I forced them down but in retrospect it was a terrible idea, my review load was so high that I pretty much did nothing in Japanese other than Anki and ended up burning out for 3~ months. I ended up quitting my RTK reviews somewhere down the line but I'm doing fine either way, kanji really aren't as terrifying as I thought when I was just starting out.

I did them all in one go but, my review pile just kept getting bigger, and with school on the way I barely had time to review, so in the end it took me a couple of months, and a week on wich I did 100 a day... (Definetely don't do that)
My advice? Go slower about it, and if you can handle it, then by all means do all the ones you want.

Its better not to rush it, as you will get huge spikes of reviews even months later. As for how, over time it gets easier and easier to take in more words at a go.

bertoni wrote:

RandomQuotes wrote:

When I did it, about an of review hour in the morning and afternoon, and at  night about an hour and a half of learning new ones.

That's about what I did.  I didn't force the learning rate, though.  I started at less than 50 kanji per day, and sped up as I got better than learning them.  Did the 500 or so in 5 days, but it took me 6 weeks or maybe a bit less to get through the deck.

This. Be wary of rushing... adding 2,000 cards in less than a month is pretty possible, but it's the many months after that, where you constantly have 2,000 cards demanding reviews beating down on your daily life, that'll get you...

That said, I experimented and found my concentration for new stories waned after about 20 cards. So I would learn 20 cards, take a break (do some reviews or some fun immersion or something) and then do another set of 20. Sometimes I'd do the sets and breaks all at my desk at once, but usually it was like 20 new cards in the morning, school, 20 new cards after school, and then 20 again before dinner. You can rack up your numbers like that without wearing down too much or getting bored.

But reviews!
Do you have time to review heavily for 2-3 months after you finishing cramming on kanji?
Be wary!

All this talking about SM model/workload vs. new cards per day prompted me to script the learning process with SuperMemo algorithm (Anki uses SM-2, in case you didn't know).

Get the script below, run the simulation and see for yourself how adding 50 cards a day is going to be like. The format of the output is:
day(day-number) ->  cards-to-review total-number-of-cards-in-learning
[code-start]
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import random

DAYS = 2 * 356 # Period under consideration in days
NIPD = 50 # New Items Per Day
SAAD = 2200 / NIPD # Stop Adding After Day
FI = 0.2 # Forgetting Index
INTERVALS = [1, 3, 7, 16, 40, 98, 245, 611, 1526]

class Item:
    pass

items = []

def review_items():
    items_due = []
    for item in items:
        item.due -= 1
        if item.due == 0:
            items_due.append(item)

    print len(items_due), len(items)
   
    due_fail_nb = len(items_due) * FI
    due_cnt = 0
    while True:
        ln = len(items_due)
        if ln == 0:
            break
           
        i = random.randint(0, ln - 1)
        item = items_due[i]
       
        # pass
        if due_cnt > due_fail_nb:
            item.interval_idx += 1
        # fail
        else:
            item.interval_idx = 0
        item.due = INTERVALS[item.interval_idx]
       
        due_cnt += 1
        items_due.remove(item)

def add_items(n):
    for i in range(0, n):
        item = Item()
        item.id = len(items)
        item.interval_idx = 0
        item.due = INTERVALS[item.interval_idx]
        items.append(item)

for day in range(0, DAYS):
    print 'day(' + str(day) + ') -> ',
    review_items()
    if day < SAAD:
        add_items(NIPD)
[code-end]

EDIT:
Removed [code]...[/code] markup to workaround broken displaying of code...

Last edited by Inny Jan (October 09, 9:59 pm)

Vempele wrote:

EDIT: I found the new record holder, shalazin. Unfortunately, it looks like that user has also long left the forum.

I believe uisukii was even faster, but alas, he too has left the forum.

You're right. The relevant thread can be found here. Uisukii claims to have finished RTK1 in exactly 14 days.

Also, has anyone noticed that, for some reason, the "author" search function does not work for only some of the banned/retired forum users. For example, the author search function turns up nothing when I search for posts by "uisukii" or "bodhisamaya". But I get results when I search "nest0r" or "IceCream". Does anyone know why?