If anyone's noticed, I've been posting a bit more on the forums after not doing much for almost 18 months. That corresponded to not reviewing too much on top of not doing a lot in Japanese over all. I do have a legitimate job as one reason for putting off reviewing. In addition, I work in a secure area where you're allowed zero personal electronic devices so my environment is entirely in English. In addition, I procrastinated a lot too. Let's just say I caught up on a lot of English shows and some novels.

Still, I've been in the mood to start reviewing again. Problem though I had over 2500 vocab, 2100 kanji, 1500 sentences and 600 grammar cards due. These were the due cards even after deleting specialty cards (movie method onyomi, verb cloze delete, kanzen master). I gave it a go with reviewing longest due, getting some wrong while getting them right the next day with a 3 month review for option 1 (yeah, the original span were like 2 years). Thought it would work, but now I'm not so sure. Something tells me I'll miss many of these when they pop up again in two to three months.

So, I made the call yesterday to start from scratch using the order I recommend for beginners. So, that means doing only keyword to kanji for RTK, but using the rtk ultralite, lite then normal groupings. Using Kore with English context clozed to Kanji/pronunciation for vocabulary. Grammar I'll just redo Tae Kim unless someone came up with a better group. In all three, I'll be very liberal with the Easy button for stuff I'm comfortable with. Finally, I'll still mix in subs2srs with new dramas.

The bitch of it is, my reading is strong but strong as a passive skill. My listening has gone down hill and speaking is getting more and more amateurish. It's common knowledge about language, but use it or lose it.

I might update from time to time with how I'm doing. Personally, I see getting the basic and lower intermediate stuff out of the way fast, leaving me with the odd forgotten material in addition newer intermediate stuff near the time I basically quite studying last time.

Well as somebody that has been using a lot of your stuff it is nice to see you around.

I just want to chip in with what lardycake said.

I'm a beginner, having only started RTK at the start of February but close to finishing it now, and just starting to mix in some "proper" study.

As a word of encouragement, should you need it, your old posts have been very helpful in guiding me down the right path, and in pointing out the directions to follow next.

A big thank you!

@Nukemarine: Glad to see you back. I know what you mean about speaking. I got back from Japan in late December, and since then, my speaking has gone downhill. (It's not nearly as bad as it was before I went to Japan, but it's not as good as it was when I left.) Now I'm making a conscious effort to find people to talk to, both locally and on the net, just to make sure I can still speak at a decent level.

Generally it's bad for me to take any kind of rest from studying. It's the whole 1 step forward and 2 steps back syndrome, followed by a rush to get back to wherever it was I was at before I slacked off. I just need to build studying into my daily routine, like making breakfast or something like that. I'm already listening to Dig while I cook, so that's something. I just need to pull out the Anki deck again. I've ignored it for the last 2 weeks. :\

I honestly think starting over is a lot more work than it's worth. But if you feel the need, you might as well. It might be a good refresher.

If you did want to go through your old stacked up cards, Anki has four options for display order: Largest interval, smallest interval, order due, and random. I'd break your review into four sessions a day, one using each order. Just to give you some easy and some difficult cards to mix things up with.

Anyway, just a few minutes working on this huge stack of cards a day can go a long way. As long as your review count slowly goes down each day by even just a few cards, your stack will eventually hit zero.

Nukemarine Wrote:Thought it would work, but now I'm not so sure. Something tells me I'll miss many of these when they pop up again in two to three months.

I think if you keep your exposure to the language up in this two or three months, you shouldn't have any problems with this. It feels like an obvious thing to point out, but if some of your cards are sourced from TV shows you sub2srs-ed, go rewatch these shows.

Nukemarine Wrote:In addition, I work in a secure area where you're allowed zero personal electronic devices so my environment is entirely in English.

I'll just point out that light novels are rather cheap. You know, that paper stuff. XD But yeah, no electronic dictionary could be an issue.

Anyway, good luck, glad to see your working at studying again.

You guys put way too much into this anki thing.

I have been through this, and just did the reviews without resetting the deck. I think that's more efficient. My guess is that you still remember a fair amount.

bertoni Wrote:I have been through this, and just did the reviews without resetting the deck. I think that's more efficient. My guess is that you still remember a fair amount.

This is a good idea for vocab and grammar, but starting kanji from scratch isn't a bad idea. Heiseg's ordering is genius, and you'll probably notice that your memory of kanji later in the Heiseg ordering will suddenly return once you review the kanji that come up early in Heiseg's order. If you skip around, your memory won't have full access to the primitives and compounds upon which the later kanji are built.

I didn't have that experience. Getting the primitives back was easy, probably because they're drilled so much. I guess it depends on how much you remember, in any case.

I second the light-novel recommendation.
I also recommend trying some 多読. If you're already a decent reader it isn't hard to find something appropriate to your level. It will stretch your vocab and kanji recognition and if you're doing it right you don't need a dictionary. You can always mark really interesting words for later.

I've gone through the pause and restart cycle a number of times. I've never found it too detrimental, but reviewing things you already know sort of kills you're motivation when you're starting up again. During my last lull I managed to keep reading a little each week. Even at that low rate what I learned/remembered seemed to balance out what I was forgetting.

Anyway, as always it will be interesting seeing what you develop!

Reading material won't be a problem. There's manga, light novels and the TV drama scripts. Problem with reading is it's only a random, passive review.

There's a couple of good reasons why I reset the kanji and vocab deck. First, the vocab deck was always done kana to kanji. That was partial production on the kanji side, but a lot was recognition since you had the sentence there for reference. Second, a couple of years back, I switched Kanji and Vocab to straight recognition. Normally, had I kept up the immersion and subs2srs in addition to reviewing, this would not have been a problem. The big thing though is not reviewing for over a year.

Now, the vocab are straight production. I need to know both the word's pronunciation and writing. Kanji I'll just keep marking easy for correct until the four month review length is reached. In both cases, I'm catching kanji and words that were difficult production wise despite being simple recognition.

Nuke I'm in the same boat. I peaked a little over a year ago after passing N2 and living in Japan (again) from Jan-May 2011. Then I moved to Singapore and back to the US.

I've tried to keep it up by playing PS3 games and speaking with my wife, but spousal discussions don't tend to stray into the realm of the unknown. We did make friends with a Japanese couple in our apartment building, and I had coffee in only Japanese for a couple hours last week. It was like flexing muscles I hadn't used in a while. All of my skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) have gotten worse, but I'm not lost in conversations- I just tend to forget a lot of words I used to know. I understand almost all the spoken grammar, but I often times struggle to use anything more complicated than basic/intermediate grammar.

I've been trying to figure out what to do- hopefully my wife and I can make more Japanese friends, because I'm definitely not sharp enough to get back to reading books. I'll continue to play my PS3 games as well (Tales of Vesperia currently), mostly for the passive input.

I also haven't stayed at all active on these forums- my last login was a month and a half ago