matsu
Member
From: tokyo
Registered: 2009-02-12
Posts: 17
A couple of month ago I “finished” RTK1. Due to some unavoidable issues I couldn’t continue up with my reviews for several months now. Consequently I now have about 1800 overdue cards.
I see the following options for me:
1. Restart RTK1 (just trying to pick up the reviews again doesn’t work, I forgot most of it already)
2. Ignore RTK1 for now and concentrate on KO2001.
Does anybody have some advice for me?
Many thanks,
Matsu
Tzadeck
Member
From: Kinki
Registered: 2009-02-21
Posts: 2484
Yeah, I have 714 expired kanji, and 433 study kanji. Haha. I'm virtually in the same boat, but I keep telling myself I'll just go through the pile.
Edit: Err, incidentally, despite that I'm going through Core6000, and am I'm not finding it bad at all. Also, I continue to be able to write a lot of the kanji for whatever reason.
I also live in Japan and have a Japanese girlfriend, so I get a lot of exposure to keep things fresh.
Last edited by Tzadeck (2009 December 21, 8:25 am)
My feeling is that monolingual keywords should come after monolingual dictionary. And, that you should only switch over a mature deck one card at a time as they come due. But, I'm not ready to offer that as advice since I haven't done it yet.
I have recovered neglected language decks (about 800 due), so I'll offer my advice on that:
Do not restart. Recover. This sort of thing happens to everyone eventually--knowing how to recover is a very useful skill. Especially if you plan to reach the 10,000s-of-cards level of SRS-happy polyglots.
Recovery is like restarting, except you only restart the facts you do not know. 1800 due means at least the other 200 are okay. Of those 1800 due, even if you can only pass 20%, that's another 360 you already know. 20% is a lowball estimate, you can probably pass 30 to 40% (or even higher)--and now we're talking about weeks to months worth of re-learning you've avoided.
If you're using Anki, set it to show failed cards last. Pick an amount of time to spend per day testing (15-20 works for me) and just do that. (Finishing the day with outstanding cards will feel like a personal failure at first. It sucks. Do it anyway.) At that rate it might be a week or two to get through the reviews, so don't wait more than a few seconds for the character to come to mind. Once you have only failed cards remaining use the browser to select all due and reset them.
From that point, you continue like you re-started--except with some luck you now only have 600-1200 to learn instead of 2042.
thurd
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2009-04-07
Posts: 756
Everything wildweathel said is true, recover >> restart. Why would you want to repeat cards that you do know 100% (like one, person, day, half etc.), rather than work on those that were the problem?
I recovered from 900+ deep hole and it's easy, you just need to be consistent. Good luck!
My personal opinion is that you should do KO2001. I am also in the same boat as you but my pile is only at 1000 ^_^.
I personally have started to sentence mine and am not finding it to be a problem at all. The fact of whether I am able to recall the Heisig keyword for each Kanji i am learning the Japanese for, makes no difference to the end result at the moment. I am learning the words at the same rate for Kanji I know the keyword off by heart for and for Kanji I have forgotten.
I don't really think its necessary to have a full 100% retention on all keywords, as long as you are vaguely familiar with them all, then that's all that matters at least in my experience.
Actually, I have found that sometimes remembering the keyword puts me off remembering the readings and the meaning of the actual word, since quite often the keyword is in no way related to the meaning of the end result.
E.g. 全然面白くない would be: whole, sort of thing, mask, white using Heisig keywords. So if i kept remembering these Heisig keywords along with the actual meaning (Never interesting or not interesting in the slightest) I would keep confusing myself.
This is just my personal experience with RTK, so don't take what I say as gospel. But in my experience it is much better to move on to mining/grammar straight after finishing RTK1.
Kewickviper wrote:
E.g. 全然面白くない would be: whole, sort of thing, mask, white using Heisig keywords. So if i kept remembering these Heisig keywords along with the actual meaning (Never interesting or not interesting in the slightest) I would keep confusing myself.
Strange, I've never had that problem. The keywords only come to mind when I dig for them or don't know a word. For example, I looked at that and my internal monologue said「ぜんぜんおもしろくない」。
Basically, what it comes down to is whether you feel retaining the keyword->kanji link is worth it. I think it is, otherwise I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of learning them in the first place. Once I'm comfortable with a monolingual dictionary, I'll switch over to Japanese keywords. Until then, I'm quite happy with the English keywords keeping those writing patterns alive.
Then again, I don't (currently) do dictation, so I can't count on Core2000 to fill that role.
