First of all, hello everybody! こんにちは、皆さん！ My first post! Now, on to the topic...

I am currently going through RTK I (Ver.4) and am on frame 1120 (gods). I am using the book in conjunction with some stories from this site (thank you everybody!) and a pre-made Anki RTK deck (which I have been modifying to include Japanese keywords and some other things)... Everything had been going great until the past couple of days... My retention rate has dropped rapidly and I am having trouble getting 5 in a row correct during my daily Anki reviews. This almost happened to me once, around frame 800, and I decided to take a 5-day break from ADDING cards, and just kept reviewing and reinforcing the stories that were giving me trouble. Then I moved on. I believe it worked quite well.

But now, I'm facing a similar setback, where out of 60 cards I sometimes get 15-25 incorrect. It's not horrible, I know, but it feels like more than 10 cards wrongly answered means I'm doing something wrong. And so I ask you: Should go on another 5-day "vacation" from adding cards and focus on reinforcing the 1120 I already have? Or will this set me back even more? I promise to reinforce and review normally.

I've gone through more than half now, I can't give up!! Failing more than 20 really discourages me from going forward. I've also been noticing my mind is getting easily distracted during study sessions/reviews.

Some more information: Started RTK Feb.6, 2012, Mondays to Fridays I add 20 cards. Weekdays and holidays I add 40 cards. From Anki Deck Statistics:

Correct Answers
Mature cards: 88.1% (59 of 67)
Young cards: 85.9% (3017 of 3514)
First-seen cards: 88.4% (973 of 1101)

Thank you for taking the time to read this! ありがとうございました！

I've noticed that the more cards I have in my deck, the harder it is for me to keep track of them all and to go on adding new ones at the same pace.

If you're adding 180/week, that seems like a lot. It's more important to finish with solid knowledge than to try to finish as fast as possible. Would you consider doing something like 15 cards on weekdays and 25 on weekends? Or, if not, I think it's sensible to take a short break from adding new cards whenever you start to feel frustrated or overwhelmed.

[s0apgun]

IMHO, no do not take a break from adding cards. Anki will correct itself, some cards will mature faster than others for you. Those cards that you're failing now will eventually mature with nothing other than frequency to enforce them in your mind.

Get through all of RTK1 and keep doing your reviews. Eventually every card will reach mature status and your retention will go up. After all the point of Anki is to continue to use the review system for a very long time even after you complete learning the new cards to create permanent retention. Finish RTK1, then take your break and let the reviews simmer out. Then start doing vocab to help create associations to cement the meaning of kanji into your brain further.

when I did kanji 2 years ago iknow was still free and it made you review the crap out of them, way more than necessary... but that being said they really stuck. so i would recommend going over and over all the new ones, as well as plenty of reviews of the older chars as well.

if I remember correctly, once I was well in I think for every 10 chars I added, I did about 3 hrs of story-building and reviews. Not sure if this metric helps tho... I was doing about 30/day and 10hrs of reviews which was probably overkill to a certain extent...but that being said they really stuck...

these characters are very similar to one another and at first you will have a hard time distinguishing. just keep doing it. doing it right is less important than having a general persistence...

You need to cut down on the amount you're adding daily. Adding double the amount during the weekend means you'll have that many more reviews during the weekdays. If you feel like you're taking in too much information then try limiting yourself to five new cards a day all week for a while and then when you feel like it's getting easier go to 10, then 15, then 20. Also if you feel the reviews are piling up then temporarily stop adding new cards like you did previously while you get your daily review average down.

頑張って！

You're being too obsessed with this... maybe you should focus on other areas in Japanese... or like do something fun in Japanese or something really fun/educational in Japanese like going through song lyrics.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. I'm not too sure what Anki classifies as a "mature" card and such, so I guess I need to read up on that. Today, there were 70 reviews and I got 17 wrong, which is not so bad I suppose! But Anki has informed me of a most terrible prophecy... tomorrow's reviews are up to 105!! As Fillanzea and mikankun have suggested, I will lower the amount of cards I add daily. Fillanzea suggested 15 and mikankun suggested 5, so I'll reach the middle ground for 10 a day for now. This is in agreement with s0apgun's suggestion to keep going, so no breaks for now. I might sneak in a quick retreat around 1600, which is where I hear many people start to feel worn out, though...

dtcamero, I used to take a long time and build up my stories, but felt burned-out afterwards. I'll try to dedicate more time towards retaining the stories as I make them up/steal them from RevTK!

And yeah, I need to cut down on those weekend cards, sadly. I really liked the weekends because I could blow past a lesson without much effort. But when I looked back, I rarely took 70% of the kanji with me! And I'm still reeling from Lesson 23, which has been the hardest so far.

Thanks for the tips, everyone.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:You're being too obsessed with this... maybe you should focus on other areas in Japanese... or like do something fun in Japanese or something really fun/educational in Japanese like going through song lyrics.

I dunno, I've heard some people have gotten through RTK in less than a month!! I'm just trying to get past this stage so I can reap the benefits. And I do a ton of fun stuff in Japanese! I always have Japanese T.V. playing in the background, I'm constantly on the look out for cool J-Pop bands, I enjoy watching J-Dramas, I try to read video game sites in Japanese, I'm a big fan of J-RPGs and I love to annoy my friends by speaking to them in what little I know of Japanese! So, I have fun AND obsess about RTK at the same time... =o

20/40 cards a day is a lot. Go ahead and take a couple days only doing reviews, you'll be fine. You'd be fine if you just kept going too, it'd iron out in the end... except that it's bothering you and not burning out is important. If you will feel more satisfied with a higher retention rate, then go ahead and take a few days on reviews only and take the time to think carefully about your stories and primitives on those cards you do miss.

If having a high retention rate is important to you, then I agree with the poster who suggest you lower your add rate going forward. Reduce the time pressure and come up with good mnemonics, and maybe do some first-day imprinting - that is, quizzing yourself on paper on that day's cards at 2 mins / 7 mins / 45 minutes (like people do with wordlists and other such memorization techniques) - before you add it into your SRS.

This is not necessary and may not make the most sense in time spent in the long run, objectively speaking - *but* if you're motivating yourself by competing against yourself on your retention rate, then it's worthwhile because it will improve your retention rate and so improve your feeling of success.

[s0apgun]

http://ankisrs.net/docs/KeyTermsAndConce...ture_cards

I do also think its important to keep it fun. Completing your reviews everyday is a reward in itself. There is a general concensus of this board is to not spend too much time on RTK. Get it over with and start learning the actual language where the Kanji is used in context. Like I said this will help pick up the slack on improving your retention rate in RTK which you will still continue to review everyday alongside vocab.

For myself and many others there was a burnout sensation at around 1600 but as soon as I reached 1800 the rest flew by easily. I did 25 new cards a day for 3-4 months. Just do your reviews everyday and you'll be good to go, it does get easier after a while.

Something that happened to me the further along I got was that I would mix up similar keywords. I didn't want to get bogged down obsessing about English keywords, so I would add some kind of hint to help me out - this could be a Japanese word using the kanji, or just some short hint to keep me on the right track and help me recall the correct kanji.

Totally disagree that reading kanji in context will improve RTK rates. Reading kanji in context means you associate actual japanese vocabulary words and a number of suggested english translations for those words with the character. That completely obliterates the kanji->keyword link if you're reviewing in the not-recommended direction and blurs the keyword->kanji link if you're reviewing in the recommended direction (said blurring being the primary reason people either switch to Japanese keywords or stop doing RTK reviews a few months after completing RTK.)

Not to say I didn't read manga and song lyrics and Japanese subtitles for dramas while I was doing RTK... but I did so knowing the hazards and choosing fun over retention rate. (I did try to make -most- of my real Japanese input music and videos and very little text to minimize said blurring, but sometimes you want to read the lines you can't make out or just sit down with something to, well, read.)

This doesn't of course mean that your comprehension of the character weakens - it becomes stronger and more complex, and answering that one simple question 'what character is represented by this keyword?' becomes harder.

I'm right around where you're at, about 1050-ish. I did take about 5 days off only because my life got a little crazy suddenly from starting a new job and also getting my sleep schedule thrown off. I just kept up with reviews and added a couple kanji per day.

Things are back to normal and I feel a renewed sense of motivation! I think small breaks are fine, but it's probably best to make it a policy to at least add a few kanji per day, like even as low as 2 or 3. I say this from experience, because my last round with RTK a few years ago I decided to take a break because of other priorities, but that few days break kept getting longer and longer, and no new cards were added. I had gotten out of the habit and mindset of adding new cards, which I don't think anyone should ever do, because a few cards a day takes hardly any time at all, and will eventually add up over time, whereas 0 per day will still be zero a year later.

If you have the time to spend learning cards, then I think adding more is okay, but if you feel overwhelmed or are short on time, there's no downside to sticking with reviews only f or a week other than finishing RTK1 a week later. In the long run, as long as you don't burn yourself out, either way is fine. I'd take a break and avoid the stress, personally.

I had the same problem when i was around 1300(i had a break for over 2 weeks). If you're adding 20 cards per day(i add 20-30), a break shouldn't be a problem. The ammount of cards to review didn't exceed 350 after 2 weeks break as for me. You can review all these in one day and the next day you'll have 90%+ rate again. I think a break was a good idea, when i've passed 1100+ i also had much lower correct answers rate and i felt really bad about it. After the break it's fine again now. Don't worry about stats in anki and take it easy;d