Oh, well... don't be distracted! I know, easier said than done. Still.

My numbers are kinda useless because I'm coming at the Kanji after Too Long studying japanese and still not having a good hold on them... the recognition slips if I don't continuously read and encounter the characters, plus being able to write correctly has been pretty painful. So if I learned 200 characters in one day, well, I didn't -really- learn 200 characters in one day, I learned 40 characters in one day and put a meaning and a story to 160 characters that, if I didn't exactly know, I've known at some point in the past.

A normal day is 20 characters though, 40 characters on a weekend day (the 200 character day was early on before I had so many reviews.) My retention rate is nearly 99% though, and I could see how I could add more characters -before- reviewing and not worry so much if I finished my review and still have a decent retention rate. I would do that if beating the calendar was more important to me than the additional hours spent reviewing from a lower retention rate.

Anyways, I generally review for ten minutes in the morning before work, ten minutes in on my lunch break, and then two or three ten minute sessions in the evening - yes, I'm using Anki with a 10-minute session limit. This is how you don't get distracted - set a short enough session limit that you'll concentrate on the characters for that long. If ten minutes is too long, do five minutes.

I'm personally drawing each character with a pencil before viewing the answer (to ensure my writing is correct and so I can't 'revise' in my short term memory whether or not I included every dot and stroke), a step that isn't really needed according to Heisig and many who are using RTK, so that's why I can only review 20-30 characters in ten minutes. You should be able to review at twice that many if you're just calling them to mind.

In between ten minute sessions I might learn a few characters. I'll write a list by hand of the characters and their meanings and review them word-list style. In-between ten-minute sessions I'll also have something to eat, do laundry, play games, whatever... but I try not to neither get distracted in the middle of a session nor do sessions back to back too often. The whole point of short sessions is to avoid getting bored with the review and spacing out - reviewing only helps properly if you're focused on and engaged with it! It's almost never the -first- thing I do when I get home. Sometimes, if I'm dwelling on Kanji on my drive home, it is the first thing I do, but if I'm not feeling like that, I'll put on some music, anime, or drama first (I'm avoiding reading too much until I complete RTK1 to avoid cluttering the keywords with synonyms and weakening the system, but that doesn't mean I'm not engaging with raw material every day!)

Anyway, 10 characters a day is a perfectly fine rate of progress. That's 3650 characters in a year, which is more than you'll every need unless you do post-graduate studies Japan. Spending 3-4 hours to get there sounds kinda painful, so shorten your sessions and get that 'distracted, not really studying, not really doing anything' time back!

Learn to use the time box with anki, I didn't and found out the hard way doing agajillion of kanji per day. The result was not pretty and almost made me quit learning. Now I just spend 10 minutes with kanji when I wake up and Rosetta stone in the evening.

Per day, every day, I study exactly 1 hour, which equals to about 600 cards (reviews; and 50 new cards per day already included). That's it. Think about it, only 20 new cards a day, makes 365*20 cards per year. Amazing, isn't it?

I'd say per day I do about 10 hours of study a day if you include everything I study and not just Japanese. Also that includes passive study such as listening to music.

Though, Japanese is on average 3 ~ 4 hours a day... bout an hour of that is Anki reviews and the other few hours I spend reading/watching drama or talking to people. On a good day when I have social commitments it goes up to 8 hours of Jap I guess you could say. Haha.

Started learning korean too so that's 30 mins per day for that. Few times per week I also watch korean tv for about an hour or so. On the weekends I tend to make my Anki deck for korean so like all up 10 hours a week of study for that.

Throw in full time uni on top of all that... makes for a busy, busy life.

2 hours max, 30min review rest learning new.

I used to study so long but that's counting immersion/reading. The srs was only for a few hours everyday. But if one doesn't count immersion and reading, then it may only be like 3-4 hours of active study. But if you have the time, then keep at it. Most people can't handle long hours, but if you break it down, then anything is possible.

Last edited by ta12121 (2011 August 18, 11:01 am)

2+ hs here:
1hr+ for 20-25 new kanji a day.
1hr or less for the reviews
a couple of minutes for reds (I usually breeze through them, although I'm having a real problem with certain kanji).
I have around 90-95 retention rate.

Is this thread related to RTK book?

If not, then.

1.30m more or less on reviewing and learning 25 new cards (reduced from 30 to 25) because it's not necessary, until december 4th there's still plenty of time to see new cards and I already studied quite some vocab.
Other that than I read articles (what, 1 hour a day?) and listen to podcasts and watch tv (drama, etc), but this does not count as study I guess.

jhenson wrote:

First, I agree that's too much time. 

Here is my daily RTK cycle.

1. Review "Red" (Previously Failed) cards
2. Review "Blue" (New) cards
3. Review "Orange" (Due) cards
4. Learn New cards (Creating a "Blue" stack for the next day's #2)
5. Re-learn/Re-study anything in Red (Which then get Reviewed in the next day's #1)

That is basically the exact method I use, except I flip 4 and 5. I used to do it your way, but discovered focusing on older cards immediately after new cards made me forget the new cards by the next day. I usually do the reviews in the morning, and the re-study/new in the evening.

ThomasB wrote:

I find 3h/day on RTK a bit excessive. I've never spend that much time per day on it even when adding 50 characters. It would be helpful to know how your study time breaks down:
- How many due cards do you have every day?
- How long does it take you to review them?
- How long does it take you to make up stories for new characters?
- How long does it take you to relearn your failed characters?

I decided to time myself today, not including breaks (I paused the timer when I wasn't actively studying). The times are incremental.

32 restudy revisions - 19 minutes
19 new cards - 35 minutes
35 expired cards - just under an hour

I failed 15 cards = ~82% retention.

After the restudy - 70 minutes
After doing 10 new cards - 96 minutes.

So actually, it looks like I'm about right, I just need to reduce my distractions. :-)

ThomasB wrote:

I think 10 characters per day is decent if you stick with it. It's better to learn them thoroughly instead of "kind of" learning 50 per day (That's what I did and as a result I went through RTK a total of 3 times from scratch). SomeCallMeChris has given very good advice, get rid of the distraction. Set yourself a time limit, such as 10minutes. Study for 10 minutes (no matter if reviews or learning new stuff) then take a little break. Repeat. Depending on your attention span you can increase your limit to 20-30 minutes. These days I started to use the Promodoro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) iPhone app to stay focuses. Maybe you can give it a try. If you can reduce your time to 1.5 hours by eliminating distraction then that would sound pretty normal to me.

To me personally it sounds like you are spending too much time on making up and revising stories. Your stories don't need to be perfect, Spaced Repetition alone will help you to increase long term retention if your story isn't all that great.

For me, the biggest problem with breezing through the stories is that if I don't fix a firm image to the keyword, I find I can't recall it without looking at the story. I find if I just brute force it through SRS reps, once it gets into the later states it'll eventually fail again after it's been dormant a while. But anyway, as I said above it looks like the time was actually getting lost on distractions anyway.

I tried the pomodoro technique and I quite like it. I'm finding I'm actually completing tasks (e.g. reviewing expired/new cards) before the 25 min. time is up, in which case I'll just take a short break early before staring the next task.

I'm currently just finishing a two week holiday so have had plenty of free time, but come next week I'm sure it'll be useful for fitting the studying into more sane spans of free time.

I find that the minimum of active study for proper progress is 45 min.

Today I did one hour, which was the addition of 200 Kanji, most of which I know fairly well. (I have restarted)

Amillerchip, I would really like for you to find an easier way of doing this. Of course if you are happy with your progress then there is nothing to say.

I can recommend some things, if that's OK...

Use all possible memory tricks that come to mind. The more stupid and vivid, the better. When you first see a new Kanji, something will pop into your head that stands out. But a normal person will dismiss this. They have been trained to. So if you examine this "flash moment" you might see that you are getting a vivid picture without realising.

I find the stories here quite reliable if I'm stuck with something. And I do remember things visually quite well, so obviously that helps. But I'm sure you have your own advantages that we don't have.

You seem a meticulous person and I feel that it would be healthy to think of different styles of thinking. The Kanji are vivid, creative, and most of all, easy to understand. Especially after the first 500, it should be getting easier to deal with the mental images because you now have somewhere to "file them away". So maybe you are at the crucial point!

There's so many ways of remembering, by sight, by touch, by smell, by sound. You can use any of these, but the fastest will probably be the one that comes naturally.

I don't put any restrictions on how I'm going to remember, I just go for the fastest way, the one that pops up first. E.g. for "cat", 猫, No. 244, I don't use a story. I remember that it is a "dog-shaped animal" - I think that's how the Kanji creators have classified it - and then I have the flower primitive as the ears, and the field as the body. It's easy enough to remember that a picture of a cat = a cat.

Also I can file it away with other Kanji that use the "dog" primitive - like monkey猿 for example, which is another animal with a shape like that, and also characters about criminality like 犯 and 獄 (because criminals = dogs in Japan probably due to some religious reason that someone else can explain), then there are some characters about hunting which use "dog" and that is a natural image so quite easy to think of.

There are so many ways of thinking of these EXCITING pictures that are even more exciting because they are the keys to understanding new things - things we need to know and will enjoy!

I don't know if that has done anything for you, but I hope it has done something! Also I hope you don't mind me intruding like this.

Another thing is to revise the Kanji OFTEN at the start (first day, and first week). When I used the RTK SRS my Kanji very quickly got to 7 days' distance or even more, before I knew them properly. I don't know if it's the same now, but I would certainly watch out for that.

I have gone off the topic but there it is.

Anyway I am impressed with your dedication!

Last edited by mizunooto (2011 August 29, 9:35 pm)

EratiK wrote:

Sizen wrote:

I'm skipping the whole SRS though;

Have you even tried it? On the long run, it's what assures best retention.
Plus in the end, when you'll have 2000+ kanji, it's really more practical to handle. And the decks are already made. It's more easy to do than it seems: one hour first thing in the morning is enough, the reviews will spread eventually. Sometimes it'll even feel like the characters have come into your brain by themselves. 
Anyway, just my 2 cents.

I'm not sure how people learn without the srs, yes I agree that it can sometimes be not useful for certain things but for long-term retention it's the best.  And it helps keep memory in when your not using the language or exposed to it. I believe for learning second,third,fourth,etc languages. It helps greatly since just using it for a few minutes everyday=long-term retention.

Studying as in reviewing with anki around 45mins-1hour. RTK takes around 30 mins of that study time, while the other 15 are dedicated to Textfugu Ultimate Verbs/Adjectives/Nouns lists. Oh and I do this every day no matter what, even if the world is ending.

Studying as in learning more kanji, depends. Yesterday I didn't learn any new kanji (Generally if my reviews pile up to 200+ in one day then I won't learn any new kanji... Like rewarding myself really). I don't have a set schedule, but on the weekends (Saturday+Sunday) I try to do 75 each day and on the weekdays 30ish.

However this is because I returned to school. I started RTK a week before school, practically no lifing it (4 hours+ per day) learning 700 in that first week. School has really slowed me down, right now I'm at 1070 kanji I think.

Now that I think about it, it hasn't been that long since I started... Let's see...August 13th was... 18 days ago... hmm not bad.