Why I'm starting over.

We all make mistakes, right?  Otherwise we wouldn't be human.  Well, I made mistakes in my Kanji learning and think it would be best to learn from those mistakes and start over, from scratch.

As I continued learning new Kanji every day and reviewing at 100 cards/day, I slowly came to the realization that I was doing it all WRONG.

Setting a cap on my reviews pushed back important cards that I may have forgotten already, until another day, and I needed to review them NOW.

So, I have decided to start over entirely, using a new deck that I picked up from the Shared Decks in Anki.  I will be setting the review cap to 9999, allowing every review card to be pushed to me when Anki says I should be reviewing it.

My plan: 

50 new Kanji/day
ALL OF THE REVIEWS/day

Goal: Finish by the end of July, 2014.

Its mentally difficult to start over, but the good news is that I've studied nearly 700 Kanji, I just didn't learn correctly to maintain retention.

I have already done the first 100 in the deck, which took only 24 minutes or so, so the first few hundred should go quickly.  I just want to make sure that I keep up on my reviews and push those cards to mature as quickly as possible so that I don't have to see them for a while.

I am hopeful that this will work out in my favor.

2000 Kanji in 38 days!  Let the countdown begin!

The early stages.

I am finding that, as I start the early stages of my self-study my hunger for the language is growing ever so slightly. I WANT to do more Kanji. I WANT to start doing sentence reps. I WANT to speed up the process and get to the really fun stuff, like: watching Japanese television, reading Japanese books, and listening to Japanese music, all with some degree of understanding of the language.

However, I know that baby steps are required for things like this.

I did decide to start doing sentences. Mostly because I wasn't spending enough active time engaging with Japanese, but also to speed up the process. I figured that if I run across a kanji that I don't know in the sentences,  then I can learn it there and when I see it in the Kanji lesson, I will already have it mastered. "Two birds with one stone" as they say.