I finished RTK a long time ago, but resumed the deck a few months ago as I was adding RTK3 stuff. I noticed that certain vocab items I would never fail in core6k, I still fail in the RTK deck when their kanji is used (by mixing them up with others, not through not remembering the kanji). So this sort of goes against everything I had read while doing RtK about not getting confused with bla bla.. it really doesn't seem to matter?

In fact just pressing fail or pass doesn't really matter, as long as you see & absorb the kanji and the "feeling" it conveys. Once I learn the vocab, I never mix up the kanji in actual use.. Anyone else feel the same?

If I took RTK seriously my reviews would probably start going up over time, instead of going down. I really don't think at this point it's all that important, I'm doing fine with core 6k - However I suck at using heisigs keywords for hints when learning new vocab. At least kanji don't look like a bunch of lines anymore. I definitely took away a lot of things from RTK, but I could probably delete my deck if I wanted to.

I just go through them kanji --> keyword now just for a refresher almost always hitting "good" or "hard".

That is happening to me too.
I think through vocabulary decks you get used visually to the Kanji .It gives you some visual clues that when you meet the kanji on Rtk deck, make the image more clear.

And through time getting so much used to the kanji visually can erase the story you've made and you will know how to write the kanji even without recapitulating the story .

I have read same comment on the forum and anyway it's encouraging I think.
Tough one might not negligate to fail a card in RTK and analyse the story problem or looking for the problem is located, especially if you want learn to write for exemple or just want to do it for fun.

Also having a general knowledge of the content of the deck and of kanji in general help you guess sometimes what might not be okey and what might be okay.

So in resume through experience one might build a good knowledge with a lot of clues that can help remembering kanjis without stories.Yet stories help to dagger them into the brain just like 留.
That was a personnal comment : )

Haha, that's what is happening to me, my RTK reviews are gradually going up to around a 100 a day now (note: I brought this down from 1500 after RTK3 stuff).

Yes it's encouraging to to newbies - don't worry if you keep failing you're reviews - you'll get it eventually. Important thing is to at least put some effort into it! Would "適当に勉強しました" be appropriate here?

Good tip on kanji > keyword. Though I may keep the production around for handwriting tests.

KanjiMood Wrote:Good tip on kanji > keyword. Though I may keep the production around for handwriting tests.

I write out my vocab when learning them so my handwriting skill gets some practice

This is why I'm replacing all my English keywords with Japanese keywords (and an example sentence to make sure I have the right word.)

If you don't want to go that far, just put a hint on the front side of your card that makes sure you have the right idea.

The worst keywords and the ones that have several totally different meanings so that you might think of a meaning that has nothing to do with -any- story. Ones that are near synonyms of each other are also troublesome sometimes, although not as much as I expected.

Anyway, don't torture yourself. Just put in a hint. Put in the whole story as your hint if you want, but usually I find something like 'spring (the season)' takes care of most problems of the first kind, and something like 'revolve (tires)' is enough to remind me of one element of a story and not mix it up with, say, 'rotate'.

(Although now I can't remember which story actually involves tires, but it doesn't matter, I'm never going to quiz those cards with English keywords again. ;p)

It occurs to me now, that also, if you make a habit of putting in hints, you can eliminate some of the more obscure keywords and simply have duplicate keywords with different hints. There's no reason not to have 'spring (of metal)', 'spring (of water)' and 'spring (the season)'. I'm sure there was only one spring although there are at least kanji for spring (the season) and spring (of water). If there's a kanji for spring (of metal) I haven't seen it, but it's just a for-instance anyways.