I've read a couple mentions on this forum of people who had done RTK more than once, and not because they hadn't succeeded in finishing the first time around. Has this been helpful for anyone? Seems a little contradictory to the whole point of RTK and SRS, but I suppose if you have been engaging with Japanese but kinda stopped writing it might help you to do the book again if you want to recall the writings without looking up the kanji images...

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Dustin - When I first started learning Japanese (I think 2006?) I'm quite sure I remember seeing posts written by you talking about Heisig on thejapanesepage.com. And I'm quite sure you have redone RTK at least one more time after that when you started posting on this forum. And now you are doing it AGAIN?!?!?!

I only bring this up because I've read enough of your posts over the years to strongly mentally associate you as being one of those guys who "Never actually learns any Japanese, keeps doing RTK over and over again".

Apologies if I'm mis-remembering things slightly, but at what point are you ever going to think that RTK isn't helping you, and if nothing else, is probably making you worse at the Japanese language itself? And isn't that the point?

I mean, even on this forum you registered 2008, so you've been studying Japanese at least 6 years and I'm pretty sure at the very least 8. A person can learn a lot of Japanese in that amount of time, and its not unreasonable you should know at least a reading for all Joyo kanji by then. Or at least be able to say read half of them, in which case RTK should feel quite unnecessary. That you still seem to think its necessary, after all this time, frankly it boggles my mind.

Sorry if I'm sounding harsh, because I know we all have our own circumstances and life things that can get in the way and slow us down, but I genuinely find your apparent complete lack of progress amazing.

To answer the question, RTK is already a huge timesink and arguably it isn't even worth doing once. If you do go through it once and aren't seeing huge benefits already, then doing it a second time is likely going to be a massive waste of time.

I did it once in march 2010. two months and done because I knew even then that this want't really learning the language. it was like an awesome prep for people who are going to seriously do language study. foundation for a house, etc.

After going keyword-kanji up to 2000, I switched all my cards to kanji-keyword, and did RTK3 that way also.

So that was really great for reading. 3 years later I passed N1 and I can read novels pretty well now. I also do a good bit of translation on the side which is its own nice kind of language study.
I can't write jack squat tho.

It's weird... finishing rtk you're so proud of yourself for having this funny skill in writing kanji that many natives don't share. yet looking up the mountain of japanese I had yet to learn I knew this was going to be a timesink maintaining the ability to write. so I stopped writing out my anki reviews and that was that. it's funny because I used to know how to write all these characters, but put a pen in my hand now and I just blank out and cannot remember.

I'm thinking that in a year or two, with another 20 novels under my belt, it would be nice to go back to RTK, with japanese keywords this time, because it is a super efficient way to learn handwriting.

NightSky Wrote:Sorry if I'm sounding harsh, because I know we all have our own circumstances and life things that can get in the way and slow us down, but I genuinely find your apparent complete lack of progress amazing.

Apparently, the apparent complete lack of progress can be confirmed. I did a little bit of googling (or if you prefer, stalking) and I found this little gem:

「うまい」は新しい言葉です。　ありがとうございます!
Mar 22, 2014 19:41

How can you avoid seeing umai in 5+ years? Even non-Japanese language learners learn what umai is (from expats who make posts making fun of Japanese people for complementing foreigners on their Japanese even though it is bad. EG. if a Japanese person says your Japanese is ii, then it is bad. if they say it is jouzu, then it is bad. But if they say umai, then maybe it is good.)

This is only for people who know a little programming, but I modified Rikaisama, so that it shows the story when I shift hover on a Kanji (I modified a dictionary file that allows it to do that).

Gives me quick access to my stories, which has been very helpful. I read in Firefox a lot (blogs and the "easy news" and stuff, haven't quite gotten around to novels yet), and usually take the time to shift hover on Kanji I can't quite recognize, and read the story. The way I see it, it's better than re-doing RtK, because 1. it's not as boring, 2. I only review the stories of Kanji that actually shows up in the stuff I read.

I uploaded the C++ code I used (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid193123), but it's pretty shoddy work, so it might be tricky trying to make sense of it. If you're a programmer, or if you ever at least successfully downloaded and compiled someone's source code before, I think you'll be able to do this too, but otherwise, it's gonna be difficult.

P.S. Note that you can install your stories, you don't have to use mine...that's why just sharing the dictionary file I modified would've been pointless. You have to create a dictionary file of your own, to add your own stories.

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You're absolutely right, I know no real japanese and nobody should listen to what I have to say.

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:You're absolutely right, I know no real japanese and nobody should listen to what I have to say.

Don't let the people here bring down your spirit.

EDIT: Oh uh to be on topic,

If you're convinced that you want to redo it then I would say that definitely do it with other study too so that you also get some more directly applicable Japanese knowledge under your belt too.

I haven't really suffered the problem of dropping writing after a certain point, but I am not using my RtK deck primarily to develop/maintain my writing skills as anymore. I just go with sentence cards and clozing the kanji I'm testing; in place of the clozed kanji, I show the reading (so in Anki this would be the hint field for the built-in cloze functionality), then test myself on 1) recognizing the highlighted vocab and 2) also being able to produce the clozed kanji. I quite like this approach personally, and it's been working quite well for me in place of focusing on RtK. If I wasn't so lazy I would test myself on making sure I understand the overall sentence; but I've been lazy these days and I'm trying to focus on heavy vocab building.

tashippy Wrote:I've read a couple mentions on this forum of people who had done RTK more than once, and not because they hadn't succeeded in finishing the first time around. Has this been helpful for anyone? Seems a little contradictory to the whole point of RTK and SRS, but I suppose if you have been engaging with Japanese but kinda stopped writing it might help you to do the book again if you want to recall the writings without looking up the kanji images...

What exactly is meant by doing RTK1 "more than once"?

Once you've gone through the whole book once (making up stories, reviewing the individual kanji to the point where you can recall each one), you're done. If you put aside for a while and need to refresh your recall, well that's not the same as re-doing it.

Maybe if you threw your notebook with the stories in the garbage and had to make up all new stories again, that would be redoing it.

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:You're absolutely right, I know no real japanese and nobody should listen to what I have to say.

Don't listen to the idiots on this forum, with too much free time on their hands.

john555 Wrote:

tashippy Wrote:I've read a couple mentions on this forum of people who had done RTK more than once, and not because they hadn't succeeded in finishing the first time around. Has this been helpful for anyone? Seems a little contradictory to the whole point of RTK and SRS, but I suppose if you have been engaging with Japanese but kinda stopped writing it might help you to do the book again if you want to recall the writings without looking up the kanji images...

What exactly is meant by doing RTK1 "more than once"?

Once you've gone through the whole book once (making up stories, reviewing the individual kanji to the point where you can recall each one), you're done. If you put aside for a while and need to refresh your recall, well that's not the same as re-doing it.

Maybe if you threw your notebook with the stories in the garbage and had to make up all new stories again, that would be redoing it.

For me, it was just going through the kanji again in the same order, using the stories I have again to refresh my memory after years away from studies, so a lot was forgotten.

I have been surprised at how much I have retained, or how well I've been able to recognize much of what I learned before.

I've actually been swapping a lot of the heisig keywords for japanese words that are tied to the kanji better for me.

Also, I did RTK in 2008, not 2006, and in the years since then I've done maybe 6 months total of japanese study.

The main text I was using うまい doesn't show up until page 290/330 and even in that context was used for delicious tasty, which I did recognize.

Sorry if I don't live up to your expectations, but I've seen a lot of benefit from using RTK, and only picked my japanese books back up about 6 weeks ago after a layoff of more than 3 years, and even at that point I haven't done much.

Having young kids, and working for myself can get in the way of other hobbies, such as japanese from time to time.

It may seem like he's judging/critiquing you but, I'm sure he means well.

@OP
NightSky has written good posts about RTK / kanji in general
The posts might give readers some perspective on the Japanese writing system.

(search kanji/rtk/etc)
Sent from iPad.

I don't think I need to do RTK again, but I was curious about people who did it again to refresh writing skills (not because they didn't finish the first time).
Completing RTK made a lot of materials accessible to me, namely novels which is a longer, more fun hill to climb.
I guess I'll dig up some threads on RTK1 with J-keywords, think about RTK3, or get back into the Skritter, but I do a lot of writing just to look up words in books I'm reading on my Mazec IME in the JED dictionary. Other than that, I think writing journals by hand or stories or essays would benefit my overall language competence quite a bit, but I'd need some kind of writing tutor to work through it with me.
Onwards and upwards!

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:Also, I did RTK in 2008, not 2006, and in the years since then I've done maybe 6 months total of japanese study.

The main text I was using うまい doesn't show up until page 290/330 and even in that context was used for delicious tasty, which I did recognize.

Sorry if I don't live up to your expectations, but I've seen a lot of benefit from using RTK, and only picked my japanese books back up about 6 weeks ago after a layoff of more than 3 years, and even at that point I haven't done much.

Having young kids, and working for myself can get in the way of other hobbies, such as japanese from time to time.

In that case, refreshing the knowledge you gained doing RtK, before you move on to learning the language, is a very good idea.

That said, since you don't have all the time in the world, may I suggest doing something a little more targeted? For instance, if it's in electronic form, look at the material you plan on learning first after the Kanji (Core2K for instance, or something else). List all the individual Kanji in it (there are free online resources where you can copy paste the materials and get the list of Kanji, and even a count on how frequent they are), and only re-do those Kanji for now.

Core2K for instance only has a little over 1000 Kanji in it. Re-doing the whole RtK deck, just to help you with Core2K, would waste half the time you put into it. In fact, come to think of it, i think I've seen the list of Kanji in Core2K around this forum, so you might not even have to find them yourself.

I'm not sure why doing RTK twice would be necessary unless a person enjoys doing it, or slipped up somewhere along the way/became lax with their reviews.

Doing RTK in addition to being familiar with the radicals (and proper stroke order for kanji) and consistent writing practice should be enough to ingrain them into a person's mind.

There are plenty of other things to learning Japanese that a person can spend that time with other than doing RTK twice.

TsugiAshi Wrote:I'm not sure why doing RTK twice would be necessary unless a person enjoys doing it, or slipped up somewhere along the way/became lax with their reviews.

Doing RTK in addition to being familiar with the radicals (and proper stroke order for kanji) and consistent writing practice should be enough to ingrain them into a person's mind.

There are plenty of other things to learning Japanese that a person can spend that time with other than doing RTK twice.

I could see the worth if you could get through it quickly (like 3 weeks or less). I would rather do other stuff with that time, but as long as you don't spend too much time on it I feel like it could be beneficial

mc962 Wrote:

TsugiAshi Wrote:I'm not sure why doing RTK twice would be necessary unless a person enjoys doing it, or slipped up somewhere along the way/became lax with their reviews.

Doing RTK in addition to being familiar with the radicals (and proper stroke order for kanji) and consistent writing practice should be enough to ingrain them into a person's mind.

There are plenty of other things to learning Japanese that a person can spend that time with other than doing RTK twice.

I could see the worth if you could get through it quickly (like 3 weeks or less). I would rather do other stuff with that time, but as long as you don't spend too much time on it I feel like it could be beneficial

For me, it was over 3 years of no reviews, keeping up with them would have made it so that there was no need to go through it again.

At first I was going to power through it as fast as I could, but I found that I'd retained enough that I could start working on the core deck, without too many issues, some kanji I recalled ok, others i would look back at my created stories to try and remember them.

I definitely had an easier time after going through the lessons and seeing the other kanji similar in meaning and differentiating between them again, which was my main issue before, and the main reason I did rtk in the first place.

I'm about 3/4 through rtk and 1/3 through core2k so far, so I'm trying not to dedicate too much time to rtk, but enough to get it behind me again, and hopefully keep up with the reviews this time.

Once I've finished that, I start going through JFE again, though the first 1/3-1/2 of it should go pretty quick.

mc962 Wrote:

TsugiAshi Wrote:I'm not sure why doing RTK twice would be necessary unless a person enjoys doing it, or slipped up somewhere along the way/became lax with their reviews.

Doing RTK in addition to being familiar with the radicals (and proper stroke order for kanji) and consistent writing practice should be enough to ingrain them into a person's mind.

There are plenty of other things to learning Japanese that a person can spend that time with other than doing RTK twice.

I could see the worth if you could get through it quickly (like 3 weeks or less). I would rather do other stuff with that time, but as long as you don't spend too much time on it I feel like it could be beneficial

I do see how going through RTK for a second time more quickly could help retain what was learned the first time through.

But since RTK seems to focus on how to more easily remember how to write kanji characters, I could also see someone going through it relatively lightly and slowly the first time and benefiting from it while spending the bulk of their time learning Japanese through other sources.

I mostly think that because of how writing is such an "advanced" and isolated aspect to learning Japanese, that over the course of 2 or 3 years it could see some good results when mixed with other Japanese learning focuses.