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+--- Thread: RtK - 2 Months Later (/thread-10383.html)
RtK - 2 Months Later - Zlarp - 2013-01-13
Having been one of the sprinters, I was always kind of afraid that after my 3 week RtK marathon I'd be too spent to keep up with reviews, or that I wouldn't manage to even finish. I'd say I came close to both of those, but because I had long train rides to fill and an iPad with Anki on it, it turned out to be a manageable endeavour.
My retention rates are now at 96%, 93%, and 88% and rising for learning cards, young cards, and mature cards, respectively. I now have 2031 mature cards in my deck and 197 learning cards and have started adding cards from RtK3 at a leisurely pace of 2-6 a day (depending on whether I want the ones with new radicals grouped together per day or I'm just too tired)
My reviews now take consistently below 30 minutes and I'm starting to approach the 15 and 10 minute marks on some empty days. I have one day on the horizon with 100+ reviews, one with 75+, but the others are all far below and I could probably afford to skip a day or two, though I haven't done so yet because it's become so routine for me.
Another interesting thing I've noticed recently: I'm starting to think of the kanji instantly in my mind and then I use it to go backwards and reconstruct the story I made from the kanji I already know. Anyone else's brain started to work like this?
It's fun to see it in action, because it seems so backwards, since the stories started out working the other way around. Still, I'm not skipping them on the reviews once I know the kanji, because I feel they still help my brain retain the kanji because of their connection to the written grapheme, even if it doesn't feel like I need them anymore.
Anyway, to all of you still struggling through the book: Good luck to you, and remember, your retention rate right now doesn't matter, it'll all work out in the end if you just trust your SRS program. If you feel like going fast and doing ridiculous amounts of kanji a day, go ahead and do it. Your short term retention will drop, but you'll be at fewer reviews a lot sooner.
Now, the thing about doing a lot of new cards at once is this: it's not sustainable. Believe me, I know. I started out doing a lesson a day, went to 50 a day, 100 a day, 150 a day and spent a lot of time doing more and more new cards. However, I did this knowing that it was impossible to keep it up. You see, while such a pace is not sustainable in the long run, once you reach a kind of critical mass, it doesn't matter anymore. Why? Because RtK "only" contains 2200 kanji. This means that, at some point, you will be done with it. You'll still have masses of reviews, but once you're used to days where you added 240 new cards (I think I had two of those) a review count approaching 1000 reviews won't seem as daunting anymore - as new cards are always harder than ones you've already done once. (luckily I never broke 1000 reviews)
However, I will only recommend this method to people who know they have the time to invest into such an endeavor. It'll get you through the kanji part of learning Japanese a lot quicker, but if you don't have the time to invest or think you'll drop out because you're gonna be skipping days, don't do it. I'm just here to say that it can be done. I'm still reviewing, I'm reading things in Japanese, and I'm happy that I did it the way I did. That is all. Just thought it'd be nice for some people to hear the experiences of a "sprinter" - as apparently a lot of "sprinters" seem to drop out from the forum after having boasted with their 100's of kanji learned per day and then supposedly failing once they face up to the immense review load.
RtK - 2 Months Later - amillerchip - 2013-01-13
I don't know how you do it. The most I ever added was 70 a day, and I blew out over that so much that I gave up and started again.
Nice to hear people have success with the sprinting approach. Took me two years.