I don't know what do to. I slowly made my way toward the halfway mark (~1000 kanji) over the course of a few months. I consistently had 80-95% retention rate. Then I went out of town for just two weeks, and now that I am back, I seem to only get about 5-10% of the kanji I'm tested on correct. I now have 150 kanji in my red pile and I still have 400 review kanji left that I just can't get myself to do, because every time I start again I fail them and give up. I don't know what to do. And this isn't just limited to new kanji, but older kanji that I had thought I knew for sure. I just feel like quitting this altogether. How is it even possible that just two weeks out of this, I have forgotten all my kanji? Did I never actually learn them in the first place? I feel so frustrated. Has anyone else experienced something like this? Anyone have any advice?

Quit Heisig. Start learning Japanese. I am being serious.

Don't listen to others. Keep going! I had similar issues, kept going, finished and never regretted it.

' Wrote:Quit Heisig. Start learning Japanese. I am being serious.

Please don't come onto the Heisig forum/site and dismiss Heisig so bluntly, especially to learners asking for advice about their Heisig study. It's rude and contrary to the site's goals. Read the rules. If you're going to start advising people to attain kanji literacy in ways other than Heisig, you need to offer more comprehensive comments than this, and in a positive way.

nest0r,
you're dead serious. Somebody should be after all.

Kanji are only a small subset of the Japanese language. Never seen or heard anyone speak in kanji.

Hello joeb11,

I had the same trouble few months ago. It's normal to have a very bad retention rate after a big stop : but it's also true that the most you review, the most your retention rate increases.
I suggest you to review until you have a certain number of red cards. Re-review them immediatly, and start gain the orange pile, etc....
Take your time, don't look at the nasty orange number, try to review even a bit every day. Don't add any cards before nearly all your cards are in the fourth pile.

ようこそ！Welcome to the forum, Joeb11!

I have not made that experience, and thank god i have not! As for your problem i would suggest you to keep going. Stop learning any new kanji for some time. Work with those you have already learned. Do the reviews, even though they are many, and don't give up!

You have made it to the half-way so far, and that is great! You don't have to work on the stories as they are already there. Read through them and re-learn them if you have to. Break your deck up in smaller junks, so you have not as many reviews. By breaking it up in smaller junks i suggest you to suspend most of the cards. If you do 100 kanji a day, re-learning, and reviewing them, it should not take you so long.

But whatever you do, don't quit, even though it hurts you right now. And your motivation is considerably low due to the fact that you have had such a large break in between. But if you continue now, you will have the hardest part behind you, and finishing the project RTK is all the more rewarding. I know you can do it!

This community is here for you if you feel the need to vent off some of your frustration.

がんばれ！
流れ星

Keep going step by step! I stopped Kanji to learn hiragana and katakana and when I went back to RTKanji I forgot some really really early kanji. Although I wanted to knock myself in the head every time, I kept going. I know it will get better soon once I get back into it.

The important thing is to not stop, not to listen to detractors, and don't get bogged down in "what-ifs." We all have lives outside of RTK and breaks like this happen.

buonaparte Wrote:nest0r,
you're dead serious. Somebody should be after all.

Kanji are only a small subset of the Japanese language. Never seen or heard anyone speak in kanji.

True, although knowing the readings of a kanji that make up a word can help. And remembering stroke by stroke is never good (see this article by koichi @ tofugu: http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/25/the-5-b...ing-kanji/). For example, if you were to learn that bubble was 「すいほう」, you would have more trouble remembering it than if you knew that the kanji were 「水泡」, then you would remember the readings of the kanji and put them together. Also, knowing the meanings helps because you would read (for bubble) "Water...Bubble" and this would help you know the word. Anyway, what is the point of learning words in kana that are going to have kanji later on if you could already know the kanji!!! As nest0r said, please don't defame Hesieg's book on here.

Heisig seems to be not just a book but THE book.

What about trying something like this:


I mean interesting recorded texts and kanji?

I suppose it is enough to learn all the radicals (and it takes just a few hours) to be able to figure out what a particular kanji is made of.
It is much easier for me to remember a word from a text and kanji, not just kanji.
And I think there are plenty of people like my humble self.
Heisig is only one of the possible ways to start learning Japanese.

I think the OP needs to make some fundamental changes. Don't get bogged down with the words of the stories; make it as visual as possible. What image comes to mind when you hear the keyword? I could probably write them if I needed to, but I've never made up any "stories" as such, I just focused on creating the memory, which I assumed it was all about.

I've stopped reviewing for massive intervals on two occasions - the second time was probably close to a year - but I remembered more than 90%. I was continuing studying during those gaps, but not writing kanji. I was laughing when I remembered some of the more difficult ones. If you do it right, it's as hard as forgetting your friend's face or something.

buonaparte Wrote:from a text and kanji, not just kanji.

You're talking about learning over 2000 characters arbitrarily through vocabulary you happen to come across in such suggested sources as 100-year-old short novels. Asides from being a chicken-before-egg situation, it sounds ridiculously unsystematic and inefficient, and just think about the margin of error for a beginner attempting something like this.

I had a similar situation.
Back when I was at frame 800 or something I went on a road-trip for two weeks, and I had a pile of about 500 reviews or something when I got back, but I managed to get around a 70% retention rate, and most failed cards were the ones I only recently added. I did "prepare" for it, by stopping adding cards about a week in advance. But yet still, I think this is a good time to reconsider your learning methods, as I believe that this is an indication that your stories aren't good enough. A story you forget two weeks later isn't good enough. SRS (to me at least) acts like a sieve: all the bad stories get sifted out, and the good ones you answer correct good all the time anyway. Perhaps you just have a great memory that you could retain all the kanji without falling back to the story, and ample SRS, but you were still using rote memorization.
So a piece of advice (which I didn't follow dearly lol, but I still managed): try to make as much stories yourself as possible, if you're not already doing it. This website is a blessing and a curse at the same time: for kanji you just can't find a story for, the repository here is a godsend, but it also encourages laziness. The last 500 kanji or so I got really lazy and copied ALL of my stories from this website. And my "young card" retention rate really dropped.
It might also help to skim through the book sequentially once. Don't necessarily start over, just read the book from frame 1 on, and take notes for any chain of kanjis/lessons/etc you have problems with.\
And just slowly and surely keep reducing your pile. Just keep a set schedule each day: for example: do 20 reviews and re-learn 20 kanji. It'll take a couple of weeks, but don't rush it. Take your time. Only do as much per day as you can handle, and keep in mind that the more cards you relearn per day, the more reviews per day you'll get. Only start learning new kanji once you feel comfortable with all your current cards.

If you really get sick and tired of the story-crap, or it just isn't for you, try RTKlite, or just stop doing the heisig method, but do take a goooood look at other methods to really find something that does work for you. You'll have to tackle them some day one way or another...There are thousands of people who have reached a higher level of proficiency in japanese than most people here without using heisig...

buonaparte Wrote:And I think there are plenty of people like my humble self.

Unfortunately, not too many.

I think you should never stop even though I have yet to finish. I'm only 600 frames in and I've recognized so many kanji in the games I play and books I read it's crazy. Even though it's not the full knowledge of kanji, it gets me hyped up when I read.

The short version: don't worry about forgetting stuff. At all.

The long version: The purpose of the SRS is to give you the bare minimum exposure necessary to retain something in memory. If you skip a day of review and have no outside kanji exposure, you have to accept that you're going to forget a greater than normal percentage of facts. If you miss two weeks of reviews in a row, you can predict that you're going to forget just about every card that would have come up for review in that time. You began two months ago, have 1000 facts crammed in your brain, and have only attempted recall on each card a handful of times. As far as I'm concerned, they're all new cards and forgetting them due to two weeks of missed reviews is the most natural thing in the world.

It can be morally devastating to completely blank out on facts you had thought you had mastered, but don't give up. After working through your backlog, you'll get another chance to test yourself on the cards you missed, and more likely than not, you'll succeed the second time around and remember them all the better in the future for your experience of forgetting.

I believe it's normal to forget like that. You know it's like being in university for 4 years, graduating and then a year later you're like.. 'I can't remember anything!', but then as you review and use your knowledge the information you learned IS there, and it become more ingrained and concrete than ever before. You just came back from a 2 week vacation and just cuz your first review had you fail 90% of your deck, it doesn't mean you never learned them. You do know them deep in your brain, and I be that once you review 2 or 3 times it will all start coming back to you. For me I took a break for about 5 months after learning about 500 kanji. When i started again a couple of weeks ago, I didnt remember anything (maybe just 1-10)., but in 1.5 weeks of practice, and reviewing from scratch i got all 500 in my head again and it took me a couple of months to learn 500 the VERY first time. So I think 1.5 weeks for a second go around is really NOT BAD. Bottom line is, when you start reviewing and practicing things you already know but forgot, you will learn it a faster the second time and it will become even more a part of you.

IceCream Wrote:im not sure where the idea of doing Heisig before learning any japanese came from (AJATT?) but i don't really go along with that so much...

Seconded. Well, i did do RTK Lite, but i was well into studying japanese by the time i started (~N5) and even further in by the time i finished (>N4). If you're one of those people who can punch through RTK in 3 months and then move on, more power to you, but if it's going to take you much longer, you may want to re-evaluate your priorities. I hear of many people who take a year to get half way through it, then have to stop for various reasons, restart again, etc... all without learning any japanese...

IceCream Wrote:im not sure where the idea of doing Heisig before learning any japanese came from (AJATT?) but i don't really go along with that so much...

Anyway, so, whatever is good for you...

I have been starting out learning the kana after which i was working through げんき1. The vocab list looks like this:

びよういん 美容院 beauty parlor
びん 便 flight
ふね 船 ship, boat
やきゅう 野球 baseball

For me those were three elements to remember. The kana あき the kanji 秋 and the English translation. Now when i look at my vocab lists both have become "one." I can now look at the kanji 秋 knowing it is spoken あき and it's English translation is fall or autumn. Since i have done all the exercises in the book and the workbook on my PC preferring to use kanji over kana i was used to them somehow.

I have to agree to whoever came up with the idea of doing RTK after Kana and before learning actual Japanese. Or as early as possible to get this major part of the language out of the way. It makes learning vocab and other things related to Japanese considerably easier.

buonaparte Wrote:Kanji are only a small subset of the Japanese language.

Kanji are actually a very large subset of the Japanese language.

Quote:Never seen or heard anyone speak in kanji.

...and? I've never seen or heard anyone speak in the English alphabet, but I find it's darn useful to know.

JimmySeal Wrote:...and? I've never seen or heard anyone speak in the English alphabet, but I find it's darn useful to know.

hahaha, that's a good one!

If you did Heisig properly through 1000 characters, then you don't really need to do it systematically anymore because you have a solid framework to work with. You know how to break characters up into radicals and group radicals into primitives and characters, and you know how to work with mnemonics to memorise characters (or perhaps not, if you´ve managed to forget everything...)

IceCream Wrote:@nagareboshi: i'm not suggesting not to learn kanji at all, just saying that you don't need to learn to write before you can read...

I would reccomend learning both at close to the same time.

Don´t quiz both at the same time, though, that´s a recipe for a headache (the three column list posted above is an excellent example. You can only work with three terms if you already can associate two of them).

... and I´m not refering to actual writing skills here, those come a long time after you learn how to read. I just think it is extremely useful to be able to copy words down, in terms of memorisation, as well as being able to tell similar characters apart.

If I come across a word I don´t know and write it down in my notebook, then keep reading, I´ll probably remember that word. If I just use rikaichan or whatever, I probably won't.

Learning to write Kanji - at least knowing the basic stroke order - is going to be vital if you're ever going to have to read a Japanese person's handwriting.

Sorry if I offended anyone, I did not intend to.

1. I am not against anyone learning anyway they want.
2. I am not against kanji. In fact, I found right from the start that they are a blessing rather than a calamity.
3. I am not against Heisig, though I do find his books boring. In fact, I am one of the not so many people who have read Heisig books thoroughly.
4. If you want to read classical literature you need to know about 15 thousand kanji.

5. The OP clearly is in trouble. I think s/he should try learning Japanese, not just kanji through Heisig.
6. The OP should honestly answer this question:
驚嘆する心がありますか。 きょうたん する こころ が あります か。 - Do you nurture a sense of wonder?
If the answer is negative, learning Japanese (kanji included) will be just hell.

7. I don't believe in learning a language (any subset included, be it kanji or kana) without listening to it right from the start and learning about pronunciation.


This thread might be of some interest:
When should I learn the kanji?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...PN=1&TPN=2

joeb11 Wrote:I don't know what do to. I slowly made my way toward the halfway mark (~1000 kanji) over the course of a few months. I consistently had 80-95% retention rate. Then I went out of town for just two weeks, and now that I am back, I seem to only get about 5-10% of the kanji I'm tested on correct. I now have 150 kanji in my red pile and I still have 400 review kanji left that I just can't get myself to do, because every time I start again I fail them and give up. I don't know what to do. And this isn't just limited to new kanji, but older kanji that I had thought I knew for sure. I just feel like quitting this altogether. How is it even possible that just two weeks out of this, I have forgotten all my kanji? Did I never actually learn them in the first place? I feel so frustrated. Has anyone else experienced something like this? Anyone have any advice?

That's a bit odd. Since it did work for me I assume that most people will have a similar experience while and after doing Heisig, maybe it won't work for some but in general, it should if done correctly.

You mentioned you had a good retention rate but going completely blank just after 2 weeks break is bad. How long have you been doing Heisig before the 2 week break? In any case my advice would be keep going, find a way to revive your interest like rewarding yourself but whatever you do don't stop at this middle point.