Wow quick reply!

I have been using supermemo for all of my Japanese inc heisig (and its good cos you can type you story in the answer which is useful if you forget it). But I have found that with all aspects of my Japanese (kanji and vocab) I need to use paper cards for the first 24hours+. So I can carry them about and test myself whenever I want to, but also to get over that first short term 'hump'. But I am wondering at what point I should be making sure I dump them and letting my card software/SRS software takeover or I would be just shooting myself in the foot?


hugs
amber

You wouldnt be shooting your self in the foot. Almost everyone goes thru this-cause so many of use study for short term benefits (tests the next day and such) rather than long term.

When I was going thru RTK the stride I finally hit was:

1-review failed cards first thing in the morning.
2-Study some new kanji, add them to the this site, and not review them AT ALL till tomorrow.

I think one is better served learning NEW kanji and getting thru the book, rather than wasting time over reviewing new kanji (short term memory).  Everyone is different, but it worked for me.

Remember, the idea is to learn the most in the shortest amount of time, which is what supermemo, anki, this site, etc are all about. Paper cards wont hurt, but if you could carry a mobile version SRS and study thru out the day you would probably be better served.

Hiya,
thanks for the replies.

I am not doing this for the short term. I think that my supermemo deck started in may 2005, thats if the workload page works how I think it does.

I am struggling with this problem of remembering things with Heisig and normal vocab.  I started getting it last year and I have not been able to work past it in either of the areas. I hoped by getting the Heisig technique working better it would knock onto my vocab problem. I was sick last month and now I am even forgetting some of my existing vocab/heisig stuff. I did ask about this problem this problem on yahoo and people said not to push it and take a break, but its been months. I am putting it down to the amount of vocab/kanji I am trying to retain and not getting to reuse it enough.

Any tips/help with this problem is appreciated as I am kinda getting a bit of the end of my tether with this problem now, and now I am starting to forget the longer term stuff I am actually moving backwards rather than just treading water.

(I am dyslexic which I think gives short term memory problems if this has any bearing)

hugs
amber

Hi Amber,

  I too used paper cards for the first 24 hours. I would review them several times during the day, then add the kanji to this site in the evening. I don't think it was because my stories were weak, but because the mechanical act of writing the kanji for the first time, then doing it again a few times over the course of the day, helped the shape stick for me. (I wrote them with a brush pen, which made it a little more fun and forced me to concentrate.) Once that first day passed, I set my paper cards aside and haven't looked at them since. I never wrote the story on my paper card.

  My long-term retention rate has been in the 75-80% range, even though I've been somewhat delinquent in reviewing after I finished Heisig. So even if your method isn't ideal from a strict Leitner schedule, if it works for you, that's great. If you're still worried you're hurting your long-term memory, you might experiment and try the method Fabrice described to see if it helps or hurts you later - it will take time to test how it affected your long-term memory, so you might try it with a group of cards and see if you end up failing those cards more often later.

  Good luck!

  Delina

AmberUK wrote:

p.s I am REALLY struggling with Heisig. I just feel in the last few weeks I have just started to forget more and more kanji. I think because I am struggling with menomics aspect of it. Does anyone know of any good books/web sites that concentrate on methods for using visualization? Thanks!

I brushed up on mnemonics from Derren Brown of all people.  He used to have a website teaching mnemonic techniques, but he's scrapped it into a book now, "Tricks of the Mind," and has taken down the old site where the text was available for free.

Here's his version of the "Roman Room-Method," which he uses to read cards and win at Blackjack;   http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=L1mweFSqACU

Just look around the net for pages that explain mnemonic techniques, you may find an explanation that suits you better than Heisigs.

A few things I have just noticed. I have a stack of the 914 cards I have 'learned' in supermemo and decided to have a go using the stack system on this web site because I wanted to focus more on Heisig as I have been struggling of late.

I added the cards in clumps of 50. This brought up a few problems. (1) I was remembering items compared to each other - this is x so y must be y cos I just had x. This is easier to do when doing smaller batches, and not something you want. I particularly noticed this when doing the group in lesson 16 (arrow* to 369 shallow). Its often something you might not be aware of until you study in a larger pack and also lead to (2) I am struggling to move over the items from short term to longer term memory.

Both of these problems I have not been aware of until I started to move the items into a larger/new deck and until I was ill and forced to take a break. Its not that I was not doing his system on purpose, I still think I am I just think I am struggling with it. I can also see why people give up because it can seem like your walking the walk and then you get to this point and suddenly find your fail rate goes sky high and that can be very demoralizing and also make you have to choose between adding new items and restudying the old.

I was wondering how long people spend each day on this?