I got to around 1000 and moved to Anki, where I now include the stories in my new cards. I plan on whiting them out when I finish, as well. I'm glad that others are doing this. I think it is a way to get into real Japanese more quickly. RTK is, after all, only a stepping stone.

P.S. Also, Khatz supports this practice, but doesn't recommend whiting them out. Personally, I think whiting them out would just speed up the process of associating the kanji with the keyword, but if you're doing real Japanese, you'd be associating them at an accelerated rate anyway, right?

Last edited by sethg (2009 May 09, 11:24 pm)

sethg wrote:

I got to around 1000 and moved to Anki, where I now include the stories in my new cards. I plan on whiting them out when I finish, as well. I'm glad that others are doing this. I think it is a way to get into real Japanese more quickly. RTK is, after all, only a stepping stone.

P.S. Also, Khatz supports this practice, but doesn't recommend whiting them out. Personally, I think whiting them out would just speed up the process of associating the kanji with the keyword, but if you're doing real Japanese, you'd be associating them at an accelerated rate anyway, right?

The Khatz recommendation is what prompted me to start including stories. The argument that broke out about this earlier in the thread prompted me to really think about the process and, upon reflection, I determined that for someone doing 100/day it is a useful practice. Our argument also convinced me, however, to white out the stories once I'm done. Khatz doesn't suggest this, but I agree the other forum members who pointed out that it might adversely effect your ability to recall from just keyword.

That's my take on the issue, but each to his own obviously.

EDIT: @Mafried
Yeah sure you'll spend as much time post-Rtk cementing your knowledge, regardless of whether you went through at 100/day or not. But for varying reasons some of us *have* chosen to do 100/day. Personally, I had already started a Japanese course at my university before stumbling upon AJATT and then RtK. I wanted to do RtK because I saw the benefits, but I couldn't afford to let the process take many months while I neglected other aspects of my Japanese. So I decided to get it done as quickly as I could. For somebody who makes this kind of decision, it is important not to drown in reviews. Including the stories helps with this.

Last edited by blackmacros (2009 May 09, 11:34 pm)

Like klaoth, a lot of the time I found that it wasn't the primitive that would jog my memory but just the first word of my story. Something as simple as the words "in the..." that started off my story.

Anyway on the subject of reviews. They are absolutely killing me >.<. I was very, very naughty for the last ~400 cards and added them at a pace of 100/day but didn't review them. I knew I shouldn't have but I did it anyway goddamnit. So I've still got around ~250 new cards that I have yet to review. I'm knocking that  back, but only at the pace of around 25 a day. That's because I'm still hovering around 180-200 reviews per day. Ack.

On a completely unrelated note, I downloaded Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in japanese and am working my way through it. It's a lot of fun but since there is no furigana I find myself reading sentences like: "saber で grass を cut ろう”. I guess this will cease to become a problem as I gradually learn the readings through my other studies (eg. I just ordered Ko2001 yesterday)?

Orenji wrote:

Once I've read this thread I couldn't help but wonder : is 100 kanji a day really that effective?

I've mastered 900 kanji with all their on and kun readings in 1 year and a half and all I can say is that taking it easy and slowly through continuous revisions is the only and best (in my opinion) way for long-term mastering.

Say, if you stopped this 100kanji/day for ~3 weeks, how many would you actually remember?

I've set a goal of 100 per month, which is pretty feasible.

Getting too excited over your achievement might get you even more frustrated if you end up realizing that you've messed up with most of what you took for granted.

I'm not trying to discourage you, I'm just trying to get you to pursue long-term memory of the Kanji which, after all, is all you'll need.

Long term memory of the Kanji comes naturally through use of the SRS over time. Since you're taking it slowly obviously the ones you have learned so far are going to be really cemented in your long term memory already. This is because you've been exposed to them for a year and a half.

As has been pointed out, no matter how long it takes to add all the kanji from rtK (whether you do it in 4 weeks or 3 years) we're all going to be end up reviewing for the same amount of time in the end (forever, presuming you keep reviewing upon finishing).

Of course if I stopped reviewing for ~3 weeks I'd forget a lot of Kanji. Thats because I've only been reviewing them for a few weeks. Once I've been reviewing the kanji for a year and a half in the SRS I'm sure they will stick in my memory too.

I don't think 100/day is the best way to do it for everyone. It might not have even been the best way for me. But it *is* possible, which is part of what this thread was about I think. Plus it means I can get into learning actual Japanese faster which I think is a plus.

Hello, I'm doing 100 per day for 10 days... only story making no SRS.
I'm doing 25 kanji blocks through the morning.
After those 10 days I'll be at 1851, and then go back to 25 per day (~1h).
I'll finish by the 28th of this month.
The 29th I'll do at least 1h of SRS for longer than 3 months every morning before bkfast.

Can we just enter all 3007 on Monday and call ourselves done? I suppose reviews would get in the way of congratulating ourselves too much, though.

Haha well in my defence I did in the order of ~1200 at the pace of 100/day as well as keeping pace with reviews. And I'm paying the price now (by forgetting) the ~400 I didn't review straightaway. So yes, reviews are definitely definitely fundamental!

Tobberoth wrote:

dewick wrote:

Can we just enter all 3007 on Monday and call ourselves done? I suppose reviews would get in the way of congratulating ourselves too much, though.

Depends on what you mean by done. Personally, as I started doing RtK seriously, I considered it a life-time investment. I will never stop reviewing, more or less. When I was talking about "finishing" and "getting done", it was just to enter all the kanji into the system so I wouldn't have to "waste time" with the book, just the reviews. For me, the actual process can't ever be completed, just more and more stabilized.

Yeh I totally agree with that.

Plus, with the ~400 I didn't review straight away I feel like there is a big difference between knowing a Kanji and having forgotten it vs having no clue what it is. So even though I've still got 250 new kanji still to review, when I encounter these ones in the wild I think "ah! I know that! its just a matter of recalling it". Seeing a completely unfamiliar kanji is much more demoralising.

Still, a more patient person than I would have diligently reviewed all their newly added kanji. And they would probably have been better off for it in terms of retention. Ah well, I'll manage to get them all reviewed in the end.

Where is KanjiMood?  He should be finished by now, but even if he's not I'm very interested to hear more of his story.

blackmacros, Personally I consider a kanji learned only once it reaches mature status (reviewed with an interval of more than one month).  Part of why I and others have been so critical is that you've neglected reviews in favor of adding cards to your new pile, and adopted methods (such as stories on your cards) based on how well that allowed you to keep up your breakneck speed, rather than how well they benefited your long-term memory and Japanese ability, which I would argue should be your only metric.

100/day and still learn is entirely possible as KanjiMood demonstrated.  He had a method by which he split the 100 into chunks of 25 throughout the day and kept up with reviews.  His method was sound and would lead to long-term retention.  That's why I'm curious to see where he is at now.

KanjiMood you out there?

mafried wrote:

Where is KanjiMood?  He should be finished by now, but even if he's not I'm very interested to hear more of his story.

blackmacros, Personally I consider a kanji learned only once it reaches mature status (reviewed with an interval of more than one month).  Part of why I and others have been so critical is that you've neglected reviews in favor of adding cards to your new pile, and adopted methods (such as stories on your cards) based on how well that allowed you to keep up your breakneck speed, rather than how well they benefited your long-term memory and Japanese ability, which I would argue should be your only metric.

100/day and still learn is entirely possible as KanjiMood demonstrated.  He had a method by which he split the 100 into chunks of 25 throughout the day and kept up with reviews.  His method was sound and would lead to long-term retention.  That's why I'm curious to see where he is at now.

KanjiMood you out there?

I neglected reviews in favor of adding new cards to my pile only in the last couple of days. I've already admitted I really shouldn't have done that, but couldn't help myself. Reading through the "I Just finished RtK thread" you see that a lot of people did the very same thing; just not at the pace of 100/day. It's a bit unfair to then view that as representative of my method and label it unsustainable. I spent around 12 days and 1200 cards succesfully at a pace of 100.day while dealing with reviews. Impatience just got the better of me in the end

I used the exact same method as KanjiMood to add 100/day but added stores to my cards. Having finished RtK I've removed those stories. My retention rates are still very high (~85% according to my latest Anki session). Besides which, in a years time it is going to make no difference to my long term memory whether I used stories in the beginning or took 40 or 50 days to finish instead of 38. In the long term scale of things, what happens in the short term gets smoothed out by the SRS process. But it certainly matters right *now* how quickly and efficiently I was able to get through RtK. I had a number of pressing real life reasons that I had to do it so quickly.

PS. The only reason I didn't work through and review all my ~400 newly added cards in a few sittings, letting them filter into my review pile, was because I was heading into a week with 4 assignments due in. Another reason I wanted to finish RtK by that weekend. Regrettably that came at the cost of reviewing those !400 newly added cards.

EDIT:

mafried wrote:

100/day and still learn is entirely possible as KanjiMood demonstrated

I hope you're not trying to imply here that, by the mere virtue of adding stories to my cards I have rendered myself unable to recall the ~1800 cards I have been reviewing?

The people who are against adding stores to your cards (and it is a valid viewpoint, don't get me wrong. That's why I have removed my stories now) seem to have this conception that the moment you add a story you become 100% dependant on it, unable to produce the kanji from keyword and aren't learning anything. I've been reviewing without stories for about a week now and my recall rates for mature cards are about 86% and young cards is 85%. Clearly including the stories was not as damaging as you seem to believe.

The major difference in recall comes on the initial review. With a story I was getting around 90-95% recall (marking the card as hard because I looked at the story). Without the story I got around 70%-75% initial recall. After the first review, recall rates seemed to equalise between including/not including the story.

Last edited by blackmacros (2009 May 10, 5:52 pm)

andresito wrote:

@ blackmacros,

Don't worry my friend,
Some other folks don't get it; we learn different, we take risks, we double our failure rate, we take good critisims, we're aggressive!

This folks spending their time here telling other's "your way of doing things isn;t going to work" probably are way smarter than us, and probably they already "finished" RTK1~10
and that's fine, I'm learning my way with my failure and success.

keep up the good work blackmacros!

Exactly. Thank you. So. Much.

mafried wrote:

If I came off as saying "your method of doing things will not work" then I apologize.  That was never my intention.  My writing style often comes off as very opinionated (even when I am not), and if that caused this thread to seem less like debate and more like bickering, then I have failed.  blackmacro's method of including stories is a valid way to learn the kanji.  My belief was and for the moment still is that it is a less efficient means to do so and that one would progress more rapidly in the long run if stories were not included on the question side of the card at any point in the study process.  However this is not set-in-stone gospel, and I do maintain an open mind on the issue.

blackmacros, please continue to post about your progress, including hard stats like review counts and fail rates.  I find these tremendously useful, and I promise you that I'm paying attention and if the numbers stay good I will have to rethink my position.

That's ok, no hard feelings. If it couldn't handle a degree of scrutiny then the method wouldn't be very good, would it?

I can take a print screen of my Anki deck statistics/graphs now (without stories, but with ~250 kanji unreviewed) and then a prtscreen week or so after I've reviewed all kanji if you would like. Unfortunately I have no images of my statistics from during the 100/day process when I used stories. My first time recall rates hovered around 91% I believe, and the recall rate for all cards was something like 94.1%. For cards where I needed the story I would pass it, but mark it as hard.

After dropping stories, first time recall has hovered between 70-75% recall rate. For young cards it has been around 80-85% and recall for mature cards is exactly 86.9% as of my writing.

Anyway when I get home I'll upload some pictures for you all.

EDIT: So I was thinking about this issue while doing my reviews and I realised that I basically had two types of stories on my cards. Some cards start off straightaway by mentioning the primitives. On some cards the primitives came nearer to the end of the story (I usually bold my primitives btw so they are kind of hard not to see). Since my Anki window is quite small I usually have to scroll down to see the primitives in this 2nd case. I actually find I'm recalling these 2nd types of cards better, now that I've removed stories altogether. I guess the conclusion we can draw from that is, if I can see the primitives immediately my mind is doing less work and therefore less likely to remember. This is what you guys have been saying all along, of course.

But yes, I would still recommend stories on cards (if you have decided to do 100 a day) for all the reasons I've stated already. It makes the process more manageable, preventing you from drowning in reviews. And as long as you remove the stories after finishing then you will still develop your long term memory of the cards (I hope! I shall deliver my Anki statistics in a few weeks and you can be the judge of this).

Last edited by blackmacros (2009 May 10, 11:31 pm)