This whole thread made me LMAO! :lol:

Aijin Wrote:I think that initiative and efficient use of their time should be acknowledged as a 'talent' of sort.

Yes this. My belief of talent is that it is the will to pursue excellence, nothing more.


Some of my friends who have WAMs (weighted average mark) in the high 90s at university go out, have fun and all but while at home they are so god damn efficient it bugs me. My idea of university back during my first few years was ***** around during the week, study it up in the weekend. But these guys would make use of every single moment at home, get everything done then ask me to go out for the weekend.


By the way 3 hours sleep a day? What the *****? How are you still alive

Aijin Wrote:I am not sure how much sense this post will make. Kinda' just started typing out my train of thought (Why do they say TRAIN of thought? Where did that English term originate? What was the equivalent before trains were invented?)

The phrase predates railways:

OED Wrote:1651 HOBBES Leviathan I. iii. 8 By Consequence, or Trayne of Thoughts, I understand that succession of one Thought to another, which is called (to distinguish it from Discourse in words) Mentall Discourse.

So this (and indeed the railway meaning) are both developments of the general sense of 'a sequence or series of things'.

The OED agrees with kazelee that the origin is French (or possibly Old French):

OED Wrote:In origin representing two French ns., traîne fem. (OF. also traïne, trahine) and train masc. (OF. traïn, also trahin), both held to be vbl. ns. from traîner to drag, draw, etc

Possibly Hobbes was (also) borrowing more directly from some French philosopher; I don't know.

BooTheGhost Wrote:I usually spend about 2 and a half hours on 50, and then like an hour and a half reviewing. Then I go and do another 50. So I guess you're right.

6.5 hours a day - To learn 100 kanji??! you're kidding right??

Wow, I did 25-30 kanji a day, but learning + reviews only took a maximum if 60mins. I used to get up early and do it before work everyday.

Maybe you'll find making up original stories and retention a bit easier if you slow down a little. Also bare in mind your reviews are going to increase exponentially as time goes on..

You spend 6.5 hours a day on kanji? Not on learning Japanese, on learning kanji? I don't know if I should laugh or cry, though I must say I'm very impressed by your determination.

I spend about 40 minutes a day when I learned 25 a day, and I thought that was bad enough.

aphasiac Wrote:Also bare in mind your reviews are going to increase exponentially as time goes on..

This is actually not true. As long as you add 100 kanji a day, your reviews increase logarithmically. That is, it will take longer and longer for the increase to hit you. It takes about 3 days until you get 100 reviews. Then it takes about 7 days until you get 200 reviews. Then 30 days until you get 300. However, this increase stops once you stop adding cards and go down, this decrease is also logarithmic.

Of course, you're going to be adding sentence cards once you're done, so the increase will continue. While there is a cap, it's quite high and quite far off.

Aijin Wrote:and am used to sleeping only 3 hours per night to maximize my productivity.

One word: sleep deprivation.

Hold on... thats two words!

Anyway, what I meant to say was this can't be true. If you were sleep deprived your brain wouldn't function as efficiently. Therefore you would be learning slower and it would be considered a waste of time. A sleep deprived brain would take 2hours to do a 1hour task.

With regards to sleep (really, 3 hours?), I found my sleep improved when I changed my diet. I followed the Zone Diet which seemed to keep me energetic throughout the day and needing only 6 hours of sleep.

As far as reviews go, with a standard leitner model and 10% failure rate, your reviews cap out at about 13 times your daily new rate (100 new a day caps out at 1300 reviews a day). With Anki's easier spacing and the current trend that no one ever keeps up such a high new rate, your reviews are less so.

I just learn 21 per day for the 3rd volume because I'm not in a hurry.

But I'm awesome anyway!

mypapa12 Wrote:I just learn 21 per day for the 3rd volume because I'm not in a hurry.

But I'm awesome anyway!

Get out you're not welcome here.

Tobberoth Wrote:As long as you add 100 kanji a day, your reviews increase logarithmically. That is, it will take longer and longer for the increase to hit you. It takes about 3 days until you get 100 reviews. Then it takes about 7 days until you get 200 reviews. Then 30 days until you get 300. However, this increase stops once you stop adding cards and go down, this decrease is also logarithmic.

Be aware, this is assuming an ideal situation in which no cards are failed, i.e. 100% retention. What is most likely in an actual situation is that ~5-30% of the cards will be failed every review, thus leading to more reviews daily.

Everything is defined by comparison I suppose. I bet people with Fatal Familial Insomnia would be jealous of my three hours of sleep

Tobberoth Wrote:You spend 6.5 hours a day on kanji? Not on learning Japanese, on learning kanji? I don't know if I should laugh or cry, though I must say I'm very impressed by your determination.

I spend about 40 minutes a day when I learned 25 a day, and I thought that was bad enough.

I don't believe 6.5 hours is inordinately much. I did at least 2 hours a day when I did 25 a day, and when I'd gotten past the 1400 mark, that increased to about 3 hours, and occasionally 4-5 hours when I'd add up to 50 cards that day or do more reviews. If anything, 6.5 hours for 100 kanji a day is going fast.

Aijin Wrote:I'm sure we all have a disorder of some sorts; high chance of mutation is one of the joys of having complex mammalian brains Woohoo for being human!
I have chronic pain which prevents me from sleeping for more than 3 hours, and also keeps me from being sleepy. It's a benefit in a way, I suppose.

Like any American and some others in this thread, I can't help myself from dissecting the personal life of a complete stranger and handing out advice. I can restrain myself somewhat, but do think it might be relevant to point out that in my experience, sleep deprivation can lead to many other problems, including chronic pain of all sorts. When I had a job that required me to wake up by around 4:30 am every day and didn't get more than about 6 hours of sleep a day, I developed a weird internal pain in my lower stomach. I changed my work schedule, got more sleep every day, and the pain went away.

BooTheGhost Wrote:Get out you're not welcome here.

That's the difference between you and me, I really want to learn Japanese, and I'm free to do it the way I want I rocks, and I win again!

BTW what's your kanji count again? Because if you want to compare...

Oh, and look what I found somewhere else:

BooTheGhost Wrote:I've been using this method for about five days now (...) The first problem is that I feel my stories are leaving me too fast. (...) I'm having a little trouble recognizing kanji in "the wild"

See? I'm not a cool guy that's doing 100 a day, but I have 2607 kanjis in my head that would tell you how awesome I am if they could talk. If you have problems after just 5 days (FIVE DAYS?! I've been learning for more than 3 months!) you should seriously reconsider your method of "100 kanjis a day."

BooTheGhost Wrote:I was doing like 50 a day, but I ended up forgetting them all so I went back and redid most of them at about the pace of 30 per day.

Good, that's better! Keep on doing 30 a day and you'll reach the end soon enough. I was doing between 25 and 30 kanjis a day for RTK1, and I'm doing 21 a day for RTK3. Good luck!

mypapa12 Wrote:

BooTheGhost Wrote:Get out you're not welcome here.

That's the difference between you and me, I really want to learn Japanese, and I'm free to do it the way I want I rocks, and I win again!

BTW what's your kanji count again? Because if you want to compare...

Oh, and look what I found somewhere else:

BooTheGhost Wrote:I've been using this method for about five days now (...) The first problem is that I feel my stories are leaving me too fast. (...) I'm having a little trouble recognizing kanji in "the wild"

See? I'm not a cool guy that's doing 100 a day, but I have 2607 kanjis in my head that would tell you how awesome I am if they could talk. If you have problems after just 5 days (FIVE DAYS?! I've been learning for more than 3 months!) you should seriously reconsider your method of "100 kanjis a day."

BooTheGhost Wrote:I was doing like 50 a day, but I ended up forgetting them all so I went back and redid most of them at about the pace of 30 per day.

Good, that's better! Keep on doing 30 a day and you'll reach the end soon enough. I was doing between 25 and 30 kanjis a day for RTK1, and I'm doing 21 a day for RTK3. Good luck!

Hahaha, no shit. I look at kanji as getting into a hot tub. Slow and steady and then everything will all be good. Ok maybe that was a poor example Whatever kanji and hot tubs rule.

Aijin Wrote:Everything is defined by comparison I suppose. I bet people with Fatal Familial Insomnia would be jealous of my three hours of sleep

Wow, I didn't really believe you, but apparently not only is it possible but also anyone can learn to do it:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10...sic-sleep/

Can I ask, what time do you go to bed and wake up?

Polyphasic sleep is different though, you usually sleep like every fourth hour, so it becomes impossible to have a normal life. It saves you a lot of time if you can do it, but it apparently takes over a month to nail it and it's horrible until you're done.

I'm of the opinion that polyphasic sleep is one of those silly self-improvement memes (such-and-such famous figure did this!) that got out of hand via bloggers. Here's an interesting exchange that cites Claudio Stampi, though I'm too lazy to read his articles for myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960176

Here's a copy of Stampi's out-of-print book, which apparently has no chance of being reprinted: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6ICZ6T27 - Supposedly he compares polyphasic and regular sleep here, finds the former lacking except in times of sleep deprivation or somesuch.

I bet Hobbes knows more kanji than Calvin.

yudantaiteki Wrote:My goal was the whole 大漢和辞典 in a month, so I did 1667 kanji a day. I studied about 8 hours a day so I only had to learn 3.5 kanji a minute. If you can't handle that you're not cut out to learn Japanese.

1667 kanji devided by 480 minutes (8hours*60minutes) is 0,28 minutes, which is about 20 seconds. Well I dont know how you can learn kanji every 20 seconds and remember anything.

jettyke Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:My goal was the whole 大漢和辞典 in a month, so I did 1667 kanji a day. I studied about 8 hours a day so I only had to learn 3.5 kanji a minute. If you can't handle that you're not cut out to learn Japanese.

1667 kanji devided by 480 minutes (8hours*60minutes) is 0,28 minutes, which is about 20 seconds. Well I dont know how you can learn kanji every 20 seconds and remember anything.

I think he's just exaggerating for emphasis. I remember reading somewhere that someone learned 2042 kanji in around 2 weeks. But they said they had nothing else to do in terms of time. So they spent all day on kanji.

I did 60 a day so may I flaunt too?

ta12121 Wrote:I think he's just exaggerating for emphasis. I remember reading somewhere that someone learned 2042 kanji in around 2 weeks. But they said they had nothing else to do in terms of time. So they spent all day on kanji.

I feel like even if you had nothing to do you still need to sleep and eat. I somehow don't think that's possible to retain all of that. But maybe it is...

ta12121 Wrote:I think he's just exaggerating for emphasis. I remember reading somewhere that someone learned 2042 kanji in around 2 weeks. But they said they had nothing else to do in terms of time. So they spent all day on kanji.

I'm doing over 100/day right now, with Japanese keywords, so it's obviously doable. It takes a lot of time per day to review/add the cards, but learning the new kanji is less than a minute for me.

I think kanji comfort/familiarity is also very important when rushing it like this, not only time spent during the day. It's obviously easier for me to do RtK when I can read 90%+ of the kanji, compared to starting from 0.

spleenlol Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:I think he's just exaggerating for emphasis. I remember reading somewhere that someone learned 2042 kanji in around 2 weeks. But they said they had nothing else to do in terms of time. So they spent all day on kanji.

I feel like even if you had nothing to do you still need to sleep and eat. I somehow don't think that's possible to retain all of that. But maybe it is...

I did it in about 17 days. It was fun. I had to go to school and all, and I have a full schedule (senior year of HS), though there was a 5 day weekend in the middle of it. But I didn't have many distractions other than that, and I'll grant that I did forget to eat dinner a few days.

It's sticking quite well. About 50/day reviews of it, which are slowly dropping down. It takes about 10 minutes to do all my reviews for it.