Hello!

I have
161 failed cards in pile 1
319 expired cards, all in pile 2-4 are expired,
184 expired in pile 5
223 non expired cards in pile 5

would you start from 0, empty the whole bunch?

Or would you rather just continue with the failed cards and move on with the exired cards?

I am quite clueless.

I KNOW I should not have stopped. But I have been away so much ... no way to continue.

Looking forward for your advice!!

Starting over seems like a waste of time for the cards you can still remember. I'd suggest just chipping away at that pile.

The real question is: how far did you go?

I started from scratch after doing nothing for 6 months (maybe like you) and I had 600 keywords (with a high failure rate). Now I'm doing it regularly with good stories, but your expired cards don't show the real info.

my recommendation, go at 80 cards a day until you get caught up. then slow it down to 30 cards a day for the rest. only 10 days and it wont be too bad since you are vaguelly familiar with them. it should work itself out.

Starting over is pointless. You'll spend even more time than you would have spent just catching up, and you still won't be -learning- anything new.

Here's an idea: Go through your due cards very quickly. Don't waste time trying to remember anything. If you don't know right away just mark it as failed. Then go through the failed pile in the order of the book.

That way you can relearn primitives that you may have forgotten better by following the order of the book and yet not waste time on things you actually remembered.

Codexus Wrote:Here's an idea: Go through your due cards very quickly. Don't waste time trying to remember anything. If you don't know right away just mark it as failed. Then go through the failed pile in the order of the book.

That way you can relearn primitives that you may have forgotten better by following the order of the book and yet not waste time on things you actually remembered.

sounds nice!
some stories probably weren't the best to stick on my mind, too!

jacf29 Wrote:my recommendation, go at 80 cards a day until you get caught up. then slow it down to 30 cards a day for the rest. only 10 days and it wont be too bad since you are vaguelly familiar with them. it should work itself out.

I had stopped at 800 cards for a few months and I did exactly that to catch up : i went very quickly through about 600 very well known cards, then slowed down a little, and from now on i study regularly and happily. It is not a waste of time to review kanjis, associated keywords and stories, and most important, the process of memorizing.

well,

so here I am. I went through all the expired cards:

now I have 244 failed and no expired kanjis.

the next thing will be going through the failed kanjis. with the book, creating my own stories.

I removed 150 cards, went down from 710 in total to 560.
because I missed a lot of cards from 560 and higher.

I think I will be able to manage this challange! glad summer/vacation/lazytime has passed!

I know this topic is a bit old, but...

My advice in such a situation would be to just review them as normal. The only difference is that your initial failure rate is really high, but don't be discouraged by that -- they'll all come back very quickly once you review the failed ones for the second time.

And as always, look at the study pages for the ones you're having trouble remembering.

Good luck!

I had the same situation, but I started over. Why? Because I could pretty much remember most of my stories, but I had forgotten how to draw many of the primitives. Starting at the beginning was not so much work, I just refreshed my mind with what I already knew, and getting things in order felt easier to me then trying to untangle a mess of half forgotten kanji in my mind. My pass rates are now higher then before, going from low 80's to mid-low 90%'s. I'm at 1400 now, and should be done by the end of the month. And they feel damn solid!

Maybe the post is old, but I just wanted to state my experience, as it differed from all the advice here.

I also started from scratch, you regain everything very quickly, but may as well take advantage of doing everything in the systemized manner we originally learnt them, and get a good all around refresher.

It doesn't hurt, and hey, it may even help a little ^_^