mizunooto wrote:

When you first see a new Kanji, something will pop into your head that stands out.

I actually started doing this before I got to the end of the Heisig stories. I was finding some of them just too artificial, and realised that if I went with my gut association with a keyword it stuck a lot better. This is definitely a useful technique if you manage to turn that image into a story that uses the primitives.

mizunooto wrote:

So maybe you are at the crucial point!

Here's hoping! Since my initial post I've managed to get my studying down to about 1.5 hours a day including restudying the failed cards, doing all the RevTK reviews, and adding 10 new ones. I'm happy with this, it means I'll be done with adding cards by the end of the year, which was my target. :-)

mizunooto wrote:

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"

This is interesting. I've started relaxing strict usage of the Heisig method too. Not quite to your level, but for example I'll sometimes remember elements as pictographs if it's easier, for example remembering the "one human legs" in 微  as a deliciously delicate pi[e], and the bit below flower in 菌 as a rice-field containing wheat.

mizunooto wrote:

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.

This doesn't bother me too much. If I remember it, great. If I need to fail it, it doesn't take long to restudy and it'll go back to the 1 day/3 day cycle again to make sure it's remembered.

Sizen wrote:

I'm by no means saying that 2000 Kanji will be easier without SRS, just that it will take less of my time. Maybe if I were studying fewer characters a day, I'd feel motivated to review with SRS....

Good luck! It'll be interesting to see if you suffer for the lack of an SRS as you learn more, but if you've already done 1000 without it maybe you won't need it. Keep us posted. :-)

I sort of sped through the other posts, but I think if it takes you 3 hours to learn 10 kanji, you must be doing something seriously wrong. The only thing that could explain such a slow rate of progress would be if you were constantly writing out each kanji many times.

I find that if a person were genuinely trusting their imaginative memory, its impossible to be that slow. It's best to limit yourself to writing each one only once or twice as the book explains.

I myself used to waste a lot of time writing them out repetitiously because I was too worried about them looking good. I think its better to learn as many of them as possible at first because once you've already learned them, you can go back and easily refine them later. It's a bit like working on a painting, rather than trying to focus on just one part of the painting, its better to work on the painting as a whole, so that you can see everything in connection to everything else.

While I was going through RTK1, I had about 200 reviews per day, which took 1h30m-1h45m. Learning new kanji took maybe 2-3h per day, for ~50 cards.
At the moment, for RTK1 I get about 50-60 cards a day, which takes ~20 minutes. Retention rate for mature cards is 93,8% atm.

Other decks included I spend 1-1h30m for reviews per day (today was 306 cards @ 1,06h), and try to spend 30 mins for studying new cards.

I do about 1.5 hours of review, followed by 2 hours reading, 2 hours listening, and 30-45 minutes watching shows in Japanese. On weekends I usually spend most of the day studying.

Lately I been reviewing faster. I have 4 decks (japanese large deck, chinese large deck and keigo and kansai ben small decks)

Japanese - around 400 reviews (add around 20 new cards a day)
Chinese around 120 reviews (add between 10 to 25 cards a day)
keigo - around 5 reviews (sometimes less, don't add new cards, only when I see a polite word I don't know or so)
kansai ben - around 5 reviews, since it's not a priority I haven't been adding cards for the past 3 months)

Anki takes me around 1h15 daily. Immersion is Ayu ready mostly and reading short novels (yoshimoto banana) at night, lately. I also have been training specificaly for the JLPT2 (reading texts and doing other kinds of exercises).

I spend about 3 hours per day, but when I can I try to 'study' a bit more.
I use some kind of input method because my main concern is to read everyday some article written by native speakers and try to get always more used to the grammar patterns(without studying it separately, although I used to and so I have already grasped the basics) and to expand my vocabulary.
Vocabulary is probably the most important aspect of every language because if you assume to know all the words of a given language you can probably infer the meaning without knowing any grammar.
Grammar acquisition comes only from a lot of input and is not worth to waste too much time to study it(but beginner should initially).
I recently pick up anki again and I am studying a deck of about 2000 words.
I abandoned anki in the past because if you not use it properly it become really tedious reviewing cards.

EDIT:
I was forgetting that this section of the forum is about 'Remembering the kanji'.
I finished studying the book one year ago.
At that time I had free afternoons and so I managed to go quite fast by studying 50 kanji per day.I used about 3-4 hours per day.
When I finished the book I continued reviewing, but soon it became annoying and I gave up, but I changed method of study.

Last edited by Max.89 (2011 November 13, 12:57 pm)

I try not to spend more than 2 hours a day on RTK, including reviews. It takes me like 40 minutes to do reviews, and then around an hour to add 40 kanji.

This is the third(!) time I'm doing it. I finished once, got to 600 the second time before I decided to postpone it until now. Right now I'm on 840, and getting stressed out in the end of semester rush. I usually don't have time to add new kanji one or sometimes two days a week. I'm thinking about dropping down to 25, and then doing 100 a day once the semester ends. Then I might sell the damn book so I can never think "Oh, I'll just stop and do it again in a few months" again.