I'm really struggling with my Anki reviews... I'm going through Heisig for 1 hour a day, and on my 1st day I picked up 20 kanji, yesterday I picked up 45.
I'm suspending cards that I haven't seen yet in the Anki deck, so that I only get new cards up to the point I've read in Heisig.
But now I'm having trouble remembering what I've studied, because Anki defaults to 20 new cards per day.

For example: This morning (Monday) Anki is testing my knowledge of new cards (first-seen cards) which I studied on Friday evening.

Should I tinker with this setting, and make it larger, i.e. 50 new cards per day? I've heard the reviews can get painful this way, but there's no way I can remember most of the stories I've made from 3 days ago, and right now I was just hitting the 1 key over and over out of frustration at being unable to remember anything clearly.

The biggest mistake people make is learning too many new ones a day. Slow and steady in my opinion is the way to go. And consistency is the most important part. I would do a max of 30 per day. 20 is a good number though. Choose a number and stick with it every single day. Even if you are sick, even if you feel like not studying Japanese. I like to think of this like Khazu does. You are Japanese. You have no choice but to learn everyday. You can't ignore it because its all that there is in the world in your life.

Also it makes it a lot easier to make sure you are as bored as possible during the months you are doing RTK. That way the only source (or one of the few sources) of entertainment will be coming from the stories to learn your kanji. Since thats all your mind will have to entertain itself, it will tend to stick better.

While I didnt cut out everthing, from the day I started doing RTK I stopped listening to English music, stopped watching English movies and TV.

Add cards in for review as soon as you make the stories. I can't imagine why you'd study the book and make stories, but only actually review them days later when Anki finally adds them into the cycle.

I'm long done RTK, but when I add vocab cards into Anki (usually 100-150 at a time) I review them right away, but only answer with either 1 or 2, so that I get a proper review in 8 hours or so (usually next day).

ahhh i didnt understand his post. need sleep brains stopped functioning.

First, I use pre-made decks for Anki because I don't have the time to type everything from scratch. Also, I keep the stories in my head, I don't write them.

Quote:I'm suspending cards that I haven't seen yet in the Anki deck, so that I only get new cards up to the point I've read in Heisig.

This is what I do every day in Anki: I use the setting "Show new cards in order added." This way, I don't have to suspend cards or modify the deck, the cards are shown in the right order.

The most important thing (according to me) is to cut the lessons in chunks of related kanjis. This way you won't learn "20 kanjis every day," but you'll learn "23 related kanjis" one day, and maybe just "17 related kanjis" the other day.

I try to learn no less than 20 kanjis but no more than 30 kanjis every day. For example take the lesson 22: 578 to 587 are related (10 kanjis), 588 to 594 are related (7 kanjis), the total is 17 kanjis. I open Anki and I change the "New cards per day" setting every day according to those chunks. So yesterday, I changed this setting to 17 (10+7). Today, I'll change this setting to 23 (kanjis from 595 to 617 because this is a good pack of related kanjis, and because 23 kanjis is a good number to learn).

My secret in Anki is not to learn a fixed number of kanjis every day.

My second secret, is that I always hit the button "10 Hours [Hard]" button for all the new kanjis of the day (those in the "chunk" I decided to learn"). This way I review the new kanjis the same day, a few hours later.

That was long but I hope it helped.

jacf29 Wrote:ahhh i didnt understand his post. need sleep brains stopped functioning.

*joins your club*
Wanna go hunt for new brains? I'd like it; one brain for work and daily life, the other for studying Kanji. I'll be done in no time!

mypapa12 Wrote:My second secret, is that I always hit the button "10 Hours [Hard]" button for all the new kanjis of the day (those in the "chunk" I decided to learn"). This way I review the new kanjis the same day, a few hours later.

I second this idea, although I had (have) a little different approach - when I started learning kanji last year, I was still in high school. I couldn't study during the day and was "forced to" study in the evening (you wouldn't believe how incredibly happy I was when I arrived home at 6 pm and could finally study again).
So I would study a group of related kanji (always kept it between 5 to 15), start Anki (with RTK1 deck), review (+input stories if needed, though I think I input some just for my own later amusement..some of them were just really funny or too bizzare ), hit the "1 - 7-9 hours" button, repeat with another group.
When I was around 30-40, I would stop, go make myself a dinner and if I was feeling like it (or didn't have some pressing matter the next day like tests, labs etc.) do some more, do some other stuff not related to Japanese.
The next day I would get up 15 minutes earlier, do reviews and go to school.

It really helped me to get some sleep in between, because that way my brain could process all the info (and some stories even found a way into my dreams ).

Oh, and at the beginning, I changed the "New cars per day" to 0..that way I could set my own pace, without having the feeling of "being forced to do x kanji a day".

Every day I:

1) Do my Anki reviews in the morning
2) Learn ~20-25 new Kanji in RtK in the evening
3) After learning them, I add them to Anki and mark all of them "hard" so they will be there in the morning when I wake up (I mark them hard the first two times I see them actually, just to make sure).
4) Repeat (I'm at 1044 after six weeks)

You get into a groove with RtK. Just make sure you have your "new cards per day" set to 0, just manually add whatever you learned that day. Good luck!

jasdev Wrote:I'm really struggling with my Anki reviews... I'm going through Heisig for 1 hour a day, and on my 1st day I picked up 20 kanji, yesterday I picked up 45.
I'm suspending cards that I haven't seen yet in the Anki deck, so that I only get new cards up to the point I've read in Heisig.
But now I'm having trouble remembering what I've studied, because Anki defaults to 20 new cards per day.

For example: This morning (Monday) Anki is testing my knowledge of new cards (first-seen cards) which I studied on Friday evening.

Should I tinker with this setting, and make it larger, i.e. 50 new cards per day? I've heard the reviews can get painful this way, but there's no way I can remember most of the stories I've made from 3 days ago, and right now I was just hitting the 1 key over and over out of frustration at being unable to remember anything clearly.

Speed up and you won't have that problem, Kanji shock yourself and you'll catch on a lot quicker.

jasdev Wrote:I'm suspending cards that I haven't seen yet in the Anki deck, so that I only get new cards up to the point I've read in Heisig.
But now I'm having trouble remembering what I've studied, because Anki defaults to 20 new cards per day.

Anki won't show suspended cards.
So either
a) you must have studied it
b) you didn't suspend the cards properly

I think the OP is asking more about how to use Anki, not how to study. I'm using the premade RTK deck for Anki as well, and heres what I do.

Since it will only give you 20 new cards each day, plus your reviews, I take care of that first. Once its all finished, you are given a screen with options. the first one is "Learn More". This option will open up EVERYTHING in the untested stack. If you have it set to review in order, you can test up until the point you stopped studying. Then close Anki, and the next time you open it it will be back to normal, with 20 new ones (if its the next day).

I could set some numbers lower in the deck properties, but I only review when I've studied at least 20 new ones. You could fix this by setting the number of new reviews to 0 (I think, I've never tried this).

jacf29 Wrote:The biggest mistake people make is learning too many new ones a day. Slow and steady in my opinion is the way to go. And consistency is the most important part. I would do a max of 30 per day. 20 is a good number though. Choose a number and stick with it every single day. Even if you are sick, even if you feel like not studying Japanese. I like to think of this like Khazu does. You are Japanese. You have no choice but to learn everyday. You can't ignore it because its all that there is in the world in your life.

Steady is great, but slow isn't. What if I don't have anything to do except for Japanese? I did 70-100/day for the last 500 kanji and they're sticking. But there should be a minimum number that should be done.

undead_saif Wrote:

jacf29 Wrote:The biggest mistake people make is learning too many new ones a day. Slow and steady in my opinion is the way to go. And consistency is the most important part. I would do a max of 30 per day. 20 is a good number though. Choose a number and stick with it every single day. Even if you are sick, even if you feel like not studying Japanese. I like to think of this like Khazu does. You are Japanese. You have no choice but to learn everyday. You can't ignore it because its all that there is in the world in your life.

Steady is great, but slow isn't. What if I don't have anything to do except for Japanese? I did 70-100/day for the last 500 kanji and they're sticking. But there should be a minimum number that should be done.

If you can handle 70-100 a day then all the more power to you. As for me, I was doing smart.fm core 2000 at the time so it was way too much.

I still think 20-30 is a good number.