Yeah it's dangerously easy to get enthusiastic and add a whole bunch of new cards, only to be greeted with tall orange stacks. It's kinda like a hangover only three days delayed

My advice is to tone down on adding new cards for a few days or so. RTK is all about going at your own pace, so feel free to be like the tortoise and take it easy.

And do focus on your orange stacks. Those are your biggest enemy?they'll get out of control if you don't take care of them now. 70 cards a day is a pain but manageable. Spread the reviews in small chunks throughout your day if you can.

I have been done for some time now, took a break, and then had a pretty hard time getting the 500+ orange cards back to green. Now its back to 30 reviews a day, (~1950 in the 4th+ stack). So 70 doesnt sound too bad. Even when "done" it will take quite some time to review. But it sure gets easier, because the stories will jump back at you once you reread them.
Something I noticed was kinda weird: When I finished for the first time, the reviews dropped to around 20 or so a day and then (more or less from one day to the next) the reviews got up to 60+ for a couple of days; did anyone else experience this?

Last edited by HerrPetersen (2008 April 22, 1:50 pm)

I derived a small rule of thumb from the scheduling chart in the "Learn More"-Section which works fine for me:
In the ideal case, if you're adding a constant amount of x cards a day (and if you're recall rate was 100% and there was no variance), after 54 days (3+7+14+30) the first cards are ready to be put into box 6. This means from that day on you have to review 4*x cards (accordingly after 114 days 5*x cards and so on). This of course becomes especially noticeable if your x is relatively high. In reality, there will be more cards to review due to failed cards and most of us don't have a constant x, it's really just a rough estimate, but I find it quite reassuring to know how much cards I will have to face approximately.

Zarxrax, I took a look at your member profile, it looks like you're planning to finish RTK1 in 3 months, am I right? This means an average of 23 cards a day, which I find quite perfect, by the way. If you maintain that speed, I would say your maximum amount of cards to review will be around 100 (maybe a few more), but isn't that manageable? Eventually the amount of expired cards a day will decrease again, and by the end of June you're able to write 2000+ Kanji!

So I'd say: Keep going and add as much cards as you can! The farther left the cards, the more important to review - if there are too many expired cards, you can skip the ones in the right boxes for a few days, that won't hurt.

Good luck!

Ok guys, thanks for the encouragement. It sounds like 100 reviews a day will be the norm pretty soon, so I guess I'll just have to deal with it, and forge on ahead.

I learned a hundred plus cards a day quite a few times, and reviews during the two months it took me to finish got close to two hundred.  I just learned cards 'til i was bored, then reviewed, then did something else, went back to learning them, etc.  Just do something else if you get sick of it.  No one is behind you with a big stick.

Except me, get to it!

I have 60~80 reviews a day at the moment, and I find it very possible to do them in a 15 minute session or so. (It could take longer, or less time... I don't watch the clock when I'm doing reviews). I was worried when I had over 40 reviews each day, but I don't think it's a problem at all (and I review 25 sentences or so in Anki each day, and 40~50 words in mnemosyne).

If it gets over 150 or so it could be really discouraging if you see that number... But other than that, try to just ignore the number and work your way through them

(Ps: I'm adding 18~22 new kanji a day, and have been doing so for the last week or 3... My daily reviews went up to about 80 a few days ago... and guess what, the number is going down! Because I guess I'm getting better at actually learning the kanji so I don't fail them as often in the beginning... I hope my reviews will stay around this number per day, it's really manageable this way. I'm a bit scared they will increase though. Ugh.)

Rivvie wrote:

It takes me way longer to review, I always write out the kanji when reviewing and immediately check the stories of those I fail.

Ditto! Always fun to rediscover older kanji I didn't review in several months (I have hundreds of long-expired flashcards ^_^ , doing ok though..) and update some stories or pick some great stories that were published since.

Fabrice (or others), here's a mathematical question that may help people determine their study time:

Success rate of review (I'd say 80%)
Number of cards added daily (I'd say 20 but let this one be the variable)
Time to add a new card (I'd say 3 minutes via reviewing story and first drawing)
Time to review each card  (I'd say 10 seconds)
Number of missed cards reviewed (Another variable, say about 40)
Time to review missed cards (I'd say 30 seconds)

Based on the above (assuming I'm not missing anything), I guess a graph could be made to let users have a rough idea of study/review times based on how much they're willing to add and review per day and how long before reviews start to peter off.

Eh, probably not too useful. But could help those that have only 2 hours a day (or less) of free time to know what they should be adding to keep progress going without a large backlog.