Also makes it way easier to get into the “flow state” when you
aren’t thinking about failures.

Just tap it in.

Learn them first with the story on the front.

Once you no longer have any trouble with that, if you want you can put the story on the back. Put any readings you encounter in your sentences on the front.

Once you stop having trouble with that, if you want to keep going, even the keywords can go, leaving just the readings on the front.

In other words, English -> Less English -> More Japanese -> Japanese Only

Typo. I obviously meant kanji.

P.p.s. Can’t wait to get enough input in that I can start reading texts a bit more fluently though! Gotta go all out, ya’ll.

P.p.p.s The last 200 Kanji from Heisig’s book are quite hard as they use less common radicals. If you did do what I did I would suggest reading through the book at the same time as there are some that do need clarification.

Nt: I am to write 100 Kanji a day and I have written each of the 2040 at least once. I also did the radicals deck on Anki for a bit too.

Days expended: 32 so far and I remember about 90% according to Anki (really around 60-70% I feel).

Because I did and it worked. Is it that enough? Because you’re telling yourself now that it’s cheating, except I cheated and had alot more fun and no, and I still learned it as well as anyone else. It just helped me not be stressed during the learning stage. I don’t understand why either, but it’s enough that it worked, so I don’t waste time bothering about it when learning new Kanji beyond RTK anymore.

I would also just to plug my typical advice that /it’s also totally ok if there’s a few Kanji that you have trouble with/. As long as it’s in your SRS and you’re diligently trying, you will eventually encode it, probably awhile after you’ve encoded all the others and your reps are lower. So stop punishing yourself and make your own studies harder for no reason at all.

Because Heisig said so.

>Wouldn’t it not stretch your nerves to actually remember the word?

Remember the word? The word is what you use to remember the kanji, not the other way around.

>Since I’m using Anki with the downloadable RTK deck, it doesn’t show any keyword or story on the SRS. How OK is it?

I shared my personal RTK Lite Anki deck. I’m not sure if you’re going that route, but it does have the option to display the story on each card. Just fill in the Story field with something, and click the “Story” text on the question side to display the hint.

1. I’m around the 2300 mark in my Hanzi and finding that with all the synonyms (sometimes 3 or 4) that pop up, (ie characters that basically mean the same thing in English) I started needing to give myself hints. Like: “the animal one” or “alchemist”, “mechanics of ..”, “what is the result?”. The hints trigger the path from the Keyword to the story. So it’s a middle way between suffering in the blank zone and putting up the whole story. The blanker I feel about a character the more detailed my hint becomes. The ascetics in this forum may feel less compromised morally by this approach. I’m also starting to use French (my mother tongue) for the synonyms . It really keeps the stories separate neurologically and the associations triggered are entirely different.

2. What suggestions beyond “Remembering the Hanzi part 1” for the Chinese crowd? I farmed about 800 more characters from Alan Hoenig’s Chinese Characters. I just got Rick Harbaugh’s Chinese characters and haven’t figured out how to milk it efficiently yet. Not even sure if it has the simplified characters. But we need a solid 3000-3500. Any other ideas? How have people used Harbaugh’s book efficiently?

Cheers to all.

Proof of how fun it is: I don’t even study Japanese any more. The system is pleasurable enough that I go out of my way to do it for virtually no reason, just like a video game, or a cigarette, or any other little addiction.

I had been doing my heisig deck with *just* keywords on the front. I’d been getting really bogged down after I’d passed the 1000 kanji mark or so, because some of the keywords are very similar to others, and I’d always get some kanji’s keywords confused. Now, whenever I have trouble like that, I just put the whole story, a picture, or whatever information I need, to disambiguate.

I was skeptical of the idea at first, but now I figure that the keyword itself doesn’t matter. I’m just putting down whatever input will remind me of the kanji.

I totally agree with what Khatz writes here… rather than ask WHY one way is better than the other, if I think something else is a better way to do it I’ll just try it for a week.. or a few days.. or a few minutes… and then see the results. It’s usually pretty easy to tell which way is more effective (or probably more importantly which way is more FUN), even if you don’t know why it is.

I have a question related to kanji, though. If anyone could help me out.

I just finished RTK 1 and I have the 4th edition. In it, there are 2042 kanji. But I recently download the kanji data file with all the stories and such and it says there are 2055. Is there more in the 5th version? Should I be worried about those 13 other kanji or are they covered in RTK 3?