Hello All,

To begin, this is my first post in this forum, and from what I have read, you guys and girls all seem to be a good bunch of people that I can learn lots from. So, nice too meet ya!

I am a big fan of RtK, because it has allowed me to remember a large amount of Kanji with little-to-no rote memorization in a very short period. A couple of months back I studied up till frame 600 in a 6 day period, and I can still write the vast majority now.

Anyway, after taking a hiatus from studying the Kanji I found this website, and I feel that it is a great method to really reinforce while I learn. The only problem is that I am a little hesitant to start because I am unsure how I should go about using the website while introducing new characters.

Do you study and create stories first for ALL the Kanji before slipping them into the review section, or do you just do it a few at a time? Do you add more Kanji only when you have mastered learning the ones you have already put into the review section?

In other words, what works best for you while learning new Kanji and reviewing with this website?

Thanks,

Alec

I've been doing Heisig via RevTK since October and my daily routine begins with reviewing due cards, then studying and adding 10-50 new Kanji and reviewing them once. I clear up the restudy pile 2 or 3 times per week. So far it seems to work nicely, I'm currently at frame 1473.

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Hi Alex and NinjaViking, welcome onboard!

Alec_xvi Wrote:Do you study and create stories first for ALL the Kanji before slipping them into the review section, or do you just do it a few at a time?

If I did RTK again, I would pick a minimum of kanji to add per day (except for weekly breaks). This can help you several ways:

* Project how much time it will take to complete the book. For example you could set 10 kanji a day, that's "only" 7 months or so.

* If you have enough time and energy left after the min . new kanji and reviews, do more. Otherwise, knowing you did your min. you can feel happy about your progress instead of being too hard on yourself. I do this for managing my work now, and it has one side effect: you learn that if you push yourself too much, you will likely fail to do the min. the next day. So you learn to be more regular, regularity is much better on the long run than trying to wow yourself about how many kanji you can learn in a day.

* The question that is more often debated here, is whether you should do the scheduled SRS reviews, or study the new kanji, first. If you set a min. you could do the Study first up to your min. kanji/day goal; then review; and *then* if you feel like doing some more, add some more kanji, or work on the Restudy pile.

It differed day by day, but here's how I would do my marathon days. The number of kanji could differ for whatever works for you. Marathon days were 100+ kanji days. You could alter it however you wanted.

1. Come up with a story for a kanji, write it in my notebook.
2. Repeat for 10-15 kanji.
3. Do steps 1,2 for the next 10-15 kanji.
4. Review (by hand) the keywords from the first set of 10-15 kanji
if they were good: add them to the review section
if not: come up with better stories for the ones i missed
Then learn the next 10, review the previous 10, learn the next 10, review.....

I would physically write the stories in a notebook, as well as the kanji. I'm not sure how many people do this, but I know it helped my memorization. Helped give me time to really focus on the story and get a vivid picture in my head.

I have struggled much more with the stories that I first thought. But in the last couple of weeks I think I have found a good pattern.

First, I second Asriel opinion of writing the kanji and the story down first. It really helps.

The second point is not to practice writing the kanji too much early on. I found doing that creates a trade-off with the story. Focus on the story.

So here is my current step by step:
1. Look at the kanji, meaning and primitives. Write the kanji and the meaning in a book (along with the hesig number)
2. Take time to think over the story. I might use this site, or a Japanese dictionary to be sure of what meaning is intended. I might also use an english dictionary to better understand the keyword.
3. Do the above for about 20 Kanji. At the end read back over them.
4. At this stage I don't start reviewing them in Anki (or any other SRS), I go and do something else. This might be reviewing previous kanji (in Anki), or repeating the process above for the next 20 kanji.
5. After this break, I will go back to the stories and read them one more time. Note, that at this stage, I will only have written each Kanji once (with the exception of difficult-to-write kanji). I think this really helps me stay on the story.
6. After I have reviewed the new kanji once, I will enter the story into this website. I usually do it when I encounter the kanji in Anki. This is a good extra review of the story and it is also nice to have a digital copy of the story.

Hey guys,

Thanks for the advice. As soon as I read your posts I was motivated yesterday to finally take the plunge. I got through the first 100 characters (which was not so difficult as I have already studied up til frame 600) and was able to get a pretty good rythm going.

Essentially, what I was doing was studying with the PDF version of Heisig open on my desktop, re-reading the his stories, and writing out my own stories (or using other Koohi users stories) in the study area first. I will now begin my review of the 100 kanji I learn't yesterday, and try and pack another 100 in.

When things at work get busy again (my students are on winter break), I will slow it down to about 50 kanji a day, and continue reviewing in the next morning.

Its nice to finally get involved in a forum about the language I have been studying for 4 years! HAHA!

Until next time!


ALEC!