Hey everyone, I'm a new user to the forums, but I've been making use of RtK1 for about a little over a month. I just hit frame 985, so I'm almost at the halfway point of the book. Unfortunately, I've started encountering some trouble since about 200 frames ago.

The problem isn't so much coming from learning new ones - those always go fine. The problem comes from long-term memory. Once a kanji starts getting to the point where it takes a week or so to show up again, I'm much more likely to forget not only the story, but the kanji as well. Often times, this problem is remedied when I see the kanji and I go "Oh yeah!" but I'm afraid the problem will occur again once it gets to the 1/2 week point again.

My percentage correct on Anki (using the pre-downloaded Anki deck) has decreased to around 75%-80% depending on the day. During my reviews today, it actually dipped down to an astonishingly low 65% early on in the review simply due to all the kanji that I hadn't seen in a week or two on Anki whose stories and kanji I forgot (though my overall percentage went up to 80% once I got to the more short-term ones).

Does anyone have any advice for helping this stuff lodge into my long-term memory? I was considering adding stories or primitive elements to the front of the cards, but that also strikes me as cheating and not truly remembering them. Maybe I should just study the failed cards heavily each time? Any advice?

I for one just ignored the problem and it went away. Your "astonishingly low" recall rate was still quite a bit higher than my normal one and now I'm at 90% and climbing.

My recall rate was below 50% at its worst, and now (four months after completion of rtk), it's around 80-90%.

Just hang in there, and let the RtK magic happen.
Also, you could probably decrease the number of new cards introduced for a week or so, just to get your familiar kanji knocked into your head.

Start with some vocabulary learning as well, so you can get become familiar to how the kanji are used "in the wild".

That also happens to me, and I'm at 1800 now. I usually forget those I don't watch for +two weeks or so, and even the simple ones that have similar keywords to new ones I forget. My recall rate is also low for my mature cards (around 73%), but for what I read in other threads (and thank you so much for clarifying it), the key is keep reviewing.

Roughly 80% retention is where you need to be.
If one some days, you get 70% or 75% it's OK.

50%-60% would probably mean you should spend another few days reviewing
without adding more kanji.

It's not astonishingly low (it's a little low), but if you want to raise it, it's very easy: slow down. That's it, you don't need to do anything else , except deliberately slow down both the learning of new kanji, and reviewing them. (well, of course, you could be doing other things wrong, but even if you don't address those other problems, this will still help raise your rate).

I don't mean slow down as in study less, I mean study slower. When you learn a kanji, and are all done with it, wait for a little longer than you normally would before moving on -it's fine if it's time spent resting. When you review a kanji, write it a little more deliberately if you know it. If you don't know it, then hit the answer button just as you would, don't try to will yourself into figuring it out - this is the one part you shouldn't slow down for; but, once you hit the answer button, go over the story slower, write the kanji slower, and move on to the next review slower.

This will not waste time, in fact it will save time, if your rate is only 65% (the math is a bit complicated, but intuitively it makes sense why spending 20% extra time/review to raise the rate by 15% is in fact a time saver - since failing a card will mean more than just one extra review, compared to hitting the good or easy buttons).

P.S. I just noticed where you are: sounds like you've passed Mr. T, but still have a lot of chapters with easy primitives in them. Where you are now, you won't have any problems by going at your current pace (and being a little shallow about the stories). Even if it seems like you're in trouble in the short term, you'll be fine because these chapters have easy primitives and relatively nice keywords. But, in another few hundred (some time after 1500), you're gonna definitely need to take my advice and slow down.

So it's been a bit since I posted this and the problem is still cropping up. Hope the tips of keeping the reviews going bears fruit. I can't help but notice though that 2/3 of my kanji up to this point (I've done 1170 around, so around 750) are due within a two week time frame and I'm doing reviews of around 120 or so almost every day (it never, ever goes below 100). I can't help but feel that this is a lot. Is it? I'm doing around 20 new kanji a day.

I'm thinking of throwing in reading of short Japanese stories, random browsing of 2chan using rikaichan, etc. to help reinforce kanji. I took Japanese during classes for a bit and understand grammar at around an N3 level on the JLPT.