I agree to a large extent with both the perspective that you should stop reviewing, and that you should continue reviewing.

Obviously, if you continue to progress, at some time you should stop reviewing. If you've become an advanced Japanese learner with good knowledge of the readings and compounds of the joyo kanji, you're not going to go back to RTK1 and go, "Well, better refresh myself on how "six" is a top hat with animal legs!" That would be like building a temporary scaffold, building a skyscraper, and going back to tinker with your scaffold.

At the same time, if you finish RTK1, and you say, "Phew! Glad that's over! What's next - maybe 8 months of pronounciation practice and and Tae Kim grammar!" That's no good either. That would be building your scaffold, not building your skyscraper, and letting your scaffold rot away.

So I think it's important to have an RTK exit strategy - and that probably wouldn't be RTK2&3 either, which are mostly more scaffolds.

The two viable follow-up strategies I can think of are either transition to attempting to read kanji in context and build your skyscraper, or delay the collapse of your scaffold by continuing to maintain it. Probably for many, it'll be a combination of both, with reading being a priority for those who are picking it up quickly, and RTK review a priority for those who are learning kanji reading at a slower pace.

Ampharos64 Wrote:I wouldn't stop reviewing them, myself. I did...and now I'm doing RTK again. It might not work out this way for everyone, but for me I feel it was the biggest mistake I've made with my Japanese studies, definitely regret it.

Although I don’t have plans to stop reviewing my batch of kanji from RtK, I’m interested why you say that. What happened that made you come back to reviewing the kanji with structured mnemonics?

I’m interested in your answer because apart of kanji that I studied with Heisig, I also have a lot that I don’t have mnemonics for. ATPOT, I can’t say, I miss mnemonics for those.

Today it took me 10 minutes to review my RTK cards. 10 minutes! I did them while eating breakfast! It's like a relaxing morning routine

I've got 12 due cards today. :p

That's a record, yesterday it was 18, but apart from today and two other days it's been above 20, and mostly around 30-40...

Zlarp Wrote:Today it took me 10 minutes to review my RTK cards. 10 minutes! I did them while eating breakfast! It's like a relaxing morning routine

That's actually a substantial part of your day, believe it or not. You're only awake for about 17 hours, so that's about 1% of your day. Plus, not only do you not have the energy to be productive 17 hours a day, you also are distracted constantly even when not busy working. So it's an even larger percent of your productive time per day.

Tzadeck Wrote:

Zlarp Wrote:Today it took me 10 minutes to review my RTK cards. 10 minutes! I did them while eating breakfast! It's like a relaxing morning routine

That's actually a substantial part of your day, believe it or not. You're only awake for about 17 hours, so that's about 1% of your day. Plus, not only do you not have the energy to be productive 17 hours a day, you also are distracted constantly even when not busy working. So it's an even larger percent of your productive time per day.

I don't consider this time part of my productive time. It's part of my daily routine to get up in the morning and sit in front of my laptop and maybe eat something. I can't focus in that time, I don't have the energy to start reading a manga or watching a TV show or what have you. Doing RTK flashcards is fine, though, as it doesn't require me to think.

uisukii Wrote:Even though it may not make sense -the actual text that is- the point of RtK isn't to be able to read Japanese. A single rough translation of a common reading, of which often isn't reliable for "understanding" native texts, isn't in any meaningful sense comprehending Japanese. That is what you study after RtK.

The point of learning a material (any material, RtK, RtK light, the periodic table of elements, the phone book, whatever a person chooses to learn) with an SRS software is to make sure you commit it to long term memory, and keep it there.

SRS takes time to accomplish that goal (the only goal it is useful for). It does not work through a short time. You may think it does, because everything you learned is committed to short term memory, but it doesn't. You WILL forget it. The reason why you remembered it in the first place has nothing to do with SRS. If you had just read RtK like a book a couple of times, you'd have pretty much committed the same amount of material to short term memory.

And no, moving on to studying words won't help remember the writing of Kanji just as efficiently. SRS is efficient because it selects what you review based on the Kanji you don't yet know. Moving on to studying the language selects what you review based on Kanji frequency, and moving on to SRS-ing words selects it based on words you know.

Only SRS-ing Kanji selects what you review based on what Kanji you don't know. And only reviewing Kanji you don't know makes you commit the writing of Kanji to long term memory. And, make no mistake about it, you DO NEED TO KNOW THE WRITING OF A VAST MAJORITY OF THE 2000 RtK Kanji, if you plan on reading and writing Japanese. The frequency with which these 2042 Kanji (well, ~ 1900 of them) appear is IRRELEVANT to whether you need to know them or not. Even if the only ones you don't know are the least frequent 30-40%, you're dead in the water as far as Japanese goes.