vosmiura wrote:

To me it seems that it's better to review soon, rather than "learn" hundreds of kanji before reviewing.  Can we even call those "learned" without any test of recall?

The 1st review should take a short amount of time relative to making up / trying to 1st learn the story.  And, by starting reviews fairly early (like 1 day after 1st learning), you'll increase your retention significantly and get a good return on the time invested in learning.

Yeah I totally agree. I knew I shouldn't have gone through the last 4 days without reviewing but I did it anyway (naughty! *slap slap* ) I did review diligently throughout the *rest* of my process though, just not the last 4 days.

Anyway my 1st reviews, even though they are abysmal in terms of recall (for those ~400 I didn't review straightaway) go much quicker than actually learning them the first time. Its more a matter of refreshing my memory of the story and primitives, then a cursory fail, and then I recall them from then on in. Takes about 20-30 seconds. So in that sense it is at least 1 step up from not having learned them at all, because it takes (took) me around 1:30 to learn 1 kanji.

Last edited by blackmacros (2009 May 11, 12:21 am)

harhol wrote:

I've been trying to get through 100 per day for the past few days. I do 25-30 in each session and always make an effort to review them all before I go to bed. My success rate for the second review (i.e. three or four days later) hovers around 70%. Most of the time I remember the story and forget how to draw the primitives, which can be annoying, but I guess it's preferable to the other way round. I don't mind having a failure rate of 30% because not only am I learning ~70 per day but there are also some great stories on RevTK which I only discover through failing.

Seems 25 is the magic number for most of us. Splitting things up into a few lots of 25 makes things a lot easier.

I never really had any problems remembering primitives, due to the fact I've got a pretty good memory for rote-memorisation. And primitives are basically rote memorisation cos they appear so much. Maybe you could try making up stories to help remember the primitives? Don't know if that would help or not, but it may be worth a shot.

On a somehwat related note though, I went through a few stages in the beginning:

1) Placing primitives in the wrong place.
2) Remembering where to place primitives by writing it into my story (eg italicising the word "above"- remember, I had the stories on my cards)
3) Incorporating the element positioning in a visual way (the mental image I create places them in appropriate primitive ordering).
4) Just *knowing* where the primitives go. I still position them appropriately in my image of course, but after a while you start to get a feel for where primitives go.

Anyway thats not really what you talked about, but I thought it might be of interest to someone somewhere

I found my ideal pace  for blocks of focused time,
blocks of about 15 characters produce my best stories.

still no SRS..
SRS who needs it..!?
Michael Jackson (aka the Taskmaster) didn't need a SRS to remember all those kids!

Last edited by andresito (2009 May 13, 11:41 am)

andresito wrote:

I found my ideal pace  for blocks of focused time,
blocks of about 15 characters produce my best stories.

still no SRS..
SRS who needs it..!?
Michael Jackson (aka the Taskmaster) didn't need a SRS to remember all those kids!

You're just cheating yourself. While you'll progress through the book faster and it'll be less dull, you probably won't remember a large portion of the book by the time you're done it, let alone a few months later.

I wonder whether Heisig used flashcards to review when he learnt the kanji? I have a feeling he probably didn't, and he certainly didn't have access to the SRS like we do today. So I would guess doing RtK without the SRS is possible.

Secondly, SRS reviews per day usually take me at least and hour and often closer to two or 3 hours because I was adding 100/day. Andresito is also doing 100/day so we're lookng at the same amount of time he would have to spend. If I understand him right he's planning to instead use those extra hours to focus on creating some really kickass stories.

I haven't done it his way and I don't know if I would, but I must admit I'm interested in how he goes. Maybe his results will show us that putting all your effort into creating really memorable stories can result in an excellent recall rate even without reviews. Who knows?

But even if he finds the process didn't really work out so well it won't really matter in the long run. He said he is going to start SRS once he is finished RtK, so he will eventually remember the kanji. This means he doesn't have to worry too much about "failing", and can concentrate on trying to make his method work the best he can make it.

Anyway, good luck Andresito and let us know ohow you do :-)

Jarvik7 wrote:

blackmacros wrote:

I wonder whether Heisig used flashcards to review when he learnt the kanji? I have a feeling he probably didn't, and he certainly didn't have access to the SRS like we do today. So I would guess doing RtK without the SRS is possible.

I sold my copies of RTK a few months ago so I can't check, but if I recall correctly Heisig explicitly talks about developing the system on flashcards in the forward, and later encourages their use.

No matter how kickass you make your stories, you're not going to remember 3000+ of them without a bit of review.

You're right, he does talk about flashcards (I can't find the section at the moment though) but I got the impression that it was something he thought may be useful for us as students. It didn't necessarily indicate that he himself used flashcards. Thats the impression I got anyway. Plus I found this quote in the book which makes me think that he probably didn't do a lot of reviewing, but focused more on making good images.

"Many characters, perhaps the majority of them, can be so remembered on
a first encounter, provided sufficient time is taken to fix the image. Others will
need to be reviewed by focusing on the association of key-word and primitive
elements." -Heisig

Anyway I just thought I would throw an alternate point of view out there to try and get some discussion going.

Thanks for that harhol. I couldn't find that section earlier, when I looked. Anyway yeah, I've got no real basis for this (apart from the quote I offered above which seems to tentatively support my conclusion) but I just get the impression that Heisig didn't really use flaschards himself. He definitely advises that we use them though.

Personally the way I went through RtK I only fleshed out the very very basics of my story when I first learned the kanji. I left it to the SRS to sort out the ones that weren't good enough and dealt with them when I failed them. So for me, it definitely would not have worked if I didn't review at all. I just didn't construct good enough stories the first time around.

But I am interested in seeing how andresito goes, and I wish him luck.

When Heisig introduces flash-cards, in Chapter 5, he says "Writing done with fountain pens and felt-tip pens tends to smear with the sweat that comes from holding them in your hands for a long time".

That would suggest that he had quite a bit of experience using them himself.

sethg wrote:

Can I just throw in here that anyone who did the 100 a day is a real beast. I'm just doing 40 every day to finish by May 30th and it's pretty intense. So... congrats on your beastliness! Really.

Hehe, I don't need a bigger head- honestly Seriously though it is more a matter of available time than anything else. If you have between 4-6 hours of spare time a day then you should be able to do 100/day. Not everyone has that kind of free time. I just took advantage of my slack schedule at University, is all.

Jarvik7 wrote:

sethg wrote:

Can I just throw in here that anyone who did the 100 a day is a real beast. I'm just doing 40 every day to finish by May 30th and it's pretty intense. So... congrats on your beastliness! Really.

It's not hard if you halfass the stories. No one needs kick-ass stories, just good-enough stories. I was doing well over 100/day for the 2nd half of the book, WITH SRS reviews and a social life. Travelling a lot during that time actually made it easier. There are very few distractions to study when you are standing in a lineup or waiting for/riding a train.

Thats exactly it. 100/day is possible if you quit fussing over trying to perfect your story. Its far quicker and far easier to make the first image that pops into your mind, whether its good or not, and move on. The SRS will tell you which ones are not good enough, when you fail them, and forces you to improve your story until you can pass the card.

plumage wrote:

Well, I just polished off RtK 1 by sprinting the last 100 in a day. I hadn't done more than 20 in a day. It took almost all day, and that was without "perfecting" each story, just trying to think of a half-way decent one. NO WAY I could've done that longer than a weekend, since it took way more hours than I have between work and sleep on a weekday. If I spent all my waking non-work hours I could probably have done 60 or so max on a workday (+reviews/studies for that day), but my wife wouldn't appreciate my ignoring her.

Still, I only did it after seeing this thread for awhile. So, cheers!

It does require a big investment of your time thats for sure. Rather than going all the way, 100/day everyday, maybe people who have to work etc could try doing 100/day on the weekends or even just one day of the weekend. Imagine how much quicker you would finish.

Congrats, plumage!

A good thing to keep in mind for everybody reading who is not doing 100 a day.

Wally wrote:

blackmacros wrote:

would finish.

"Finish" what?  Input?  Sure.  But that is hardly "finishing" RTK1.

There's also a good feeling to be had sitting pretty at 1,350ish with over 1,200 of those in box 4+.  (as long as one eventually finishes...)

@blackmacros: True, but then again since I only have like 30-40 reviews a day I have lots more time to do my sentences and other fun stuff.  (that is assuming you are continuing your reviews and not halting them).  It's also fun to start substituting Japanese words for the keywords once they get up to half-a-year on the return date (and resetting their progress).

Last edited by welldone101 (2009 May 19, 12:24 am)