Just to be clear, I'm not asking how it works or asking when it's most useful etc.

Super-quick background: I'm on RTK1 and I'm at #1238 atm, I've been using a deck for the 6th edition and I have it formatted as a simple Front: Keyword | Back: Kanji with story below it.

THE DETAILS:

Was just reading the "Do you keep SRS a secret?" thread which linked to this lifehacker post: http://lifehacker.com/5903288/i-learned-...-heres-how

In it, he mentioned "you can typically learn 20-30 new words a day in about 30 minutes on your smartphone."

I'm wondering if I'm approaching Anki wrong, basically. I've been trying to add 50-80 a day and at this point it takes me ~2.5 hours to go through all my reviews (~250 a day lately, reviewing at a speed of ~2.36cards/min) and another ~4 hours to add in all my new cards (in other words, making stories for 50-80 Kanji)

And the number of reviews per day is just getting bigger and bigger. So my guess is that I'm just giving myself a hard time, hitting "hard" when I should've hit "good" (basically, if I have to think for more than 1 second I hit "hard"), or that I need to customize Anki to space my cards differently, or SOMETHING.

But I know that with the way I'm currently doing it, adding 20-30 words a day (taking out the "making up a story" part since they're just talking about vocab) would still take a lot more than 30 minutes after a few days of consistent addition.


THE QUESTION WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO IT (aka tl;dr):
How do you keep your reviews from stacking up? Related: What determines your "good" and "hard" buttons? (I've probably hit the Easy button like 10 times, ever, in my 5825 reviews so far...)

Also related question: Is it worth it to go through creating stories ahead of time for each Kanji?

Note: I'm asking for your personal experiences, not "how to"s unless you think there's something I'm missing that deserves a "how to"

It is indeed important to rate your answers accurately for the spacing to be optimum. To me "easy" is like an instantaneous recall, then "hard" and "normal" are decided according to what you feel is a hard and normal retrieval time (which you shoud start to feel after 1000+ kanji). If I remember correctly, you're supposed to hit the "normal" button more than the others for the algorithm to be nice. But you know, more than 50 kanji a day is a quick pace, and the reviews stack up (especially after a thousand). Usually, people start adding less at this point, until the review rush has gone by.

My personal experience is that if I add to many cards/items, I suffer from a large number of reviews. I can't fix my memory. I can't fix the way I mark my answers (if I don't know the answer it's "fail", if I need 15s for a recall it's "hard"). But I do can control number of new cards added.

My advice?

Stop adding new cards NOW... (and wait for the reviews to drop to a reasonable level).

I hit "hard" if the recall time is greater than 15 seconds in my RtK deck (I used 25 seconds as the threshold prior to completing RtK). I also hit "hard" if I could give the answer almost instantly but had serious doubts about it, for instance if I almost instantly recall two kanjis that I think might be the one I'm looking for (in this situation I usually hit "hard" if I give the incorrect of the two kanjis as well, but take careful note to not mix it up with the wrong one the next time).
I usually hit "easy" if the recall is instant, and I am completely sure it is the right answer. For me this most commonly happens with kanjis that also acts as primitives with the same keyword or very common kanjis.
For anything else I hit "good".

Uzeil Wrote:Also related question: Is it worth it to go through creating stories ahead of time for each Kanji?

I did this and never regretted it. I did in fact make my stories so much ahead of time that I had written (or copied) stories for all 2200 kanjis (6th edition) by the time I had actually learned just below 300 kanjis, and I think doing this helped me get through the book mentally. I'd say do it if you feel like it and otherwise don't. I don't think it ultimately affects the efficiency of the process too much in either direction at the end of the day.

Edit: Actually, if you feel like you are having too many reviews, it might be a good idea to make stories ahead of time and stop adding new cards (or at least add less) for a while now until the number of daily reviews has decreased to a manageable level again.

I went with 50 per day, 100 on weekends, so a similar pace to yours. I hit hard when a card took more than 5 seconds, basically when I had to wonder about it. Easy I sometimes used as well, for kanji that were incredibly easy (common primitives without a change in meaning for example). My review count piqued at, dunno, around 400, and thereafter remained relatively constant. I mostly copied stories from the site, made very few myself, and by the end for the majority of the kanji I just remembered a sequence of words describing the primitives. Hence, learning new symbols usually took me 30-60 minutes tops. My reviewing was also faster than yours, at ~90 minutes.

Can't keep reviews from stacking up, but they don't stack til infinity anyway. Even if my answer % was a bit lower than someone with 20 a day, in the end, what matters is how many you learn per day, not how good your correct/mature percentage looks - a 70% mature at 50 per day is give or take twice as good as 90% and 20 per day.

If you can, keep it up. Burning yourself out is worse than slowing down, and the only drawback to going fast is how frustrating it can become at a solid 100 per day.

Thank you for the responses

To summarize what I've taken from them:

1) Hitting "Hard" just because I didn't recall it near-instantly is likely part of the cause for my huge review stack
2) Review humps are normal when you're rushing through it like I've been
3) I should tone it down considerably until this review hump passes

I really like the idea of doing the stories alone for a while and just keeping them suspended for now. I want to have at least basic primitive understanding of all RTK1 Kanji before I start my combination I've concocted for myself (tae kim + A Dictionary Of Basic Japanese Grammar + graded readers + core2k + a particularly easy-but-amazing japanese-subbed anime), and honestly making the stories fulfills that "basic primitive understanding" I want, Anki just serves to push those understandings into my long term memory (whereas I've been using it as if I have to "pass" the "Anki test" before it "counts")

In other words, you've all cleared up some thoughts about Anki that should help me out


Another question though... (I feel so needy )
Whenever I see people referring to what an SRS/Anki has done for them, they always refer to it as having them constantly review something they've learned. But if you're consistently hitting "Good" for that thing, that wouldn't be "constant review," that'd be like... 3 times a MONTH, and then even less after that. That's much of what made me think I should be defaulting to "Hard" if my recall is ANYTHING less than instantaneous, and that "Easy" is basically for like "Why are you even asking me this."

So... yeah, kind of related to the question about "Do you customize the card spacing in Anki?" (if I worded it that clearly) because if not, I don't understand how people say they use it for the constant review before tests (in my experience, the majority of test material is covered within 4 days prior to the test, assuming a MWF class, which would be 1-2 reviews per item if you hit "Good" ...)

So... what gives? =S (Sorry my questions are so jumbled. If I could pin down exactly what I need to know, I would've just Google'd all the information down like usual )


EDIT:
@Fadeway: Ah, someone as masochistic as I've been! Question on your review time being faster: Were you writing each Kanji down? I've been writing each Kanji down before hitting the "Show Answer" and I have NO idea if that's worth all the extra time it takes.

Also, I find using the stories on this site to be entertaining and useful for forming a story, but it tends to take me 3-4 fails before I grasp a Kanji using their stories, where forming my own I tend to get it in 0-1, but then again it might take less time to fail 2-3 more times than it takes to come up with stories... especially considering the goal isn't to have stories that last an eternity, just stories to use until I don't need them anymore.... HMMMMMMMMM

There is a cram feature in Anki, that allows you to review all the cards, even if they aren't due, which is what I suspect they might have been referring to. It could also be that they refer to the fact they are constantly (i.e. at least once a day) reviewing the deck, but not the individual cards. I have about 30 reviews each day in my RtK deck four months after adding the last kanji, so I'm still reviewing in my RtK deck every single day even though, as you suspected, I'm by no means reviewing all the kanjis every other day (in fact, my average interval is 126 days by now according to Anki).
Unless you have a very specific and good reason I'd advise you to not tamper with the card spacing!

As for writing out all the kanjis, I did initially write down all the kanjis on paper (up to about kanji number 900), but later on began just writing them out in the air (my retention rate fell about 1,5% when I stopped writing them out on paper, but I still found writing them out in the air helped me do things much faster in the long run). Recently I've started writing them out on paper again as I don't have that many reviews anymore and feel that I can easily manage it. No matter what I would advise you to at least write them out in the air or on your palm as you could easily make small mistakes you don't catch if you just visualize it for a few seconds in your head (at least this happens to be the case for me).

As for the stories, I often just copied stories and changed them ever so slightly to make them feel personal, and this worked wonders for me as I, like you, would sometimes have troubles remembering other peoples stories if I didn't really work with them myself. What really did the trick might have been, that I actually read them pretty thoroughly to make these small tweaks instead of just skimming it and hoping I'd recall it next time (not saying this is what you do by any means).

Edit: Stupid typos. xD

In reverse order:

I think there is a consensus that stories you make yourself have a better response, but people argue about if you should spend the time to do so (about a minute to create a story). I personally did and never regretted it (for half the stories; the stories on this site are so good).

Heisig recommends to write every review, and I feel it really ingrains the kanji more. Fellow graduate classmen who followed normal Japanese classes (without Heisig) still struggle to produce some kanji, and keep forgetting the others (though they know the Japanese word/reading, and their recognition in context is good too). I don't see that ever happening to a RTKer; well it does happen to us too, but that's 10% of our kanji, but for them it's maybe a third (even maybe a half).

People "constant" reviews are vocab and sentence reviews: with 10k+ cards deck (each), you're likely to do a little everyday (plus you have to consider the initial adding period that spreads on months). Do that for 2-3 years, and it really pays off.

Ah, I guess I was just misinterpreting the whole "constant review" thing to mean constantly reviewing the same card (where they probably meant constantly reviewing in general, like you guys are suggesting).

And I'm not sure how long it takes me to make stories for individual Kanji. I know that to make stories for ~80 Kanji, around 4 hours will pass, but that's just because I hate doing it so I constantly space out (I've tried to "timebox" this but it just doesn't work. Some Kanji have ~4 primitives with little to no connection to the keyword, and my mind is just like "Mmmm nah." and Heisig tends to put 4-6 of those monsters in a row, sometimes more). And my stories are like... I don't know, I'm probably being too intricate with them.

Oddly enough, the stories I love the most from the community are the hardest to remember by far. I'm sure it's related to my state of mind (Basically, if the story is particularly funny or sexual, I'm not going to be in a particularly "giddy" or "horny" mood, respectively, while reviewing Kanji characters in a flashcard program, hahah. And apparently, memory recall has a lot to do with being in the same state of mind you were in when the memory was planted, according to two professors I've had.)


Anyway, thanks for all the input! Any more thoughts/input you have for a fairly new SRSer that are fairly difficult to find would be greatly appreciated! (I've read the majority of the main table of contents on AJATT, but I've found the majority of AJATT to be loose ideas that I can't really use...)