I'm a hypocrite.

I speak some Japanese. I took two years of it in college, studied on my own for a few years, then spent nine weeks in the country over two trips, during which time, among other things, I lived in a Buddhist temple and studied 抜刀術 from a monolingual priest. I've let my skills lapse since then (both with the sword and the language), but my wife and I still speak Japanese to each other on occasion (particularly when shopping--not too many Japanese merchants near where we live).

Why am I a hypocrite? Because people ask me how to learn Japanese, and the FIRST two things I point them to are this site and the Heisig method. I tell them if they want to learn Japanese they need to know the kanji. I tell them there is no better method than Heisig for doing so. I tell them they must make it a top priority and to never let themselves lapse in their studies, until they reach the end.

My hypocrisy?

483.

That's how many kanji I know, according to Anki. Sure my kanji deck has about ~1500 cards in it that I once knew, but they form a hodge-podge history of a bunch of different attempts I've made at various kanji learning methods, and over 1000 of them are currently suspended. They are artifacts of all my failed attempts to learn the kanji, more times than I can remember. I'm effectively illiterate, and besides being embarrassing it is holding up any further studies of this language that I do love.

Part of the problem is that I physically lack a “mind's eye,” which makes imaginative memory quite difficult. But the bigger problem is that I let other things (job, family, social life) get in the way and then before I know it I'm off the tracks and months go by without review. There is no excuse for that.

I'm determined to not let it happen again. So I'm coming clean, starting this public log of my progress, and making a commitment: I will start now and finish RtK-1 by the end of February, a hard deadline for me. Hopefully a public log the fear of humiliation will keep my priorities straight

I've restarted RtK-1 on Monday, and I've done exactly 50 kanji for each day since (some I know, some are new--I didn't study in Heisig's order previously). I am scheduling all of my life around these studies, and not letting anything be more important. I'm at frame 250 and almost out of Part I of the book.

Wish me luck

抜刀術ですか？面白い

I did RTK over 3-4 times. One was in the beginning, but my computer got formatted so I lost all the data. Then I did it over again. Once I was done, I felt it wasn't working. So I did it again. But that time around I took it slowly. The key is to go at slow paces. 10-30 new kanji per day and to make really clear stories if possible.

I managed to do remembering the kanji vol.1+3. So I got up to 3007 kanji. But that was only the beginning of my journey. I've been learning japanese for almost 1 year and 5 months now. I've noticed over this time that, the key skills to have are reading/listening skills. Due to RTK books, now I can write kanji and I learned kana on my own before I started. So far I've been working on my listening,reading,writing skills. Speaking is on the way as well but that's on my priority list as well.


Anyhow sorry for my rambling. For the kanji, I always timebox. So I do it in bursts throughout the day. Much easier than doing all my reviews for my all my anki decks in 1-2 hours. That way I get a lot done and I can easily add more cards and learn more

300.

Ugh, I'm sick, but I'm not letting that get in the way either. It took me about an hour and a half to go through 50 frames, of which only 13 were new/suspended. Still, I did the whole process for all 50 to solidify those stories. I'm finding it hard to concentrate with this headache. But I'm very glad to have made my quota!

@ta12121, thanks. I've found that so far I'm only actually doing 10-30 new facts a day. The other 20-40 frames are kanji that I already know from other studies (but I'm spending time re-doing stories for them, as per Heisig's suggestion in the book). It's a comfortable pace so far, but I worry that as I get further into the book the percent of unknown kanji will increase and I'll have trouble keeping pace.

I think those that finish RTK will come back and do it again. I know I am in that position right now. I did RTK to the finish and continued for six months after finishing only to stop outright. I continued my Japanese studies, but focused less on active writing.

Now I do RTK with actual cards and love it.
http://bushbo.posterous.com/paper-versio...ying-kanji

I only have the first 1200 (Kanji Odyssey order) characters, but it is working well. However, I think it is easy since I have all the primitives and stories down. My only issue now is to work in Japanese keywords.

356.

I went a little bit further today, just to make sure I got at least 25 new/suspended cards. I'm getting into the arrow primitives, which I always had trouble with. There's just too many of them, and each one isn't used often enough to be memorable...

@brianobush, thanks. I think part of the problem is that we wait too long to use all of the kanji after RTK. An I imagine that it can be frustrating to continue reviewing them for months afterwords, and yet never see many of them in the wild.

I like your paper flashcard system. The first time I attempted RTK (back in 2005, I think), I did paper flashcards just like heisig recommended. What I didn't have though was a system for review. I just kept adding cards to one giant stack that got bigger and bigger. Once I got to about where I am now, the reviews got unmanageable. I stopped reviewing, and stopped remembering. I wish I had known about Leitner, or figured out a similar system back then.. I might have made it all the way through.

Im at #323. I just started RTK1 on Jan.12th. I do plan to do one lesson each day. I kinda sped up in the beginning doing two to three lessons in a day but when the kanji started piling up and it was getting harder and harder to sort through my memories, I brought the gear back to 1st and so I'm just sticking to one lesson a day now.
What I do with it is taking it easy and not bother with numbers, just by one lesson at a time. Then I do a review at the end of each lesson using this site (so I do the blue stack). Then, if I forgot some kanji from that preliminary review, I let it go to the red stack and starts solidifying my mental image of the those keywords. BUT I let it go until tomorrow to create short-term memory. The next day, I study the next lesson and add the cards at the end. Before reviewing the new blue stack, I go through the red stack from yesterday and if any kanji gets forgotten again, they get left in that red stack to be studied again along with the forgotten ones from the new blue stack that I would be reviewing from today's lesson.
With this method, I hope to finish RTK1 in around 56 weeks or less than two months. Honesty, of course, is the best policy. If you don't know it with your eyes closed, you don't know it at all. The race becomes a race if it IS a race, but if you treat it like a stroll in the park, it WILL BE a stroll in the park.
Wish me luck! And best of luck to everybody!! Especially you Mafried!

Oh and I forgot, when I started getting 2nd, 3rd, and soon 4th reviews of the stacks, I do those reviews FIRST before starting a new lesson each day. I do all the expired stacks all at once so it doesn't matter if the kanjis are on their 2nd or 3rd or 4th review already. A review is a review. Again, take it easy. If you keep noticing "OMG, this is the 3rd or 4th review for this kanji and I still can't get it...I must be stupid!", then you WILL feel stupid and get discouraged. Who wants to do this to themselves? I range from 80-90% memorized each time I do the reviews so that number is a big encouragement and "ego-stroker". It makes me feel CAPABLE. Then, I go on to my daily routine as said above. Mind you, I am a single mom with 2 kids, a part-time job and soon would be going to university for my Bachelor's full-time. So I DO need to take it easy, lest I make myself insane. LOL

395. --end of Lesson 17.

Another grueling session. This time there was only a half dozen that I knew. I decided to stop after 395 because Lesson 18 is a long one and it'll be best to do it in one go tomorrow. At least my reviews aren't piling up yet. I've got about 40 cards scheduled each day for the next week. The SRS simulator says that at my current rate I should peak at around 300 reviews when I finish. That's doable... barely. I just need to make sure I make it to the finish line.

@Akeiko, thank you and good luck! Being a single mom is a full-time job in itself! My wife went back to school as a return student, so I know how hard it can be. You have lots of courage, and I'm sure you will do well in your studies!

438.

Another grueling session. I wanted to complete Lesson 18, but I only got about half way through. This is the third day in a row that the pace for adding new cards has been tough. There's a few tricks I have in mind for improving my study routine. But if those don't work I may have to revise my schedule..

EDIT: Did a few more before dinner and upped the count for today.

Keep going, once you get to 500, then 1000. You'll feel a huge weight lifted since your almost to the end. Plus just keep going, I know from experience that I've only gotten so far in Japanese because I never missed a day

I'm sure anyone can learn kanji, but like anything in this world, it takes time.

488.

Did better today. I broke up new sets of kanji into groups of 11, and interspersed that with other work that I have to do. That seemed to work better and I was more productive to boot.

@ta12121, thanks. can't wait to feel that weight go

Good luck!
But I'd suggest that if you once knew 1500, then your problem is most likely that you're just not actually reading enough. Once you get enough kanji/vocabulary and readings down you can abandon RTK completely imo. And you don't even have to be that anal about memorizing them all perfectly. Really once you have 95% of the cards in stack 4 (if you use this site) and you know the primitives then the kanji barrier is gone, and you need to start chipping away at the much much larger vocab barrier to make further progress.

It's my third time trying the Heisig method. On the second try, I finished RTK 1&3 but did not keep on SRSing after that.

The two things that helped me the most where:

* good stories: funny, absurd, shocking, stupid, but stories that you'll remember (and it's written in the introduction of the book, I know because I read it *again* a few months ago)
* some kind of Pomodoro thingy to help me focus on learning (or re-learning) even when I skipped a few days and have more than 200 kanjis to review

543.

Thanks, guys. The problem is not that I hadn't been reading, it's that I hadn't been doing anything. I dropped Japanese for a long while, basically since my last Japan trip almost two years ago. I do find that a 30-minute timer on my phone really helps me focus. It's long enough that I don't feel constrained, but still omnipresent and keeps me from being distracted. Tricks like that helped me get through 55 kanji today. Time to go make my post to the 1/4 way thread

600.

And I'm back on track! The last dozen or so were a real breeze. The 心 primitive is really easy for me--the stories were sticking without much work at all. Reviews are at about 150/day, but that increase should be logarithmic so I'm not too worried.

nadiatims Wrote:Good luck!
But I'd suggest that if you once knew 1500, then your problem is most likely that you're just not actually reading enough. Once you get enough kanji/vocabulary and readings down you can abandon RTK completely imo. And you don't even have to be that anal about memorizing them all perfectly. Really once you have 95% of the cards in stack 4 (if you use this site) and you know the primitives then the kanji barrier is gone, and you need to start chipping away at the much much larger vocab barrier to make further progress.

I never stopped during RTK. It get's lower and lower over time. I'd say it's worth doing for the long-term. Heck when I do get fluent I doubt I'll ever stop srsing. Maybe I'll stop adding hardcore or something, but I won't stop using it. Small price to pay for not forgetting what you've learned

ta12121 Wrote:I never stopped during RTK. It get's lower and lower over time. I'd say it's worth doing for the long-term. Heck when I do get fluent I doubt I'll ever stop srsing. Maybe I'll stop adding hardcore or something, but I won't stop using it. Small price to pay for not forgetting what you've learned

Yea, I don't see the value in stopping. I _do_ see a value tweaking your SRS algorithm if it no longer fits you, though (and anki's interval settings allow you a good deal of flexability without rolling your own SRS algo).

overture2112 Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:I never stopped during RTK. It get's lower and lower over time. I'd say it's worth doing for the long-term. Heck when I do get fluent I doubt I'll ever stop srsing. Maybe I'll stop adding hardcore or something, but I won't stop using it. Small price to pay for not forgetting what you've learned

Yea, I don't see the value in stopping. I _do_ see a value tweaking your SRS algorithm if it no longer fits you, though (and anki's interval settings allow you a good deal of flexability without rolling your own SRS algo).

yea that's true. Although I don't want to play around with the algorithm, just to be safe.

mafried Wrote:600.

And I'm back on track! The last dozen or so were a real breeze. The 心 primitive is really easy for me--the stories were sticking without much work at all. Reviews are at about 150/day, but that increase should be logarithmic so I'm not too worried.

your almost half way, keep going!

You should open your graphs in Anki and look at the due cards chart. If it looks like your reviews are getting out of control, then slow down a bit, because it's keeping up with them that's most important in the end. When you're deciding what the right pace is, you should take into account the number of reviews you can handle each day, and not just how many new characters you can learn with the book. Maybe it sounds like obvious advice, but a lot of people seem to get overrun and experience burnout (including me).

Hey mafried just wanted to say good luck to you. I'm actually in the middle of doing RTK1 at the moment for the first time, and had actually already set the same goal as you of completing it by the end of February (well actually the first week of March, but only because i'm doing 35-40 a day). At any rate, you can now say you have a "study partner" in your quest for kanji literacy, since we are pretty much the same point in the book. (I just reached lesson 23 today).

and again, best of luck to you

650.

Although most of those cards are sitting in my new pile. I reviewed them, but I'm so tired that I don't think any of the stories will stick. I rescheduled them all as new, and will quickly go through them in the morning. Lesson 23 looks like a monster, but so far it's pretty easy going. I've just had a lot of difficulty focusing. I think I don't study as well on the weekends.


I am definitely going to keep reviewing my RTK deck indefinitely. Reviews will very quickly drop down to just a handful a day, and at some point I can roll the RTK deck into my main Japanese deck and have it be a normal part of my review. I've experience how quickly kanji knowledge can fade once you stop reviewing, so why waste all that effort?

I also intend to do RTK-2 immediately afterward, replacing most of the RTK-1 cards with Japanese keywords.

@Javizy, here's my due graph:



As you can see I'm really not generating a lot of reviews. Right now they're taking less than an hour of my time, and I'm not being very efficient about it. It's adding cards that is the bottleneck. I expect that I can handle between 200 and 300 reviews a day, and that's about as high as it will get for a few weeks at the end. Of course as soon as I finish it'll take just a week or two for the reviews to drop to their current levels.

@unholieststew, I'm always glad to have a study partner! Good luck! (BTW, I've heard around 800 is a rough patch, so watch out soon!)

Good decision to eventually replace the keywords with Japanese ones. If you want to be able to write by hand, I think it will help you alot in the long run. I never did RTK2 so I don't know how good it is, but I wish you luck in your endeavours.

700.

And this time I've reviewed them all! Expecting 200 reviews tomorrow, so the reviews are starting to rise (but it's not a problem yet).

When I first started this attempt, I figured I would do 50/day until I got out of familiar territory, then start respecting the lesson boundaries. However I've found that meeting an arbitrary goal is quite empowering, and striving for that goal is improving my efficiency.

When I reach my quota I feel like I'm on top of the world. I feel like I could keep going and make tons more progress if I wanted to, but I just choose not to. Of course that's usually not true--I'm usually stressed, burned out, and anxious to get some work done on the rest of the stuff in my life. But for some reason when I meet that totally arbitrary goal I set for myself, that stress and anxiety disappears, and I feel on top of the world.

I've also been exploring how best to meet that quota. I'm now adding cards in batches of 11, 11, 11, 9, and 8. This makes it easier as I get towards the end to avoid burn-out. I intersperse these study sessions with 10-minute timeboxed review sessions, first of the expired cards, and then the new cards, and finally the cards I failed that day. I'm at about 150 reviews/day right now, and that's taking about a half-hour (three timeboxed sessions) to do.

EDIT: One more piece of advice for others out there: NEVER fail an already failed card! On previous attempts I would continue to fail a card until I finally remembered it. In hindsight I was relying in the end on visual memory or repetitive drill. Now I treat new cards and failed cards exactly the same: if I do not immediately know it, I flip the card and do not guess. Then I recall the story and take at least a minute to solidify it, before opening my eyes, repeating the story in my mind and writing the character once, and then marking the card as hard so that it shows up the next day. I always mark cards in my new and failed pile as hard, regardless of how well I remember them or whether I remembered them at all.

In summary: 1) treat failed cards the same as new cards, and 2) study, then mark as 'hard' new/failed cards so that you review them again the next day.

750.

Bit of a rough day today. I woke up late, so I wasn't able to study in the morning like I usually do. By the time I got home from work I had a headache and couldn't concentrate. 30% of the stories from yesterday didn't stick, but I don't know if that is because of their difficulty or my mental condition (or for that matter, because I wasn't reviewing pen in hand the last few days)...

Anyway I made it through and met my quota, but I haven't reviewed the new cards yet and it doesn't feel like a victory. I still have to do my review of frames 501..750 as well. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day...