nadiatims Wrote:I don't get it. You re-did RTK "after almost 3 years and having forgotten almost every kanji". Did you literally study no Japanese during that time?

Pretty much. I learned about a thousand contextless words after RTK, took numerous 6-month breaks for university with lackluster reviewing of those thousand words a few times a year. I forgot how to draw 四.

nadiatims Wrote:Fussing over RTK is like fussing over the first step in a marathon.

Pretty much. That's why I wanted to get it over and done with as quickly as was humanly possible. That's the point of this thread. To get this ugly step out of the way and get to learning real Japanese as quickly as possible.

Everything else you said, though, is exactly what I'm doing. I don't care for the keyword too much, despite what I've said in this thread. If I remember it and it helps, great. If I've forgotten it but need it for disambiguation or other reasons, I'll look it up. I'm not dumb; I can learn a new character without a story or English keyword, and can ignore one meaning I've associated with it if it's not the right one.

My original intent was to help someone who is doing something I've done by telling him how I did it, which happened to involve recognition cards, which some people don't like. I've tried to defend them by explaining how I've found them useful. I'm not here to tell you to hang on to those keywords and never let go. Hell, I've quit RTK as of today. I've barely touched the deck in the last 15 days. I'm busy learning real words anyway.

I have learnt the hard way that rushing RTK isn't as good as it may seem. You want to get it out of the way and focus on "real" Japanese, but the thing is, you will have so many reviews per day that you simply can't do both.

The benefits of RTK+Anki increase as more cards become mature, which doesn't happen for 2,000 kanji in a short amount of time, no matter how fast you add the cards.

lardycake Wrote:You want to get it out of the way and focus on "real" Japanese, but the thing is, you will have so many reviews per day that you simply can't do both.

Then screw the reviews. When you study other aspects of Japanese you get constant review of kanji anyway.
The way I see it is, either take kanji slow studying it in parallel with other study, or get through it quickly and then study Japanese. You don't have to wait to get all the cards mature (or beyond the 4th box on this site) before starting on Japanese. You can always return to it later if you really feel the need. I just think doing nothing but RTK for 6 months to a year is a shame, because you think you've studied a good chunk of time but you still can't actually do much at all in Japanese, except impress people with your kanji writing skills.

Day 3

It get a lot easier to go at and maintain a high review and new card rate.

I know it's late but just want to share this

1901 kanji
http://japaneselevelup.com/2011/09/04/ja...anki-deck/

ok. I was the sad guy over there begging for a spreadsheet since anki doesn't work on my device (problem solved). And my java srs app is just leitneir based. Only yes and no.
Spacings of its 8 boxes (fixed)

1 day, 2.7 days, 7.4 days, 20 days, 55 days, 148 days, 403 days, and 1097 days.

Even those that I managed to send to box 4 (20 days), I still recall a lot of them. So I think the likes of nadiatim are on to something.

Sorry for the text walls.

P.s. I quit rtk. Just vocab hunting. (sorry if this gets double posted. Won't show up even with a few browser refresh.)

Day 4

Good work. Keeping this up with 12 hours of school is not easy. 80 new kanji is still excellent progress.

Thanks
I'm pushing myself to get it done so I can get to the fun part sooner.

i don't really see the point. sorry.

you're going to be studying japanese for years, and will just burn out bc you'll start to hate doing it.

my 2 cents, your energy is great, but stop adding any new cards for 2-3 days once your rep count feels overwhelming... then add large numbers again for 5-6 days, repeat.

i'm doing something like this for core6k (almost done hooray ;D)

dtcamero Wrote:i don't really see the point. sorry.

you're going to be studying japanese for years, and will just burn out bc you'll start to hate doing it.

It's not that I think I will be done after I finish I just want to finish RTK so I can get to the part where I feel like learning sooner.

dtcamero Wrote:i'm doing something like this for core6k (almost done hooray ;D)

About that what exactly should I do after I finish. It seems like everybody is doing something different.

Congratulations on almost finishing it. How was it? How long did it take? Did you do that right after RTK of was there something else?
How do you feel about your level of Japanese. I mean like can you read a book with minimal problems or not yet or what?

Would you recommend I do Core2k after RTK?

EasyJapanezy Wrote:

dtcamero Wrote:i don't really see the point. sorry.

you're going to be studying japanese for years, and will just burn out bc you'll start to hate doing it.

It's not that I think I will be done after I finish I just want to finish RTK so I can get to the part where I feel like learning sooner.

The longer one lingers in RTK the more likely he'll burn out.
And why "study" for years? It doesn't take much to get into real (even if beginner) Japanese, at which one is more into enjoying the language.

Well, I think the thing a lot of us are finding a little puzzling about this is that we didn't really dislike doing RTK in the way some others dislike it. All of us wanted it to be over sooner not really because we didn't like doing it, but because we wanted to know more Japanese sooner.

At the same time as netsplitter is giving his advice on how to do this large volume of new material really quickly I think I should share the advice I wish I could have given myself at the beginning.

To me there was nothing more demoralizing than drowning in the reviews that got stacked up quickly when moving too fast. It was also annoying to be relying more on rote repetition than a more balanced and conservative learning strategy. Without exception, every single time I've tried to construct a "if I do X many new cards per day then I'll be finished in Y days" sort of study plan it has failed miserably because I didn't properly anticipate how fast the reviews would stack up over time.

The SRS is going to adjust to how fast you're actually learning, and if you're flooding it with new material without actually properly learning it then your reviews per day will never go down. Even in your best case success scenario here's how it ends up: 2 days after the end of your plan you'll have 1400/1950 cards due. You'll have technically "seen" all the cards in the SRS at least once, but really only know about 500 of them. Then the entire thing will try to stall out as you begin the extremely inefficient process of actually learning every single general use kanji all at once over the next year. I think a lot of people when they first start the process of learning a new language and discover SRS try to almost outsmart it in this way, but I don't see the point in it.

There's also the puzzling thing that RTK is already a more efficient version of what people used to do. So the idea that people are trying to make a more efficient or faster version of RTK itself is silly to me. I'm sure there exist some people that can go through RTK in 2 weeks or whatever, but those people in my opinion are such crazy outliers or they're just not telling the truth about how well they know that material.

Steady, even more than slow, wins the language learning race. I've made quicker progress than any language course I've ever taken by studying moderate amounts every day with an SRS and sticking to it. I wouldn't have gained a whole lot besides a lot of extra stress and heartache by trying to make that process faster. In fact I just recently tried to do that very thing in order to finish lots of material before taking JLPT1, and....it set my entire study plan back at least a month because it wasn't realistic. Right now, I'm on a steady track to conservatively complete both Kanji in Context and RTK before the 1 year anniversary of starting back on both of those.

Now, it would be difficult for a complete beginner to accomplish this because they would need to do a beginner level textbook first, but the question I would ask those of you trying to rush RTK is why you need to know the meaning of kanji you won't ever encounter in your studies until you're into intermediate or advanced level. Unless you guys doing RTK fast are planning to jump immediately into advanced Japanese material where you might actually encounter those kanji then it just seems a little silly.

I know a year sounds crazy and slow or something to complete RTK, but it's actually a lot faster than people used to accomplish this pre-RTK and pre-SRS. I think more people need to keep that in mind a bit when they start trying to rush the process. If RTK is done at a moderate pace along with the beginner level material from a textbook like Genki 1 then most people should be near finished with RTK by the time they enter intermediate level. That's crazy efficient compared to the way a lot of people learn or fail to learn Japanese, and shouldn't be seen as slow at all.

That's really the biggest issue I have every time I see the discussion of speed-RTK come up. Why does it need to be faster than it already is?

undead_saif Wrote:The longer one lingers in RTK the more likely he'll burn out.
And why "study" for years? It doesn't take much to get into real (even if beginner) Japanese, at which one is more into enjoying the language.

Well I consider that studying too... studying doesn't have to be unpleasant if you find a rhythm that works for you. It's just important to understand that language acquisition is at least a 3-year marathon unless you're doing something very extreme... and a popular way of disturbing that rhythm/never finding one is to take on too much too fast. There are lots of threads here following people who were adding 200 cards/day and then quit altogether.

easyjapanezy Wrote:It's not that I think I will be done after I finish I just want to finish RTK so I can get to the part where I feel like learning sooner.

I empathize with this entirely but you are building the foundation for a house. Everything will be built on your creation of a mental slot for each character, just as you have done with the english alphabet. my opinion is that a sturdy house has a sturdy foundation... this way things won't shake loose later, forgive my extended metaphor. There will be pleeeenty of time later for you and real japanese to become familiar with each other ;D

easyjapanezy Wrote:About that what exactly should I do after I finish. It seems like everybody is doing something different.

Congratulations on almost finishing it. How was it? How long did it take? Did you do that right after RTK of was there something else?
How do you feel about your level of Japanese. I mean like can you read a book with minimal problems or not yet or what?

core2k seems so basic that it's probably more useful to make/find a subs2srs deck based on an easy ghibli movie. I'm a big advocate of audio accompanying cards bc I think it aids listening skills...
While that's going on, in my opinion you should also find some easy manga with furigana and read with a J-E dictionary at every opportunity. I started with fullmetal alchemist which was hard but enjoyable. pretty much anything is going to be hard in the beginning so it's important to find material you like...

core6k looks like a 3-4 month project. I actually really enjoy it for some reason so it's going by at about 50 words/day, with a 2-day break here and there when reps pile up. I'm 2 years studying now and already knew about 1/4 of the words in it, but there rest are great and I see them everywhere I look now, which is great. planning on doing 10k next.

novels still seem really hard for some reason... i'll be fine for 20 pages and then a half page will be totally opaque, and with nothing else to go on i'm lost thereafter for a while. Movies/radio/manga are getting pretty accessible however, bc in that situation there's intonation/images/gestures to fill in the occasional blank.

@EasyJapanezy

Firstly, I want to congratulate you on your resolution – regardless whether you will manage to do all the kanji in the planed time or not, you will surely learn something (like how to tackle the unknown ones, for example).

There are probably a few options you can take after doing Heisig and it's likely that some people will be suggesting you AJATT. I won't. This method has two many problems and it is not obvious that this is an effective way of learning Japanese. My issues with AJATT are 1) disregard for grammar, and 2) purely input based approach (listening to incomprehensible Japanese falls within this category as well).

You can go and read the whole [1]thread where people were discussing AJATT. I remember there was one post that in bullet points listed issues with that method. Unfortunately the thread has 1517 replies so finding a specific post in that hay stack is kind of problematic (believe it or not but I did read the whole lot...).

So, if not AJATT, then what? Take a look at [2]this [3]guy. There are elements that japaneselevelup and AJATT share (like kanji first, sentence based learning) but they do differ in places where my main objections with AJATT are. There are some points I disagree with japaneselevelup but in comparison to AJATT it is a great improvement.

EDIT:
Ahh, textbooks (that's actually another example where AJATT got it wrong, I think). There are two main stream textbooks that people seem to use. Genki and Minna no Nihongo. As I understand, Genki uses romaji, whereas MNN is Japanese script all the way from the beginning – I thought that after you are done with Heisig, you may not like romaji

[1]http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=682
[2]http://japaneselevelup.com/
[3]http://japaneselevelup.com/2011/08/21/japanese-quest-starter-guide/

In the end I think the best study method is always going to be whatever motivates you to keep studying everyday. For some people doing something like RTK or using anki is so removed from actual Japanese that they find it demotivating, while other people (me included) like to have that extra bit of structure to their learning and the idea of reviews building up stops them from slacking off for too many days.

I didn't do RTK but I'm a strong believer in the benefits of learning at least the 1000 most commonly used kanji at a pretty early stage through anki/flashcards, rather than the pretty slow and random pace covered by most textbooks. I think the two key points in doing this are that you get used to the shapes of the kanji and also it allows you to start reading quite a wide range of native material.

If you can get a good grip on those first 1000 then more advanced ones become easier to pick up just through exposure. I think this is kind of similar to the way that natives learn kanji, in that the first 1000 or so learnt at elementary school involve a large amount of rote learning, kanji drill books etc., but once they move onto higher grades this doesn't seem to be so much the case. (anyone who knows more about this feel free to correct me, I know a lot more about the classes at elementary than the later levels, but that's the impression I get from the books I've seen)

Basically what I'm trying to say is that don't get too hung up on trying to remember the rarer kanji right from the start. Yes it might be useful to learn them once in terms of getting you used to the shapes of kanji, but I don't think it's too much of a big deal if you then forget their actual meaning.

good luck

mutley Wrote:I didn't do RTK but I'm a strong believer in the benefits of learning at least the 1000 most commonly used kanji at a pretty early stage through anki/flashcards

The thing is that RTK teaches over 2000 frequently used kanji, but -not- in frequency order, so if you do RTK you pretty much want to do RTK all the way to the end. And you certainly want to completely memorize all of them as you go, that's pretty much the whole point, getting the kanji memorized beforehand and not needing to worry (much) about encountering unknown kanji as you learn Japanese.

There is somewhere an RTK Lite list for doing only 1000 or so most-common kanji, but honestly, I think 2000 is a good amount to know to actually read native material. I wouldn't consider any of the RTK Kanji rare, exactly, although 匁 (monme) jumps to mind as a character I've never encountered... still, the 'rare' RTK kanji pretty much fall into two camps: characters that are rare on their own, but appear as elements in more complex characters, and characters that are names of trees. The tree names do often appear in personal names (which is I think why they are there), but I suppose if you don't like trees they aren't -that- important. (I kinda like learning the trees though, personally!)

erlog Wrote:There's also the puzzling thing that RTK is already a more efficient version of what people used to do. So the idea that people are trying to make a more efficient or faster version of RTK itself is silly to me.

I'm sure they said the same thing to Heisig. How can innovating an efficient technique to make it more efficient be a silly thing? Now I'm the one who's puzzled.

erlog Wrote:I'm sure there exist some people that can go through RTK in 2 weeks or whatever, but those people in my opinion are such crazy outliers or they're just not telling the truth about how well they know that material.

An accusation! I think we are outliers simply because it hasn't been attempted enough times. I want people to know that it's possible so they can choose if that's what they want to do (or at least have a go at it).

I'm not lying about how well I know the material, but I did leave out what I chose to do shortly (about 20 days) after I finished RTK, which contributes to why I still know it so well. I grabbed the JRTK deck from this forum, modified it to my needs, and gradually suspended kanji from my RTK deck and unsuspended them from my JRTK deck as I encountered the words in my various beginner materials. It's been two months, but I have 480 of the kanji entries reviewing in that deck. I probably have another 200 unique kanji amongst my other decks. I don't think it's too bad for a couple months of work. I've already accepted that I probably won't see a few hundred of the RTK kanji within next year, but I'm glad I didn't have to use any extra effort to learn the 600 or so I've encountered in the last two months. ("Encountered" in this case means within my anki decks, not in the wild. I attempt to read real things every now and then).

For me, that was the whole point of getting it out of the way as soon as possible. I didn't have to stop and learn 600 characters. I already knew them, so I could focus on learning words and grammar. Wasn't that the whole point of RTK? To give you the advantage that Chinese natives had, by being able to recognize the characters and learn the actual language, instead of wasting all your valuable learning time being bogged down by characters? (I think Heisig said this in his book.)

erlog Wrote:Steady, even more than slow, wins the language learning race.

Rapid and consistent also wins the race, but much faster. Whether you can pull it off is another story. There's also no reason to overload on every aspect. I did it with RTK, but now I'm going at a steady pace with my beginner resources. In fact, I've averaged about 90 reviews a day in anki in the last 20 days, because I'm too busy actually learning the material as opposed to "doing" them. I intend to do a vocab grind sometime early January, though. We'll see how that turns out.

erlog Wrote:the question I would ask those of you trying to rush RTK is why you need to know the meaning of kanji you won't ever encounter in your studies until you're into intermediate or advanced level.

You have no way of knowing what you are going to encounter in the future. Unless you are only using beginner-level textbooks and only intend on using those for the next year. I see a lot of "advanced" kanji in the wild, and I add a bunch into vocab decks if I feel the need to. The real argument here is if there's any point in learning 500 intermediate/advanced characters in advance when you can just learn them yourself as you encounter them. I'm undecided on this. Of course, I can't unlearn them, and I'm glad I know them now, but I'm not sure if it was worth the effort.

Perhaps being able to trim RTK of advanced characters without removing the ones that make later characters easier to learn is the next evolution of RTK. I don't think RTK lite does that (correct me if I'm wrong).

Day 5

Day 6

dtcamero Wrote:my 2 cents, your energy is great, but stop adding any new cards for 2-3 days once your rep count feels overwhelming... then add large numbers again for 5-6 days, repeat.

That's exactly what I'm going to do. It seems 7 days is my limit. My mind just feels so sluggish and tired from the high volume non stop reviews.

I'm going to take 2 days of, work through the reviews and just give my mind a chance to take in all the new information, then I'll go again at like 200 a day.

To be honest I would recommend against a break if you really want to do it as fast as this.

The reviews alone are still going to be hell, you will come back after the "break" still feeling awful and thinking to yourself that with a bit more effort you could have been that much closer to the end by now.

Not to mention that it really doesn't matter if you can't keep up with the reviews. Just get through the material quickly and move on. Keeping all the kanji fresh in your memory like this only seems important because of the review process itself, RTK becomes useful for...doing RTK. The idea that you go through RTK, space all the cards away and then you "know" kanji is a false one anyway. You'll be continually learning different readings and plenty of new characters as you start reading. The amount of kanji review inherent in the reading process and in any post RTK flashcarding pretty quickly makes RTK redundant.

nadiatims Wrote:I just think doing nothing but RTK for 6 months to a year is a shame, because you think you've studied a good chunk of time but you still can't actually do much at all in Japanese, except impress people with your kanji writing skills.

Haha that hits too close to home for me. I started both in parallel for the first 3 months of this year then dropped language learning for pure RTK. When I finally finished and started vocab and grammar again it was painful realising how little I knew at the end. I should have rushed RTK in 3months instead of the 6 it took.

I have learned so much in the few months without having to spend the whole review session(1hr) memorising stories for kanji. Then there are the keywords that are stuck in my head but are completely wrong (after knowing the Japanese word).

I am currently trying to get through Tales of Xillia (PS3), in the first 1hr already had to lookup over 100 words (knowing the kanji isn't enough).

What you have done is pretty remarkable. I wish I could do the same.

My problem is getting stuck in one kanji when I should be moving on, and taking needless breaks while trying to memorize a hard letter.

I think what would help is a some sort of a pacer software that would let me know every time I have to move on. Like, set an alarm for 2 minutes at time. I haven't come across something like this yet that resets with a click of a button though.

Day 7

But never mind the ending I changed my mind, thanks to some of the advice here.