Hello,

I'm wondering about the point when I stop thinking about the story behind the kanji and start remembering it only by its shape. How was your retention after you made the "switch"? How long did it take you to forget the story and still retain the Kanji?

I'm not that far into RTK, but my ~500 Kanji which have turned mature are all due in the next 10 days, and I'm a bit afraid that I'll have to relearn quite a few of them again.

Thanks! : )

RB

I’m of opinion that there are two conditions under which doing this does not harm your progress.

Firstly, you should be able to “see through squiggles”, which means that you should be able to identify elements/primitives/radicals the character is composed of. Admittedly, Heisig does a good job here but I wouldn’t be able to tell you when the cut off figure is - it may be at 0, or it may be at 2200. (*)

Secondly, you should not study kanji outside of their context – you want to study complete words and/or collocations. I’m not big fan of SRSing sentences (I prefer real texts) but if you don’t mind those, it will do you no harm. For the study you can use positions like “Kanji in Context” (Japanese only, so you should be comfortable with basic grammar) or “2001.Kanji.Odyssey” (easy grammar, English translation of sentences). There will be times when you will be mixing words because of similarity of the composing kanji. When this happens by all means create a mnemonic (if needed, go back to Heisig method) that will help you making the distinction.

On stopping reviewing – don’t do that. The reasoning here is simple, if you remember those characters then in a matter of two/three reviews they will be pushed far into the future. If you don’t then you do need restudy them.

(*) For the record, I did around 1100 characters with Heisig, and have no special problems with remembering words that contain characters from beyond that set.

I'm sorry, it seems like I formulated my question wrong.
I absolutely agree on everything you said, and will start SRSing sentences as soon as I finish RTK. I think it's faster to concentrate on finishing RTK before starting, because then I can start understanding the whole sentences. I also noticed there are some rather basic Kanji in the second part of RTK, and learning them with SRSing without RTK seems ineffective.

Currently I lack the time to add more than a few Kanji daily as exams are coming up, and I'm concentrating on keeping the ones I have already learned. I hope to finish RTK in late February and then start the sentence SRS.

My current concern is that my RTK related stories are fading, leaving only the pure Kanji alone. Without the mnemonic. I know that this is bound to happen one day, but not this soon. In some cases it's fine and I can remember the Kanji just fine, but with others it's not. I can't remember it without peeking at the story after not seeing it for a month. My fear is that without the stories I will end up mixing up or completely forgetting the Kanji. Should I review the Kanji and stories once again, just to be on the safe side, or can I trust Anki with this and keep forgetting the stories.

I know Anki will never get tired of bringing the Kanji up, and that I'll eventually remember them without mnemonics. But I don't want to waste time, as the Kanji are just the door opener. I think that the real fun just begins after finishing RTK I.

Oh, and is there some kind of suggested threshold for correct answers for mature cards in Anki? I unfortunately don't yet have enough mature cards to have any data.

I did this from the first kanji (I never used stories).

RoyalBlue Wrote:I know Anki will never get tired of bringing the Kanji up, and that I'll eventually remember them without mnemonics.

In that case fail when you can’t recall the story but I don’t think it really matters. As I said, for reading, you don't need Heisig's mnemonics.

I'm only at 500-something at the moment so I suppose it might better for someone more familiar with RTK to say, however . . . I don't feel you should place too much weight on the stories.
That is to say, if you can reproduce the kanji from the keyword then mission accomplished. The story is a way to trigger your memory of the kanji and strikes me as irrelevant if you get the kanji without it. The stories are supposed to fall off anyway.

In cases where you find yourself not getting the kanji right though, go back and work on the story again, or visualize it better if some parts of it are missing, so to speak. You technically don't have to, I mean you can just fail yourself until you get it right but I find it easier to go back to the book, see why I'm drawing a blank and work on the story once again.
If that makes sense. I feel I'm beginning to ramble. :x

Thanks guys. Instead of worrying about it I'm just going to spend the time learning more Kanji instead. ; )