Just take your time! There's nothing wrong with doing 20-30/day - I did that as well. And now (3 months and 3 weeks later) I'm through. :-)
Everybody has to find his/her own pace.

thanks for the reply.
i actually am using Anki, but just for the review process, not the remembering process. its hard to remember something on the screen and as awesome as Heisig's method is, his stories are hard for me to remember. :p
But i'll have to stop my method i guess, as expected it's impossible for me to keep 2000+ flashcards at bay - it takes up so much space and i'm not even halfway done!

sarahrepin wrote:

i actually am using Anki, but just for the review process, not the remembering process.

You can use a second deck with small timing intervals for learning, try the learn mode plugin, or the cram feature if you feel you need to seperate the two processes.

So far I seem to be doing fairly well with doing it all in one deck though.  I quickly go through about 50-100 (depending on if it's a workday) kanji on this site while referencing Heisig's book for caveats and Katsuo's spreadsheet of unnamed primitives to optimize a bit, then afterwards I update my anki deck against my revtk stories with the handy export to csv feature on the site and a small python script, unsuspend the new kanji I added, and finally start reviewing them.  At worst, the initial review is delayed until the next day, in which case my first time answer correct% gets pretty bad, but the only downside to bad correct% stats is more reviews, which you'd do anyway with the seperate learning phase.

That said, a seperate learning phase _might_ be worth it in some cases, but I think you'll find the extra overhead really isn't neccessary for RtK if you're leveraging stories correctly.

sarahrepin wrote:

its hard to remember something on the screen and as awesome as Heisig's method is, his stories are hard for me to remember.

The top stories on this site are usually better, give those a try.

A_Broken_Pencil wrote:

When you come to a new Kanji, don't just jump onto Heisig's story. Instead, look at the radicals and see what <i>your</i> id says. That way it's tailor-made to fit your mind, kind of.

Also look at the top suggestion(s) on this site.  They're often perfectly fine when taken verbatim, and otherwise a great starting point to base/refine your own story with.

I do an average of 3/4 kanji a day, and I learn something like 20/30 new kanji only on saturday or sunday.

I won't learn the prize of the quickest folk who has finished RTK, but it's not the (or my) goal.

If I was learning faster, my expired cards would explode and I would probably give up because i've loads of work next to that T.T.

Better do it slowly than never finish.

Last edited by breakies (2010 November 20, 5:22 am)

steelmole wrote:

I've tried to do 50 or 100 in a day.  It just killed me.  It wasn't the way for me. 

Guess how many I do a day now?  8.  That's it.  Setting the bar so low got rid of all the pressure and the stress.  I never beat myself up about my kanji.

Such introspection may be difficult, but was there anything in particular about it that was stressful?  I ask because I was just the opposite; 5-10/day felt like a chore because it wasn't enough to really "get into it" and I eventually stalled, whereas when I restarted at 50/100 per weekday/weekend day, I couldn't help myself but raise that to 80/160+ by the end.

steelmole wrote:

Find your own pace.  Hell, if you do 6 a day you'll finish in under a year (and if you're like me, you'll enjoy the whole process a lot more).

Always good advice, but given the purpose of the thread, it's worth reiterating that it's also okay if "your own pace" is 100+/day and that figure is by no means exaggerated if you're willing to put the time in.

overture2112 wrote:

steelmole wrote:

I've tried to do 50 or 100 in a day.  It just killed me.  It wasn't the way for me. 

Guess how many I do a day now?  8.  That's it.  Setting the bar so low got rid of all the pressure and the stress.  I never beat myself up about my kanji.

Such introspection may be difficult, but was there anything in particular about it that was stressful?  I ask because I was just the opposite; 5-10/day felt like a chore because it wasn't enough to really "get into it" and I eventually stalled, whereas when I restarted at 50/100 per weekday/weekend day, I couldn't help myself but raise that to 80/160+ by the end.

In reality there are some days where I learn more than 8, but I probably stick to 8 for more than half.  I think the real difference is the feelings of success.  With 8 a day I can always do all the new ones and all the reviews, no matter how busy the day has been.  When I was aiming for 50 I would learn a lot, but I would end lots of days feeling like a failure for not keeping up to my own high expectations.

meeatcookies wrote:

I think that 20-30 is the best if you have time, doing more than that may have a bad effect later. It's not a "who's is faster" contest, ive tried learning more than 30, but i dont really think it's more effective. Thanks to adding "only" 20 to 30 new kanji each day i can recognize ~95% of them by both: looking at the kanji or reading the keyword. There wont be a need to go back and relearn already known kanji this way. Im doing Pimsleur/Japanesepod101 at the same time, just leaving the vocabulary using kanji for later.

That's the way to use the srs system. Slow but enough to challenge you without going overburn. I've set my number for 30 a day and decreased my count addition to 30-40 vocab cards a day (new). The reason why most people get away from the srs is because of the huge number of reps per day. The key is to do a small number and let it build to huge numbers in 2 years time.

I often did 200 a day, English on and kun readings but not stroke order.

eubankp wrote:

I have a hard time believing anyone does 100 a day, or more, for more than one day. It's just insane. I did 70 once and I had the entire day free to study. I usually averaged 30 a day. That was a good rate for me. If I was really cookin' I'd do 40 or 50. But, I finished yesterday

That's how it's done, slow but enough to get some good work done. I only add 60 cards a day now (30 for sentence deck and 30 for vocabulary deck).

I did rtk1 in 10 days during holidays......production and recognition decks (trying to recognise in a split second) for each and yeah.....it was a full time job. 10 hours a day 1000+ reviews a day. It took about another month of testing on anki to be confident enough to say that I've truly learnt them.

Its amazing how streamlined this website makes this process..... just choose your favourite story from a list and put it into the premade anki deck.

I'm doing rtk3 100 kanji a week which is alot easier

Last edited by midonnay (2012 March 08, 10:43 pm)

truando wrote:

10 days? madness! congrats on winning...

I'm doing it for the second time right now and I do 100 a day, also production and recognition. it's OK except on days when I'm tired.

And people thought I was crazy for doing 3007 kanji in 3 months...

Seems to me like a lot of people decide that certain numbers are too big without even trying them. Kinda like the people who think that 3 kana a day is a sane pace. They're capable of far far more but somehow they've convinced themselves that they're badass for even attempting to learn the kana at all. At each step, they pat themselves on the back about how *hard* it is.

Others have a weird fixation on pass rates. Like, "i only do 3 kanji a day but my pass rate is 98%. All you people learning 100 a day have crap pass rates like 60%". Totally ignoring that 60% of 100 is a much bigger number than 98% of 3. How many kanji you can recall while you're doing RTK (assuming you do RTK before learning japanese) is *irrelevant*. It is a useless skill by itself. The only effect failing cards has is on the number of reviews. It doesn't matter if your recall rate is 20% or 100% 2 weeks after learning the kanji. What matters is that, 6+ months later when you're learning japanese proper, you know the kanji. In SRS terminology, the important metric is the rate at which you get new kanji into the mature category. If racing through them and failing tonnes of them gets more mature cards per week, win.

Comparing absolute numbers is a little silly though. People have wildly different amounts of free time. A better metric is kanji per hour. But even that is pretty pointless. Just do as many as you can and try to finish as soon as you can. Avoid burning out and try to consistently make progress. And even more to the point, remember that the goal is to learn japanese. Avoid getting bogged down in RTK for more than a few months.