...confusion

...I seem to confuse 圍(1222, to surround) and 團(1471, Troupe)... Need to invent a special story to separate the two.

1500 characters, but...

RTH1

Day 69

Finished learning the new characters a couple of days ago, but with the amount of daily reps (more than 300) it's a bit difficult to say it's done. So, I'll wait for several days to get the number of cards per day at least under 100 and only then I'll consider the RTH1 finished.

Finally cleared the pile of reviews

RTH1

Day 37

So, finally cleared all the missed reviews and restarted learning the new characters. Currently approaching the 1000 character mark.

Fighting the backlog

RTH1

Day 28

On character 713. Yeah, not much progress. Between all these New Year celebrations, the work and the new Android cellphone I got, there was not much time left for doing the reps. Amazing, how fast the cards pile up in your SRS, several days ago I had about 550 cards to review. Slowly I'm fighting this pile and it's already below 300. Pretty soon the level should be back to bearable and I'll restart learning new characters.

Alarmed look on a cyclops' face

Another tendency in RTH that I'm not such a big fan of, is that Heisig does not like to introduce auxiliary characters/graphemes. Matthews, on the other hand, does it all the time, even when the auxiliary character will be used only once, not to mention more frequent graphic elements. While doing Matthews' "Learning Chinese Characters" it seemed funny, maybe even slightly irritating, but now, after I've been able to compare the different approaches, Matthews' seems better. It's usually easier to create a good story that combines only two elements, whereas RTH is chock-full of three- and four-element combinations. Also with Matthews' approach I've learned some rare characters "for free". (Also Matthews usually gives more etymologically correct keywords, but that's another story).

So... characters 環 and 還 (luckily I learned Canjie and can type them without knowing how they are pronounced!). Five elements each! Both of them (frames 677 and 678, ring and give back) contain the same combination (睘) that is also a part of some other characters, in addition to being a character itself. (Pretty rare character, of course, sorting characters by frequency will place it somewhere in 9000+ place). zhongwen.com lists it as "alarmed look" and it seems more or less consistent with other dictionaries. Still, it's a tad too abstract to use as is, I should find something more visual. Another look at the character: eye ... a line, could be a nose ... a mouth ... remains of a "long robe" character... Could be a lot of things, but that large eye on top makes me think of a cyclops. All right, that's pretty memorable, so that's what I'm going to use for 睘: surprised cyclops! Now I just need a good story that involves a king and a surprised cyclops to use for ring.

Still with RTH

RTH1

Day 17

On character 681.
About 300 cards per day in Anki (including reviewing older, non-RTH cards).
When divided by the number of days, 680 characters gives about 40 characters per day. Of course this number does not actually mean anything. I already know (from Matthews) a noticeable chunk of characters, so what I'm doing is setting myself a target number of characters to learn per day (sometimes it's ten, sometimes it's thirty) but count only the characters that are new to me. So when I study 30 (new) characters it results in a total of 65-70 characters to learn. Even when I decide that I "know" a character, it still might have a different keyword and it all means that "30 new per day" is unsustainable. I'm trying to do "20 new" but it's still a lot, especially with a growing number of reviews. On the other hand the ratio is getting lower, as characters grow more complicated it seems I know less of them.

Count 'em

This is weird. When I started using an SRS for hanzi studies I've picked a bit of advice somewhere that explained how to do reps correctly: you get your SRS to show you the English keyword, you draw the character on your palm or in the air (or in your mind if you can) and count the strokes. Then you press a key and see the answer in your SRS that should include the stroke count for the character. That way you immediately know if you've missed a stroke, confused some graphemes that are easy to confuse (like 又, 夊, or 攵) etc. Well, I've found this advice to be very useful and up until now I was sure that it comes from Heisig books. I've had a small suspicion when having downloaded an RTH deck for Anki I didn't find a field for stroke count in it. But now that I'm reading an actual book I can't seem to find it, so probably it was somebody else.
Anyway, this was a great advice, thanks to whoever thought of that!

RTH arrived

My “Remembering Traditional Hanzi” by Heisig arrived today. It's faster than I expected and now there's a difficult decision. On one hand I'd like to start studying the RTH as soon as possible, but on the other hand I want to finish the sentences-project without too many distractions. At the moment I'm not sure I can handle the amount of studying required for sentences alone, leave alone the additional Hanzi cards.