shonanthebeach
New member
From: Shonan
Registered: 2007-11-15
Posts: 3
I would like to take tests. To review and click yes, I know it is not telling me anything. I would love random order tests. By the way, the book is great, but after getting into the 700`s I wonder why I am writing the stories rather then the other way around. I paid for the book. Would have gladly doubled the price if teh stories were there to make it more fun and faster to learn. I introduced this book by the way to my nephew. It took him a little less than a year to remember them all. I know about 1200 MAYBE....not sure. Food is my specialty and many of those are not included in the main Kanji anyway.
dwhitman
Member
From: pennsylvania
Registered: 2007-09-19
Posts: 43
(Guessing what the problem is)
To takes tests here, go to the Review section. Add flashcards to your stack down in the "manage flashcards" area at the bottom. The site assumes you're learning in the order from the book, so just type the number of the highest card you know, and all the cards up to there will be added in one operation.
When you first add cards, they appear in the never tested stack. Click on it, and you go into a random order test of the cards in that stack.
Cards you remembered go into a higher up pile. After a period of time (varies depending on the pile) they "expire" and you should test them by clicking the expired stack. You can test cards in a stack at any time, but if you wait for them to expire you'll be spacing reviews out in a way that helps transfer the info from short term to long term memory.
rotifera
New member
From: USA
Registered: 2007-10-18
Posts: 1
shonanthebeach wrote:
... after getting into the 700`s I wonder why I am writing the stories rather then the other way around. I paid for the book. Would have gladly doubled the price if teh stories were there to make it more fun and faster to learn.
Forcing yourself to go through the effort of creating the stories is part of making the learning faster. When you create your own stories, you can exploit your own experiences and quirks of mind, and that should lead to more efficient recall. To put it in extreme terms, the point of the book is not to teach you the kanji, but to teach you how to teach yourself the kanji.
Besides that lesson, there is a great deal of value in the book's ordering the kanji to enable a building-up process. That definitely makes learning faster. And the whole process is supported by the book's identification of primitives. So even though we have to create the stories ourselves, we don't have to do it completely from scratch. We get a nice concrete set of building blocks to work with.
As for tests, the review function on this site does present kanji in a random order. To get the most out of it, make yourself actually draw the kanji before flipping a card. That makes it just like taking a written test. And for a memorization task ("remember this? yes/no"), what other kind of test would be helpful?
billyclyde
Member
Registered: 2007-05-21
Posts: 192
Tests can be a lot of labor, which RevTK's SRS will do for you, but here is a test auto-generator:
http://rtk.semuel.co.il/test_pages.html
It creates a PDF which you can then print out and use as a test, up to whichever frame number you've finished. I did one at 1200 or so and found it helpful as a supplement, but I haven't needed one since.
And as to the stories stopping, you'll remember stories you write better by relying on your own memories and associations. I personally think far fewer people would finish if Heisig had provides stories all the way; but everyone else here on this site has provided stories, so no worries!
