Showing posts with label heisig. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heisig. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

1889 Kanji Characters

It's been slow going for a while now but I'm 153 away from finishing the book. I would have said that's just a few weeks away but it seems that every week now something comes up and I end up add only 10 or so kanji. The current chapter is a mixed bag of kanji that don't really fit into the scheme at all and is supposedly the most difficult chapter. I hope I can finish the whole thing before December. I'd like to be able to say I cracked it in less than a year. At this point there is no way I'm giving up!

Some stats - I've done 22451 repetitions, that means I've written that many kanji. So on average I've written each one about 12 times which is not so bad really. I have an 88.2% success rate on "mature cards" which is also OK but I find recently that cards from 6 months ago are coming up and I'm flummoxed. I think Anki is a bit too aggressive in increasing the interval between repetitions. I could tune that but at this point it's mostly working and I don't want to screw with it. I've been doing this for for 319 days. On 160 of them I added new kanji, on 159 of them I added no new kanji.

Finally a graph:

Sunday, June 14, 2009

1362 Kanji Characters

1362 might not sound like significant number but that is 2/3 of the way through the 2042 characters of Remembering the Kanji. It has become a bit of a slow slog but the progress is fairly steady. I thought I'd get more done while Midori and the kids were away but so far I haven't done anything amazing. In fact 54 in the last 7 days is less than 10 per day - I was occasionally able to beat that with the family around. It's way off the pace from my first 4 weeks but I had 2 weeks of rest before that and I was excited and motivated by the discovery of a sure-fire method of learning the kanji.

It's nice having a fixed goal of 2042. This covers the standard high school kanji and some extras that are too useful to leave out or necessary for the method. It also allows me to set motivational targets. Without a fixed goal, I could set targets of doubling my kanji count and meet the pretty easily to being with. Going from 128 to 256 in about a week was possible. After that, doubling gets harder and harder and doubling 600 to 1200 took a very long time because of lack of free time. But with a fixed target, now I'm on the down slope. The next target is 3/4 (1531), then 4/5 (1633) and so on.

The first hint of trouble begins when I finish number 2002. That's when I go across the 49/50 mark. The trouble is that I also cross the 50/51 mark which makes kanji number 2002 twice as exciting, that might not seem like trouble but more is to come. Kanji 2003 only crosses 51/62 and Kanji 2009 only crosses the 60/61 mark but from there on in every kanji crosses at least 2 marks. Kanji 2041 crosses 1020 marks! All the way from 1020/1021 to 2040/2041. But the real problem is the last kanji. When I complete that I will cross an infinite number of motivational markers, presumably resulting in infinite excitement, that can't be a good thing.

To avoid danger to myself, my family and small animals near by I have already ordered the follow on volume which covers a further 1000 useful but less common kanji. I will deploy that as soon as I feel the excitement is getting too much. Mr Heisig sure is a devious man.