I finished Heisig many months ago and have kept up daily reviews dillegently ever since, but I can honestly say (despite them being few in number) that I now dread them. In fact, feel that Heisig has served his purpose; I can write them fairly well and know the meaning of most of them. It is with this in mind that I've considered abandoning kanji reviews and allowing myself to give undivided attention to actual Japanese sentences/texts, and the only thing really stopping me from doing so is my slightly obsessive-compulsive personality.

Anybody else grappled with this dilemma?

You shouldn't need to. When you know an SRS fact so well you don't need to see it anymore, it won't show up.

The SRS throwing cards at you simply means you aren't finished with it.

Tobberoth Wrote:You shouldn't need to. When you know an SRS fact so well you don't need to see it anymore, it won't show up.

The SRS throwing cards at you simply means you aren't finished with it.

This.

Zorlee Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:You shouldn't need to. When you know an SRS fact so well you don't need to see it anymore, it won't show up.

The SRS throwing cards at you simply means you aren't finished with it.

This.

This

bombpersons Wrote:

Zorlee Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:You shouldn't need to. When you know an SRS fact so well you don't need to see it anymore, it won't show up.

The SRS throwing cards at you simply means you aren't finished with it.

This.

This

This.

I suspended all my RtK cards in order to focus on words, sentences and vocabulary. I'm considering reinstating the corresponding character cards as I go through the kanji systematically while learning the readings, but I've felt no great desire or need to do so. While a lot of the rarer characters have slipped from my grasp, as soon as I renew studying a character I utilize the story when writing it and its easy to tell when stories are weak-- in which case I return to the RtK mode of thinking and attempt to correct that weakness.

I suspended those cards because they were getting in the way of progress on other fronts and I feel like it was the right decision in the long run.

The main problem I ran into was the propensity for RtK cards to become leeches, as well as a crushing amount of reviews everyday that I couldn't get through that built up and overwhelmed the rest of my cards. I answered them at first, but was overwhelmed, so I pushed them to the end of my reviews using tags, and finally suspended the offending cards altogether.

Just start switching them with Japanese keywords. There is a thread for that.

Switching only one at a time (as they mature)? I think Wrightak said that caused more harm than good if I remember.

I just do sentences, I haven't reviewed my RTK deck in ages.

From someone that has done it....don't. Unless you start doing production on all of your sentences you will forget how to write them. Like others have said if you are SRS'ing correctly then the number of RTK1 cards that pop up on a day to day basis should become almost zero.

FutureBlues Wrote:The main problem I ran into was the propensity for RtK cards to become leeches, as well as a crushing amount of reviews everyday that I couldn't get through that built up and overwhelmed the rest of my cards. I answered them at first, but was overwhelmed, so I pushed them to the end of my reviews using tags, and finally suspended the offending cards altogether.

If you were being overwhelmed with RTK cards then you didn't know those cards very well and definitely shouldn't have suspended them. That is the entire point of the SRS.

activeaero Wrote:

FutureBlues Wrote:The main problem I ran into was the propensity for RtK cards to become leeches, as well as a crushing amount of reviews everyday that I couldn't get through that built up and overwhelmed the rest of my cards. I answered them at first, but was overwhelmed, so I pushed them to the end of my reviews using tags, and finally suspended the offending cards altogether.

If you were being overwhelmed with RTK cards then you didn't know those cards very well and definitely shouldn't have suspended them. That is the entire point of the SRS.

The entire point of an SRS is memory efficiency. Learning the RtK cards was a valuable exercise, practicing them for a few months afterwards was a valuable exercise, being crushed by 200+ RtK reviews whenever I took a day off, or the 1000+ reviews I had after going to Taiwan for 2 weeks wasn't valuable, so I washed my hands of it.

As it stands now, I'm doing kanji production as a way to supplement my reading practice, which serves a dual-purpose and allows me to remember the RtK stories as I need them. In other words, I streamlined the process and no longer have to deal with massive amounts of backlogged cards.

I'm done with RTK for 4 months now and I have only 20 reviews a day.
if you get 1000+ reviews in two weeks means you had about 75 reviews per day?
That tells me you don't know the cards very well yet, so the last thing you need to do is stopping I think.

I am doing 25 new japanese keywords with Wrightak's deck. As soon as all my keywords are switched with Japanese ones I will stop using this site. That will take me about one more month I think and my reviews will be only 10 a day on this site so I feel I am ready for Japanese ones.

Nii87 Wrote:Switching only one at a time (as they mature)? I think Wrightak said that caused more harm than good if I remember.

Nii87, I got your tweet, where you asked about replacing mature cards. Replacing cards as they mature is a different proposition. Mature cards are ones that you should know well. Replacing cards as they show up will actually tend to replace the ones you know less well first. (Assuming that the cards you see more frequently are the ones that you have trouble with, which is what an SRS is supposed to do)

I wouldn't replace them as they show up, but replacing cards with large intervals and high ease factors first may be a good way. I'd be interested to hear how it goes for people.

I replaced cards pretty randomly at first but I found that the most effective method for me was to start from frame 1 and work my way through. That way, the benefits of Heisig's primitive ordering are harnessed.

FutureBlues Wrote:

activeaero Wrote:

FutureBlues Wrote:The main problem I ran into was the propensity for RtK cards to become leeches, as well as a crushing amount of reviews everyday that I couldn't get through that built up and overwhelmed the rest of my cards. I answered them at first, but was overwhelmed, so I pushed them to the end of my reviews using tags, and finally suspended the offending cards altogether.

If you were being overwhelmed with RTK cards then you didn't know those cards very well and definitely shouldn't have suspended them. That is the entire point of the SRS.

The entire point of an SRS is memory efficiency. Learning the RtK cards was a valuable exercise, practicing them for a few months afterwards was a valuable exercise, being crushed by 200+ RtK reviews whenever I took a day off, or the 1000+ reviews I had after going to Taiwan for 2 weeks wasn't valuable, so I washed my hands of it.

Your problem isn't Kanji reviews stopping your progress, it's your inefficiency doing RtK. You shouldn't get 200+ reviews when you take a day off once you've finished RtK, it should be more like 40. Skipping Kanji reviews should be when you get 2 reviews each day and always know them. At that point, you're just wasting time. If your SRS is throwing almost 100 cards at you each day, that means you fail them a LOT. Obviously, it's a bad idea to stop in such a situation.

Tobberoth Wrote:

FutureBlues Wrote:

activeaero Wrote:If you were being overwhelmed with RTK cards then you didn't know those cards very well and definitely shouldn't have suspended them. That is the entire point of the SRS.

The entire point of an SRS is memory efficiency. Learning the RtK cards was a valuable exercise, practicing them for a few months afterwards was a valuable exercise, being crushed by 200+ RtK reviews whenever I took a day off, or the 1000+ reviews I had after going to Taiwan for 2 weeks wasn't valuable, so I washed my hands of it.

Your problem isn't Kanji reviews stopping your progress, it's your inefficiency doing RtK. You shouldn't get 200+ reviews when you take a day off once you've finished RtK, it should be more like 40. Skipping Kanji reviews should be when you get 2 reviews each day and always know them. At that point, you're just wasting time. If your SRS is throwing almost 100 cards at you each day, that means you fail them a LOT. Obviously, it's a bad idea to stop in such a situation.

The long and short of it is this: About six or seven months after I finished RtK, I was in a a situation where I began to fail keyword --> kanji cards not because I couldn't remember how to write the kanji, but because the vocabulary I was studying was interfering with my the RtK keywords. When you're studying words like 始まり and 初めて and then you see the keyword start or begin, it's easy to mix them up, so for a long time I was juggling a bunch of leeches around because I'd mix up shop and store, or whatever. Around the same time, in order to spend more time on RtK I decided to merge my decks, and deal with my massive fail pile. I did that, but because I had about 200 cards in my fail pile, my daily reviews skyrocketed as all of those cards had to be restarted at very small intervals. However, I did it all. I got through it. Eventually life intervened and during a small, 10 day vacation I had a lot of reviews build up, to the point where I couldn't even randomize my cards anymore because RtK cards were taking far longer than reading cards to work through. I set up my tags so that RtK cards would be reviewed at a low priority, but by the time I got through my daily word reviews, I just didn't feel like going though a massive stack of RtK reviews everyday in addition to all the other reviews I was doing. So after watching my pile grow to more to than 1500 RtK reviews due, I decided to cut it off and suspended all my RtK cards because honestly, after a certain point, RtK reviews become more of a more of a chore and less of a help. There's a point of saturation, I think and I reached that point.

Now, I can typically remember new kanji and write them after seeing them only once and as I go through the kanji again, this time systematically studying the readings, I'm refining and in some cases rebooting all my old RtK stories as I run into them. Guess what? It's working fine.

If you think Heisig still pulls out his boxes of flash cards and drills RtK keywords, then I think you're kidding yourself. He himself states that over time the keywords will lose focus and you'll no longer have to drill them time and time again when you encounter kanji in the wild. I have reached that point-- it's that point where masturbating with an SRS doesn't really provide a benefit anymore. It's just a waste of time.

FutureBlues Wrote:The long and short of it is this: About six or seven months after I finished RtK, I was in a a situation where I began to fail keyword --> kanji cards not because I couldn't remember how to write the kanji, but because the vocabulary I was studying was interfering with my the RtK keywords. When you're studying words like 始まり and 初めて and then you see the keyword start or begin, it's easy to mix them up, so for a long time I was juggling a bunch of leeches around because I'd mix up shop and store, or whatever.

When you can remember it going from Japanese to Kanji, don't you think it's time to switch over to a Japanese keyword? That's what I'm planning to do once I finish book one. I'm already itching to do it for some kanji, but have resolved to wait until I have finished book one.

My take on it is the following. Once you have all the RTK down pretty good (1900+ in the fourth stack) it is a sensible decision to stop reviewing - or at least narrow the reviews down to the kanji that you are actually using in your sentence/vocabulary deck (assuming you use anki to review those).
I have a little script, that looks for new kanji (vs my personal known kanji). So once I add a new batch of sentences in anki, I check those for new kanji and I do not have to deal with the frustration of reviewing stuff I will not be using "in real life" for a long time. So currently I am only reviewing around 1200 kanji Heisig-style.

FutureBlues Wrote:The long and short of it is this: About six or seven months after I finished RtK, I was in a a situation where I began to fail keyword --> kanji cards not because I couldn't remember how to write the kanji, but because the vocabulary I was studying was interfering with my the RtK keywords. When you're studying words like 始まり and 初めて and then you see the keyword start or begin, it's easy to mix them up, so for a long time I was juggling a bunch of leeches around because I'd mix up shop and store, or whatever. Around the same time, in order to spend more time on RtK I decided to merge my decks, and deal with my massive fail pile. I did that, but because I had about 200 cards in my fail pile, my daily reviews skyrocketed as all of those cards had to be restarted at very small intervals. However, I did it all. I got through it. Eventually life intervened and during a small, 10 day vacation I had a lot of reviews build up, to the point where I couldn't even randomize my cards anymore because RtK cards were taking far longer than reading cards to work through. I set up my tags so that RtK cards would be reviewed at a low priority, but by the time I got through my daily word reviews, I just didn't feel like going though a massive stack of RtK reviews everyday in addition to all the other reviews I was doing. So after watching my pile grow to more to than 1500 RtK reviews due, I decided to cut it off and suspended all my RtK cards because honestly, after a certain point, RtK reviews become more of a more of a chore and less of a help. There's a point of saturation, I think and I reached that point.

Now, I can typically remember new kanji and write them after seeing them only once and as I go through the kanji again, this time systematically studying the readings, I'm refining and in some cases rebooting all my old RtK stories as I run into them. Guess what? It's working fine.

If you think Heisig still pulls out his boxes of flash cards and drills RtK keywords, then I think you're kidding yourself. He himself states that over time the keywords will lose focus and you'll no longer have to drill them time and time again when you encounter kanji in the wild. I have reached that point-- it's that point where masturbating with an SRS doesn't really provide a benefit anymore. It's just a waste of time.

The reason Heisig isn't pulling out his boxes is because he didn't have an SRS. The thing about an SRS is, it spaces things as you learn it. 7-10 reviews, and you'll never see that card again in your lifetime. The cards disappear when you are done with them. If they are appearing, you aren't done with them. It's really just that simple. (This isn't true for this site... but I would guess most people migrate to Anki eventually.)

If the reason you're failing cards is mixup of keywords, you've failed in adapting your SRS. If you know 始まる, why isn't はじ・まる your keyword for 始? That way, you would never fail it and it would be out of your life in a few reviews.

What you're doing now is basically saying "I'm failing these kanji, so I can't be bothered anymore. Who cares, heisig stopped, so why can't I?" IMO, it makes no sense.

You don't HAVE to continue doing your Heisig reviews to learn Japanese. In fact, you don't even have to start doing Heisig reviews in the first place. Question is, why would you want to start doing it, then not finish it? Isn't that a huge waste of effort?

I think it's really odd to say "Well, i don't see these kanji in real life, so I ignore them." How does that matter? Pretty much every single kanji in RtK1 is 常用. ALL of them are needed for JLPT1. Just because you haven't gotten far enough to use them doesn't mean you shouldn't know them. If that was true, why would you do RtK in the first place, before doing sentences... you're not seeing any of them in real life! The point is that it's good to know the kanji before you run into them, and that will always be true.

If you're like me, you write down kanji during the reviews. This takes time. Now that I think about it, it's reproducing the same effort I do during vocabulary reviews as I write down the words there too. I sometimes mark the card wrong or a 2 if I write the kanji incorrectly.

So, it's not too much of a stretch to do a kanji statistic scrub of my vocabulary deck and remove kanji from the RTK deck that matches.

That way, kanji that still have not found a word in my vocabulary deck are kept in practice, but I'm not wasting too much effort on kanji I'm going to write one or more times anyway during other reviews.

Such is the strength of Anki.

Yes at some point you might want to quit doing RTK flashcards. However, it won't be because you can't justify time for the reviews. On a long enough timeline, everyone's reviews for the first RTK book will round out to about 10 kanji per day with all the kanji in box 8 or higher. That's nothing. You can get through that in less than 5 minutes.

So this is kind of a catch-22. By the time you quit RTK flashcards they'll be using up so little of your time that quitting them might not even make sense.

If you're getting kanji exposure from somewhere else now, why not stop RTK? If you forget the odd kanji or 2, the world isn't going to end. Or maybe delete RTK cards as you learn words that use the same kanji.

I don't mean to hijack the thread, but what effect do you think stopping english keyword - kanji reviews would have on sentences and reading? (I'm talking about strictly recognition/reading sentences - I don't even write them)

Reviews take so much time and are not waning because I always confuse keywords now that I'm really learning how to use the kanji. If I'm planning on doing rtk again a year from now with Japanese keywords, would it hurt me to stop english reviews now and focus on reading?

Tobberoth Wrote:You shouldn't need to. When you know an SRS fact so well you don't need to see it anymore, it won't show up.

The SRS throwing cards at you simply means you aren't finished with it.

Sorry for going back to the very beginning of the thread, but I feel I need to get my point across:

With under twenty expired cards each day (all from the fourth column onwards), the amount of time and effort I spend reviewing is minimal. It's very easy to say that the cards will practically never show up after I've 'SRSed' them enough, but that doesn't really discuss or solve the problem at hand. What I'm trying to say is that while you were absolutely technically correct in saying what you did, even these small amounts of cards are mentally something I dread doing, regardless of whether I'm "finished with" them or not. I'm sure you'll all agree that while routine is necessary for learning (and indeed for many other things in life), when that routine begins to wear one down, it's time for a change.

Honestly, I posted this thread in the hopes that some human advice or responses would surface and convince me that if I truly believed I had gained all I could from Heisig then I should quit immediately in favour of something more productive and fun. It seems, though, that the infallible SRS system has once again triumphed and I am to forever remain a slave to those three buttons: "No", "Yes", and "Easy".

Sarcasm aside, does anybody agree?

Why do RTK again? Just learn words and sentences that use the kanji.