Your key words there are 'once I master'. The idea of an SRS is, well, SPACED repetition, so, yes, once you're a master of the language, a few months shouldn't do anything but make you a little rusty for a short period. (And people do often complain that after a few months of non-use even their native language will feel rusty.)

If you're worried about having too much to review every day, not to worry as when I was adding ~20/day the reviews stayed at ~80/day, and now (I'm not adding anymore) they've dropped to ~20/day.

What do you mean by "leave it for a period of time"? If you plan on going on a 10-year hiatus then of course you'll forget a lot of kanji, but few months will be ok. Anki tells me that for ~half of the kanji, I'll need a whole year of non-exposure to forget them.

Good luck on completing RTK! Knowing 2000 kanji isn't out of reach at all; just keep going and in a few months time you'll have learnt everything and you can then sit back and watch the time needed to review them everyday decrease.

mastermx Wrote:So your saying no one can say that they have learnt kanji. Because it would require constant review anyway? Your telling me it wont stick to long term memory unless its constantly reinforced by exposure.

I was hoping someone to say "One you've learnt it, its there"

Nothing sticks in memory forever without constant exposure! This isn't some special property of kanji. Do you think if I showed you a new word in English, you could recall and spell it again tomorrow? How about in a week? Or a month?

You say you can never forget your mother tongue; but I guarantee if you went a year or two without speaking your second language, you'd start to forget it..

mastermx Wrote:Because if thats the case, then i might aswell just do the lite version knowing that most people forget all the other kanji's anyway except for the most used ones.

They don't forget them because they're SRSing them.

mastermx Wrote:So how far do i have to go through heisig till i can use AJATT?

you need to do ALL of RtK1 before you can start properly on AJATT.

If you want to study Japanese independently in the meantime, that's fine. I've been using Rosetta Stone Japanese (pictures + sounds + kana, just like the cards you suggested) and Pimsleur to built up my vocab while doing RtK, to give me a headstart in sentence mining.

Going through Tae Kim's grammar guide would be a good thing to do on the side too; actually I may start that tonight..

At first it was the thought of how long it would take to learn kanji the threw me off. I'm a little impatient :p

But yesterday i thought to myself I might as well learn all of them. Because after this big obstacle it should be much easier. However, I realized that whilst doing the kanji i was doing them wrong! every time i learnt a new kanji i was moving it to the fourth compartment without waiting for it to suggest an expired repetition. I read through the FAQ on this site and found out that what I was doing is bad... please help, what should i do? do you guys think i should start from the beginning and repeat all kanji again? or should i continue and learn newer ones? Im on 323 kanji ATM.

mastermx Wrote:At first it was the thought of how long it would take to learn kanji the threw me off. I'm a little impatient :p

It's only 4-6 months if you study 30-60mins a day; significantly quicker if you study more. That's a tony drop in the ocean compared to your time to learn Japanese - plus you can do other things in the meantime!

mastermx Wrote:However, I realized that whilst doing the kanji i was doing them wrong! every time i learnt a new kanji i was moving it to the fourth compartment without waiting for it to suggest an expired repetition. I read through the FAQ on this site and found out that what I was doing is bad... please help, what should i do? do you guys think i should start from the beginning and repeat all kanji again? or should i continue and learn newer ones? Im on 323 kanji ATM.

a few people on this site have made that mistake! personally I'd recommend starting over, using the "remove cards" function (so you keep the stories) and quickly going though them again. Remember, only review expired orange ones!!

If you've only gone through 300 or so like I think you said, starting over again is pretty easy thing to do. Just remove them all, add them all back, review them (if you want, just review 60-80 of the new blue ones a day) until they're all normal cards, and then review as normal. You'll have some high rates for awhile, but it'll quickly wind back down.

Er, I don't use 'only' to diminish your efforts. It's just that, since a lot of people do end up having to deal with 80+ cards in a single day sometimes, reviewing 300 in a day (or breaking it up) is relatively easy compared to, say, 1600.

thanx for all the help guys You've been very patient.

I started again as recommended. I found that so many of the newer ones that i moved up to the fourth compartment i have completely forgotten them. Because when they reached the fourth compartment, i never reviewed them again. From personal experience ive found that the kanji that i have dissembled into primitives come to me much easier. Mnemonics and visualization help ofcourse, but i think it is easier to utilize those two in conjuction with the primitives. This is because primitives give you nouns as a means to visualization.

One more question, these primitives, were all created by heisig, right? they mean nothing to the japanese because they are simply tools of heisig to simplify them. Is this correct?

[Katsuo]

mastermx Wrote:One more question, these primitives, were all created by heisig, right? they mean nothing to the japanese because they are simply tools of heisig to simplify them. Is this correct?

Japanese (and Chinese) also break the kanji into components. There is a standardized system of 214 components, called "radicals" that has been around for 400 years or so, and is still used in most dictionaries.

But the radical system is showing its age, and isn't ideal for learning. Heisig made his own version, giving the components English names and expanding the list to over 300. Sometimes Heisig took his name from the Japanese name, but in other cases he changed it completely.

Here's a cross-reference table I made.