OK, for whatever reason I forgot to add these to the last post. BAD Khatzumoto! Here we go:
Oh, wait, before we start, wanna here a sad story? I wrote this post out in one go like 3 days ago, and then a mis-directed click caused me to lose it. All of it, son. Desk-slamming pain. And pain from slamming the desk. OK, for real now, here we go:
0) If you take only one piece of advice I have offered in these past two posts, take this one: use an SRS. In any class that requires you to memorize something, which should be just about everything except those P.E. classes, you should use-an-SRS. How? What you do is, you make yourself exam questions during and after each class. That’s right, you make them up. And of course make answers. And of course make sure your answers are correct. While your at it, enter all your homework questions and correct answers/solutions into the SRS as well. You will be surprised how easy it is to make up questions when the material is fresh in your mind…and grateful when you see rather similar questions on the exam your instructor makes.
Why do this? So that you don’t need to cram. Cramming sucks. It sometimes works, but rarely, and it’s a huge cause of stress. What if I told you that you would never need to cram again? That’s what the SRS can do for you — make it so you never need to cram, or even do special studying for exams (other than your daily SRS reps).
You see, what most people call pre-exam “revision” or “reviewing” isn’t revision or review at all. It’s straight up re-learning forgotten material, from scratch, like a Martha Stewart cake. The Germans have a word for this: wastingyourfreakingtimedude. If you’re going to learn something, learn it once, and never forget it again. An SRS can help you with that.
If it’s so easy, why don’t more people do this already? Because it requires forward planning. Don’t try to SRS things up for an exam at T-10 seconds to launch; it won’t work. You need to start this SRS thing, to sow your seeds, well in advance of the harvest, I mean, err, exam. Sow. Then reap. Sow. Then reap. Sowing comes first. Pay a little in terms of work each day, maybe get a buddy to keep you kosher, make up your questions during or after each class, and practice them every day, and then reap the benefits come exam time. As Jim Rohn says, the things that are easy to do are easy not to do. Say you make up 20 questions per class session and have 3 class sessions a week…That’s 60 questions per week, or 900 per 15-week semester. Try making up 900 good questions the day before the final. It probably won’t work.
Sidenote: another good thing to focus on is anything where the instructor says “this will be on the exam” or “this is important”; that’s most of what going to class is for.
1) Use mind maps heavily where they work. Generally this is in classes that require you to memorize, organize and reproduce large amounts of disparate information. Mind maps give you that gestalt view that linear notes do not and cannot. It would not be an exaggeration to say I aced my college history classes (and by “ace”, I mean doing things like earning all points possible in the class) because of mind maps. Tony Buzan, the number one dude-above-all-dudes of mind-mapping recommends them for almost everything, and he’s not wrong as such; however, there is one field where I have found mind maps more or less useless: that would be in classes that require the memorization and application of Al Gore Rhythms: methods of calculation. So, most mathematics-type classes. There aren’t that many ideas or concepts to arrange in a typical mathematics class, you simply need to know efficient methods for solving problems and checking your solutions. So, don’t bother as much with mind maps in these classes. Try to follow the guidelines for making good mind maps, but don’t get too hung up on it, and don’t be like me and worry about “what color to use next”. Just for kicks, here a couple of my own mind maps from the aforementioned history class:
2) Quendidil was right. Adam Robinson’s What Smart Students Know (WSSK) is a great book, it really is, but those 12 questions that Adam makes up are just too complex. Part of being a smart student is actively choosing what NOT to do, and what to IGNORE, so Mr. Robinson probably won’t be offended if I tell you that you only need, like, 5 questions to get you through school, and you don’t even need them all in every class. Four of those five questions are your old favorites: who? what? where? and how? The fifth, greatest and most neglected of them all is: what if? Whatif is your new best friend. Get to know her. For one thing, she’ll help you in making cool SRS questions (1), and when I say cool, I mean both “fun” and “the kind of stuff that will be on the exam”. Asking what if not only gets you engaged with the material, no matter how boring or stupidly presented, but also encourages you to truly, meaningfully deepen your knowledge of said material. They say that you don’t know how good something is until it’s gone. Perhaps they should also say that you don’t know the significance of something until you consider its radical alteration or even its absence. What if water molecules weren’t shaped like Mickey Mouse heads? What if you changed just one physical constant? What if this variable were given a negative value? What if…What if…What if…
[Note: Why? doesn’t seem as important a question in terms of schoolwork…but the curious might also include it in the list of essential questions, to make six. Now that I think about it, if enough of us asked “why?”, we could help school suck less, or maybe even just realize that we don’t particularly need school…But why be radical when we can just let the next generation waste 12+ years of their lives, too, right? Oh, I’m sorry, that was out loud 😀] Now that I think about it, I guess “why” does matter in school, but only in the limited, how-teacher-says sense, not in the true sense of asking “why”. Most teachers don’t want to hear what you think, they want to hear what they think repeated back to them; in this sense they’re not bad people, just vain, like many of us.
3) Class summary sheet. This is another golden Adam Robinson idea. Too many of us live on an intellectual hand-to-mouth basis. Heck, too many of us live on a financial hand-to-mouth basis, but that’s another story. Just dragging our feet to class, day in day out. Sitting in there…trying to chew gum while the teacher isn’t watching. No idea what the dude is talking about. Only the vaguest idea of what we covered last class, and no idea of how today’s class fits in the whole. Playing with our pens, pretending that they’re aeroplanes. Or maybe that was just me. But, regardless of how stoopid certain things about school are [and there are a lot of things stoopid about school, any frank teacher will admit this to you, and he will admit that the primary reason that things are being done the way they are is to make them as easy as possible to grade]…
Dude, we need gestalt [am I even using this word right?]. We need whole. We need the overview. Don’t wait for someone to give it to you — no one can give it to you in a way that suits you, but you. The way to give yourself the overview is by having a single sheet of paper that contains a summary everything that has been covered in the class up to the present time. You update this sheet after every class, shrinking and abbreviating as time goes on. In my math classes, particularly calculus, I made this sheet linear — it contained nothing but calculation methods — but for everything else, I used some kind of mind-map structure, because things tended to interconnect more.
4) Exploit “state”. Do work during and after class, when the material is fresh in your mind. Strike the iron while hot. Wait till later to goof around (don’t wait too long, though 😉 ). When the project or class “state” — all the data and nuances and ins and outs of some project or class — is all fresh in your mind, USE it. Reloading wastes time/self. What this means is practice is: try to get as much work as possible done during class or shortly thereafter.
5) OK, so textbooks suck, yes, they were made by war criminals and sadists in their spare time. But forget about whining. MINE the suckers! MINE them for exam questions, and put those questions and answers into your SRS (0). On second thought, do be a bit picky — you only need mine the parts that are important to the instructor.
5.5) Get other books — supplementary books, books outside of the set framework. If you wanted to learn about something in real life, you wouldn’t get only one book, would you? And you wouldn’t get only the book or books that one person told you too, would you? I didn’t think so. But for some reason, we tend to this at school. We tend to only use the assigned textbooks. Big mistake. First of all, remember this — at present, textbooks aren’t written for students, they’re written to impress the people who are in charge of buying them for, or assigning them to, students. Secondly, even if textbooks were actually written for students, it is statistically unlikely that a single human being or small group thereof would have the combination of willing, ability, and clairvoyance to explain everything to you in just such a way that you would understand it perfectly just from the one text. So you need other books, just like you need a second or even third medical opinion. Hearing things from another perspective may be just what you need to make something click. I remember how some physics books would simply assume that I knew how to do something that I did not necessarily know how to do, so I went and got other physics books that actually showed the simple details and basic assumptions of certain calculations. Also, this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but my algebra sucked before I really actually had to use it, which was in calculus class, and I had to teach myself algebra using a book called, funnily enough, Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide, and on top of that, I got another book called How To Ace Calculus (a math book that’ll have you laughing more than like 90% of the shows on Comedy Central…oh was that out loud?), and, yes, I did ace calculus.
6) Schoolwork is a product, not a work of art. It just needs to get done. You only get rewarded for producing it in a timely fashion. “Timely” is medieval Swahili for “long before lateness is even an issue, or otherwise ASAP”. There is no reward for worrying about it, nor for hating it, nor for putting your soul into it. So produce. Quickly, efficiently, and yeah, maybe you can find your joy in your speed and efficiency. All you perfectionists out there: get it done. Remember: you have other stuff to do that you actually care about — like Japanese. Lots of anime to watch, manga to read, senbei(煎餅) to eat, Pocari Sweat to drink. So get the schoolwork done and out of the way, and don’t let it eat any more time that it needs to. Remember Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion — use the law against itself; shrink the time through timeboxing (see previous article) and get work done quickly.
OK, that’s all I’d really like to say about schoolwork at this point. I kind of feel unqualified talking about school because of the failures that I previously discussed, but, having said that, I have also had pretty massive scholastic success, and that success was basically always accompanied by a good, systematic method. I have sometimes been too lazy or too perfection-obsessed to apply good methods, but when I just applied them, I did really well. Use these methods, make them work for you, keep your common sense set to “on”, and I imagine you should do really well, too. Especially with the SRS thing.
Thanks a lot for another great article. Not too closely related to Japanese study but very useful for someone who’s going to be starting university in the not too distance future. =D
神様が出た! :O
The 20question-SRS thing is really helpful!
Great advice. I wish I had read that back in the day. Another off topic comment, I recently finished the 2042 general use kanji through Heisig (it took 4 months) and would like to share some things that I learned along the way to anyone beginning the process or to those still plowing through it:
1. Use the Reviewing the Kanji website. Take the time to write out the mnemonic stories that you make up for each character so they are recorded. I didn’t start recording them until about 700 and regretted it. Making up your own stories works the best in terms of recall I think, but if you do use someone else’s story on the site, I would suggest changing it just a little bit to put a personal spin on it.
2. Personalize the frequently used primitives. Primitives like finger, thread, person, etc. will keep popping up again and again. Don’t keep them abstract in your stories. For example, decide from the beginning that the “thread” primitive will be Spiderman and then whenever it pops up just incorporate Spiderman into your story for that character. New primitives are introduced all the time. What I would do is scan ahead and see how often they would reoccur to determine if they needed special attention.
3. When SRSing, reviewing is more important that adding new kanji. This may seem obvious, but it becomes much more difficult to do once you pass 1500 or so and it does definitely slow the progress. I did the first 1000 in about a month, but it took 3 months to finish the second 1000 because the more you learn, naturally the more there is to review. I would open the SRS and it would tell me I had 180 to review and I’d be like, that will take my whole evening! It was very tempting to just skip the reviewing and start learning new characters, which I did do a few times, but in the end this was not a good thing. The SRS reviews would just multiply (as anyone who skips a few days knows) and then by the time I had caught up with the reviews, I had to go back and re-learn all the new kanji again.
On a separate question to Khatz, now that I’ve moved onto sentences, when I encounter words with combination kanji, I find my mind automatically recalls the English keywords for the respective kanji and then tries to form some kind of mnemonic using those keywords. So far this has helped with recall later on, but I can’t help thinking I shouldn’t be doing this as it is just embedding more English past the intial English keyword. Do you think I should be concerned with this?
Ah! The mis-directed click thing happened to me a few times for forum posts as well, especially at 2am :P. You might want to try typing in a word processor before transferring to the actual site next time.
I just finished RTKI too (about 2 weeks ago), took me about 4 months altogether, which seems like way too long because the last month and a half I was doing it full time, (although I had a few months-long interruptions). I’m pretty impressed that Heisig was able to memorize them all in a month without having his own book to guide himself… In retrospect the Heisig method seems obvious (how many of us learned our ABCs and how to pronounce them in words at the same time!? wtf), but I spent so long trying to memorize kanji the conventional way that I don’t think I ever would have come up with the correct method on my own. After all, the dumb method works too, if you spend 10 times as much time on it.
Anyways, aside from languages, I have never had trouble remembering things at all. Back in school I used to ace tests and I never, ever studied. With non-language subjects, there is a logic behind everything and because of that I can remember everything, no problem. I think what it is is that I have a higher short term memory capacity than most people – I can fit more facts into my immediate memory – so I can understand larger, more complicated, interconnected logical systems of facts.
The only exception back in high school was Spanish class, which I flunked out of. I also tried to study French on my own and didn’t get very far. With Japanese I had made the determination that I would learn it to the same level that I know English, no matter what (since I want to live in Tokyo and I don’t want to be one of those illiterate perpetual English teachers). From the beginning I have believed that there is nothing special about Japanese people and that anyone can learn Japanese to their level. For me it’s been mostly a struggle to discover how to memorize things. It took quite a while before I even figured out flash cards, let alone SRS.
It was only a couple years ago (I am 29 now), well into my study of Japanese, when I realized how most people struggle to learn things, because I was finally struggling like this with Japanese, and people would tell me, “now you know what the rest of us go through to learn things”. With languages there is no logic – it’s really all convention – and your facility with the language needs to become a habit, to the point where you’re rarely, if ever, thinking logically about it.
Heisig’s method has made me realize how I never had trouble memorizing non-language things, because his system basically creates a logic. But the thing is, ultimately even with the logical facts outside of language that I don’t have any trouble remembering (mathematical formulas, programming data structures, historical events, etc.), if I use those facts often enough I don’t bother to think about the logic.
For instance, I still remember enough about calculus that I could figure out the formula for the volume of a sphere “by hand”. But I don’t think about that, I just remember the formula. Now, most people have a lot more trouble understanding the “why” behind the formula than I do, but really they could make up a story involving some dude named Radius making a cubic pie, and they would remember it just as easily as I do. Either way, if you forget the logic behind it, but just remember the formula, that’s (usually) the important part. This is the point that we all need to get to with kanji (and words, and sentences) as well.
It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I have already forgotten many of the keywords. Still, nearly every kanji still evokes a “meaning” and I think that is the important thing. If you make up a story to remember vocabulary based on the keywords it won’t be a problem, because the keyword is meant to evoke a meaning, and each kanji does have a meaning (closely related to the keyword) which you ought to remember. The English keywords and stories that we’ve used to remember the kanji are only scaffolding, and they will naturally fall away when your actual use of the language enables you to remember it without any special effort.
BTW thanks for doing this site. I was running out of money going to language school in Japan, and when I found this site it crystallized a lot of things I had started to figure out the hard way (like: being in Japan isn’t nearly as important for your Japanese as your time spent studying). I’m now living a lot cheaper in Southeast Asia, studying Japanese using your method. It kinda sucks here, but if I stayed there I’d have to get an English teaching job, and that would slow me down quite a bit. Good motivation, anyway – the more I study, the sooner I can go back to Japan and get a job.
@Christopher
You wouldn’t happen to be in Thailand would you? Just curious because I lived there for three years a while ago.
Personally I think 3-5 months is the right time frame for learning RTK regardless of how much time one has to devote to it. I mean, while I applaud the effort of someone that says they’ve “learned” all of RTK in a month or done 3000 kanji in 30 days, I just don’t buy that they would then be able to jump in and start applying them. Is it possible to make up 2000 or 3000 mnemonic stories in a month? Yes. Are those 2000-3000 going to be retained in one’s long term memory? No. It just isn’t enough time. There’s no way to prove this, but I’d bet that if after finishing RTK, a test were given to the ones that claim to have done all those in a month, their recall would probably be 50% at best.
That is of course just my opinion and I’m sure exceptions may exist. I guess the point would be it probably isn’t wise to rush through RTK to get to the sentences, however tempting this might be. Khatzumoto even makes a reference to the time it takes to retain in another post: “When you first learn a sentence, of course you’ll “remember it”. What counts isn’t so much that first time, as 2, 3, 10, 52 weeks later.”
I also agree with what Christopher said above, that the keywords and stories are just a scaffolding or foundation that will eventually fade once you start to apply the language itself. But if enough time isn’t spent reinforcing that foundation before one starts to build on it, when it does crumble away, it may be discovered that it was all for naught and a long process of re-learning would be in order.
nah, that’s not true at all. With anki in your side they WILL become long-term memory, the only thing that may occur is to fail more cards in the process but that’s not a big problem
“There’s no way to prove this, but I’d bet that if after finishing RTK, a test were given to the ones that claim to have done all those in a month, their recall would probably be 50% at best”
Yep, but as you know, we aren’t here to have good grades on tests. In real life situations I always see kanji>keyword and not keyword>kanji which already helps a lot, and even if I can’t remember a kanji I just look up the keyword to remember its story. Besides, there’s the benefit-cost ratio, it’s better recall 50-70% of 3000 or 99,9% of 600?
just remember that the old heisig finish all the kanjis in one month and was able to recall almost ALL of them
“But if enough time isn’t spent reinforcing that foundation before one starts to build on it, when it does crumble away, it may be discovered that it was all for naught and a long process of re-learning would be in order.”
Thanks to immersion+anki your foundation is always becoming stronger, day after day, hour after hour, second after second, even if it can’t support much stuff right now, when you finally get something to put on it, it will be strong enough to support thousands of floors
Actually I just arrived in Khon Kaen, Thailand today. I was in Vientiane, Laos for the last two months. I’m just bouncing around on tourist visas. Got a friend that’s coming down to Bangkok from Tokyo for a month next week, and we’re probably headed to Cambodia and Vietnam.
It might be a good idea for me to drill the kanji for a while more. It’s really hard though; I’ve found the kanji to be easily the most boring part of the language. I made lots of kanji stories involving child rape, heroin abuse, bestiality, etc. but these things don’t shock me or even amuse me anymore. But it is so nice to be able to read and write… so much easier than it was even a month ago.
Will using an SRS make learning Japanese way faster than if I were to spend all my time just watching/reading/speaking/listening to Japanese without reviewing the sentences again later? The reason I ask is because entering sentences into the SRS seems really boring and time-consuming. Has anyone posted online any SRS files that I can use instead of entering sentences on my own? I guess asking that makes me seem lazy but if it can save me 100 hours of typing sentences into a program and allow me to get straight to reviewing them instead, I think it is worth asking. I’d like to maximize my amount learned to time spent ratio. My Japanese reading is around JLPT2 level now, and my listening and especially speaking/writing level is not as high.
When learning new words in a language you have to encounter them many times till they become ‘yours’. In real life, just by watching/listening/reading etc, there is no guarantee when you will encounter a word again so you may forget it in the meantime. By inputting the word into an SRS (in a relevant sentence) you force exposure to the word at steadily lengther intervals, which should provide the most learning for the least effort.
As you say you are around JLPT2 level I would say it’s a case of doing what you want to do. If inputting into an SRS is too boring for you, don’t do it. Just be sure to re-watch/listen/read to your Japanese materials so that you increase the exposure to the words.
Babies seem to manage without an SRS so it’s definately possible…
Rob – I finished both books in 30 days.. and by finished I definitely don’t mean commited to long term memory by any means. I admit I couldn’t help brag about it a bit in an earlier post. It’s been about a month since I finished and I still have to review around 170 per day average on my SRS.
However I disagree, as long as you have the time for them you -can- immidiately gain benefit from sentences (although I already have a bit of japanese experience), and in fact the sentences will further reinforce your memorization of those kanji you encounter (especially if you’re using katz’ reading-to-writing method he mentioned recently, which I honestly really am fond of and recommend to everyone).
Of course, I would not recommend anyone trying to go through it as fast as I did unless they have full free time just about. My last few days were ridiculous, as well as the following days of reviewing after I finished (it was at -least- 400+ kanji per day typically, not including the new kanji entered).
My point is that you can indeed reap rewards, so long as you continue your kanji reviews every single day and have time for sentences well. Once you get to 3007 you really won’t often encounter any new kanji anymore (as we speak I’m at 3022, recently added 誅, ‘death sentence/penalty’, for the word 天誅[てんちゅう] I encountered, “divine punishment”), so more than anything else the kanji review time will continue to decrease as there are few that ever need to be entered at that point, giving you more and more time for your sentences.
Time is the biggest issue, the more you have the more you can get done, but we have college, jobs, friends, family.. don’t cut out time of the important things in life. Even if you can only do 20 per day they’ll eventually be complete at some point along the road. I personally live alone right now and don’t really have any family anymore so I just got lucky.
The task is truly never ‘finished’ though, you don’t just put down the SRS and say “I’m complete!”, you really should continue to use it pretty much for the rest of your life.
@ Roger
I think that is a valid question. If we look at how kids acquire a language, they certainly aren’t watching the same show, listening to the same audio or reading the same sentences over and over again. I recently started entering sentences into my SRS and yes, it is a bit slow going. I have to force myself to not do the math in my head in terms of how long it will take to get to 10,000 sentences at my current pace. So what are the benefits to using a SRS? Here’s my take on it:
1. It provides an outlet for writing/reading. For me personally, if I were not using an SRS, I think I would fall heavily toward just watching and listening. So while I’m sure my listening comprehension would improve, I would bet that my writing/reading would not be at a native level after a year and a half to two years.
2. An SRS allows you input/review sentences that have personal meaning to you. I think this is probably the most important aspect of putting in the sentences yourself. My favorite show is ダウンタウンのガキの使いやあらへんで!, and most of my sentences come directly from that. Luckily on this show they often type out what they are saying at the bottom of the screen which helps a lot. I’ve discovered that because I’m putting in sentences that I find interesting or funny, my recollection is usually 100%.
3. An SRS will reinforce newly acquired vocabulary frequently leading to a higher retention rate. This point is dependent upon how diligent a reader the learner is. If one reads constantly, they may run into new examples of the same vocabulary at about the same frequency, but if not, then the new vocabulary might not pop up again for a long time, allowing the words to slip from memory.
Still, all that being said, in the long run I wouldn’t think there would be too much difference in using an SRS or not IF – and that’s a big if – the learner were diligent enough to do the same amount of writing and reading on their own.
@Zack
The way you did it is certainly interesting. I won’t try and argue which method works better. It seems that the overall time spent learning and reviewing would kind of even out though don’t you think? I mean essentially instead of learning and reviewing in little chunks, you did all of the learning in one chunk, followed by massive reviewing. I would think that the reviewing of 3000 kanji to the point where you could effortlessly recall each one would take at least a couple months. But your way may indeed be faster and more efficient for someone who can devote all their time to it as you did.
In my earlier post, I didn’t intend to discredit what you did in any way and it certainly is a feat worth bragging about. I know I felt like bragging and I’ve only done the first book!
Rob – Actually maybe I’m misreading you, but I reviewed while learning.
If you want to know exactly what I did, I’d review the days kanji, then go through the book and thoroughly make mnemonics for the next 100, then enter them in on the SRS (although in this case I already formatted and imported all of them before-hand so it’d speed things up and all I’d have to do was just take the next 100 out of my new material pile). Then all the days failed kanji and the new kanji would be in the final drill (supermemo, where you repeat through just learned/forgotten material) and I’d repeat them continually until they were solid on the brain for the day.
It was just time consuming more than anything, near the end at around 2500+ it would take all my free time for the day, but it really was successful otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I also had to come up with a ways to remember all the weird species/types of plants/animals/stones I’ve never heard of in RTK3 (usually I made mnemonics playing on the weird names), and had to make a way to distinguish kanji with similar meaning (usually with hints in the question box that don’t give away the kanji but hint at which one it is). I think I learned at least 10-20 new english words every single day while I was learning new kanji. But I’m ramlbing.
It will indeed take quite some time before they’re more solid in the brain, but like I said it’s something one continues on regardless. Down to reviewing 170ish per day, and I’m forgetting less and less of them each day, and not really even thinking of the stories anymore when I write them. Doing sentences also helps reinforce them, like I said.. you get an immidiate benefit for both the sentences and kanji when you start doing sentences. It’s like you see the world unmasked. It’s really pretty cool, honestly.
I’m not saying what I did works better, I really didn’t do anything different, I just spent more time on it and got through it quicker. Even I don’t really recommend anyone doing it this quick unless they -really- have the time needed to dedicate themselves to it. I was just lucky to have the free time. It was an instense kanji bootcamp for a streight month where I ate and breathed kanji, complete with kanji breakfast cereal every morning.
awesome post yet again. it never occurred to me to use an SRS in schoolwork. great idea
Feynman (very famous physicist) after being on the board for choosing textbooks for schools:
www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm