I am not sure if I'm just experiencing some temporary glitch, or if I've made that wrong step in the journey that I was warned about.

I am hovering about 300 Kanji cards (using this website, not Anki) and I am having a hard time keeping track of everything. Each day, I am given about 40 cards to review and on a good day I can get 50% of them, rarely more. And some cards I just never get right.

I've tried to add 15-20 cards a day, since that seems to be what passes for a slow rate in these forums. (100/day? really?) I can't imagine that I'll be able to keep up when the expired cards/day gets into the hundreds. I fear each time I get a card for review, because one mistake and a card with many successful reviews goes back to the beginning. It's hard to see how any real progress can be made when reviews take up more time than I have to study (about 1 hour/day is all I can do. Student years are far behind me).

When I get a new batch, I try to visualize the stories, following all the steps in the intro to lesson 11 (BTW, what's the big idea in not telling people how to use the book until 100 pages into it?). I focus on the words, trying to arrange the pictures but I can only keep an image for so long before my mind starts to drift. Then I re-open my eyes and write the kanji, stroke order, repeating the primitives, all that. Then I enter the new cards, wait 10 minutes and review the new cards. I'm lucky to get 50% with this system. Heisig makes it sound like once you get an image, it will stick permanently. That isn't my experience at all.

Are these numbers reasonable? Is a 50% review good? My fear is that all my time will be spent reviewing and I won't be able to progress past that. Would using Anki be any better? Or switching to lite?

Some background:
The company I work for was acquired by a Japanese company last year. In January, they sent me to Tokyo to meet the rest of the company (I am a mobile phone programmer). That was awesome. I really liked Tokyo and want to go back, possibly for an extended time. Thus, trying to get as much にほんご as I can, as quickly as possible.

50% retention is very low. There's been a thread on this before, 80-90% pass rate seems to be the average.

50% failure just means you're not remembering your stories. If you're forgetting them 10 minutes later, that's very worrying. Are you making up your own stories or using ones on the website / book? Can you talk us through your process of memorising?

EDIT: the issue could be your attempts to "move pictures around in your head" and then re-visualise the image later. You're meant to play the stories out in your head (imaginative memory) rather that remember pictures (visual memory). Personally I don't "see" any images at all; recalling the primitives is like recalling the plot of a TV or movie.

I'm not sure about your 50% as never looked at mine % but I can suggest you this. Take a look at the images that I use for queen and arrival. Add a bit of narrative that talks about those pictures (you know that in this step you should use keywords of the primitives, don't you?). Try not to remember a picture as such but rather be able to reconstruct the image from your narrative. In the reconstructed image you should/must be able to identify focal elements as they are your primitives. (You may have some issues with relative placement of the primitives but in the examples below the original images are already such that the focal elements are in the right places.) The kanji should be yours.

queen: http://images.arcadja.com/matthei_theodo...0_3301.jpg

arrival: http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/7731/karatesd3.jpg

It does sound like you're doing pretty much the right thing, but 50% is quite low. Don't worry though, I had about the same retention rate when I first started (and was incredibly excited because I never thought I'd be able to do even that), but by the end of the book it got a lot better.

I think the best advice anyone will be able to give is that you should experiment with different methods. Stop thinking about the "correct way", and focus on trying to find what works for you. Probably almost everyone on here came up with there own variation on Heisig's method by the end of the book.

Here's some thoughts about what you could try:

1-Make sure you're making a record of your stories (preferably on the site), so you don't have to start from scratch every time you forget a kanji.
2-Make sure you continue to visualize your story as you write the kanji.
3-Say your story out loud, especially while writing the kanji. Repeat it as you write and emphasize the primitive you're currently writing.
4-Write detailed stories that contain clues as to where each primitive should be placed in kanji. (See below)
5-Write descriptive stories that evoke stronger images. (See below)
6-Write sparse stories that you can do quickly. Possibly even foregoing correct grammar and writing in a note taking style. (See below)
7-Allow yourself to look at the stories and pass the card if you can then write it. This may sound too easy, but a lot of the people with high retention rates are doing this. (Also, see below)
8-Be less strict about failing cards. For example, if you get a stroke wrong but tried to write the correct primitives, you can pass the kanji and just practice writing the primitive a few times. Focus on trying to get it right in the next kanji it appears in. (see below)
9-Don't allow yourself more than a few seconds to try and remember a difficult kanji. You'll obviously fail more this way, but your reviews will start to go a lot quicker. I know it's frustrating to fail a mature card, but think of all the times you spent 30 seconds agonizing over a card and then failed it anyway.
Edit, forgot to mention:10-You don't need to try and hold the image until you get bored and your mind wanders. Just come up with a story, try and build as strong an image as possible and then write the kanji while it's still strong.

As you can see some of these are contradictory, so experiment and see what works for you. The only ones I'd say you really should do are 1,2 and 9.

About 4,5 and 6: More detailed stories obviously make the kanji easier to remember, but they also take a lot longer to come up with. Experiment with different levels of detail to find what works for you. I eventually settled on succinct stories that I could write quickly, because I found that although detailed stories made the kanji much easier to remember at first, after about a week my retention rate evened out toabout the same, and I could do several kanji with simple stories in the time it took me to do one detailed one.

About 7 and 8: It's debatable how well you need to know each kanji, but if you're planning on SRSing vocab keep in mind that you'll be starting from the smallest intervals, so you're effectively re-studying a kanji every time you learn a word that uses it. This means it doesn't really matter if you've not got it completely perfect, as just being familiar with the kanji will make easy to remember. It's also worth bearing in mind that it will be a long time before you learn words for most of the kanji in the book, so I think it's probably inefficient to spend too long on them. In fact, I now find that it almost doesn't matter if I'm learning a word with new kanji, partly because the primitives are always familiar, but also because the way in which they are arranged often seems the most natural. In some cases I know that they'd never be the other way around.

In addition to the good advice above, think about dialing back the number of new kanji/day, especially if you're having trouble. Maybe even take a few days off from new kanji and just review/solidify the ones you already have. I also am many years removed from school, and I started going at 15/day. After less than a month I reduced that to 10. When I finish in mid-March, it will have taken me 7 months to finish RTK1. Not everyone has to do 100/day.

Thanks for all the advice, right now I am thinking of trying to concentrate on getting part I down before I move on to the rest. No reason to rush it, right?

To answer various questions:
aphasiac: (that's an awesome name, btw)
I started with the stories in Heisig's book, but a lot of them didn't really work for me so I tend to use ones from the website more. Or I come up with something of my own, and yes, I do try to stick to the keywords as given. I was always unclear on what imaginative vs visual memory was supposed to mean. I took it to mean don't try to work literally from the Kanji (like a pictograph), which would be hard in any case. I can try thinking of it terms of a plot and see if that helps.

Inny:
The image for queen is pretty succinct, the one for arrival has a lot of extra details.
Trying to come up with a memorable narrative that doesn't include such details can be tricky. Heisig seems to rely mostly on absurdity as a hook, which I find just doesn't stick.

Splatted:
Lots of choices here, which is good. I've generally used other people's stories, so I didn't see a need to write them down but I can see how that would reinforce learning. Same with speaking outloud. More senses, the better, right?

Not sure I get #7, are you saying that the card passes if I can be given, say wealth (one mouth field) + house and write 富? That definitely seems easier, but it also seems sort of like cheating, since stories are harder for me than writing the primitives.

Quufer:
Good point. I guess that I tend to think of this as something that I need to finish before I get to the "good stuff", which is building vocabulary and reading. Not that I haven't had fun with it. My workplace is full of kanji and it's really cool to look at the stream and pick out bits of it and break down the elements. To see meaning where before was only confusion. I'm just impatient, it seems.

ありがとうございます

Sorry for the slow reply.

Quote:Not sure I get #7, are you saying that the card passes if I can be given, say wealth (one mouth field) + house and write 富? That definitely seems easier, but it also seems sort of like cheating, since stories are harder for me than writing the primitives.

That's pretty much what I meant, though I'd still try and make proper stories. I remember that I tried it for a while and it was harder than I expected. I didn't make stories that told me how to position the primitives, so I found that I still had to remember the kanji to be able to write. I can't remember too well, but I think I eventually decided it was better to review without looking at the story though.

Quote:I was always unclear on what imaginative vs visual memory was supposed to mean. I took it to mean don't try to work literally from the Kanji (like a pictograph), which would be hard in any case. I can try thinking of it terms of a plot and see if that helps.

I always thought imaginative memory was just remembering whatever you imagined. So if imagine a cat and then try and remember what that cat looked like, you're using imaginative memory, but if you look at a cat and then try and remember what it looked like, you're using visual memory. The image of the real cat was much more detailed than the imaginary one, but when you try and remember it you'll find that most of that is lost. In fact, it probably ends up looking more like the imaginary cat, which is pretty much the same as it was before.

I may be completely off with this, but I think the image you create using the visual memory of the real cat is actually an imaginative image. The problem is that most of specific visual information is lost in the process. It's easy to remember that you saw a cat, but not as easy to remember exactly what the cat looked like, so you deliberately imagine things that weren't there in order to represent the things you don't want to be lost. For example, if you want to remember it had stripe across it's nose, you could imagine you saw the cat get in to a sword duel and it took a wound across it's nose. This image of the cat in the duel is essentially the same as the old one (ie. you still can't remember what the cat's nose looked like), but you know that the wound from the fight represents a stripe, and therefore that the cat has a stripe on it's nose.

I seem to have rambled on quite a lot, but basically what I'm trying to say is that no matter what you do you'll end up using you're imaginative memory. The Heisig method just gives you a way of converting the visual information that would have been lost in to something that will be retained in an imaginative memory.

@Splatted

I think the OP is over complicating otherwise simple things. He should understand that real images that he looks at are only there to help with imagined images. So it doesn't matter whether they are "succinct" or have "a lot of extra details" - they are just a starting point anyway...