't want to be testing my short term memory on this site. That's what iFlash is for. I want to test the long term. To make sure I test that properly, the drills on this site are done every morning before I've looked at any study materials or any kanji at all for that matter. This ensures that it's an accurate test of long term memory.

I'm missing quite a few more than I would ordinarily, but they're ones I've legitimately forgotten. However, because I'm familiar with them, it doesn't take too long to toss them back into my iFlash review queue and work on them some more. I don't have to formulate new stories for these kanji, or really think very deeply about them. I simply need to reacquaint myself with them and then move on to the newer kanji.

Current Kanji Count: 419
Current Lesson: 18

How long do you keep the kanji in iFlash? Just for the first few days till you put them on this site or longer?

I think high rates for the first 500 or so are quite common.

Mighty_Matt Wrote:How long do you keep the kanji in iFlash? Just for the first few days till you put them on this site or longer?

I keep them in iFlash the whole time. I downloaded a deck that had all of them and I created a new category. I move them into the new category as I study them. I'm using the scoring system and I drill through all the ones between 0 and 7. Not knowing one moves it right back to 0.

Also, the ones I miss from reviews on this site are marked as zero in iFlash so that I can review them. Then I drill those in sets just like I do for new kanji.

A hint about setting things back to zero when you get them wrong;

iFlash actually has no setting for this, but you can control how many points it takes off that card's score when you miss it. Since I only drill 0-7, no card in my set has more than 8 points on it since they're moved out of the rotation at that point. So if you set the amount of points iFlash docks from that card to an absurdly high number it will set it to zero instead of going negative.

An interesting little factoid to add to all of this is that I'm missing about 25% of all cards I review on this site no matter if I study 150 cards the day before or I study 50 cards the day before. It's a constant 25% miss rate on reviews, and I find this to be very acceptable at the pace I'm working(75-100 kanji per day).

While I realize RTK is supposed to be about more than just brute force memorization, drilling gives me something active to do to cement the pathways in my brain. I've found the mnemonic method from RTK helps a lot in the very very beginning of remembering sets of kanji, and it helps later on when I seem to have forgotten completely. This means it's quite a bit easier to restudy the kanji again as it's simply practicing the mnemonic that is obvious from the primitives that make up the kanji I missed.