About mid August I began to slow down with my kanji study. I'd like to blame it on the fact that that's when my classes started up again. Anyway, I just logged back in today and found several hundred expired cards. I've managed to power through them, but most of the cards from decks 3 or below I've forgotten. Now I have an endless pile of failed cards to work through.

To prevent me from getting lazy, I'm going to make it habit to study for an hour a day. If anyone else has any suggestions for us slackers, please give them

Every day, no breaks, never. Sounds like your plan of an hour a day is a great idea. I used to be a slacker during school, and it ended up severely stressing me out in the end. Doing work is the best way to feel good.

keep it up. I started in march, finished rtk1 in four months and now my rtk reviews are 40-50 per day max and take about 20 minutes. your devotion will pay off... believe me.

jacf29 Wrote:Doing work is the best way to feel good.

I totally agree with this. If I go a day without doing anything constructive (no programming, no Japanese, etc) I feel really bad =(

Every day, even if it's only a little bit. It takes five times as much energy to get it back. I finished RTK1 at the end of April. Then in mid June had to leave for 2 1/2, with no reviews. I had to redo RTK (I had don 18,000 plus reviews to that point), and while I'm flying through it (at 1200 or so) , I would have saved tons of time if I could have continued reviews (10 min/day). Take the long view on it. Slacking just creates more stress and consumption of time.

I've only gotten through 631 kanji so far (using RTK method, but not kanji order). I find that if my motivation wanes, I can come back here and read some posts to jump start my motivation, and to remind myself WHY I want to finish RTK. Also, I find that setting a goal of 30 cards a day works very well for me. Very rarely I just can't compete 30 though, because of time constraints, so I set the goal to be 210 a week.

I find that grabbing something written in Japanese and looking at it for about 15 minutes motivates me to start studying Kanji. I get motivated because I can understand a little bit about what is going on thanks to my previous study but if I just study a bit more I will soon be able to read most if not all of it. So that usually does the trick.

The key is getting up at 4am and be studying an hour before your brain knows you are awake. At 4am, no other rational person is up. Therefore, no distractions. Actually that is how I start every day now. I have the coffee pot pre-programmed and jump up into the shower as soon as my alarm goes off. I know it seems impossible to believe (especially to a slacker as I once was). If you can have will-power those few seconds after the alarm goes off, the mind is super clear that time of the morning with a shower and cup of Joe in you. The rest of the day you are free to be completely worthless (with a clear conscience)

or just stay awake till 4am. that's how i roll...

Try this kind of thing: the pomodoro technique . It worked for me.

bodhisamaya Wrote:The key is getting up at 4am and be studying an hour before your brain knows you are awake.

That's what I do: 6AM every day, I have at least one hour of freedom when I can learn and do my stuff freely. Everybody's sleeping, it's a strange sensation. And if you add some tea...

I am WAY too foggy in the morning, I am not a morning person whatsoever.

It takes me way too long to fully wake up to be able to study properly that my schedule will not allow it, since I have a wife and kids and a very specific rest of life schedule.

Evening study ONLY for me, lol but it works for me

I made friends with an all girl band in Tokyo. They are adorable, but can't speak English very well. When I hang out with them and can't say anything, THAT motivates me to study more.

strugglebunny Wrote:I made friends with an all girl band in Tokyo. They are adorable, but can't speak English very well. When I hang out with them and can't say anything, THAT motivates me to study more.

wow i would say you win with the best form of motivation haha.

reminds me of a girl i met who was a foreigner. i figured she seemed nice (only liked her as friend), so i invited her to eat breakfast with me and my friend after the night out at the club. Turned out she came with 20 of her friends who were those superhot girls foreigners have no chance of dating from shibuya. of course they knew no english.

but dang was the best connection i ever made in tokyo.

jacf29 Wrote:reminds me of a girl i met who was a foreigner. i figured she seemed nice (only liked her as friend), so i invited her to eat breakfast with me and my friend after the night out at the club. Turned out she came with 20 of her friends who were those superhot girls foreigners have no chance of dating from shibuya. of course they knew no english.

but dang was the best connection i ever made in tokyo.

Yeah, that seems to happen sometimes, and it sucks. Especially in places like Shinjuku and Shibuya.

Here is their MySpace page by the way: http://www.myspace.com/merpeoples

I really like their music, so that and a combination of alcohol, got me to speak to them and hang out with them. I met them at a punk club called the Shinjuku Loft. I love the punk music scene here in Tokyo.

I think coming to Japan when you can't really speak Japanese is the best motivator out there. There are so many cool things, and cool people, you just can't connect with if you can't understand the language. How the hell foreigners live here for so long and not have a burning desire to learn the language, I don't know.

Using Anki, what is the best way to stop your review process when you need to mark a halt coz leaving for a few days or others. If I just select ALL the cards of my deck and use the SUSPEND function, won't it erase my stats? Or could I just recover when I come back from my days off as if nothing had happened on my deck?

They don't because they are content hanging out with their foreign friends and japanese friends who speak English.

I am very interested to see what the other side of Japan is like once my language ability improves enough. By the other side I mean the Japanese who don't give a crap about learning English after highschool and aren't obsessed with American stuff. Like they only listen to Japanese songs and only watch Japanese movies etc.

I'm a big fan of using rewards when pushing towards long term goals. Right now I'm studying for JLPT 2 Kyuu and pushing around 300 SRS reps a day. To say the least, it's exhausting, but I stay with it daily.

How? I reward myself after every fifty reps. Usually with a bite of a food or a drink I enjoy, or just checking out an article from the Onion. Either way, I'm rewarding good behavior, which makes it easier to stick to.

This takes some time to get used to. For now, as you're doing your reps, give yourself a big reward on first couple of days you complete your work - sometimes like an ice cream sundae, an ice cold beer, or having your girlfriend come over. Afterwards, make them smaller and more manageable, like having a candy bar after doing all the reps or watching your favorite show. After a while, both doing the reps and a rewarding yourself becomes a habit, and you can get a lot more done with little motivation.

I've been doing this for about 11 months and have done around 70,000 reps in the process. To say the least, my Japanese has improved, but it wasn't through raw motivation, but through Pavlovian carrot-and-stick training.

I tend to do my Anki study in the morning when I'm still in bed before I get up.

Will try and get up earlier and do them. I've never really been a morning person.

I'm not a morning person either, but I always have some time when I'm finished washing and dressing, while I'm eating breakfast, in which I do my reviews. It's become a routine so if I don't do it, it feels like something is wrong (tip for slackers; make sure you do something every day at the same time, so it becomes a routine).

Then at work, if I have some time off in between teaching classes, and otherwise when I get home, I study new kanji. I can't study very many a day, because my job is tiring. But I try to do as many as I can before I notice I'm just not taking them in any more.

strugglebunny Wrote:Here is their MySpace page by the way: http://www.myspace.com/merpeoples

Off-topic, but wow really good band. Now if they only had an album, and I wasn't living in the US....

Evangelo Wrote:How? I reward myself after every fifty reps. Usually with a bite of a food or a drink I enjoy, or just checking out an article from the Onion. Either way, I'm rewarding good behavior, which makes it easier to stick to.

Thanks for the tip. I'll think of trying something similar... -just replacing the food with Japanese music.

I also get the majority of my motivation from talking to Japanese people. My lack of comprehension/ability to express myself clearly really motivates me to get better. It also shows me what I'd like to learn how to say... so I can look up vocabulary specific to that topic, and find example sentences for these words.

If no Japanese people are available, just watching a really interesting Japanese show can inspire you, as well... because then you want to understand, eh?

CKBrown1000 Wrote:Anyway, I just logged back in today and found several hundred expired cards. I've managed to power through them, but most of the cards from decks 3 or below I've forgotten. Now I have an endless pile of failed cards to work through

I just cleared the ~300 failed/expired cards that had stacked during my slacking time. Feels good man.

Now off to study more, will hit the 500 mark soon ^^.

Phail3d Wrote:I just cleared the ~300 failed/expired cards that had stacked during my slacking time. Feels good man.

Well done!

Phail3d Wrote:

CKBrown1000 Wrote:Anyway, I just logged back in today and found several hundred expired cards. I've managed to power through them, but most of the cards from decks 3 or below I've forgotten. Now I have an endless pile of failed cards to work through

I just cleared the ~300 failed/expired cards that had stacked during my slacking time. Feels good man.

Now off to study more, will hit the 500 mark soon ^^.

Congratulations, that’s awesome!!!!!!!!!!!