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Should you do Multiple Japanese Decks Simultaneously? — 33 Comments

  1. I initially did scenario 1 with RTK. This was really tough and I am glad I managed to stick with it, because the burn out hit me very quickly, even though Japanese was still new and shinny. In the end I was so burned out when I finished that I didn’t do reviews for the deck and essentially lost most of it over the next 2-3 months. I would definitely not recommend scenario 1 to anyone.

    I then went through Jalup 5000 over the next year while essentially having no proper Kanji support as I wasn’t maintaining my Kanji deck. This is possible, but also very frustrating as it is really difficult to tell Kanji apart without dedicated study. No damage done, but I think I could have learned my decks faster if I had had Kanji to support me.

    For the past year I have been relearning kanji. I initially used Kanji Kingdom, but decided that I was too far past the J-E stage and have instead chosen to study it on my own using a self engineered J-J kanji system. This is definitely the sweet spot for me, as I now have the kanji knowledge necessary to better see the connections between vocabulary and a lot of readings and meanings of words are now obvious the first time I see them.

    tl;dr: I have essentially tried all 3 scenarios and doing kanji and vocabulary at the same time worked best for me.

    • Yeah, I think that was a good idea to try to figure out a way to relearn the kanji J-J, since you were so far into your studying already. You might have to share that self-engineered system sometime!

  2. That Topic is something I spend alot of time thinking through and through.
    And I came to the same solution of studying both at the same time.

    While I love Kanji, learning them is just a big hurdle for me.
    Kanji Kingdom and RTK make it easier and quite enjoyable, but Kanji-Flashcards just don’t ‘flow’ when reviewing and that drains my motivation quickly.

    But boy do they help if you actually know them, when learning sentences cards. For me it feels like meeting a familiar face in an unknown place. They are a great memory aid, and just make it more enjoyable.

    So in the End I’m doing both, using Kanji Kingdom, primitves from RTK and Jalup Beginner, even though the Kanji are a bit behind on my schedule.

    What also helps is that Kanji Kingdom is sorted by strokes, so when I encounter a unseen Kanji I can estimate when I’ll meet it in my Kanji studies and look forward to it.

    • It’s a topic a lot of people spend time on as it makes a major difference long term, so people don’t want to mess it up early on.

      It sounds like you found a nice combination using KK, RTK, and JB.

  3. I also tried different combinations of these scenarios, with varying success (and failure). I wouldn’t recommend going for all the Kanji first before learning actual vocabulary and grammar – I tried this and just as described in the article I felt it was too frustrating and really burnt me out. You simply do not see any purposeful progress in your learning – even though you kind of know that you ARE doing something. This frustration even caused me to quit Japanese entirely for several months.

    Funnily I ended up with the same conclusion that is proposed in the article, I currently combine Jalup Beginner (about 750 Cards in from my first learning attempt) with a deck from the Kodansha Kanji learner’s course (about 150 cards in).
    With a pace of 10 new cards form each deck per day, I just do fine and feel that I’m maintaining a good balance between learning frustration and feeling good for making progress. Also, the Kanji introduced in Jalup Beginner nicely match with those in the Kodansha course, so there are some satisfying synthesis effects :)

    Nice article, keep up the great work with this site! :)

    • The burnout rate is so high when someone tries it alone. Good combo with the JB and the Kondasha kanji course. I didn’t know they matched up so well.

  4. I agree with the article. While technically more efficient, the percentage of people who can actually learn all 2000 Kanji first without burnout, is probably pretty small. If you can do it, I think it’s wonderful and you did a good job. If you can’t do it, all that matters is that you pick yourself up and try something else. The real goal in this journey, is not quitting.

  5. My experience with the “only Kanji” road has not been successful at all. I did RTK cold turkey for 2 to 3 months and nothing else and severely burned out. I never did any reviews after that and ended up resetting the deck. It took 8 months to get back into Japanese.

    But as I’m stubborn, I did it again! This time I incorporated a little Japanese, but creating my own Anki cards took forever, so I didn’t add cards consistently, and ended up doing RTK most of the time. I burned out again after 2 months, and stopped for 8 more months.

    For my third attempt I decided to change things up. I reset everything again and I bought Jalup decks and did RTK starting from the end, so every day kanji were getting easier. Having pre-made decks has been a life-saver for me, or at least a “japanese-saver”. It took all the decision making out of the equation, and I had a clear path to follow.

    Thank you Adam for that.

    I’ve just celebrated my one-year Anki anniversary. I finished Jalup up to Expert 5 and everything went pretty smoothly.

    There are still days I’m fed up with Anki, but i know that even if i miss a day, I’ll get back to it. I’m not worried anymore about quitting Japanese.

    So I definitely agree that doing both at the same time was the key, at least for me.

    • Congrats on your one year Ankiversary :P

      And that’s a big comeback after 2 long stops. You’re doing great now.

  6. I largely did RTK and Jalup Beginner/Intermediate at the same time, but almost never on the same day/week/sometimes month. When I felt my kanji skills were lacking, I’d focus on kanji. When they felt sufficient I would focus on sentences.

    • That’s an interesting take on it. So rather than do one then the next, you would do a little of one for a while, and then switch to the other, and then back depending on your feeling of necessity. I like it.

  7. I did all of RTK before I even started Jalup Beginner, but there are a few reasons I believe for why I was successful.

    1. It wasn’t my first time trying to learn Japanese, so I already had some knowledge (about level 8), including kanji a typical student studying it in university would know. Even though I had forgotten a lot, just having been exposed to year 1 and year 2 university Japanese before probably helped me avoid nagging feelings to hurry up and start sentences.

    2. Because of 1, I understood very deeply just how important it is to know the kanji (and how big the wall is), as I had already tried learning without it. When I think about it, I was in a similar situation as James Heisig himself; that realization is why he wrote RTK in the first place.

    3. I couldn’t afford the Jalup decks yet, so I was doing kanji while I waited to get the money for them.

    4. Every few chapters, I looked at pages written in Japanese (usually song lyrics) to see how many kanji I recognized, and every time I knew a few more. It was very motivating.

    In my situation, RTK first was my best chance at success, but I think at any other time I probably wouldn’t have made it through. Even then I occasionally had to make myself do new cards, though I enjoyed it most days.

    • Number 4 is a great tip for those doing kanji first, as it makes you feel like you actually see some progress, even if you can’t “use” it yet.

      And thanks for sharing your story of how you managed to be successful with the scenario 1 route.

    • I also did all of RTK before JALUP beginner, and succeeded because of point 4. In my case, I was already in Japan and could measure my success by reading signs around me. Gradually, I recognized all the kanji and understood the majority of signage around me.

      If you reach that point, without speaking any significant Japanese, you can follow sign instructions, choose vegetarian options on a menu and capitalize on advertised discounts. It really creates a lot of opportunities!

      There is great value in being familiar with “all the kanji”. But hooboy did it take time and dedication (to be fair, still does). To anyone going through RTK right now, I strongly recommend point 4.

  8. I think that learning all the Kanji before starting sentences is not going to motivate most people. Japanese people spend years learning all the kanji, so it should not be necessary to know all of them first to read! I whole heartedly agree with this advice.

    That said, I think it is a good idea to go into the kanji deck for at least a few weeks before starting sentences, because you run into kanji very quickly. I found it was very discouraging and frustrating when I didn’t have enough kanji practice under your belt first. In earlier attempts at sentence-building (prior to finding Jalup), I had far too many unstudied kanji, and not enough experience to recognize them when they popped up. Therefore, it took me probably five times as long to do the sentence practice as it does now. Knowning the kanji in the sentence first takes the veil of fog off of the meaning.

    I’m currently about 1200 kanji in, and have about 700 sentences from the Beginner deck. I add four new kanji a day and that is about the critical mass for me now (since I do not want to spend more than 30-40 minutes practicing kanji per day). If I run into a new kanji in my sentence deck, I immediately thrust that one to the front of my learn pile to make sure it is reinforced. Though the “order by stroke count” method sounds wonderful, once you are a few hundred kanji in, I don’t think you need to follow order that strictly (since most kanji are phono-sematic compounds of simpler elements).

    Don’t underestimate how much kanji can help you, though, if you are wandering around Japan. Figuring out how the toaster oven and toilets work is much easier if you know the kanji. It makes life far more 嬉しい. ;)

    • Interesting approach. So go in with a kanji headstart, and then go simultaneously.

      And yes, I agree that if you live in Japan, just having kanji skills without the actual Japanese skills to go along with it can still make life easier.

  9. I think I have discovered a Jalup “hack” for getting through Kanji Kingdom as fast as possible with minimal reviews. The catch is that you have to sacrifice drawing/imagining the Kanji. Granted you are willing to only memorize the English meanings of the Kanji the following hack might be helpful to you:

    Jalup NEXT hack:

    As you proceed through learning the cards, read each sentence out loud as you normally would, except, after reading the card pay attention to whether or not the card is the last card in the series. 乙一. In this series, 一 would be the last card in the series.

    1. If the card is NOT the last card in the series, “freeze” the card.
    2. If the card IS the last card in the series, “add” it to your reviews.

    Once you are finished adding the cards for the day, immediately review them.

    The result is that you only have to review approximately 1/3 of the Kanji Kingdom cards, YET, you review ALL of the Kanji. Pretty efficient huh? I’m using this technique now to learn 100 kanji a day. The beautiful thing about Next is that it allows you to immediately review a forgotten Kanji, so did you forget a Kanji? Just click on it, review it, and then click the red x. Easy!

    If learning the kanji was this easy when I first started, I think I would have been able to tolerate RTK before starting other decks. Perhaps others might try this hack and let me know how it feels to you. Maybe some people need to draw the kanji to be able to parse out the kanji in order to identify it with its english meaning, but others might not and you might just be one of those others.

  10. As a quick comment on this, I run a language club for middle schoolers that want to learn Japanese. I’m an English Language Arts teacher, so I’m learning what works for my kids by trial and error and improve a little each year.

    This year, the kids had to “unlock” each next step. Finish hiragana in Memrise, then you unlock kanji. Finish 10 levels of kanji, then you unlock some vocabulary sentences.

    They absolutely hated it because there often wasn’t enough crossover to make things relevant. They learned hiragana just to not use it for RTK, then learned kanji that wouldn’t show up in their sentences. A very dedicated child was able to make it, but he’s also gifted in that he can just plow through things with a long term mindset, which, turns out, is rare in 12 year olds.

    Next year I’m having the kids work towards some of the simplest stories in the graded readers book series. I’m going to make them build through the hiragana, then only kanji and vocab that show up in the story, then drill through that story.

    All that to say many students I’ve seen over the past three years do best when they can actually use these interlocking parts of a language when they actually show up together.

    • You’re awesome for doing this by the way. I’ve thought about doing something similar for the youth manga/anime club at my local library but never had the guts to do it (or honestly the commitment, time-wise). You’ve given me some good ideas here.

      You might benefit from having some manga lying around for students to poke through that’s easy (slice of life or popular series kids would know) and age-appropriate. A small variety helps. I got my kana reading quickly up to speed mostly because I just read furigana in Yotsuba. I didn’t understand almost anything but it was really motivational and inspired me on. Same vein as what Adam and you mention – let students work towards reading and give them reasons to use what they’re studying.

      And again, you’re super awesome. Hope I can do something similar with kids someday.

      • I actually do leave Yotsubato laying around, they have access to that and the first few volumes of Naruto (just due to interest).

  11. I tried to do rtk first before sentences, and even though I already had some japanese vocab/grammar knowledge, with doing kanji I didn’t feel like I was improving and couldn’t keep it up. Also, rtk just didn’t stick in my head. Never reading the kanji and only producing them meant I struggled to recognise them (a problem kk has solved for me neatly).

    I also found I already knew many of the kanji in the first 500 jb cards due to how common they were – stuff like 何, 時, 日本人, 食, etc I’d picked up through other learning methods I tried, so I was able to start jb without doing any kanji at all and then, feeling really motivated by how easily the kanji were sticking in my head, I decided to re-attempt an actual kanji learning method.

    I think the trouble is I’m just not a visual learner. I don’t remember what things look like, and images don’t stick in my head, but kk’s clever and funny sentences do.

    It’s worth noting that anki only works for me if I encounter the stuff I learned “in the wild” at least a time or 2, so that’s another reason why rtk first didn’t work – I wasn’t really able to read anything. Now I can read to reinforce the kanji I’m learning in both kk and jb which makes all the difference I think. If you can’t do immersion for however long takes to do rtk that’s very frustrating.

    • Encountering “in the wild” is as important or even more important, which is why people shouldn’t think they must sacrifice immersion for Anki.

  12. I did Jalup beginner and Kanji Kingdom at the same time. The Kanji can be very painful and time consuming but in the end it really pays off to know them. I’m almost done with the intermediate deck right now. Because of the hard work spent on the Kanji, new words are a lot easier to learn and remember and my reading ability is increasing exponentially.

    Now I’m just hoping that one day my conversational and listening skills will catch up!

  13. I have to agree with your way of doing both at the same time. I’m the prime example of doing RTK 1 only is so failure prone. I tried this back in the day at the recommendation of AJATT. In your head it seems like it is cake, but geez it is HARD! Once you hit Kanji #500, things really start to drag. It ended up me rushing through it, and nothing stuck AT ALL besides those first few hundred which I actually gave the needed time to. So far I’ve started over and been doing both at the same time. The result? Fun. So, IMO doing them both at the same time is the best!

    • That’s great on your restart doing them together has made a difference. I hope this time takes you all the way to the end.

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