I started RTK towards the end of January and managed to get to frame 2005 in 2months. I stopped adding frames at this point since university holidays ended and lessons resumed.

I managed to keep up with reviews for ~3 weeks. Then I got lazy over the next 2 weeks and reviews started piling up. Mid-semester exams for all my subjects kicked in at this point so catching up on my laziness wasn't my priority. After all the exams finally dissipated, I was left with 1000+ Anki reviews pending. By this point, I had gotten too used to skipping reviews and I ended up just stopping/hiding from reviews altogether.

So now, 8 weeks later, I'm wondering if I should be continuing the deck from where I left off or restarting the deck/learning process. Over the last 3 days, I did a few reviews and as expected, alot was forgotten

My retention rate was 94%+ before the break and now, it's fallen to 49% for "young" cards and 44% for "mature" cards.

Here's my anki graph if anyone's interested.
Anki Graph
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Edit:

For anyone interested, I ended up restarting the whole thing during December. I was spending too much time on each card, and if I started failing cards for not answering in ~6 seconds, I would have ended up failing most of them which would have resulted in basically learning the whole thing again anyway (but in a random order).

In Finished RTK thread:

"Finally finished on my second attempt of RTK. On the first try, I got to frame 2025 over ~2months but I was too trigger happy with the "good" button. The end result was taking about 30 minutes to go through 100 cards. When I got lazy and reviews piled up, I just gave up.

Started again on 1st December 2013 (~9 months after giving up the first attempt). Went through the initial chapters at around 25-35 kanji per day. Reduced it to 21 kanji/day at frame 600ish. Reduced it again to 11 kanji per day at frame 1800ish. My main focus on the 2nd attempt was to keep review times short (~100 cards in 10 minutes) so it wouldn't feel as much as a chore.

Here are some graphs of my progress.
At frame 1065:
http://i.imgur.com/ZuAd8IL.png
At frame 2042:
http://i.imgur.com/rvx1Iqr.png
~1 month after finishing
http://imgur.com/SfrVho2

Now I'm going through Tae Kim's grammar and then it's vocab building I guess."

It could be worse. No point in adding new cards until you finish with your reviews: frame 2000 is already an achievement, at this point I think it's more important to consolidate your knowledge than rush towards the endline. I don't see any reason to restart from scratch. You might also want to tweak some of your stories/images.

Yeah, I've been in your exact situation a couple times with RTK before (except I was only at frame 1400ish both times), and it's fine to pick up where you left off, just expect that ulta-low disheartening retention rate, but take solace in the fact that it'll start coming back quicker as you re-discover all the primitives again. Like EratiK said, make sure to do story maintenance if you have a lot of trouble!

It took me about 3 weeks to get out of my hole, so it might take you a month or longer, it all depends! But 1 month seems better than starting over, right? ^.^

I'm in the exact same situation right now, got 1540 cards to review on this site. I think I'm just gonna try and review something like 100 a day. There's no point in trying to rush the reviews, I'll do em slowly and it'll go back to normal eventually

No point in rushing to the goal when the goal is to remember these 2 years - 20 years from now. Rushing and stopping reviews because you can't handle them is in contrast to the creation of SRS.

My advice to you guys:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en...k_film.jpg

I'm on frame 2102 and while I generally try to stay abreast of reviews, they've blown out to 600+ once or twice with the odd life-imposed hiccough. Chip away and catch up, don't get too stressed about the retention rate (I let a LOT of less-than-perfect recall through to the keeper when trying to clear a backlog, but I figure that high-rotation kanji will cement themselves through sheer language exposure, and as for the less-frequently seen jobs, well, SRS is designed to catch those hard cards eventually. One of my self-imposed stressors (especially through some of the more challenging stretches) was expecting too much of my recall - accept that sometimes near-enough or simple recognition is good enough for present purposes, accept you will fail a percentage outright, refuse to get hung up about it, and plug along trusting in sheer passage of time and the SRS process. Sooner or later it becomes clear if a story just isn't working and when that happens, you find something better. As time goes on, you learn what sticks for you. When you catch up, you can start catching those dodgy cards again and looking at them with a bit more rigor. It's a long game as PP have said.)

I was originally going to try to finish in 3/12 but here we are over a year later. Don't lose sight of what you have achieved just getting this far.

quanticism Wrote:I started RTK towards the end of January and managed to get to frame 2005 in 2months. I stopped adding frames at this point since university holidays ended and lessons resumed.

It's only RtK cards you've taken a break from? And at 2005?

Just get back into it if you want. You don't have to stress over getting all of your behind reviews done in a very short amount of time. Even after 3-5 months I'd be willing to wager that it would take a week, tops, before you get back in the flow. The way RtK works (if you've followed the authors advice) is that basically by the time you reach the point you were at, even if you forget the stories and such up front, you'll probably find yourself able to write out kanji radicals without too much effort at all.

Those sort of things kind of "sink" into your head and even if you don't remember it all upfront, all it takes is a bit of practice for those lines and squiggles to become simple kanji again. It doesn't take much.

My story is similar to yours and every other person's in this thread.

I finished my exams about three weeks ago. Up until my last exam I hadn't been doing any reviews at all, not even vocab. I just simply didn't have time. Not even up until my Japanese exam did I cram much kanji at all, since it was purely an oral exam.

After my last exam I took one or two days off from studying anything, and then I dove head first into my 500+ reviews, which I finished in about 4 days. I failed many cards, as is to be expected, but eventually it ebbed out and now I usually don't get more than 4 failed cards per daily review (this might vary of course, and besides, the number of failed cards per review is not so essential).

I was near 1500 kanji when I stopped reviewing, and now I'm at 1542 and adding new cards on a fairly regular basis.

Even if you were below the 1000's I, personally, still wouldn't start completely over, and especially not if I had gotten as far as you have. Just slowly finish up your reviews, and you'll eventually recall most of the kanji you will have forgotten. Then you can start adding the last kanji and finish the book.