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Keep it up. I'm surprised you're doing so well. When I try to cram so many stories into my head in a day, I get very slow (~3 min per kanji trying to make good stories) and still have terrible recall rate. Your effort motivates me to work harder though. I'm in a similar but much easier position: I need to add about 30 new kanji a day to complete RTK1 before I'm off to grad school.

When I rushed through RtK I, my recall rate was (and very much still is) absolute crap the day after studying and even three days after entering the cards. The fact that your recall rate is so high is quite impressive.

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Even if you finish RtK1 in 60 days that would be quite impressive, so don't be too hard on yourself. If mother nature gave you an advantage with memory and/or imagination (working with "imaginative memory" as Heisig calls it), go for it! And thanks for sharing your experiences.

I am particularly interested in how you manage the reviews at the same time.

I didn't have the website until frame number 1500 or so. For the first 1000 kanji I did an overnight review of the learnt kanji, and each week a review of the last 70 kanji or so. The only time I was certain to have reviewed everything was when I took my pile of 1000 hand made flashcards and did a full review at half-way point.

I'm thinking perhaps if you don't review more than two times until frame #1000, depending on how fast you go, then you can do a full review to push all cards to stack 4. Work on the failed kanji. Again at 1500 you could do a full review to push them to stack 5. Again, work on the failed kanji. Then go for #2042.

If you review up to stack 2, 1000 kanji in 10 days (in the best case scenario), that would be 200 reviews a day... might work.

In any case, [kana]ganbatte[/kana]!

Wow, I got huge respect for your discipline.
Myself, I don't think I ever got about 30-40/day, and I think that is alot.
Then I got into a rut and stopped for some weeks, after that I did a whole bunch in ~2 weeks (like 400) and got "stuck" again, just had no drive to review or learn new kanji.

Now, some weeks ago I just "started" again, slowly working my way up.
I'm doing the website reviews daily, and trying to learn a few new, too. (as many as I can handle at least)

Anyway, I wish you good luck, and may we both finish the book in good time. (albeit each at our own pace, I could never keep up your murderous pace )

Wzafran, you're pissing me off! I just hit 1394 this morning and was ecstatic until I read how fast you're zooming along.:o NOW I'll be FORCED to study so as not to be left in your dust. Bummer on the pc, dude. I feel for you. (As I'm writing this, a Japanese teacher just came up gloating about getting his summer bonus. Another thing to piss me off. Can you say 差別？:mad

Man, you're going through it all so fast! O.o
Now I have to study more kanji a day too...well, I was already changing my study habits but now I really have to get moving. I'm using Slime forest adventure now, though because I find it much easier and more fun to study with than flashcards(I think they were my downfall in the past. It was a pain[literately] to write 20-30 a day and it was boring so I kept getting restless.) Hm...I'm learning the kun-yomi along side too, but when I finish grade six, I think I'll switch to compounds until I get all 2000 meanings.

I have to agree with what you say about not tiring out as fast when making an image then moving onto the next one. Using this post as motivation and noting what you said before about tiring out when spending a long time (relative ) repeating each kanji, I move onto the next kanji when ive got an image formed in my head.
I'm not making the incredible progress you've made but I've got through 235 in 4 days which I'm happy with

I'm also using an English dictionary...'vermillion'....huh?!? lol

wzafran and littleblue, I also noticed that I tired much less when making an image and then moving on quickly to the next. I did this for the last 300 kanji in RTK I, and was able to make stories for 50-70 kanji per day--which was a lot for me.

Sometimes I liked the image so much that I would go over it and sort of "savor" it in my head, but I think the important difference was that I wasn't forcing myself to go over it again in order to feel more confident about having the story--these stories would just sort of spontaneously come back into my head to be enjoyed.

I also found that my retention for these final 300 kanji was extremely high, higher than
for many of the kanji that I did more "careful" story-making for (which was already very good). I think the enjoyment factor figured high into this--you know, enjoying the groove of being able to crank out the stories one after another and then just let them come back to me to be savored on their own.

wzafran, I also noticed that when I was in a groove and enjoying the process of making stories and quickly going on to the next that my mind became more and more capable of quickly forming images and creating stories that worked for me.

So perhaps it is better to become a hermit and go through Heisig quickly.

Which leads me to wonder about what I'm doing now. I'm currently working on RTK III much much slower -- only 10 kanji per day -- because I want an overview of each kanji as I learn its writing. So I look up meaning and vocab in a couple sources and input it for later memorization in an SRS. And this takes a lot of time--image forming and story making for the 10 kanji per day still takes very little time.

My reasoning for doing RTK III this way is that unlike RTK I, where we will often come across the majority of these kanji when reading and more naturally come to associate the kanji with its uses and meaning within vocab, RTK III kanji are rather rare and we probably won't be able to make this transition as naturally.

Also, I already have a good background in Japanese and doing RTK III this way allows me to immediately know if this is a kanji for a Japanese word that I already know. For example... oh so this is the kanji for にわか or わずか. Gosh, it's great to know this in kanji even if it is usually written in kana now. I'll probably still come across these in novels, etc.

My question for you and everyone else is, do you think it is a mistake for me (at my Japanese level) to try to learn the RTK III kanji like this? I feel like RTK III is an entirely different animal, but... pehaps I should continue to use the "divide and conquer" principle of RTK I and capitalize on the benefits of going through learning the writings quickly, and leave the above-mentioned discovery and work for later.

Any thoughts?

BTW, keep up the great work you two!

Awesome!

Thanks for writing your diary, it has some nice tips and as you put it it's very motivating to see what others have done. I was somewhat stalled but I'll resume zooming through it now. Congratulations

congratulations!!

you've inspired my to step up to a 50 a day schedule, which will have me done at the end of the month if i can keep it up.

[edit: so much for that idea. i've passed the 1500 mark but my failed stack is also past the 500 mark... yargh]

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wzafran Wrote:Does this mean that when you're making mnemonics, you're (artificially) forcing your mind to go into the REM phase as well?

When you are visualizing in your mind, you're probably using more of the right brain than the left brain.

Also you might find this link interesting if you haven't seen it.
http://supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm

Congratulations, wzafran! Remarkable and inspirational! I stand in awe. Best of luck with RTK3.

I'm gonna give 100 a day a shot since I'm going to have a lot of free time during summer vacation ^_^

I'm gonna try to add kanji in groups of 25 spread out over four times a day. I'll space out the new kanji with breaks and sessions for covering expired cards.

That's an amazing effort there!!

I'm currently doing a minimum 20, but often up to 50, kanji per day rate for RTK1, using ANKI. And while I find it easy to do this per day, by the end of the week, with a couple of hundred relatively new kanji still being reviewed, I am wondering how everyone manages the time, not for learning new kanji, but for completing the 'review' stacks?

I'd love (and have the time) to go through 100 new kanji per day from RTK1, but after a week i imagine I'd easily have a couple of hundred kanji in the reviewing pile, which I probably wouldn't have time to completey.

Anyone else feel the same way? Have any advice? Etc?

The thing is, if you're doing 100 kanji/day, you need to do your reviews every day, without fail. It's doable, but it takes a lot of extra time, so it depends on how much free time you want to invest in it, and that varies from person to person. If you're doing fine with your current pace, then I would say that if it works, don't fix it. But if you're not happy with your current pace, and you feel you could do more without sacrificing your retention rate, then go for it.

You have to make sure you don't cut corners on your initial reviews/stories/learning. Don't cut corners just to hit 100. If you start cutting corners just to make 100, you'll start cheating yourself long-term, and then you wind up wasting time correcting problem kanji later on, because you cut corners on them to meet an artificial goal.

So yeah, 100 a day is doable, but if it takes you 2 hours to do 50, then expect to spend at least 4 hours to do 100.

rich_f Wrote:You have to make sure you don't cut corners on your initial reviews/stories/learning. Don't cut corners just to hit 100. If you start cutting corners just to make 100, you'll start cheating yourself long-term, and then you wind up wasting time correcting problem kanji later on, because you cut corners on them to meet an artificial goal.

I'm not so sure about this. Surely you are going to see a whole lot of kanji after you're finished with this, in many contexts. I tried to continue reviewing kanji and doing lots of reps after I'd done RtK, and I must admit I did it rather hurriedly (2 months) and some are not as set in my mind, but it's more of a tool than an end in itself. I just wanted kanji in words to look familiar, and now they all do, regardless of whether I can remember the story or not. When I see one I don't quite recall I just look it up, remind myself of the story and go learn some more.

Soon after doing RtK I stopped doing my kanji reps and switched straight to sentences and reading. I have so much reinforcement I can't see why it's so necessary to do hundreds of extra kanji-only reps as well. Just go get some graded readers, do some sentences, work through a textbook, just use it and they will become more and more familiar. Two birds with one stone.

@rich_f: What you said about not cutting corners just to reach the 100 is a very good, and i dare say obvious, point that I had forgotten. After reading these forums I am just so eager to get through RTK and start on the sentences that I think I got a bit carried away with aiming to complete too many kanji per day rather than learning them well.

Having said that, I have now changed my learning methods slightly to shorten the time it takes to learn and get my reviews done quickly, so I can learn more in one day.

This is what I used to do:
I would read through and make images/stories in my head for approximately the next 20 kanji in RTK, writing each one out once as I did this.
I would then open up anki, and do my reviews, and then when they were done, I would start doing the kanji I'd just learnt in Anki's "learning" phase. In the early stages, when my review pile wasn't too big, the delay between reading new kanji in RTK and doing them for the first time in Anki, caused by the review pile, was a good way to see which new ones had stuck and which ones hadn't.
But, as I started to increase my per-day quota, the review pile grew too big, with 'repeat in a few days' kanji also taking up a lot of the review pile. Hence I was struggling to get through the review pile and still have the energy for the new kanji in 'learning mode'...

SO, this is what I now do (started yesterday):
First thing I do when I wake up is jump on Anki, and go through the entire review pile. Some days there are 60, some days there are 130, but no matter what, I empty the pile, because I know the pile will just keep growing if I leave it. Knocking down the pile is pretty quick anyway, since it's the reviewing phase, and I probably know most of them.
After that I take a break, have breakfast, or whatever. Then whenever I am free (perhaps after breakfast, perhaps not until the evening), I will jump back onto Anki and make sure the review pile is emptied again. (this time it will be much smaller to begin with)
Then, I read through and make images/stories in my head for approximately the next 20 kanji in RTK, writing each one out once as I do this on a separate piece of paper. **Then I go through each character I have written and try to recall the keyword just by looking at it.** This helps to immediately enforce the story in my mind. Then I jump on Anki, finish any reviews that have accumulated, and do what i've just learnt in 'learning mode', getting most of them right.
Depending on what time of day I've done this, I will try to take a break and repeat the process later with another 20 or 30 new kanji.
This means I am now getting 40 to 60 kanji done per day (fairly easily) rather than the 20 (and occasional big bursts to 50) that i was doing before.

As you can see, the quantity I can get done is interconnected to the quality of my learning process, so as I've been able to improve the quality of my learning, so too has the daily quantity improved. I think this 40-60 kanji per day range is more than enough, so I will stick to it, rather then aiming any higher.

PS: I just reached the 500th kanji in RTK, so I'm very pleased with myself. Feel free to congratulate me!!! (even though I assume most of you are far further ahead than that)

@ phauna: I found what you said quite interesting too, actually. It was a viewpoint coming from a completely different angle to how I've been thinking. I am still going to try hard to build as strong a foundation as I can though, even if everything will be reinforced time and time again once I get into the sentences. I just think I'll immediately understand sentences quicker if I know perfectly the meaning of the RTK kanji. Also, since I'm only 1/4 of the way through RTK 1, i need to learn them well now, so I am armed with the primitives to more easily build up my knowledge of the rest of the RTK characters.

I'm doing aproximately the same thing you do now ashman and it works.

At first I was a bit worried about Kanji that didn't stick in the first go. And there are always some, that I can't recall on the first go of newly added Kanji. But by progressing further and further I found out, that I don't have to worry about failing some of the Kanji. I haven't stopped adding around 40+ Kanji per day and so far my review rate is still above 90% every day.

Those Kanji that didn't stick at first don't need any additional work, apart from just a few more reviews. I also expierience, that after I could write a Kanji correctly once, I hardly fail again. There were a few Kanji I had to put into the failed stack for 4 times in a row, but eventually even those got down, and now I'm having no trouble with them at all.

My biggest problem doing reviews is mixing up Kanji for similar keywords (I guess this will be the case for most people here). Sometimes I'm undecided whether this or the other Kanji would be the right one to use. In that case I try to focus on the special connotations of the given keyword, to find something peculiar, by which I can distinguish it from the other one more precisely.

In the end, I just learend to trust the SRS system over time. The Kanji I fail more often just show up more often, and those which I don't fail I know anyway (I'm always surprised how clearly I know Kanji from the first few hundred frames).

Over the last 1000 frames however, I kinda experienced that I grow more and more accustomed to learning new Kanji. Right now I'm hardly failing any of the older Kanji (i.e. more than 100 frames before the new ones) and occasionaly, when I fail an old Kanji and look up the number, I'm really surprised to see that this was actually more than 700 frames back. Most of the time it just feels like I've learned them just 2 or 3 days ago.

And congrats to you ashman. I always feel kinda relieved hitting a certain "mark" I passed the 3/4 mark yesterday and I'm now a few frames before Kanji 1600. I plan on finishing in about 10 days at most, which is actually very motivating right now. I started on the book just at the end of February, so it hasn't been that long.

Airymon,

Thanks for your hasty response, your congratulations, and your general confidence which has added to the rest of the inspiration and determination I get from reading this forum. And well done on reaching 1600!!! that's superb.

I also just started at the end of February, but at first I was only doing something like 8 per day, as I had a lot of other commitments. Now I am free much more, and so if I continue with 40+ per day I should happily finish the book well and truly by the end of May.

Sadly I've been studying Japanese for the last 12 years, and struggling with kanji for about 5 years. It always was the hardest thing for teachers to teach, so they ignored it, and it was the hardest thing for students to teach themselves, when using old-fashioned rote methods. Discovering RTK as well as the SRS learning software has just amazed me. I never though I could learn kanji this quickly.

I'm now thinking of using Anki for other unrelated university subjects like biology and geology.

Hahaha, so someone else actually finished RtK1 in 20 days. That's amazing dood. Congratz. What's more is how our situation is similar. We both have a 1 month vacation. His pace was 100 a day, and he actually finished on time.

Originally I started 10/21/2008, and I planned to finish in 3 month, or at most just before February (100 days). Then a few days ago I made a post on the '10 hours of studying a day' thread, making a remark about finishing all 3007 by studying 10 hours a day. http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...8#pid35738

I wasn't too serious, joking really. However, after reading wzafran's diary I have become motivated and determined to actually do it.

When my vacation started I was at 766. As on 8:00PM 12/20 I am learning lesson 30, which would put me at 1124. I have 23 days until January 12th when my vacation ends.

Goals:
Study kanji all day, every day (or as much as possible)
Aim to do about 100 kanji a day (prioritizing finishing lessons)
Leave no kanji in Failed, Never Tested, or One Review piles
Keep up with reviews (prioritizing over learning new kanji)
*Finish 3007 kanji before February 2009

booyakasha

Hey everybody, Season's Greetings and Merry Christmas

I'm not going to keep a diary like wzafran, but I am going to post periodic updates. I'm aiming to do about a hundred kanji a day. However, I'm not going by pure numbers, rather by lessons. Today, I hope to do lessons 37+38 (32+57 kanji)

Reading wzafran progress it seems that it takes me longer to get through about the same number of kanji. So at this time I'm pretty much studying all day.

Goal: 3007 before February
10/26/08: 249
11/23/08: 514
12/20/08: 766
12/25/08: 1394

Good work, boys and girls. Show us your might!