I'd say about 20 too.  That's how much I did, and turned out well (high retention, low number of reviews to maintain).

If you have time to do as many as 80 that's fine but you'll probably end up with hundreds of failed cards at the end, plus a couple of hundred reviews to do per day long after finishing the book.

The secret to completing Heisig is finding a VERY comfortable pace
that you can deal with. 80 kanji per day is crazy for most people.
People spend their whole lives and never even get close to memorizing
2000 kanji. So basically you have between now and your death to finish Heisig.

Btw, If you do 6 kanji a day for the whole year, you can finish Heisig.
So 20 if more than enough.

Last edited by chamcham (2008 March 04, 2:28 pm)

Thing is, as I said before, I got the luxury to be able to completely devote myself to studying right now. No other tasks at hand + I'm going to Japan for three months starting mid May.

Right now I'm not feeling I'm at my limit, but I don't know if I will break it by doing too much in a short period of time and regretting it later on. I'm thrilled of course to complete it as early as possible, but I don't want to rush now and forget too much later on. I thought about trying to speed up a bit for now. Maybe 60 per day. But only as long as it seems managable - i.e. my review rate doesn't drop.

As things become more difficult I may be forced to slow down again, but I don't want to waste time. I still hope I can finish the book in April. It would be a major advantage, cause I guess I can manage reviewing daily while being in Japan, but I don't know what will happen in the first few weeks when I'm there.

I'd like to hear what people think about it, who actually did finish the book in a really short period of time (after all Heisig still claims for himself you can do it in 6 weeks or so) and whether or not they were struggling with extreme difficulties either later on during their studies (forgetting too much at some point sooner or later) or after finishing the whole book and still a few weeks down the road. I understand that the slower you move on, the easier it will be, but right now I want to push my limits.

Instead of aiming for a certain amount of kanji per day, I focus on spending a certain amount of time on RTK per day - which is usually a couple of hours. On the days I add new cards, I learn anywhere between 30-60.

At first I tried to make myself learn a certain number of kanji per day, but found this frustrating because some days I would be too busy or tired to meet my goal, and other days would be the exact opposite.

Focussing on time spent learning rather than amount learned per day has worked well for me so far (I'm at 950 after a month, and happy with my progress).

If you have nothing else to do and you are at the beginning you should go hard at first.  The first five hundred are quite easy and show up a lot in the later ones, so you will get a lot of revision of them.  Until chapter two heisig gives you his stories, so it's much quicker to get through them.

If you are going to Japan in three months, then you can finish in three months, it's a good pace for someone with a lot of time.  Just make sure to clear your failed stack every time you sit down to study more kanji.  The failed stack should be the first thing you always do in a session.

I did it in two months, because I wasn't working and had almost all day everyday.  If this is the case with you, then I see no reason to go as fast as you can.  Kanji is not meant to be easy, so don't expect it to be, it's hard.  If you can do six hours review a day then you can do a hundred a day.  Split the learning into a session in the morning and a session at night, or even three sessions.  The first thousand felt quite easy, so speed through them and take a little  more time on the second thousand.

If you start to fail a lot of cards then you know that speed is too much and you can relax a bit.  Just don't stop, don't take a break, you will just have to learn them all again.  Do you want to read manga right now, or in six months?

Last edited by phauna (2008 March 04, 5:24 pm)

rich_f wrote:

A few things that may help: someone posted a list of primitives in RTK1 that are actually kanji from RTK3. See if you can find that and make use of it. It may help with some characters.

It's on the sticky thread of this same forum.

EDIT: beaten to it.

rich_f wrote:

I'm also taking notes on "Confusing Keywords" as mentioned in that thread. If I get a kanji wrong because I get a keyword confused, I make a note of it, too.

In some of those cases, I found the problem was in the chosen keyword. Using a more accurate one (when available) solves a lot of problem. Additional keywords also work for kanji with many meanings.

Last edited by DrJones (2008 March 04, 6:10 pm)

I would say go as fast as you can, especially at the start. If you don't feel like you at your limit the push it up some more. As you get further along in the book it takes longer to review, but as long as you review you won't forget them. later on your will easily be able to notice the right amount when your fails are low and the pace is comfortable. its all well and good setting daily targets. but make sure you are flexible some lessons are easier than others. 1000-1200 I just flew through then 1200-1400 felt like a nightmare in comparison. when you feel you can go fast do it, when you need to go slow it will be obvious.

I aimed for 30 a day, at first I did more but then it became much harder to keep up with all the revisions and still add 30 kanji. I managed to finish the book with an average of 26.9 kanji/day.

Yeah, whenever I took shortcuts, I got burned. Even if you find a kanji you don't "like," (and there are plenty that annoy me), take the extra time to find a way to get it into your head.

I did the 2,042 index card method, which really helped me, since I broke the pile into manageable chunks of 20-60 kanji per pile. I'd break a pile at either a chapter end, or at a character group end.

Then I'd drill a pile (inorder) 1-2 times a day, going from keyword to writing out the kanji, and I'd do that until I could get 90% of the pile. I'd do this with 2-3 piles at a time, and whenever a pile hit 90%, I'd add it to the RvTK website.

I found this helps keep my retention rate around 90% or so overall. Even so, there are patches that will slow me down, and some days I won't add any new kanji to the site. But then there are other days I'll either add 20, or sometimes 80. It totally varies, depending on how well I'm learning, but I figure it still averages out to 20-30 a day. It's kind of frustrating to be close to finishing, but still have about 300 to go. And they seem to keep getting harder.

Oh, and the best advice is to personify really frequent radicals. Fingers became "Fingers the Thief" for me. Person became "Mr.T," because I grew up when he was popular (and he sticks in my memory.) Thread is another good one to personify, and Pinnacle became the evil golf resort, "The Pinnacle," bent on world domination through golf. Also, the left-hand radical for heart can work well if you personify it, too. (It's that 3-stroke thing.) The only rule of RTK is "If it works for you, use it. If it doesn't, toss it."

Actually, I already have stories on the cards. I made them like Heisig suggests in Chapter 5. I don't drill a stack 800 times before I put it in, either. It usually only takes a couple of days. I'll drill it, then set it aside for 12-20 hours, then drill it again, depending on how busy I am. I'm usually doing this with 2-3 diffferent stacks at a time. Some days things stick better than others, so I don't stick an arbitrary "it must go into RvTK by X number of days" rule on them, either. As I put a new stack (or two) into RvTK, I go to my box, grab another stack or two and put them on the bottom of whatever it is I'm reviewing now. It's not really that hard to do.

Granted, the cards are more work initally, but I can carry them with me if I feel like it, and I can use them for RTK2 if I decide to go that route. And of course, I have a nice physical representation of my progress-- finished cards go into another box, to save until I decide on RTK2.

I don't have to put a whole lot of stress on my memory to get them down, either. I just use spaced repetitions to get them in in the first place, then let RvTK take over as my long-term SRS. The main reason I use RvTK long-term is because I don't want to have a repeat of what happened to me when my PDA with all of my Twinkle data died in Japan, and I prefer RvTK to Anki for RTK.

I use personifiers selectively (for maybe 10 radicals total) because they work for me. I don't use them for everything, but when faced with 50+ kanji with "person" over and over again, my eyes glazed over, and one story started to sound like another. I found it worked faster and easier to just use Mr.T as a crutch. (It's not like Mr.T isn't a person, either.)

Heisig himself said "The abstract notion of person so often has a relation to the meaning of kanji that confusion readily sets in. So many of the previous stories have included people in them that simply to use person for a primitive meaning would be risky." He then said to just use a memorable person of your own.

Cylons worked to differentiate the vertical eye from the horizontal one. I know it's still an eye, because the old Cylons in the original BG from the 1970s had the red LED eyes that went back and forth. So it's a strong image that leads me back to 'eye' anyway. It's not like I'm going to forget that one. What it does do is give me a strong cue as to how to write the 'eye' we're talking about, and it gives me ready-made characters.

Spider-man for thread works, too. The thought of 60-70 stories about "thread" didn't do much to inspire my creativity. 60-70 stories about Spider-man, who shoots thread and fights criminals, work just fine. And if you want to, you can even use that basic view of Spider-man and just make it all weird for mnemonic effect.

I'm not saying to do it with all of the radicals. It's just a tool people can use if they're not "feeling it" creativity-wise. I didn't see the point in trying to make stories work with some of these radicals until blood starts gushing out of my forehead.

I also agree with you that personified primitives should bear at least a tangential relationship to the actual one, but you shouldn't be afraid to use a tool simply because it feels like a cheat. RTK itself is one big linguistic cheat, if you want to look at it that way. I'm just trying to find new ways to make my old brain work.

EDIT: Come to think of it, Heisig does the same thing with RICE FIELD and BRAIN. Brains have no relationship to rice fields whatsoever, but they're more fun to use in stories than rice fields... with some exceptions of course.

Last edited by rich_f (2008 March 05, 12:33 pm)

Jarvik7, did you finish RTK and then face difficulties because of the arbitrary choices of primitives, or did you just decide that they were inappropriate from the get go?

I followed the primitives in the book, and used things like Mr. T and Spiderman and plenty of other things that helped to memorize the writings.  Now granted I've only been studying post RTK for 2 months but I have been working intensively on kanji readings, and I've yet to regret the use of any particular arbitrary primitive in RTK for even one second.

Last edited by vosmiura (2008 March 05, 4:16 pm)

DrJones wrote:

That is intriguing. I'm facing difficulties right now because many arbitrary primitives 'break the mood' of my kanji study and the resulting stories feel forced and wrong, which I don't enjoy too much (I started looking at etymology sites to solve this problem). But I'm curious about how does this affect you after you have learned them. Maybe the problem is in learning non-t?y? kanji?

I know you mentioned before that there were some primitives you didn't like.  I can't help but think that if you never looked at the etymology sites in the first place you would have been more content and had fewer of these difficulties in the first place .

But anyway, I think you're in the last quarter of the book right?  It starts to become arbitrary primitive overload for several chapters, so it does get harder to make stories and remember what's what.

Though there are many arbitrary primitives (especially towards the end of the book) they did make it possible for many of us to finish the kanji in the book.  There are not many (or perhaps any) other kanji books that can be done from 1 through to 2000+ and actually work.

I'll see how it goes long term, but in two months after RTK I focused on readings and vocab and I'm pretty content.  I don't have all that much to complain about what RTK taught; for the time invested.  I'd be interested to see comments from others who finished RTK and how their study progressed after that.

Jarvik7 mentioned it may be a problem if you aim for Kanken 1.  Umm... most Japanese people can't even do Kanken 1 so I think that's not something that bothers me greatly.  I'll be content if I can pass Kanken 2 within a couple of years.  Post RTK1 I think it's largely a matter of vocab, not of kanji themselves.

Last edited by vosmiura (2008 March 05, 4:52 pm)