Remember that the point of putting sentences in your SRS is to be able to do the four things that Khatz said in the post: 1) be able to say it aloud 2) know the meaning of all the words in that sentence 3) know the overall meaning of the sentence and 4) be able to write it down yourself.

The answer or “back” part will have the aids that you will need to “decode” your sentence. It would of course be better if it’s in kana or kanji. It really will depend on you what you will put on the answer part, whichever will really help you understand what the sentence is trying to say.

I have my own question for Khatz and the other readers:

What is your opinion on the “proper way of writing kanji”? I.e. stroke order and stuff. A lot of books and guides insist that all kanji should be written in a specific order. I’ve searched and this site does not address this.

Thank you and keep up the good work!

QUESTION (FRONT):

これは例文です。

ANSWER (BACK):

これ　は（わ）　れい・ぶん　です。
This [as for] example-sentence is. (PL3)
*This is an example sentence.

——————————-

Do you mean I enter a sentence I want to know in Japanese mostly using Kanji and then answer it in Hirigana???

But whatever I doubt anyone will answer seeing how this was posted years ago..

You’ve probably figured out an answer to your question, but here’s what I do with new words: add more sentences with that word. A good place to go is http://www.jisho.org/ and put in your word, and then search for sentences with that word in it (I wouldn’t rely on the site too much because some of the sentences/translations are off).

As for not memorizing, just don’t try to memorize the sentence so that you can recall it without the SRS. Of course, you’ll be memorizing the kanji, the readings, “the sentence” if you will, but only with the SRS. You don’t need to pull sentences out of your head while walking around town, just to make sure you’ve memorized them. Like Khatz said, it’s too failure prone and you might get the sentence wrong.

Hope that helps!

When I add my sentences into my SRS, what do I do with the words that are new to me? Do I make separate flash cards with just a single word, or do I try to learn entire phrases? I feel like I have to keep failing a card over and over because I can’t remember the pronunciation of just one word….What should I do?

One last thing: Khatz (or anybody): when you say “Don’t memorize the sentences” what precisely do you mean? Are you saying just don’t use rote memory? Should I just read it (at first with the help of furigana), then if I can’t pass the four checks, fail the card, and repeat until I get it? Thanks everybody!

now I’ve decided to enter my post here. Of course this site is really briliant. However, I think I got stucked in my learning prozess. I have about 500 entries in my SRS just to realize that I only can answer just a few ones of them and to forget almost all the pronouncation and things… This is really frustrating-,.-
I bought RTK2 and its… like… its okay, but not the really good thing you know?
Somehow I’ve got the feeling to forget all the kanji meanings and only can say a hand of these sentences. I have been in Japan for two weeks and all the others taking classes were able to speak japanese much better than me.
I miss a bit my payoff … Or am I too impatient?
During this times i miss someone to chat with, who has gone through the same problems. This would be so nice maybe…. However
Thank your for answers

Alex

Thanks much!

Yes, it’s generally considered by most people that it was a bad idea. You don’t want to complicate the process by adding a whole new element to it. If you learn all the on-yomi, soon you’ll be relying on reading the sounds only, and not being able to simply recognise words. In short, you could spend months learning RTK2, which is far harder than RTK1, and in the long run, it may not help you at all.

Read Heisig’s “Remember the Kanji”

Add the individual symbols to your SRS until you remember them all

Read “Remember the Kana”

Add the individual symbols to your SRS until you remember them all

And then string sentences together in SRS, that you have obtained from the internet, for example, using the furigana to find out the pronouncination/phoenetics and add that to the answer, along with the meaning of the sentence?

(Sorry im extremely new to this, and the idea of beginning to learn Kanji bewilders me at the moment)

Thanks in advance!

Mrs. Khatzumoto here. Khatz covers how you learn to pronounce the kanji in his FAQs section. The fourth question down reads:

“Remembering the Kanji Volume 1 (RTK/RTK1) does not cover kanji readings. How will I learn pronunciations of kanji in Japanese?
You learn kanji readings on a sentence-by-sentence basis. When you input a sentence into your SRS, part of the input process will be for you to find out the readings for its kanji. Those readings will be part of the “answer” section on an item in your SRS. Go here to read Heisig himself explain the system.”

In the comments section of this article he answers a similar question with a more detailed answer:

“>how do you manage to memorize the kanji readings and stuff?
1. Learn the reading of each kanji as it used in the sentence. So, rather than learn all the readings of a given kanji, learn the one reading that is being used *in this case*–in the sentence at hand.
2. Add that kanji reading to the “answer” section of the SRS.
Note:
(i) A sentence has a kind of rhythm to it that will actually make the reading quite easy to remember, generally speaking. Certainly, it will be easier to remember than an isolated kanji reading.
(ii) Also, be sure to use SHORT sentences to begin with, don’t overwhelm yourself. Something like 「テレビを見る。」 or 「夕食の支度をする。」 or 「慌てて登校する。」　is a good length.
(iii) Use sentences that have multiple parts of speech. What I mean is, you want nouns, verbs and adverbs/adjectives all in there.”

So, to sum up:

1. Don’t worry about the readings when you are still learning the kanji.
2. After you’ve learned the kanji, then you learn the kana (hiragana+katakana). These are your pronunciation guide.
3. When you are ready to start picking out sentences from your immersion environment (listening, books, etc.), you will naturally and gradually learn the readings of kanji one by one in the context of individual sentences you enter into your SRS (start really simple!). At this point, dictionaries with sentences, beginner books and books with furigana (tiny hiragana printed over or beside kanji) are your best friend. (Some manga–especially those written for Japanese children–put furigana on all the kanji. Like Sam says, it’s frustrating when you don’t know if a book from an online store has furigana…Sorry we don’t have reviews of furigana books on this site yet–will put that on the to-do list. Until then, here’s a link to an article Khatz wrote on how you can automatically put furigana on any Japanese website: “Kanji Reading Aids”)

Here is an example of how to learn pronunciation of kanji in the context of a sentence when you enter it into an SRS:

1) Put the sentence with kanji in the question of your SRS: 行こうよ！
2) Using hiragana, indicate the pronunciation of the kanji in the answer: いこうよ！ (or 行こう＝いこう, etc.）

The fact that each kanji has multiple readings can sound intimidating when you think of it all at once, but it’s easy when you take it sentence by sentence. Like Khatz says, you just get used to it. Kind of like how English speakers get used to how “ough” in words like “dough” is pronounced like “ow” in “snow”, but the “ough” in “cough” sound like “off”, and the “ough” in “rough” sounds like the “uff” in “cuff”. When you’re still learning the alphabet, if you worry about all the diffent ways you can pronounce the vowels, you might get a heart attack. You start out with something easy and fun like “The Cat in the Hat” and before you know it you’re sounding out the highly-processed ingredients on your cereal box and asking your mom what “dextrose” and “trisodium phosphate” are. Likewise, when learning Japanese pronunciation sentence by sentence, your knowledge gradually builds and connects until you develop a ’sense’ or ‘feel’ for how a kanji is probably read (even if you’re not sure). It’s a process that you go through a step at a time.

Also, I remember reading one of khatzumoto’s posts, but I’m having a hard time finding it now. Something to do with learning how to read kanji. I forget, am I supposed (if i were to follow this particular method) to complete RTK before attempting to (learn how to) read japanese characters? How and when am I supposed to assign a reading to the characters?

Glad if anyone can answer some of my questions, and also, in the question regarding the readings, pointing me to the relevant posts would be helpfull.

This is a couple months late, so hopefully you’ve already had your q answered. I have a min before bed so ill cover this one incase anyone else reading through has a similar query.

two points will pretty much answer your question:
1. your SRS reps will become further and further apart as you get them correct, so you can keep adding cards at a good pace and maintain a similar “per day” workload while you keep learning. eventually cards become once a year or two years or more after so many reps.

2. 10k sentences is ALOT of info. Think about it for a min, by the time you have 10k sentances in your deck you can probably pick up any comic-book, magazine, even newspaper or text and have a pretty dambed good idea whats going on. If not perfect comprehension. At this point the SRS becomes obsolete. Rather than spend that 2 hours a day on your SRS, you can spend an hour or two reading a comic book or browsing japanese stuff on amazon or whatever. if you run into something you don’t know, then you might throw it into your SRS so you can fill gaps in your knowledge further. You’ll be doing that with a monolingual dictionary – so there’s more reading practice. And the process goes on. (I picture this as a smooth gradual process, its not like the plan is: do 10k sentances then -> read comic book)

My strategy is this (and I make no point of saying its the “right” way to do it), If im at home with some free time i’ll put on some music or tv or a movie or something and play around on my SRS. If I finish all my reps and still have free time I’ll add some items that I want to know. I avoid trying to “grind out” 2 hours of straight SRSing. Im doing it all the time when life isnt getting in the way. If I cant cope with the reps ill tweak the level of SRS imput.

How many of you have over 20,000 cards? How would (or do) you deal with using an SRS to learn, say Chinese, Japanese AND Korean if you wanted to do the “10,000 sentence” method for each? Wouldn’t the load eventually just become unbearable and take too long? Is there a limit or shortcoming to spaced repetition in this respect?

I’d appreciate any answers on this. I’m considering using Anki for Korean, but I intend to learn Chinese as well. The thought of spending several hours a day in the future doing SRS reps is rather frightening…