Hi all,

First post here, just hoping to get your feedback. Im really into RTK and have set lofty goals for myself in terms of learning a lot of kanji in a short amount of time. But it seems like I top-out at about 25-30 kanji a day after reviewing my previously learned kanji and committing the new stories to memory. I am curious how some people are pumping out 100 kanji a day as I have seen on this site. I'd like to know your secret

I think they did reviews and 25 kanji every 2 hours for 8 hours a day. It's nothing magical, but for many putting that much time a day is either not feasible or burns them out.

Another guy did a different approach that finished quickly, but I forgot the thread he posted on.

I am also amazed when I read that, I find myself being able to do no more than 50.

I must say; it gets easier with time. If you are just starting, 25-30 is a lot! I remember when I was just starting I did 25 kanji in one go and I was exhausted afterwards. Now that's ok for me to do, have a break and do another 25 later on.

I did 20, which was my limit for the long term. I could pull 40 or even 80 out of my butt a day when I was really really into Japanese because of some occurrence, but I couldn't hold such a tempo. It depends on a lot more than study methods, it depends on your mood, your goals and personality as well.

There are some techniques though:
* Make very short fast stories. Not a good idea since you will get bad retention.
* Switching between adding and reviewing. Add 10, review 20. This seems to work for some people.
* timeboxing. Give yourself 30 minutes to add cards and see how many you can do. Then give yourself another 30 minutes later.

Hey thanks for the feedback. I was guessing people had to be putting in full days of study to knock out 100 in a day. I guess I'll just have to take the slow but steady approach.

I stopped and started, stalled and slowly made my way through lots of RTK. When it came the last ~700 I knuckled down and got em done in 3 weeks by doing about 35 a day. Was a good pace. 頑張って！

Yeah, it goes faster at the end. You get into the flow, so to speak...

Here is what I do to do about 100 a day:

Almost always use other people's stories from this site. It takes me less than a minute for each kanji. I read through some of the stories and pick one that I think will work best (you get better at knowing this as you do more). Obviously spending less than a minute on average for each kanji is not enough to retain the information completely. So either right after or later that day I unsuspend the new cards in anki (i use the premade deck). Then i go through only those cards that i learned that day. This is where you see if your stories are good. If you remember it from the keyword, that story is good. If you don't remember it from the keyword, but then when you see the kanji you instantly remember the story, it's probably still good. If you look at the kanji and still don't remember the story, you have to go back and find/make a better story.

For this entire first review, I only mark HARD if i got it right, or WRONG/AGAIN if i got it wrong. This ensures that I will see them the next day. I find that at this point I don't know any of them well enough to suspend them for 3-5 days. Then the next day when you review you should be able to get most of the cards right and can again see which stories need work. You could also use the Cram feature in Anki if you don't want to mark them all as hard.

So the process is:
1.Learn new kanji using this site. Move quickly but make sure you have a good story
2.Review all of those kanji the same day, checking stories and making sure you are choosing to see them again tomorrow.
3.The next day review normally.

This process has worked for me so far (300 to go). Basically i try to get through the storymaking process as quickly as possible because I know that Anki will force me to learn them all.

I guess I spend 3-4 hours a day on kanji this way.

Thx mac, I'm going to try that myself!

I did the same thing as mac but I did 25 kanji per day myself. Don't worry about going so fast, it's not a race. 25-30 is quite reasonable.

I see where you're coming from ipsencastle however, I'm currently living in Japan and would like to expedite this process so I can get onto learning the speaking aspect of the language (Im following the AJATT method). Doing 25 Kanji everyday for 3-4 months can be a little de-motivating.