抜刀術ですか？面白い

I did RTK over 3-4 times. One was in the beginning, but my computer got formatted so I lost all the data. Then I did it over again. Once I was done, I felt it wasn't working. So I did it again. But that time around I took it slowly. The key is to go at slow paces. 10-30 new kanji per day and to make really clear stories if possible.

I managed to do remembering the kanji vol.1+3. So I got up to 3007 kanji. But that was only the beginning of my journey. I've been learning japanese for almost 1 year and 5 months now. I've noticed over this time that, the key skills to have are reading/listening skills. Due to RTK books, now I can write kanji and I learned kana on my own before I started.  So far I've been working on my listening,reading,writing skills. Speaking is on the way as well but that's on my priority list as well.


Anyhow sorry for my rambling. For the kanji, I always timebox. So I do it in bursts throughout the day. Much easier than doing all my reviews for my all my anki decks in 1-2 hours. That way I get a lot done and I can easily add more cards and learn more

I think those that finish RTK will come back and do it again. I know I am in that position right now. I did RTK to the finish and continued for six months after finishing only to stop outright. I continued my Japanese studies, but focused less on active writing.

Now I do RTK with actual cards and love it.
http://bushbo.posterous.com/paper-versi … ying-kanji

I only have the first 1200 (Kanji Odyssey order) characters, but it is working well. However, I think it is easy since I have all the primitives and stories down. My only issue now is to work in Japanese keywords.

Last edited by brianobush (2011 January 22, 7:30 pm)

Im at #323. I just started RTK1 on Jan.12th. I do plan to do one lesson each day. I kinda sped up in the beginning doing two to three lessons in a day but when the kanji started piling up and it was getting harder and harder to sort through my memories, I brought the gear back to 1st and so I'm just sticking to one lesson a day now.
What I do with it is taking it easy and not bother with numbers, just by one lesson at a time. Then I do a review at the end of each lesson using this site (so I do the blue stack). Then, if I forgot some kanji from that preliminary review, I let it go to the red stack and starts solidifying my mental image of the those keywords. BUT I let it go until tomorrow to create short-term memory. The next day, I study the next lesson and add the cards at the end. Before reviewing the new blue stack, I go through the red stack from yesterday and if any kanji gets forgotten again, they get left in that red stack to be studied again along with the forgotten ones from the new blue stack that I would be reviewing from today's lesson.
With this method, I hope to finish RTK1 in around 56 weeks or less than two months. Honesty, of course, is the best policy. If you don't know it with your eyes closed, you don't know it at all. The race becomes a race if it IS a race, but if you treat it like a stroll in the park, it WILL BE a stroll in the park.
Wish me luck! And best of luck to everybody!! Especially you Mafried!

395. --end of Lesson 17.

Another grueling session. This time there was only a half dozen that I knew. I decided to stop after 395 because Lesson 18 is a long one and it'll be best to do it in one go tomorrow. At least my reviews aren't piling up yet. I've got about 40 cards scheduled each day for the next week. The SRS simulator says that at my current rate I should peak at around 300 reviews when I finish. That's doable... barely. I just need to make sure I make it to the finish line.

@Akeiko, thank you and good luck! Being a single mom is a full-time job in itself! My wife went back to school as a return student, so I know how hard it can be. You have lots of courage, and I'm sure you will do well in your studies!

Keep going, once you get to 500, then 1000. You'll feel a huge weight lifted since your almost to the end. Plus just keep going, I know from experience that I've only gotten so far in Japanese because I never missed a day

I'm sure anyone can learn kanji, but like anything in this world, it takes time.

Good luck!
But I'd suggest that if you once knew 1500, then your problem is most likely that you're just not actually reading enough. Once you get enough kanji/vocabulary and readings down you can abandon RTK completely imo. And you don't even have to be that anal about memorizing them all perfectly. Really once you have 95% of the cards in stack 4 (if you use this site) and you know the primitives then the kanji barrier is gone, and you need to start chipping away at the much much larger vocab barrier to make further progress.

Last edited by nadiatims (2011 January 27, 6:24 am)

543.

Thanks, guys. The problem is not that I hadn't been reading, it's that I hadn't been doing anything. I dropped Japanese for a long while, basically since my last Japan trip almost two years ago. I do find that a 30-minute timer on my phone really helps me focus. It's long enough that I don't feel constrained, but still omnipresent and keeps me from being distracted. Tricks like that helped me get through 55 kanji today. Time to go make my post to the 1/4 way thread

nadiatims wrote:

Good luck!
But I'd suggest that if you once knew 1500, then your problem is most likely that you're just not actually reading enough. Once you get enough kanji/vocabulary and readings down you can abandon RTK completely imo. And you don't even have to be that anal about memorizing them all perfectly. Really once you have 95% of the cards in stack 4 (if you use this site) and you know the primitives then the kanji barrier is gone, and you need to start chipping away at the much much larger vocab barrier to make further progress.

I never stopped during RTK. It get's lower and lower over time. I'd say it's worth doing for the long-term. Heck when I do get fluent I doubt I'll ever stop srsing. Maybe I'll stop adding hardcore or something, but I won't stop using it. Small price to pay for not forgetting what you've learned

overture2112 wrote:

ta12121 wrote:

I never stopped during RTK. It get's lower and lower over time. I'd say it's worth doing for the long-term. Heck when I do get fluent I doubt I'll ever stop srsing. Maybe I'll stop adding hardcore or something, but I won't stop using it. Small price to pay for not forgetting what you've learned

Yea, I don't see the value in stopping.  I _do_ see a value tweaking your SRS algorithm if it no longer fits you, though (and anki's interval settings allow you a good deal of flexability without rolling your own SRS algo).

yea that's true. Although I don't want to play around with the algorithm, just to be safe.

You should open your graphs in Anki and look at the due cards chart. If it looks like your reviews are getting out of control, then slow down a bit, because it's keeping up with them that's most important in the end. When you're deciding what the right pace is, you should take into account the number of reviews you can handle each day, and not just how many new characters you can learn with the book. Maybe it sounds like obvious advice, but a lot of people seem to get overrun and experience burnout (including me).

Last edited by Javizy (2011 January 29, 6:28 am)

650.

Although most of those cards are sitting in my new pile. I reviewed them, but I'm so tired that I don't think any of the stories will stick. I rescheduled them all as new, and will quickly go through them in the morning. Lesson 23 looks like a monster, but so far it's pretty easy going. I've just had a lot of difficulty focusing. I think I don't study as well on the weekends.


I am definitely going to keep reviewing my RTK deck indefinitely. Reviews will very quickly drop down to just a handful a day, and at some point I can roll the RTK deck into my main Japanese deck and have it be a normal part of my review. I've experience how quickly kanji knowledge can fade once you stop reviewing, so why waste all that effort?

I also intend to do RTK-2 immediately afterward, replacing most of the RTK-1 cards with Japanese keywords.

@Javizy, here's my due graph:



As you can see I'm really not generating a lot of reviews. Right now they're taking less than an hour of my time, and I'm not being very efficient about it. It's adding cards that is the bottleneck. I expect that I can handle between 200 and 300 reviews a day, and that's about as high as it will get for a few weeks at the end. Of course as soon as I finish it'll take just a week or two for the reviews to drop to their current levels.

@unholieststew, I'm always glad to have a study partner! Good luck! (BTW, I've heard around 800 is a rough patch, so watch out soon!)

Last edited by mafried (2011 January 30, 1:38 am)

700.

And this time I've reviewed them all! Expecting 200 reviews tomorrow, so the reviews are starting to rise (but it's not a problem yet).

When I first started this attempt, I figured I would do 50/day until I got out of familiar territory, then start respecting the lesson boundaries. However I've found that meeting an arbitrary goal is quite empowering, and striving for that goal is improving my efficiency.

When I reach my quota I feel like I'm on top of the world. I feel like I could keep going and make tons more progress if I wanted to, but I just choose not to. Of course that's usually not true--I'm usually stressed, burned out, and anxious to get some work done on the rest of the stuff in my life. But for some reason when I meet that totally arbitrary goal I set for myself, that stress and anxiety disappears, and I feel on top of the world.

I've also been exploring how best to meet that quota. I'm now adding cards in batches of 11, 11, 11, 9, and 8. This makes it easier as I get towards the end to avoid burn-out. I intersperse these study sessions with 10-minute timeboxed review sessions, first of the expired cards, and then the new cards, and finally the cards I failed that day. I'm at about 150 reviews/day right now, and that's taking about a half-hour (three timeboxed sessions) to do.

EDIT: One more piece of advice for others out there: NEVER fail an already failed card! On previous attempts I would continue to fail a card until I finally remembered it. In hindsight I was relying in the end on visual memory or repetitive drill. Now I treat new cards and failed cards exactly the same: if I do not immediately know it, I flip the card and do not guess. Then I recall the story and take at least a minute to solidify it, before opening my eyes, repeating the story in my mind and writing the character once, and then marking the card as hard so that it shows up the next day. I always mark cards in my new and failed pile as hard, regardless of how well I remember them or whether I remembered them at all.

In summary: 1) treat failed cards the same as new cards, and 2) study, then mark as 'hard' new/failed cards so that you review them again the next day.

Last edited by mafried (2011 January 30, 9:50 pm)