If you think you are reviewing too much, cut back on the kanji/day. I find reviewing the cards backwards and forwards really helps remember them, so stick with it… if that’s what you’re doing, that is. The objective is to remember them well, not to race through as fast as you can cause it’s boring. If you keep clicking “hard”, you’re obviously doing too many a day for them to stick properly. Kanji overload.

I once tried to do 100 RTK frames per day for a couple of days but I had to reduce it greatly cause the reviews were just too much XD I was really slow when I started, but by the end, once I had learned lots of little helpful methods and tricks for learning them, I could maintain about 50-60 per day. I slowed down to a crawl when I did the supplement a few months later, but that’s because it wasn’t as important.

Ummm, well I do keyword>kanji on Koohii and reverse on Anki. It’s good because… say you see the kanji「鳥」in a word somewhere, you’re only used to seeing the keyword FIRST so it (for me anyway) would be harder to recognise straightaway. While eventually you shouldn’t need to remember RTK keywords to learn vocab (some time in the distant future hehe), it’s pretty helpful sometimes :). So anyway, you’d go Settings>Deck Properties…>Select the model you want to change>Edit>Card Layout>Flip

:)

Oh, and depending on how you have the card layout in the first place, you might have to juggle things around a bit, so that it looks/works better. For the standard RTK shared deck though, you shouldn’t need to do much more to it after it’s been flipped.

• This reply was modified 13 years, 4 months ago by  MisterM2402 [Michael].

>>Ummm, well I do keyword>kanji on Koohii and reverse on Anki. It’s good because… say you see the kanji「鳥」in a word somewhere, you’re only used to seeing the keyword FIRST so it (for me anyway) would be harder to recognise straightaway. <<

This is counterproductive to the RTK process and IIRC the book tells you not to do it.

You don't want to be training your brain to think of an English keyword when you look at a kanji. You want to get through RTK and then start associating Japanese readings to those kanji as soon as you can.

By doing 'kanji to keyword' you're at best spending more time on RTK than necessary and at worst making it more difficult for your mind to replace the keywords with Japanese readings, because you keep reinforcing kanji to keyword.

@Elenkis: Well, what he actually says is that you don’t HAVE to learn it kanji->keyword because apparently in time you’ll just know it. I agree, if you’re learning the WRITING of the kanji backwards (kanji>keyword), then THAT’S counter-productive, but there’s nothing wrong with using it to remember vocab. The old example that I keep pulling out time after time: the word「飛行機」is read in RTK terms as “fly, going, machine”. How is that NOT helpful!? I’m not saying you have to think of “fly, going, machine” for all eternity, it just helps when learning the vocab at the first instance. Over time, you don’t think of the words in RTK terms, you just know the words as they are.

Also, I’ve been doing RTK cards both ways for a while now and I’ve had absolutely none of the troubles you speak of. I barely associate readings with Kanji anyway, only vocab words (which are sometimes one and the same). For instance, when I see「手」, I think of “hand”,「て」and「しゅ」(depending on the word it’s in) and that gives me no trouble whatsoever. When you start out learning ANY language, of COURSE you’ll translate things in your head back to your best language, it’s pretty difficult not to. And anyway, since I see vocab more than I do RTK keywords, I kinda reasign them in my head e.g. instead of thinking of「備」in terms of “equip”, I now relate it to “prepare”, as in the word「準備する」.

I’m getting really sick of all these people telling me that my way of doing things, which has worked wonderfully for me, is wrong because they assume it can’t work for them (without even trying it). It’s not you personally Elenkis, I just hate having to keep defending myself against EVERYONE. >.<

But anyway, yeah @Armando: Whoever you decide to listen to, don't bother doing 2 decks the same way (koohii and anki) – it means you get more reviews, yes, but it detracts from the "Spaced Repetition" algorithm that's employed. The algorithm for when to schedule cards is what helps you remember stuff – leaving a card JUST the right amount of time before you have to recall it again stretches your brain and helps reinforce it. You could argue that seeing it more times helps do that too, but you have to be careful – passing a card in one deck only because you saw it and failed it in the other 5 minutes ago isn't a good way to be doing things, I think; kinda defeats the point. It's up to you though, just whatever works.

The worst thing about defending myself all the time is that it wastes so much time with all the replies XD Though I'm doing this to help Armando, not just to refute Elenkis.

*phew*

I can agree with what is written above to some degree with everyone and a little of my own opinion… Here goes…

‘To each his own’ right?

I mean the most we can do is recommend to others our own method of doing things, and hope that someone might find it useful.

I, myself, never bothered to use RTK. I found it kind of extra effort to remember the kanji once for meaning (1 kanji – 1 english meaning) and then to learn again for some vocab (one reading) and perhaps another reading (further vocab?). So I skipped on the RTK all together.

I don’t memorize kanji unless I know atleast one vocab word containing it. And even then, I memorize it by using the vocab. This method has been very effective for me in recent months. I have taken to writing practice as a way to commit them to memory and associate them to a vocab word for meaning.

But again, to each their own…

• This reply was modified 13 years, 4 months ago by  KiaiFighter.

Hmmm… when he says the bit you quoted, he also says that he’ll explain later why that is. I’m *sure* in the explanation he says something to the effect of “don’t bother going kanji to keyword, because in time, you’ll just start to know it” – goddamnit, the words are definitely there but I just can’t find them in the book XD. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that, while Heisig says kanji to keyword should just eventually “click”, it didn’t for me. I was dire at recognising what kanji meant out in the wild (and winterpromise31 said the same thing), so I decided to it back to front, so that I’d REALLY know the cards inside and out.

As for 大丈夫, I learned that just from the fact that it had such similar kanji in it, but that isn’t the point. The point is that the keywords CAN be used no matter what the word – like the Heisig primitives, these kanji can be used to make “mini-mnemonics” (well, I do anyway). I say “mini” because they come quickly (most of the time they just pop into my head) and they go quickly (while I can still remember a lot of these mini mnemonics, dependence on individual ones seems to fade pretty fast), and also they’re not very long.

But anyway, yeah, you just gotta do what you find works. The majority of Heisig’s stories are utter balls, so eventually (quite late in, unfortunately), I stopped reading most of his entries altogether, going straight to Koohii.

Oh yeah, and if someone had trouble remembering 大丈夫, they could just think of a woman saying something like “My husband is large and he has *ahem* length – all right!” – ok, so it’s not the best, but hey, if it helps you remember haha. Obviously you wouldn’t have to recall that every single time, but maybe only for the first few reviews until you’ve got it nailed ;)

Anyhoo, to Anki and beyond!!