Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) my life is not as busy as it used to be, so I will almost always have enough time for 1-2 hour reviews, even if it is just spread throughout the day.
The only reason I am going so fast is because I am a relatively impatient person, and I want to learn as much Japanese as fast as possible, but if you think slowing down will be better in the long run, I will definitely consider it.

If you have the time to do all the reviews, and you don't burn out with boredom or press, and it doesn't have you make up shit stories, then the non-expert that is me doesn't see anything wrong with it. Even if one's initial retention rate goes down because of the sheer amount of cards, it should eventually short itself out if you keep reviewing. 75% still means you get most of them down.

It does seem a little crazy though.

Last edited by TwoMoreCharacters (2011 April 09, 5:10 pm)

zachandhobbes wrote:

Why go with 100?

Toooo stressful for me. Caused me to burn out the first time. I say stay with 50 to 70.

I agree. Don't go doing 100 per day. Go for your normal pace. You'll get more out of it that way. Plus you'll be able to maintain and get farther

I think I will continue to experiment with a number, and just go with however many I feel comfortable doing.

The best answer of all!  I'm impressed that you can do 100 per day.  I could do that at the end of the deck, but not at the beginning.

Hopefully you've seen this advice elsewhere, but, however many kanji a day you are reviewing make use of timeboxing. If you are using Anki then there is a timeboxing feature built in (I've left mine on the RTK deck's default 5 minutes or 20 kanji, whichever comes first).

This does two things. It should help prevent burnout since you might well still do two hours of review, but it won't be two solid hours or review. The second is that you may very well find you get more reviewing and studying done in the same amount of time. Knowing there's a time limit seems to aid in focusing.

I also use the timeboxes to break up studying new kanji. For the last few hundred frames I've been alternating five minute reviews with studying five new frames, then a few minutes of something completely unrelated (catching up on email, web browsing, whatever). Then five more minutes of review, five new frames, etc, etc.

Now, on week days I let myself stop after adding fifteen new frames and just do reviews after that, a few more on weekends. On the other hand I'm also working full time. If I had the days completely free I suspect I'd push a bit further. Just keep an eye on the number of reviews due. I'd say you should set yourself a maximum number of reviews or time spent (something that works for you, even if it's something we'd find crazy for ourselves like 200 kanji or six hours whichever comes first), and if you find you are hitting that limit them pull back on the number of new kanji you add until the reviews come back down. The nice thing about any SRS (Anki's or the Lietner style one this site uses) is that reviews will ease down over time since the cards wait longer each time you pass them.

Even if whatever you are using doesn't have built in timeboxing, you can find free timer applets for most every operating system. I picked up one before I switched over to using Anki for kanji review, and I still use the time for other things (like making sure I don't forget and leave clothes in the washing machine all day).

I think the reason I forgot 25 kanji was because I was trying to get through them as quickly as possible, so my stories were not very vivid and I did not spend enough time trying to memorise it properly.

Yesterday, I went a bit slower, and learnt them in smaller groups(15), the result was that my retention had jumped up to 90% on the first time.

I want to stick with 100 a day, seeing as I have no school for the next 2 weeks I should be able to handle the reviews.

@LilFluff
I had heard of timeboxing, but I was not exactly sure how to do it properly. Before I tried it the way you said, I set the time to however long I thought it would take to do the whole thing, and the number of reviews to however many there were to do. This meant I was trying to get through all of my reviews at once, and it was becoming a bit of a chore. With the timeboxing, I find that it is easier to get through them, and I am probably doing it faster as well.

MountainDewGuy wrote:

My mature % rate is only 90.

What do you mean "only"?
If you want my opinion, 90% is the normal retention rate for mature cards. Khatz had 90% for his (3500 kanji?) deck, I had 90% of mature cards after I finished RTK1.
Stop beating yourselves up people. In a way, it's not retention that's important, it's to keep reviewing (or to start immersing and/or to switch to JP keywords and keep reviewing for those that are past that stage).

Last edited by EratiK (2011 April 15, 10:26 am)

I've been up at 97-99% and down as low as 50%. There's so much that affects your retention that it's always hard to really calculate. I will say that at the beginning, as you start your journey with SRS, there will be a lower level of retention. Also, true retention is vastly different to what the SRS really indicates as it can only be tested through native material (testing via SRS isn't a perfect science). From what I see, you are doing fine - just keep at it and find what works for you.

KMDES wrote:

My advice? Push it to 200! ;D

Seriously though, the way you're learning Kanji may only be functional for 50 per day, so you have two options. 1) Go back to doing 50. 2) Figure out why you're forgetting 25 a day and fix it.

Dissect and determine if it's worth fixing to get more kanji per day. 100 is no where near impossible, but it's probably going to be more than twice the work of 50 to retain them all.

This.

Lower retention of new cards just means more time spent reviewing and has no long term ill effects.  As long as you can keep up reviews, continue doing more cards per day until you don't have any time left to spare- in which case lower your new card rate and thus lower your review time for the next few days (then turn it back up later on if you find yourself with time to spare again).

Learn to stop worrying and trust the SRS. It may feel a little weird at first, having a large number of cards that you don't feel totally confident about, but the SRS algorithm will sort it out.


NB. The only reason to look at new/young card retention rate is to get a better estimate of the number of reviews due each day for the next week, the knowledge of which would let you better ride the line of "maximum number of new cards you can handle while keeping up with reviews given your time constraints".