Question for people who have been around for a while.

I have been quite worried about making sure when I am writing to make sure I don't move on until I can remember/write it super perfectly.

However I have noticed that if I don't stress about it, the character comes up in another word a few days later... I am thinking it is probably not important to be super perfect on each character as it will come up so many times in the future anyway?

If this is true then it means we can churn through more characters more rapidly! (:

The system is designed for you to forget prompts about 10% of the time (if your target retention rate is 95%), and it's still efficient at 20% (~90% retention). It's not really efficient at 5% or less, though. Perfection is slow and speed is king.

And when you're just learning a character, you're expected to forget it more frequently than that until you get it into longer retention intervals of multiple days. I would just try to come up with the simplest memorization technique that could possibly work for a new character and then go fast, resorting to coming up with stronger mnemonics only if a character proves tough to learn.

I feel like I make better progress when I am very strict on myself, but I'd be curious to hear what other people think.

It's very good to practice characters in different words, by the way, because then you're also learning the different shades of meaning provided by the extra context.

James

I find that being strict with how I write characters up front leads to greater speed further down the line.

I still have plenty of times when a character comes up and I have to pause and think about how to write the character, but over time, I am finding that a lot of those characters have become automatic for me. (It also helps that I am currently not adding new characters to my queue for the time being. :)

It's a pretty interesting question. In reading this and some of the other forums it sounds like a lot of people get to the ~1500 character, 9 month point and realize that they either have a lot of stuff in there they don't want to really learn or that they want to be more strict on the memorization. (hence the rash of people blowing away their record and starting over a month or so back - starting with James I believe).

For me it just felt like there were a lot of characters that I could muddle through but didn't know stone cold. The more similar characters I added the more of a problem it became. I didn't want to go drastic and start over so instead I stopped adding for a month and marked myself super strictly and deleted any words in the mix that I resented being there (surprisingly hard to bring myself to do). Just got to the other end of the process and feel like it is all much more solid.

I wonder if you could avoid that being super strict from the start, or if it is just a function of reaching the point where there are too many similar characters to keep straight without being rigorous. It seems like strict might cost you in enjoyment from the start but help you in satisfaction?

I tend to be rather lenient on myself. I find it more interesting to get more new characters.
Although I know that there might well be a character or two that I won't recognize/remember (I'm not aiming at being able to write them in a 100% free recall way), I feel that the additional words I have learnt in the time I've "saved" can compensate. If there then once is a character I encounter which I have forgotten and need to look it up again, I will definitely remember it better the next time it pops up in Skritter....no worries:)

@jcardenio Actually when I got to 1400 characters the problem wasn't the similar characters, it was the fact that I didn't know how many of that 1400 were actually useful and how many were archaic or rare.

Khatzumoto of AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com uses the rule that, if you test yourself on something and get it, but you were even a little bit in doubt, mark it as wrong. The next time it comes up, you will know it cold. I often think I should start being that strict with myself. When I have trouble with similar characters I use that technique and it is helpful.

The only problem is when you have two characters that interfere with one another. Interference is a term from psychology that refers to the situation where you have two memories that get in each other's way; for example, if you are trying to think of a certain song but keep remembering a different song which sounds similar, that would be interference. In this case I think it's better to actually delay studying one of the options and focus on one of them until you know it cold, and only then start studying the other one.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/374487/memory/275826/Interference

James