I've heard this is something you "can't stop," or it will mess up everything (I think that's for the SRS rather than the Heiseg method, but since I'm using both..) Well, I didn't exactly stop, but due to extenuating circumstances it was all I could do just to keep up with daily reviews.

Today is the first day in over a month that I added any new cards to my deck. I'm at 1200 now, using 6th Edition if that matters. While it may take some time to get back into the rhythm, I'm hoping I don't need to start from scratch.

A month is nothing, don't worry! You kept with the reviews, that's the important part. In a way you probably cemented your base knowledge a lot (your passing rate went up, right?), while spacing your reviews, so apart from the time loss (but some people take years to do RTK1 you know?), no harm done. ^^

Getting way behind on SRS reviews makes it hard to recover; but you said you kept up with the reviews, so there's no problem.

Agreed, no problems seen here. Come back to worry when you have gone a month without reviews.

I'm sure there is as far a lot of people committing this unescapable mistake and maybe doing it more than once (as it was for me) but doing it once is good to learn something ...Well I mean it's better to do it now than when completing the RTK1/3 for exemple !
Never stop reviewing from now on !
Everyday review everything before starting any new cards this became a golden rule to me after getting through much mistakes each time.
Keep on!

The OP didnt stop reviewing i dont think.

By just reviewing, you're keeping a "Holding Pattern" of sorts where you might not getting any better in the language, but you're not forgetting what you learned.

This is actually recommend for people that may have learned a lot of new material for a bit of time (examples can be found in the 100 kanji/day thread) where they're getting 200 plus reviews a day. By just doing reviews and not adding new material, they slowly reduce their study load without compromising what they learned.

Now, stopping reviews altogether can have serious consequences. Many things will be forgotten which means you have to reproduce effort. That's like having a brain dump after the finals in college.

The only problem with stopping really is just that you aren't making progress. Your learning efficiency for kanji and language goes up as you learn new material. So by not continuing to learn new material you're kind of capping out at your current efficiency. I found that later kanji helped cement my knowledge of earlier ones, and the process got easier as I went along.

My reviews take a lot less time than they did a year ago, and I'm sure they'll take even less time next year. This same thing happened with my sentence cards, vocab cards, and cards for kanji kentei. A year ago I never would have thought I'd be able to handle 500 reviews a day, but my efficiency has shot up so much that I can do it like it ain't no thang.

Only about 125 of those reviews are Heisig, though. The rest are Kanji Kentei cards where about 30% require me to write something. However, my average time per card is the same between my Kanji Kentei deck and my Heisig deck. I can do a card every 9 seconds on average.

I also think the case could be made for learning SOMETHING new every day even if it is really small. Instead of stopping, just do 1 or 2 new kanji per day.

I stopped for a whole year lol. You don't really need to start from scratch. Just go through your orange columns of due cards, your stories will come back real fast and you might be surprised at how many you remember. when I went through it I got 3/4 of them so I really only had to "catch up/review" with a lot less than I had anticipated.

either way, you do it a month later, a year later, it's gotta be done so just do it and don't think about it too much.

I can't emphasize this enough, but it really doesn't matter if you don't review things for a day or a week or whatever. People here kind of have an SRS hang-up but the questions you should be asking yourself are "Am I getting better at Japanese?" "Is this working?" "Is this enjoyable?" If the answers to these questions is yes, it doesn't really matter that you haven't SRSed in a month or that you have 10,000 cards piled up or whatever.

nadiatims Wrote:I can't emphasize this enough, but it really doesn't matter if you don't review things for a day or a week or whatever. People here kind of have an SRS hang-up but the questions you should be asking yourself are "Am I getting better at Japanese?" "Is this working?" "Is this enjoyable?" If the answers to these questions is yes, it doesn't really matter that you haven't SRSed in a month or that you have 10,000 cards piled up or whatever.

A couple months ago I would have vehemently disagreed, but by now I have changed my views and I am in agreement with this statement. I now believe that the "due cards" in an SRS are just a suggested amount. You can do more. You can do less.

This doesn't really backup the argument, but Anki2 limits reviews to 100 per day by default. Just something to think about.

erlog Wrote:Only about 125 of those reviews are Heisig, though. The rest are Kanji Kentei cards where about 30% require me to write something. However, my average time per card is the same between my Kanji Kentei deck and my Heisig deck. I can do a card every 9 seconds on average.

Hmm, my process for every single review is to write each and every kanji (Or attempt to.) When you say you only write about a third of them, are you referring to something altogether different? (Or maybe the question should be, what are you writing and what are you not writing.)

(I'm studying a Kanji Kentei book as well)

The Kanji Kentei is an exam that tests you on

-writing kanji
-reading kanji
-identifying radicals of kanji
-knowing the correct stroke order of kanji
-4-kanji jukugo
-identifying what kind of compound a certain compound is (e.g., in 昼食,　昼 describes　食, but in　入館,　入 is the verb that you're doing to the　館.)
-There's more stuff you have to know in the higher levels.

So not all of the questions require writing kanji.

I stopped several times including a break of a month because I felt demotivated, and getting back up on the horse was more difficult than it should have been. If you're ever really demotivated, make an "effort" to add just one card at least for the day. That way it might not be difficult to suddenly get back at it and do the rest of the day's work.

OzarM Wrote:

erlog Wrote:Only about 125 of those reviews are Heisig, though. The rest are Kanji Kentei cards where about 30% require me to write something. However, my average time per card is the same between my Kanji Kentei deck and my Heisig deck. I can do a card every 9 seconds on average.

Hmm, my process for every single review is to write each and every kanji (Or attempt to.) When you say you only write about a third of them, are you referring to something altogether different? (Or maybe the question should be, what are you writing and what are you not writing.)

Fillanzea already answered this part of the way, but I'll talk about my process. For my Heisig cards, of which there's about 125-150 per day, I have a special notebook that I write them in neatly. I write a kanji for every card for my Heisig deck. The goal here is to keep limbered up with the kanji.

The other thing, Kanji Kentei, is testing different things. Some cards I only have to be able to read. Some cards ask me about kanji radicals. Some cards are like Heisig where I have to write a single kanji, and other cards are more like a spelling test where I'm writing entire kanji words. So not every card is asking me to write something. I just use scratch paper for this, and I write the kanji very quickly in a very flowy/cursivy style.

Here's a link to information about the test:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei

@erlog and Fillanzea, what level are you aiming for? I looked at some books for 10級, and it was pretty easy. Wikipedia says that 10級 to 4級 are just for elementary school students. So does that mean that you guys are aiming at 3級 and up?

Actually, 5級 covers all the kanji that have been learned by the end of elementary school.

I don't know if I have any intention of taking the test, but I'm using the kanji kentei as a framework for more generally getting my kanji knowledge to a higher level. Recently I comfortably passed a practice test for 5級, and I'm currently studying at the 4級 level.

Now, I've admitted many times that writing kanji is my weakest point. But it's not just a kanji test; it's a vocabulary test. You have to be able to see a katakana word in the context of a sentence, identify the word they're looking for, and write it out in kanji. 10級 is easy, 7級 and 8級 are pretty easy... but even 5級 is kind of tough.

partner55083777 Wrote:@erlog and Fillanzea, what level are you aiming for? I looked at some books for 10級, and it was pretty easy. Wikipedia says that 10級 to 4級 are just for elementary school students. So does that mean that you guys are aiming at 3級 and up?

I actually took 準2級, 3級, and 4級 this past weekend. I definitely didn't pass 準2級 or 3級, but it didn't feel that crazy. I think I was on the edge of passing 4級, and if I didn't pass it this time then I definitely will pass in October. I'm pretty sure I can be on track to pass all those, and then have my first try at failing proper 2級 in October.

We should probably make a kanji kentei thread, but so few foreigners take it that I haven't really found anyone online even that I can talk to about it.

10級 is kind of easy, but the test is kind of deceptive. Even if you can read at a very high level, producing and remembering which words go with which kanji is a completely different skill. The kanji order the Japanese school system uses also tends to be slightly different from the order foreigners use to study the kanji so even at the easy levels there will be a lot of things you don't know.

That's why I've worked my way up to my current level using KanKen DS3. I don't want there to be any holes in my kanji knowledge.

erlog Wrote:We should probably make a kanji kentei thread, but so few foreigners take it that I haven't really found anyone online even that I can talk to about it.

You mean like this one? :-)

EratiK Wrote:but some people take years to do RTK1 you know?

OMG really? That boosts my confidence a lot ^^.

kaamaru Wrote:

EratiK Wrote:but some people take years to do RTK1 you know?

OMG really? That boosts my confidence a lot ^^.

And some don't finish RTK at all, yet it doesn't stop them from being fluent and proficient in Japanese.