Thank you very much for recommendations! Android apps are not compatible with my phone *waves fist to the sky*, but movie titles in katakana are great!

@Michael Thank you very much! It took me four months with several one-week breaks (breaks in studying new kanji, not in reviewing!). And I’m so glad you replied to me here, because I wanted to thank you personally for advice about RTK. I’m talking about reverse (kanji -> keyword) decks. I know most people, including Heisig, advise against it, but it helped me immensely. I’ve started doing reverse reviews around 1000th kanji. Since then, retention rate and recognition of kanji improved drastically for me. I especially like the feeling of instant recognition after seeing the character, while for the <1000 kanji I still have to “read” through the primitives to remember the meaning. Anyway, thanks :)

I’ll slow down to 10-15 new kanji/day now, so hopefully number of due cards will drop quickly.

Hahaha, I know what you mean when you say “exceptional” kanji. Every time Heisig warned about certain kanji being difficult I had no problem remembering it. Mostly I struggle with logical and obvious kanji since they are, eh, “easy to remember and easy to forget” :D Yesterday I couldn’t remember kanji for fishing, I mean, water + fish, wth?!? :D

@ リンディ You’re almost there! Don’t know why, but I’ve heard it from other people, and it happened to me as well, but after 1000-ish kanji studying is much faster. It took me three months for the first 1000 and only a month for the rest of the book. Keep going! :D

• This reply was modified 13 years, 4 months ago by  Hatt0ri.

Yeah, that site is so much fun! I’m glad you like it :) I actually like the simplicity of Anki interface, but I’ve never used it for studying, only for reviews.

That deck sounds like a great idea! Would there be an entire sentence or a single kanji on question side?

• This reply was modified 13 years, 6 months ago by  Hatt0ri.

Yeah, additional lang packs should be listed in that place, or among Windows updates (if pack was installed through update and not manually from downloaded file). What puzzles me now is the fact Japanese is not visible either :S

Well, there is one more thing to try. Copy your current lang settings to all accounts. Some people say this helps. This feature is located in Advanced tab of Regional and Language options. I have only vague idea of how and why this could work, but it doesn’t hurt to try. Beyond that, I really don’t know what to recommend next. Sry T_T

Solved the problem yet?

It’s hard to list all possible solutions here, since I have no idea what your settings look like or what you did while uninstalling English keyboard layout (just an example – it’s impossible to uninstall keyboard layout while it’s set as default, it will just keep coming back <- maybe this happened?).

Anyway, as a quick solution until you find something better, why don't you just change key settings for language inputs? Instead of using alt+shift to toggle between inputs, create a new key combo for French input and another one for Japanese. EN might still show up in your Langauge bar, but you won't accidentally end up using it.

No, I’m not a native speaker. But in my country English language classes are obligatory throughout elementary school, high school and in Universities.
Seems like my country is not participating in JET programme (only citizens of 36 selected countries can apply). Well, I can still contact Japanese embassy over here and see if they can recommend something else. I’ve skimmed through job offers at Interac web page. Even though native level of English is standard requirement, I can still register in Interac’s database with English as a second language. Great :)
Thank you very much for replies!

Purpose of going through the list is not to perfectly learn all the words, but to familiarize yourself with them, to kind of “prepare” them for Anki. But it seems to me you are already familiar with words (since you crammed them in Anki). You just can’t recall them.

Well, there is one thing I left out when writing about lists, because it seemed obvious to me – I use mnemotechnique for every single word, just like Adriana described. Awesome examples, btw. I can imagine how learning words letter by letter, without assigning any meaning to them, could be very hard. If there is nothing to “tie” the English word to its Japanese counterpart, recall can become hell. If you are not using mnemotechniques, give them a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

There is also another way of learning vocab I tried out, without using mnemotechniques, but I find it troublesome and time consuming. Maybe it works for you. Basically, you have to repeatedly expose yourself to words you want to learn. For this you need a picture and an audio of a word (because you still need to “tie” the word to something; put it “in context”). Good thing about this, beyond finding pics and assembling everything together, you don’t have to put any effort in it at all. Just go through all pics/audio every day. Bad thing, it takes long time for everything to sink in (for me, 7-10 days), before you can use Anki for reviews. Compared to that, if I go through vocab list one day, I can start using Anki the next, so I like the first method better.

And yes, whichever method you use, when you start reviewing in Anki, you will still fail some cards XD Don’t worry. Review more. Good luck!