The nihingoshark article blew my mind. Exaggerating aside, the fact that you can just do the reviews or learn just a few cards instead of your normal x cards a day is something I never thought about. It really made it easy to have a mindset where you can just do reviews on a bad day but still know that you won't get killed by a review avalanche. That's what stopped my previous attempts. Thinking that you have to do everything in one go or you have to learn exactly x cards today is stressful and makes you not want to open anki at all on a bad day. Thank you for sharing this.
You are very welcome and I'm glad it helped! Yes, it's important that you are enjoying the journey too. If your way of studying is killing your motivation to learn Japanese, you should sit back, understand why, and try to solve that. I took two and a half years to complete RTK, I was quite slow in comparison to other folks, but the important thing is that I completed it. Slow and steady wins the race. Good luck! 頑張って！
Been attempting that book for so many years. This is my 4th attempt, I'm sure I'll finish it this time. Hopefully. I do have a question, how do you proceed from there once you finish rtk?
@@BYMfreak You should be immersing as much as humanly possible in japanese. Listening, reading, watching, etc. That is the backbone of progress. After RTK, you need to integrate "sentence mining" into anki, which is the process of finding sentence in the target language that have just a small piece of information you do not know. You study these sentences (japanese sentence on front, word with meaning on the back) while simultaneously immersing in japanese every physical moment you can. The goal is to produce a deck of at least 10,000 self-made, self-found sentences from content you have engaged with directly. Once you have reached a decent level with bilingual sentence mining (roughly 1000-2000 cards in) you should switch to monolingual sentence cards. This means that you use japanese definitions on the back of the card and rely as little as humanly possible on your native language (of course there is a transition period where english/japanese defintion hybrids are acceptable, but this is only temporary) You should be aiming for about 15-20 bilingual cards a day until you switch to monolingual, at which point you should be making around 10-15 cards a day. I can't stress how important the immersion is during this whole process. It forms the bedrock of your language acquisition. Every waking moment you possibly can, you should have japanese entering your ears and eyes. I switched to monolingual sentences around a month ago and I'm slowly building my way up to my 10,000 card goal, all the while immersing in japanese. It's a slow and ambiguous process, but the end result are proven (search Matt vs Japan, Britt vs Japan, and Khatzumoto to see evidence). On a side note, I found my retention for RTK drop off quite significantly after a lot of my cards reached a certain interval, so I have since restarted it at a slower pase of about 7 cards a day. By all means you should do RTK to start, but don't overload yourself with too much at once. go to Matt vs Japan's youtube channel and watch his stuff
@@BYMfreak Once you finish RTK you can proceed in many different ways. You are now at a similar level as a Chinese person learning Japanese: you know the "alphabet" of the language, so to say, so it's time to start putting all of that to use! The total immersion that @Artymus Prime suggests is probably the most effective way to get your Japanese going, ideally you would move to Japan and have the language all around you. That's obviously not always feasible. Just going through textbooks like Genki or Tae Kim's Guide and doing exercises is also a valid way to proceed. Some people attempt to do RTK2, although I believe you get the most out of that book once you already have a good base of Japanese (in contrast to RTK1 which can be very effective even if you have little or no knowledge of Japanese). You could also go to class, although 20% of the time will probably be used to learn Kanji and that will be a waste of time for you, since you already did that. In any case, total immersion should be a goal for you sometime in the future.
Thank you both for putting extra effort into answering my question. These things are all far ahead of me. Focusing on rtk for now, I've tried juggling rtk and tae kim on one of my attempts and didn't go well for me. At least I have a much clearer goal now.
Good stuff. I also recommend to set your max interval in Anki to 6 months. As cards that are set too far into the future wont come up again for a long time and your likely to forget them.
That's actually very good advice! I did just that. I don't mind seeing 四 or目 come up once every 6 months if that also means I will review other forgotten kanji more often. And once it's been several years after learning the kanji, you do indeed get a huge interval of several years, which is not that helpful. I would only recommend people to do this if they are not immersed in kanji, though. If you are in Japan, you are going to "review" all kanji frequently anyway, so don't bother changing the interval then. Thanks for the tip!
I agree that it's more effective, since the stories are adapted to you personally. However it's not more efficient, since you have to spend time coming up with good stories, and that's not always that easy. Seeing mnemonics from other people can inspire you to come up with tweaked stories that you (and probably only you) will remember better. That's the point.
Great video. This tri-force is very effective. I personally use physical flash cards for the kanji which is difficult to manage, but it's great because you can actually write out the kanji. I just wish there was an easy way to implement SRS for physical flash cards.
Glad to know you liked it! I would never have the patience nor dedication to have hundreds and thousands of physical flash cards. I know because I got tired after doing 50 physical flash cards! When I review in Anki, I always write the kanji that corresponds to the keyword, either with pen or paper, or tracing it with the finger on the palm of my hand. Good luck going forward!
physical flashcards are pbjectively worse than anki. The phone app of anki has a screen-draw function, so don't waste your time with proven less-efficient methods
You can use the occlusion add-on to transfer your physical flash cards to anki. Take a picture of your card and cover up the stuff you want to remember. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, search youtube for 'anki occlusion' and you'll find lots of different videos showcasing it.
Buy a small, portable dry-erase board that you can put in your bag or backpack. Buy some tiny dry-erase markers as well. When you are doing your Anki reviews, draw out each kanji on the dry-eraseboard as you do each card (to test your writing and memory). This way you don't have piles of paper and can also practice your writing.
I also use RTK and Kanji Koohii. However I can't use Anki properly because it honestly is to complicated for me. I just don't feel like watching several videos and tutorials on how to use it properly. It definitely needs a more user friendly update. Besides that Anki costs nearly 30 bucks..
Anki can be a bit daunting if you're not very tech savvy. However in my set-up guide video I go step by step to have it work for our purposes. But I understand that you might want to use a different SRS tool if Anki is too much. I dont' know how much more user-friendly they can make it, for me it's already very user-friendly and has the advantage of being very customizeable. Also Anki is free in any OS that is not an Apple OS if I remember correctly.
You've earned a subscriber. The video was useful especially the part of having to a shared stories on the free website of Koohii which is something i just learned from you, for Anki i used it but i didn't like it much, so i'm using memrise instead.
I'm glad this helped you. I believe Anki to be more flexible than Memrise, so I prefer it. However it's probably a matter of taste, and I'm sure Memrise can do a good job for the SRS part.
Koohii's SRS system has been refined recently and I believe it can do as good a job as Anki or Memrise now. Before it was really bad for mobile devices, but they fixed that some months ago. I personally still go with Anki because I use Anki for many other flashcard decks apart from the Heisig kanji deck (German and Latin in my case). Use whatever works best for you! Maybe it's worth it to try out all three systems and stick with the one you like the most!
I am using this method but with similar tools. RTK free PDF full file. Even though is 5th edition. Instead of Koohii I use Jisho, and instead of Anki I use Memrise.
That’s pretty cool. I have bought all three books of the remembering the kanji series. Not sure if it was that great of a choice to buy them all but surely I like the book 1 which I am using now and although many people complain about it, it works for me and I am happy lol. Anyways I use anki as well and the decks although I prefer the mobile versions which I use on my phone and tablet everywhere. I like your video. It’s very nice and I am sure it can help many people. Looking forward for more content. How’s your progress going?
I also have all three books, and they're a great reference. Book 1, 6th edition onwards is the really important book. I'm glad you liked the video and I wish you all the best in your study. I've been quite inactive in the channel lately, but I just produced a video and hope to produce some more in the not so far future.
GlosuuLang Oh! Thank you so much for your kind words. I also wish that you can achieve your goals with your studies and glad to know that you produced a new video and that more videos will come out at some point. Looking forward to watch them. I understand , sometimes life gets us way too busy and stuff. Have a wonderful night! 🙏🏻
The nihingoshark article blew my mind. Exaggerating aside, the fact that you can just do the reviews or learn just a few cards instead of your normal x cards a day is something I never thought about. It really made it easy to have a mindset where you can just do reviews on a bad day but still know that you won't get killed by a review avalanche. That's what stopped my previous attempts. Thinking that you have to do everything in one go or you have to learn exactly x cards today is stressful and makes you not want to open anki at all on a bad day. Thank you for sharing this.
You are very welcome and I'm glad it helped! Yes, it's important that you are enjoying the journey too. If your way of studying is killing your motivation to learn Japanese, you should sit back, understand why, and try to solve that. I took two and a half years to complete RTK, I was quite slow in comparison to other folks, but the important thing is that I completed it. Slow and steady wins the race. Good luck! 頑張って！
For someone who has completed RTK using anki, I can confirm it is an incredible method
Been attempting that book for so many years. This is my 4th attempt, I'm sure I'll finish it this time. Hopefully. I do have a question, how do you proceed from there once you finish rtk?
@@BYMfreak You should be immersing as much as humanly possible in japanese. Listening, reading, watching, etc. That is the backbone of progress. After RTK, you need to integrate "sentence mining" into anki, which is the process of finding sentence in the target language that have just a small piece of information you do not know. You study these sentences (japanese sentence on front, word with meaning on the back) while simultaneously immersing in japanese every physical moment you can. The goal is to produce a deck of at least 10,000 self-made, self-found sentences from content you have engaged with directly. Once you have reached a decent level with bilingual sentence mining (roughly 1000-2000 cards in) you should switch to monolingual sentence cards. This means that you use japanese definitions on the back of the card and rely as little as humanly possible on your native language (of course there is a transition period where english/japanese defintion hybrids are acceptable, but this is only temporary)
You should be aiming for about 15-20 bilingual cards a day until you switch to monolingual, at which point you should be making around 10-15 cards a day. I can't stress how important the immersion is during this whole process. It forms the bedrock of your language acquisition. Every waking moment you possibly can, you should have japanese entering your ears and eyes.
I switched to monolingual sentences around a month ago and I'm slowly building my way up to my 10,000 card goal, all the while immersing in japanese. It's a slow and ambiguous process, but the end result are proven (search Matt vs Japan, Britt vs Japan, and Khatzumoto to see evidence).
On a side note, I found my retention for RTK drop off quite significantly after a lot of my cards reached a certain interval, so I have since restarted it at a slower pase of about 7 cards a day. By all means you should do RTK to start, but don't overload yourself with too much at once.
go to Matt vs Japan's youtube channel and watch his stuff
@@BYMfreak Once you finish RTK you can proceed in many different ways. You are now at a similar level as a Chinese person learning Japanese: you know the "alphabet" of the language, so to say, so it's time to start putting all of that to use! The total immersion that @Artymus Prime suggests is probably the most effective way to get your Japanese going, ideally you would move to Japan and have the language all around you. That's obviously not always feasible. Just going through textbooks like Genki or Tae Kim's Guide and doing exercises is also a valid way to proceed. Some people attempt to do RTK2, although I believe you get the most out of that book once you already have a good base of Japanese (in contrast to RTK1 which can be very effective even if you have little or no knowledge of Japanese). You could also go to class, although 20% of the time will probably be used to learn Kanji and that will be a waste of time for you, since you already did that. In any case, total immersion should be a goal for you sometime in the future.
Thank you both for putting extra effort into answering my question. These things are all far ahead of me. Focusing on rtk for now, I've tried juggling rtk and tae kim on one of my attempts and didn't go well for me. At least I have a much clearer goal now.
Good stuff. I also recommend to set your max interval in Anki to 6 months. As cards that are set too far into the future wont come up again for a long time and your likely to forget them.
That's actually very good advice! I did just that. I don't mind seeing 四 or目 come up once every 6 months if that also means I will review other forgotten kanji more often. And once it's been several years after learning the kanji, you do indeed get a huge interval of several years, which is not that helpful. I would only recommend people to do this if they are not immersed in kanji, though. If you are in Japan, you are going to "review" all kanji frequently anyway, so don't bother changing the interval then. Thanks for the tip!
You don't need to do that. It shows you cards when you are more likely to forget them. If you add a Max interval it will be unbearable after some time
I think you should be making your own stories, thats a hundred times more effective
I agree that it's more effective, since the stories are adapted to you personally. However it's not more efficient, since you have to spend time coming up with good stories, and that's not always that easy. Seeing mnemonics from other people can inspire you to come up with tweaked stories that you (and probably only you) will remember better. That's the point.
Great video. This tri-force is very effective. I personally use physical flash cards for the kanji which is difficult to manage, but it's great because you can actually write out the kanji. I just wish there was an easy way to implement SRS for physical flash cards.
Glad to know you liked it! I would never have the patience nor dedication to have hundreds and thousands of physical flash cards. I know because I got tired after doing 50 physical flash cards! When I review in Anki, I always write the kanji that corresponds to the keyword, either with pen or paper, or tracing it with the finger on the palm of my hand. Good luck going forward!
GlosuuLang haha, thanks for the encouragement. I’ve got to around 450 now. I still have a few inches of space left on my desk.
physical flashcards are pbjectively worse than anki. The phone app of anki has a screen-draw function, so don't waste your time with proven less-efficient methods
You can use the occlusion add-on to transfer your physical flash cards to anki. Take a picture of your card and cover up the stuff you want to remember. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, search youtube for 'anki occlusion' and you'll find lots of different videos showcasing it.
Buy a small, portable dry-erase board that you can put in your bag or backpack. Buy some tiny dry-erase markers as well. When you are doing your Anki reviews, draw out each kanji on the dry-eraseboard as you do each card (to test your writing and memory). This way you don't have piles of paper and can also practice your writing.
I also use RTK and Kanji Koohii. However I can't use Anki properly because it honestly is to complicated for me. I just don't feel like watching several videos and tutorials on how to use it properly. It definitely needs a more user friendly update. Besides that Anki costs nearly 30 bucks..
Anki can be a bit daunting if you're not very tech savvy. However in my set-up guide video I go step by step to have it work for our purposes. But I understand that you might want to use a different SRS tool if Anki is too much. I dont' know how much more user-friendly they can make it, for me it's already very user-friendly and has the advantage of being very customizeable. Also Anki is free in any OS that is not an Apple OS if I remember correctly.
For me Anki is totally free
You've earned a subscriber. The video was useful especially the part of having to a shared stories on the free website of Koohii which is something i just learned from you, for Anki i used it but i didn't like it much, so i'm using memrise instead.
I'm glad this helped you. I believe Anki to be more flexible than Memrise, so I prefer it. However it's probably a matter of taste, and I'm sure Memrise can do a good job for the SRS part.
At a glance it seems Koohii has its own Flashcard SRS system, what are the main reasons one still needs Anki or Memrise?
Koohii's SRS system has been refined recently and I believe it can do as good a job as Anki or Memrise now. Before it was really bad for mobile devices, but they fixed that some months ago. I personally still go with Anki because I use Anki for many other flashcard decks apart from the Heisig kanji deck (German and Latin in my case). Use whatever works best for you! Maybe it's worth it to try out all three systems and stick with the one you like the most!
Great video
Glad you liked it!
I am using this method but with similar tools. RTK free PDF full file. Even though is 5th edition. Instead of Koohii I use Jisho, and instead of Anki I use Memrise.
Similar tools can also get the job done. Use what you like best!
keep up the good work . really useful thanks
Glad it helped! I'm hoping to produce some more content soon, my channel has been quite inactive recently.
That’s pretty cool. I have bought all three books of the remembering the kanji series. Not sure if it was that great of a choice to buy them all but surely I like the book 1 which I am using now and although many people complain about it, it works for me and I am happy lol. Anyways I use anki as well and the decks although I prefer the mobile versions which I use on my phone and tablet everywhere. I like your video. It’s very nice and I am sure it can help many people. Looking forward for more content. How’s your progress going?
I also have all three books, and they're a great reference. Book 1, 6th edition onwards is the really important book. I'm glad you liked the video and I wish you all the best in your study. I've been quite inactive in the channel lately, but I just produced a video and hope to produce some more in the not so far future.
GlosuuLang Oh! Thank you so much for your kind words. I also wish that you can achieve your goals with your studies and glad to know that you produced a new video and that more videos will come out at some point. Looking forward to watch them. I understand , sometimes life gets us way too busy and stuff. Have a wonderful night! 🙏🏻
Awesome, thanks!
You're welcome!
Very useful thank you so much!
Glad it helped!
I'm sorry but who actually reads a software manual? hahaha
I guess the same kind of people who make CZcams videos and learn Japanese. =P
Who doesn't love the Stories and Kanji that contain "crotch" in it.🤡