Stansfield123 wrote:

Getting good rates on reviews is not the same as learning something. Of course you can get a good rate if every question is something you looked at several times in the past few days.

If you keep getting good rates on your reviews then yes, that is the same as learning something. I was obviously not only talking about the first reviews, but the later when there are weeks or months between each time the kanji show up.

Stansfield123 wrote:

However, if twin A spends 150 hours to study 2000 Kanji in six weeks, and twin B spends 120 hours to study the same Kanji in two weeks, then they both take a break of 6 months, you'll find that the difference in knowledge wont be 150/120. It won't even be 3/1. It will easily be 10/1, because the second twin will have forgotten almost everything he learned.

That example is completely ridiculous. Firstly there is no reason to assume twin B spent less time than twin A, you obviously have to spend more time every day to learn RTK faster. And obviously the person spending six weeks will know it better if both stop reviewing immediately after the process since he has been reviewing his kanji for a longer time, but including a 6 month break in the comparison is completely meaningless, of course you have to keep reviewing.

On the other hand I could say that if both twin A and twin B kept doing their reviews for six months, they would both know the kanji equally well after that time, with the difference that twin B could start studying actual Japanese 4 weeks earlier than twin A.

I think everyone should just be happy to work at their own pace.
Some will be slower. Others will be faster.
The important thing is that you're going at a pace that feels right.

You're about as familiar with the meaning of "evidence" as you are with the meaning  of "concrete".

Look up both. Then try to stop using "concrete" to mean "substantive" and "proof" to mean "evidence" . They're four different words with four very different meanings. Can't just be used interchangeably.

I'll use whatever words I like, you still have nothing. You have no proof. You have no evidence. You have nothing concrete. You have nothing substantive. All you have is your semantics, a clear sign of a bullshit argument if there ever was one.

Worth a go ....

(Again, I think this argument gets back to the fine grain of just what is meant by "intense concentration", and whether we are talking about working at the bleeding edges of novelty/innovation/critical care/new information/paradigm modification, or not. 

In my own experience, some 4 hour work sessions take more out of you than some back-to-back shifts do.  With experience and habituation, once-novel activity becomes routine and more akin to rote:  using a manual transmission is novel and difficult at first, but quickly becomes a routine and cerebellar task rather than a cerebral activity that requires eternal hypervigilance.  There's an auto-pilot component to most procedures and most jobs in experienced hands, which doesn't mean they don't attract *any* concentration, just a different order of attention once you've mastered the essence of the thing.  As the saying goes, "I could do it in my sleep, now."

It's not that people don't work/study for more than 4 hours a day; we all have and do; the point under debate is one of just how much of that requires the sort of very sustained and intense mental focus being discussed.)

Here's an interesting blog from a workforce that knows a thing or two about critical concentration:  http://airtrafficcontroller.blogspot.com.au/

ETA:  been reading about air-traffic control shifts, with most awards providing for no more than two hours on, then half-an-hour-off as a minimum.  This is an industry where erroneous assumptions about cognitive stamina are especially hazardous, and where you might therefore expect roster convention to reflect harsh realities and risks.  (On similar pragmatic lines, recent brain scan work seems to demonstrate that the human brain matures at about age 25, something that the insurance industry worked out quite some time before PET studies were available.)

Last edited by warrigal (2013 February 07, 12:39 am)

It'd be interesting to look at the error rate or some other measurable function versus time spent on the task.  I can't cite chapter and verse but there's evidence for example that people will get more avoidant with respect to making decisions if they're fatigued, hungry or otherwise less-than-fresh, defaulting to "easier" or status quo options and so on (and more like to make mistakes/crash and so on, as zgarbas notes). 

I'm not saying that no one can or should do a 40+ hour week :-), just that there are optimally productive conditions versus what most of us find ourselves actually doing.  What you would hope is that most of us in most jobs most of the time have enough reserve relative to the task and duration that this peak functioning isn't required 100% of the time.  When this equation is stressed, worker stress and occupational health and safety issues start to emerge.

Last edited by warrigal (2013 February 07, 3:28 am)

ryuudou wrote:

Betelgeuzah and AlgoRhythmic seem to simply be disagreeing with the information because it offends them

I think the issue was that this blog post looked at these figures and went "Hmm they have something in common, maybe this is what makes them successful, only thinking hard 4 hours a day." Sure anyone can say that, even a math professor, but at best its a correlation.

This is on par with someone looking at successful entrepreneurs and going "Hey, a lot of these guys went to the Top 5 universities in their country. So if I go to a top 5 I'LL be rich!!!" and failed to miss the extraneous variables that might also link a Top 5 and their success. Things like personality, work ethic, intelligence, and where they grew up.

EDIT: Unless you set up rigorous experiments and test the idea that "4 hours of intense thought leads to <whatever>" and have controls. You can't really say that limiting their amount of time was really what made them successful.

Last edited by vix86 (2013 February 07, 5:30 am)

Richard Hamming says the opposite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw He's talking about the best of the best kind of math/hard science researcher like those receive the Nobel Prize, and it even excludes the vast majority of the first class researchers because they're just exceptionally stellar and not the very top though.

I found a transcript here: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouA … earch.html

The relevant part is:

So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

I think pretty much every mathematician does this. I do too. It's the same as when your mind can't stop playing Tetris if you close your eyes or even sleep when you play it for too long during the day. Your brain keeps playing it.

Last edited by magamo (2013 February 07, 6:28 am)

4 hours a day sounds like my limit.

I don't have a good attention span.

ryuudou wrote:

Agreeing with Stansfield123 here.

Betelgeuzah and AlgoRhythmic seem to simply be disagreeing with the information because it offends them, but Stansfield123 has provided substantial support for his arguments and claims; even if it's not "factual" support it's still substantial to the point where you can't simply disregard the entire premise because it insults your internet ego on how fast you learned kanji.

Oh I'm sorry, I must have missed the conclusive evidence part where it states that studying kanji for more than 4 hours a day is impossible. No but seriously, I'm sure that 4 hours a day works fine for the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré and world class virtuoso violin players, but this really doesn't mean that much. You really can't compare brute forcing 2200 kanji into your head with the process of mastering an instrument or all the complexities of chess (which is the type of things mentioned in the interview), it's ridiculous. You can't just listen to an interview about something like this and then mindlessly apply it to every other type of work. I mean, grinding kanji was pretty boring sure, but really not that mentally straining. At least not compared to mastering chess.

Before you can draw any kind of conclusion you must define what "deep work" means, and how much of that is required to learn a kanji? And that is assuming that this guy is actually even correct, I don't even know who he is and there was no real evidence backing up his claims. But I'm sure you see the problems.

And as several other people in this thread pointed out, there are way too many individual factors in play as well, and you can't draw any conclusion about how much individual people doing RTK in 2-3 weeks really learned it or not. I sprinted through it myself and can talk from personal experience, and I've had no problems at all remembering them since my marathon finished.

@Betelgeuzah @AlgoRhythmic

(nameless child above this writing not included because his post isn't response worthy)

The same argument you're using can be applied to Heisig: Oh I'll go and find every kanji learner who learned to write them from memory in 3 months without Heisig, and then I'll go find every Heisig learner who did it in 12 months. Imaginative memory? Heisig is faster and more productive? Easier retention? Nonsense! Heisig is a farce!

"But as shown here people who take upon this method of learning the kanji are similarly successful and finish in similar time frames..."

Oh I'm sorry, I must have missed the conclusive evidence part where it states that studying kanji via Heisig is more efficient. Perhaps some people are more talented than others, an just happened to study via Heisig? Farce! Farce! Nonsense!
_______________________________________________________________

And yet you've both spent hundreds of hours reviewing and learning via this "farce" Heisig theory, despite so many outside variables that can be cited to effectively "water down" the anecdotal "Heisig - Kanji efficiency" correlation, despite no formal studies on the Heisig method by any reputable cognitive scientists; this inconsistency in your behavior is further proof that both of your actions here are nothing more than an emotional knee-jerk reactions because StanField123 has pointed out things you don't like. The evidence cited here is definitely not as strong as the collective good word for Heisig, but it's still a significant correlation as successful people don't "accidentally" have extremely specific time-management routines "just for the hell of it". Nobody has stated that you can't study at your hardest for 8 hours a day, but that the "Effort:Reasonable Benefit" ratio goes down effectively wasting time for miniscule gains; this is supported by plausible evidence via a correlation of successful people having productivity schedules that work around getting the most out of the these four hours — additionally there is a significant amount more of supporting information online for the things pointed out by the thread starter that rival the amount of "unfounded" support that Heisig has.

While it's fine not to believe it you also can't so easily fundamentally dismiss it just because you don't like it and it hurts your feelings. Not believing in something doesn't make it a "farce" as you two have either said or implied; "I don't believe in X" is not logically equivalent to "X is wrong". The difference between you two and the thread starter is that he has a good amount of support evidencing for his claims, and you don't. Please have some more respect for someone who is going out of his way to attempt to advance our collaborative learning efforts like the thread starter. This is not a playground.

(despite what some of the responses below would lead you to believe)

Betelgeuzah wrote:

I'll use whatever words I like, you still have nothing. You have no proof. You have no evidence. You have nothing concrete. You have nothing substantive. All you have is your semantics, a clear sign of a bullshit argument if there ever was one.

Javizy wrote:

And this is what the blog post and the figures Stansfield123 pulled out of his a$$ in his last post give us? This sort of junk belongs in the pub prefixed with 'I know a bunch of people who...'

Last edited by ryuudou (2013 February 07, 4:47 pm)

^Indeed. Please do so .

The point I got from the original post was simple and useful:  if you find that there is an upper limit on your personal productivity for the day (in terms of intellectual/creative endeavour, and presuming that one is operating on all cylinders and with all stops out) and if you have hit on a routine that works optimally for you while avoiding diminishing returns and pointless busywork, then it looks like you have some good company. 

Which is where the great value in this site is:  shared experience.  Take what you will from it.  Some posters are cautioning against allowing anecdata to become received wisdom without close examination and testing, and that's a fair point as well.  It all hinges on what is ultimately a pretty subjective experience of effort expended, but it doesn't mean that looking at empirical experience has no value.

Chang's book about piano practice is an interesting read (I'm no pianist, so musicians have at it):  http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book/en/preface.  The link is to the preface which addresses his thinking on the subject, and I think it's germane to our discussion in a kanji forum because it flows on from one of the examples cited in the original post and because the author seems to be making a careful distinction between busywork (which can consume hours with limited pay-off) and a more mindful, problem-orientated approach (sound familiar?)

Last edited by warrigal (2013 February 07, 4:34 pm)