I've been using the SRS here on the site and things have been going pretty well. I'm adding 10 to 20 kanji a day, but I'm getting close the the 500 mark(feels good to know that I'm almost a quarter of the way), but now I'm starting to forget some of the older ones. Anyways I started making flash cards of the hard ones that are giving me a lot of trouble. I don't make them for everyone card a fail, but the ones that I miss 2 or 3 times I make cards for. I review these cards everyday, instead of using the SRS. Is this a problem? Does it somehow mess up the SRS? I've only been doing this for a week and it seems to be working and helping the stories stick, for those really annoying kanji, but I don't want it to mess everything up. Any advice?
Well, I tried that first, but it didn't always seem to work well. Sometimes it works, but for the really hard ones it doesn't seem to have much effect. I try to memorize one and the 1st time it doesn't work. The 2nd time I try to make the story more clear and visualize it again. The next time I still fail it, and the 3rd or 4th time I remember it, however if I just look at the flash card more often, I don't have to fail it 3 or 4 times before I remember it. Also if I fail something 3 times and then the 4th time I remember it, I don't know if it's because the story is better or I just practiced it more.
captal
Member
From: San Jose
Registered: 2008-03-22
Posts: 677
Do what works for you. It's not always easy to take your SRS with you (though mobile phones help). So put your flash cards in your pocket and pull them out when you have time during the day. Sounds like a good way to more productively use your downtime.
I read some good advice on AJATT from Wan:
1. Take 10-20 kanji- some known, some problematic, and recall/create your mnemonics.
2. Take 5 minutes off
3. Create a list of keywords on another piece of paper
4. On an empty sheet, reproduce the kanjis in order
5. If a mistake is made, stop, and try another mnemonic or improve the one you have
6. Go through the list several times
7. Randomize the list and try again
I've done that a few times with the kanji that I keep forgetting, and it seems to help.
Thanks for the advice everyone. Just to clarify, I'm still using stories and imagination, but I'd doing reviews more often than if I only used the SRS. I can't do all the kanji this way because it would take to long, but the ones where the story doesn't stick well for some reason, I thought this might help. I guess I could come up with another story, but it seems like it would take more time to come up with a good story for some of these than to just practice them more. I'll use some of the advice people gave here and stick with what I'm doing now. If I find in a few weeks, this isn't working I'll just go back to only doing SRS.
3 times isn't that bad when it comes to learning kanji. Some kanji I failed probably ten times or more before just getting right once. The magic about an SRS program is it doesn't really matter. As long as you don't need to know the kanji tomorrow for an exam, this is a long term journey. The SRS guarantees that *eventually* you'll get the kanji. SRS is a very long term thing, my Mnemosyne deck is getting near a year old now, 3 revisions is nothing.
Here's how I envision RTK finishing up (I'm around 1300 frames currently). I'll finish the book and have accumulated a bunch of "hard" kanji that I haven't mastered yet, as well as easier kanji that just happen to be near the end of the book. The latter will get passed pretty fast, within a week. Over a month or two the harder kanji will gradually get passed. At THAT point, say a couple months after FINISHING the book, if some kanji are STILL undoable, THEN I'd learn them by rote just to clear them out of my "unlearned" number.
There's little reason to learn by rote *during* RTK, it'd just mean the difference between being 40% done vs. being 40.001% done.
