Hello all, I have been lurking the forums for quite awhile.

I completed RTK yesterday (took about 2 months), and now that I'm off to study the kanji readings, I'm quite confused. How do you use KO2001?

I have the Anki Deck, but, what exactly do I do? The front card of the deck has a sentence:

"Due to the low yen rate, exports of Japanese enterprises have increased."

IN JAPANESE with KANJI. And I supposed to read this sentence, fail it for the first time (since I can't read it) and try to remember how to read it when it pops up again?

There is also a listening section where the front card says "Listen." Am I supposed to re-write what is being presented? Sorry if it may seem like a dumb question, but I would like to confirm if this is what I should do so I can go along studying quietly without regrets. Thanks for the input.

円安で日本企業の輸出が増えた
Oh hell I remember that one

KO2001 has a very intuitive kanji order, which is why many of us like using it. However, the sample sentences, as you notice, introduce later kanji early on. This makes the sample sentence, which is meant to aid understanding the kanji words, more a hindrance than a help.

There are a couple of threads here that talk about using sentences that are sorted by the KO2001 kanji order (search for user Cangy threads). The benefit is that the sentences are sorted, so they will not have more complicated or less used kanji early on like the above sentence. This lets you gradually learn progressively more complicated or rarer words.

The sentence decks for KO2001 and Core 2k6k have been sorted using KO2k1 kanji order, with positive comments from users that tried them. Most common compliment is the learning is faster and retention is better.

To be honest I think the KO2001 deck sucks with anki. The sentences are way too long to work well with a SRS. The sorted core2000 deck would probably suit you better.

maybe sentence mine a textbook first, because this is a good way to get a solid foundation.

I just failed it first time and remembered it when it came up again. For listening I just tried to comprehend the spoken sentence. KO provided me with a great foundation to start reading. It would help big time if you used the re-ordered version.

You can also suspend/delete stupid crap.


...and full-sized sentences only really work with cloze deletions, anyway. I remember spending forever trying to learn some song lyrics using too long of sentances in anki... don´t test yourself on more than one tiny chunk of information at a time, or it won't work very well.

If I wanted to do KO2001 in anki in the original order, I wouldn't fail the cards for not knowing the sentences, but instead just the single vocab words that they are supposed to illustrate.

First, you need to learn some basic grammar.

Buy a textbook, use Tae Kim's Site, or Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar, or something like that.

Go learn some grammar, then worry about kanji in a month or so.

Then go buy the books or the CD for Kanji Odyssey 2001. (Hey, if you're going to use their intellectual property, you might as well pay them for it, and they're useful.) If you read each set of entries for each page, the sentences will make more sense, but they have a lot of kanji in them that are "out of order," which means that they come from later in the book, when they shouldn't really be popping up yet. (Probably because the people who picked the sentences are lazy and just yanked them out of newspapers, or something like that.)

You can either learn them now, or use a "sorted deck" like kore which has sorted the sentences so that you will only learn kanji you're supposed to learn at the time you're learning them. (So you don't learn kanji "out of order.")

If you learn the out of order kanji now, it's a slightly steeper learning curve, and you should probably add extra sentences to cover the vocab you're learning. I grabbed sentences from online dictionaries, but you could also use smart.fm.

Anyway, that's the drill. And yeah, what everyone else said-- long sentences are a drain. Break up the long ones into two cards, or get sentences elsewhere. That's why having the books or CDs is useful.

If you have trouble remembering vocab, add a few extra sentences with the vocab in it. I find the whole idea of only having to have one sentence in my deck with a vocab word in it ridiculous, anyway. I usually add 2-3 extra short sentences for vocab, depending on how common it is. (Common vocab will show up in other sentences naturally, uncommon vocab won't, and needs a "push.")

You have a deck full of difficult sentences and despite their order you can simply not remember 6 new words at once per sentence.

Alternatively, you study sentences but you are not able to understand or recognize the kanji compounds by themselves or in another sentence.

New strategy.

Study vocab.
Study vocab by suspending all sentences.
Study vocab by suspending all sentences and unlocking some kanji compounds with kanji that you do know.

You know 人　手　一

Today you might unsuspend compounds you know everything in, and maybe some that you dont... The point is to have enough overlap in the new words that you add that you are studying new things multiple times.

人手　一人　人前　手前　前　

Great, you learned 前 today

Tomorrow, you could add

一人前 出前　人出

Learning several new kanji this way is far easier than introducing words that contain all new kanji, and you will remember new words better because of the overlap - it helps to learn the readings since they will likely repeat in your new words, and form a better relationship to the "meaning" of the new kanji you encounter.

The thing to remember about KO2001 is that (like most kanji learning resources) it assumes that you're learning kanji in the "traditional" style, ie as you go along, and so that you're going to come to it when you already have a reasonable grasp of basic grammar and vocabulary. So I agree with rich_f and vinniram that it doesn't make a great deal of sense as the first thing to try straight after RTK.