Hi all,
I'm starting at over again after doing about 200 kanji during a week back in March. I envy people who suggest that you go at this full time. No can do. How do people keep at this. I've decided to try to do 30 a day. Any suggestions? Anyone else have to start over?
Laura

Here's my method "currently" as it tends to shift depending on workload:

First I add 30 new kanji (or finish the chapter if I feel it's close enough) but I don't review them yet. Next it comes time to study missed kanji from day before. Here I spend time to revise my story especially for ones totally missed. After that I review the added (I read over Heisig sections then the KanjiCan stories). That's in the morning.

Later, I review any cards up for it. At the end of the day, I test the new cards I added. Any missed will get studied the next day.

EVERY time I study or test a card on this site, I write it down unless it's a total miss. That one I mark wrong and wait for the study time when I'll write it down after looking at the story.

The best advice I can give is don't ever take a day off from reviewing, even if it's only for 15-20 minutes. It's not so much about quantity, it's about maintaining some sort of momentum.

In addition to my two giant shoeboxes full of 3x5 flash cards, I have Twinkle on my Palm PDA so I never have an excuse to miss out on reviewing when I have some downtime. I've also managed to fit reviewing a couple of stacks of paper flash cards into my daily routine for getting ready for bed, and for going over while I make/eat breakfast.

I don't obsess so much over stories working/not working anymore... I just let the spaced repetitions do their magic. I figure even if I can't remember a particular kanji, if I just keep drilling it every day, the story will eventually just stick. (This also makes me much more strict about failing kanjis, too.) I still tweak stories every now and then, but that's only if the original story just totally blows. It's weird which ones will really stick, and which ones won't stick as well.

I started studying with Heisig's method and this site a few days ago, and I would like to know your opinion on something. What do yo think about the time you should put between studying a goup of kanjis and reviewing them here?

I mean, it is too easy remembering a group of kanjis if you studied them that very same day, and even more if there have been no more kanjis filling your mind that day. I'll start reviewing each bunch of kanjis only after having started my studying a new one. I hope that will help me to realize what kanji I remembered because I'm really learning it, or if just remembered it because I had seen it a couple of hours ago.

I agree with the advice to review every single day. Otherwise you run the risk of putting off reviews for longer and longer periods of time, getting overwhelmed and discouraged by large piles of overdue review cards, and eventually feeling like you need to start over. (I started over several times. I would have finished much earlier than I did just by staying on top of my reviews.) Try splitting your daily review up into smaller chunks of time throughout the day (or at least in the morning and evening) if that makes it easier for you.

After doing your review, learn at least one new kanji. Someone suggested this to me. Their logic was something along the lines of ... if you do even one new kanji you are one kanji closer to finishing, and sometimes learning just one new kanji will bring up the motivation to do another, and then another, and before you know it you will have finished a group of 10 or 20 kanji. On busy work days (with no access to the internet) I would print a page with at least 10 new kanji: keyword, kanji, and story outline (or the space to write story notes in) to have with me throughout the day. Then whenever I had a moment I would work on it. I would usually skim through story ideas in Heisig and on this site in the morning before I left for work, and then would go over the stories or story ideas in my mind several times during the day, and finally would type up my story ideas once I got back home. I think this approach actually worked the best for me as my stories were more or less tested several times in my mind before I ever attempted to write them up.

Try to figure out how many kanji you can realistically learn each day in addition to doing your reviews. Realize that some days stories will come easier and you can learn more in a shorter amount of time and other days it will be like trying to get blood from a stone. You might want to set an absolute minimum daily goal that you should be able to achieve (no matter how busy you are, how difficult that day's kanji are, etc) in addition to an ideal goal to shoot for whenever you can do more. For example, you may decide that you want to set 10 new kanji/day as your absolute minimum learning goal and 30 kanji/day as your ideal. Remember, a pace of 10 new kanji/day will still allow you to finish both RTK 1 & 3 in less than a year! This way you will still make steady progress and you will also feel good about yourself on the days that you can only meet your minimum goal.

Don't push so hard with an unrealistic daily pace that you burn out and end up taking long breaks (days, weeks, months) from study. You may want to start off with 10 kanji/day as your ideal goal and 5 kanji/day as your absolute minimum. Try this for a while and if you feel like it is easily do-able then add a few more to your daily quota and see how you do with that. You may also want to give yourself one day off a week from learning new kanji as a reward for your hard work the other six days...but don't give yourself a day off from review.

Hope this helps.

[ファブリス]

Transtic Wrote:I started studying with Heisig's method and this site a few days ago, and I would like to know your opinion on something. What do yo think about the time you should put between studying a goup of kanjis and reviewing them here?

Soon after studying a new batch of kanji, you can do a simple review in order, just write down the keywords somewhere while you are studying them.

Then sleep on it and wait for the next day to do your first "Leitner" review from the blue stack.

For me, the realization that you have to do the reviews on schedule for the Leitner hypothesis to work was critical. Also, the fact that, when you've got a lot of kanji, like flaming torches in the air, you cannot afford to be reviewing too many on any one day. If you add them in chunks of 30, or 100, or whatever, then they will come back for review in (pretty close) to the same size chunks. But with limited time for the daily review, I cannot afford to have 100 reviews a day. So, my strategy is to be gentle on the addition side of the equation. Know in your heart and soul that it will build a momentum. Then be gentle and trust the review schedule. If you review 2x a day, then you're cheating the system, and (IMHO) cheating yourself. You have to let the mind a-l-m-o-s-t forget, and then trigger it to remember, in order to transition that knowledge most efficiently from short-term to long-term memory.

I'm consistently reviewing 40-50 kanji every day. So, I "without fail" do my expired cards. I also "without fail" add 10 kanji to box #1. Since I'm "starting over" in a sense, I've got about 520 failed kanji just waiting to move from that box to box #1. I'm whittling away at that "failed kanji" stack.

One does forget. The forgetting index of x days is not exact. Sometimes the review comes just t-h-a-t much too late to successfully trigger remembering that kanji. You need it to be close to that limit, but you'd rather that it didn't exceed it. You just gotta trust the system to be good enough for a good fraction of the time. Like 90% or so. You know it's close when the memory floods back with an "oh yeah" sort of feeling when you see it again. Or when it hovers just outside your grasp, and you can a-l-m-o-s-t tell yourself the story to write the kanji from, but just not quite.

If I could have done it this way the first time, I don't think I'd be starting over today. I remember having 200 kanji to review on many days, and it was a complete downer. Not having the time to clear out the expired kanji made me reluctant to even show up.

Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV) but to me, it is very important to control the number of expired kanji, to keep them in the realm of consistent doability. That is the snare that will trip me up. The only way I know to do that, is on the other side, to control/limit the number of daily additions.

Thank you everyone for the good advice. I think I will reduce my daily additions to 20 Kanji at first. And I like the suggestion to at least wait till the end of the day to do the first review after imputing new Kanji.

The first Kanji of the day today was gall bladder. Jeez.... It's encouraging to know that I'm not the only person trying again. (^_-).

I don't know if this would help keep you motivated as well but I made a small chart which shows me how many kanji I have learned and how many I have to go. It's kinda like one of those thermometer things they have at grocery stories that slowly fill up as they get donations or whatever. I'm going to try and update it each week to keep track of my progress as well as giving me a visual status of how far I have to go. I am at kanji 385 right now so I was able to fill in a huge chunk of the thing right off the bat!

I also agree with not doing to many Kanji at a time and making it a daily routine. If you think about it if you did 15-20 kanji a day you would be learning almost 100 a week. If you kept that up for 20 week or so (about 5 months) you would be done! At first I thought 5 months! That's still a long time. But really think about it. Japanese was my minor for in College and in the years I studied I never even got close to learning the meaning of that many kanji! On top of that it takes Japanese people years and years to learn Kanji! So to me 5 months seems like a pretty good deal.

It keeps me motivated just knowing that I've discovered a method that allows me to cut out the grunt work of learning kanji.

Laura Wrote:And I like the suggestion to at least wait till the end of the day to do the first review after imputing new Kanji.

ファブリス Wrote:Soon after studying a new batch of kanji, you can do a simple review in order, just write down the keywords somewhere while you are studying them.

Then sleep on it and wait for the next day to do your first "Leitner" review from the blue stack.

I agree with Fabrice, that is is good to do a simple study-oriented review (in Heisig order or randomized) of that day's new kanji. I always liked to do this just before going to bed as some studies say that you remember stuff better if you review it just before sleeping.

But do your first "official" randomized review checking for retention the next day. This way you have one day to forget the kanji whose stories and images may not hold up and to remember the ones that do hold up. The kanji that you pass won't come up for another three days and you are more likely to remember a larger number of them than if you do the first review on the same day that you learned them. IMHO they are still too fresh in mind on the day you learned them to be a accurate test of retention.

CharleyGarrett Wrote:For me, the realization that you have to do the reviews on schedule for the Leitner hypothesis to work was critical. [snip] You have to let the mind a-l-m-o-s-t forget, and then trigger it to remember, in order to transition that knowledge most efficiently from short-term to long-term memory.

I also agree with CharleyGarrett that it is important to do review on schedule for a Leitner SRS to work. However, I believe there is room to "play with" the schedule in the early stages of the process. Some people on this site and elsewhere swear by doing initially frequent reviews of newly learned kanji, repeating that first randomized review for the first three days or so before going on to a more typical Leitner progression.

For myself, I decided to go over my new stories and kanji as many times as I could the first day (which for me was still a "learning" day), but always did my first "official" review the next day. Because I reviewed using different software I also decided to set more frequent initial intervals:1 (the next day), 3, 5, 7, 15, 30, 60 days... I had a 95-98% retention rate all through RTK I. I feel that this initially more frequent review schedule worked well for me, and I was able to progress to a more typical Leitner schedule with a retention rate that still remains 95-98%.

So even though I feel that it best to hold off until the next day for that first "official" review, by all means experiment and see what works best for you -- especially in regards to the first three days after learning kanji and/or the frequency of the first two reviews. If you hunt around the forums you will find a lot of threads on this and similar topics with some great suggestions to try out.

To be fair, the Leitner system is somewhat underminded by Kanji in that you have Kanji with Kanji, so you're reviewing something more often than others. Not necessarily a bad thing. Sun, One, I, Moon, Rice field will be seen everyday even if the card itself is seen maybe every 4 months or more. Others, like icicle, eternity, make a deal and others you'll only see when that card comes up so you're more prone to forget totally by the time review is here. Not a bad thing, just the way the system works.

So I won't get hung up about reviewing alot more than normal early on. Eventually I'll finish all 2000 and have them all in block 5 checking daily or weekly to see what expired and missing a few I'm sure. THAT'S when Leitner will shine.

To the original poster, you could stay at 30 a day I think. It's when your missed block starts getting unwieldy (say 100 cards or more) that you need to probably lay off a bit. Even then, if it's getting to that, you probably need to look at the story and form a much better VISUAL picture in your head. May not even be an issue with you. Best of luck and skill to you.