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RtK done quick
Index » RtK Volume 1
Not really. Kinda sad, huh?
Well, okay, sort of. But things I know very well are the exceptions. The things I know well here are my wife, the location, and the wedding dress. But I have a very hard time remembering what her makeup or hair was like, or the jewelry she was wearing (which was unique to that day) without looking at our wedding pictures. And when I do try to remember, what I get back are more like descriptive words than images.
It's apparently quite common, but not well studied:
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/23 … mind.s-eye
Discover ran the above article about a brain patient, and it generated a flood of letters to the editor from people like me who thought this guy's “condition” was just normal everyday life. There's now some psych studies being done to see how many people there are like me, and why it occurs (seems to be developmental, not genetic).
When people talked about being able to ‘see’ things in their mind's eye/imaginative memory, I always assumed this was allegorical. I didn't realize people can actually close their eyes, think about something they may have just seen once or not know well, and have an image of it come to them in (somewhat) vivid detail. I can't do that. What I get is words typically. My guess is that I have no direct link to my visual memory*, but rather recall passes first through the language center. What limited imaginative faculty I have then pulls together an image that matches these words, but the words generate the scene, not describe it. It is the words that I remember, and the scene is constructed from them. If the words are wrong, then my visual memory will be wrong.
* Although it clearly is there because I can have vivid dreams at times...
Remember, sure: if I think about what I did yesterday, the memory comes back in. And if it was things I do often in locations I visit often, I'll probably have a good visual memory of it too. But anything unique or original I remember as words. If I met someone for the first time I could probably describe them to you, but I'd really struggle to remember their face beyond those descriptive words.
It makes Heisig difficult because I am forced to make direct associations of keyword -> primitives. The story becomes less a tool for remembrance and more a validity check. If I see a keyword and remember the primitives correctly, the primitives will trigger the memory and only then will the whole story come back in vivid detail. If I don't get that vivid memory, then I know I remembered the wrong primitives.
Heisig explicitly warns against remembering keyword -> primitives directly. And so would I because I know it's no walk in the park. But unfortunately there's no changing the way my mind works 
833.
Today was a hard day. I started my reviews in the morning, and continued throughout the day as I had free windows of time, but didn't finish until just after midnight. I didn't start on a good footing either--I failed more than half of the cards from yesterday. The stories just didn't stick at all. Someone warned me that around 800 is a tough zone. For me it started around frame 700, but because of the delay of SRS scheduling, I'm just feeling the effects now.
After those failures, and knowing how much other work I have to do today, I gave myself permission to do just 33 cards today and the next two days. I can do this (three consecutive days at 33/day) two more times and still meet my end-of-Feb completion date.
The other reason I slowed down is that I have a big hump of reviews coming in the next couple of days. This is what my due graph says:
I think the hump is from the day I added new cards, but pushed off reviewing them until the following morning. That had its ramifications, it seems. This difficult zone I'm in now is probably going to have an even worse effect...
mafried wrote:
When people talked about being able to ‘see’ things in their mind's eye/imaginative memory, I always assumed this was allegorical. I didn't realize people can actually close their eyes, think about something they may have just seen once or not know well, and have an image of it come to them in (somewhat) vivid detail.
I can't do that. What I get is words typically.
My guess is that I have no direct link to my visual memory*, but rather recall passes first through the language center. What limited imaginative faculty I have then pulls together an image that matches these words, but the words generate the scene, not describe it. It is the words that I remember, and the scene is constructed from them. If the words are wrong, then my visual memory will be wrong.
* Although it clearly is there because I can have vivid dreams at times...
If, when i close my eyes to try to see something, i fail. There does not come up any image of anything if i try. But i knew all along that i can daydream pretty well. Sitting there, looking into the distant, i can conjure up all sorts of visual images before my inner eye. Sure, my surroundings do not vanish when i do or when i let it happen, but i have clear images i can draw upon. And i can sort of "control" those images, play around with them. And this is how i did RTK, with my "visual memory," to help me to remember.
Maybe you can draw upon the "power" of daydreaming as well. If visual memory does not work for you this might be something that still works. Try to relax, just sit there, and try to see your wife on her wedding day. Do not try to force any memory to come to you, to be able to "see" what it was she wore. Just relax and let it happen. Let everything that happened on the day of your wedding come to you, and "look" at what images come before your inner eye. Then try to walk through that scene, and "see," if you can make out any details, like jewelry she wore.
If this works you can try the same with the stories for RTK. Say you have the keyword "autumn," before you start writing any stories, that contain the primitve elements "wheat" and "fire," sit there, relax and let your mind conjure up images where those two primitives, in autumn, play a role, and "form" 秋. If you have found a great image, write down what you have seen!
Or say, you try to do 森, three trees, try to see yourself walking through a wood, where those three trees are, and let something happen to them.
mafried wrote:
Heisig explicitly warns against remembering keyword -> primitives directly. And so would I because I know it's no walk in the park. But unfortunately there's no changing the way my mind works
Do you know the saying that goes: "Many paths are leading to Rome?" If you do, you will notice that there is not one single way to accomplish it. The above mentioned is not visual memory as described by Heisig, but it did a wonderful job for me, because this is how my mind works.
If i read a book, say Murakami Hard boiled wonderland or the End of the world, i can see most scenes before my "inner eye," and experience his world. I have read that book so many times, and i can "see" the chubby girl, who is dressed all pink. Or the librarian, and how he the main character stands there at the counter, with an ice cream he bought for her. Or the scene with the unicorns lying in the grass, or the apple grove, or the shed where the shadow is waiting for his death.
I can clearly see this right now, while typing this all too long wall of text. While all i try to say is this, you just have to know what works best for you, and use it as effectively as possible. And if the method fails, look for one, that works and is a better fit for you. 
Here is an interesting article about "visual memory," and how to improve it. I guess you could try that and see if it works. *click me*
頑張ってね！
1018.
Just three short of being able to post in the half-way thread. But my brain's fried--I guess I don't have what it takes to hang with the 100/day thread crowd 
@NoSleepTilFluent, sounds like you're making great progress. Consistency wins the race! Mind sharing your blogger site?
EDIT: Feels nice to be in quad digits though
Last edited by mafried (2011 February 08, 2:53 am)
Being in the 4 digits is great, it's even better once there's only 3 digits remaining!
Keep it up, I took several breaks near the end from adding cards just to maintain my sanity, now I usually have about 75 cards ( next 2 days I've spiked to 120ish ) and other than that it's dropping regularly with a few minor bumps, it gets harder, much harder, if you keep up this pace, but then it gets 10 times easier once you're done and things mellow out
Last edited by Dustin_Calgary (2011 February 08, 2:52 am)
Some people have different memory abilities.
For me, I can associate things with song and musical notes and sounds VERY well, but I struggle with the picturing images and stuff.
Unfortunately it seem those of us with other strong memory types than text and images get the shaft with RtK 
1092.
My grandmother passed away last Sunday; the funeral was on Friday. I have have been quite busy over the last week, obviously. I decided at first to stick the whatever-it-takes/schedule-my-life-around-the-reviews attitude of my first post. My grandmother is certainly more important than my Japanese studies, but I was worried--no, scared--that if I took a small break it would inevitably turn into a long extended break, as it has in the past. I also took it as a personal challenge of sorts to maintain my studies in face of everything else going on.
Of course it didn't work. I fell quickly fell behind in my last few posts. Now 4 days later and I've really only kept up with my reviews (thanks having Anki on my smartphone), adding less than 20 in one rare free moment. At least my reviews per day have been cut in half from 200+ to 114 today.
But while doing reps in the car on the way to the funeral I found myself rethinking priorities. Maintaining the 50/day pace had become difficult recently, and I was considering dropping to 33/day. It's the increasing demands of approaching deadlines in my personal and professional life that is causing the problem, not the number of reviews--even at my peak of 200 reviews/day I was spending less than an hour in Anki. The bottleneck is definitely adding new kanji, as I cross-check each one against a slew of online dictionaries. I can do 50 new-kanji/day only on a very good day, unless I had already researched most of the new kanji (as was the case early on).
In the “thread 4 the rest of us” wemaydance, I, and others had a discussion about day-to-day consistency vs. sprints and sabbaticals. I'm always an advocate of consistency over unsustainable speed runs, and it made me realize that I've been a bit of a hypocrite in this thread. 50/day is unsustainable, and on the bad days I don't make it. I think it would be much healthier to set a bar that I can meet even on the bad days, and allow myself to both exceed this rate on good days, and to meet the bare minimum on the bad days. So to that end I've drastically reduced my day-to-day goals: 11/day minimum, and absolutely no more than 30/day (added in sets of 11, 10, 9), no matter the circumstances.
Why the maximum value? Well another part of the reasoning is that I want to give myself study time on the good days to study and explore other parts of Japanese. Assimil, Tae Kim, preparing my RTK-2 and KO2001 decks.. those are all things I'm itching to work on now, and allowing myself a little time on those per day, on the good days, would do much alleviate that. The maximum limit will hopefully keep me from feeling like a failure from not doing more RTK.
At 11/day I'd finish May 11th. I was hoping to be done sooner, but better late than never, and as long as I'm done before summer I'd be happy. If I can pull 30/day on the weekdays, and the bare minimum on the weekends, Mar 24th would be my end date. (That just happens to be the baby's due date..)
So that's my plan. Now that I'm back home I'll post more regularly, hopefully keeping to my daily update schedule.
@NoSleepTilFluent, I was going to point you at the 500 thread, but I see you found it already. There's also a 3/4 thread, but you'll have to search for it as I don't think it's been posted to in some time. I plan on reviving it soon
@Thora, thanks for the response and advice! I remember when you first joined, and watched your progress. It means a lot to hear from you I've had the same experience with kanji chains and similar methods. I find it difficult and unnecessary to remember a chain of stories in order to pull out the meaning or reading of any one kanji. I tried it, and too often I would forget some link in the middle and then the chain would be useless :\ After RTK-1 I plan on doing RTK-2, which has a method I can appreciate. No kanji chains or towns for me
@ta12121, thanks! I was calculating how many days I have left at my new pace, and realized that I've entered triple digits for the number of kanji left--950 to be exact. It's finally sunk in that I really am more than half-way...
Last edited by mafried (2011 February 13, 12:21 pm)
