I finished RTK 1 bout 3 months ago with production format using this site then after that I went to anki and use recognition cards for 3 months till today. I am also doing Core 10k recognition soon after completing RTK 1.

So my question is if I can stop reviewing my RTK 1 deck. My RTK recognition deck is more mind killing than my Core 10k deck since I have to concentrate with just 1 kanji and also some kanjis are very similar. But in Core 10k there is context and the on and kun reading allows me to make connections. So it's more fun and I maybe think I dont need RTK 1 reviews that much since it has served it's purpose not making kanji less alien. The thing I'm afraid is forgetting some kanjis

What approaches did you took when you finished RTK?

Also when you encounter I new kanji what approach did you took to remember it?

What a coincidence. I just came onto this site to write with the purpose of asking pretty much the same thing, and then I see that you've already went ahead and done it. Very convenient! At least now I know I'm not the only one with this dilemma.

I finished RTK roughly 1 year ago, perhaps the 15th of July would have been my RTK completion anniversary. I was of course immensely relieved to finally having finished it (it had taken me 1 year) and what's even more astonishing is how I could keep up reviewing even 1 year after finishing.

But now ... I'm beginning to feel my mind burning out a little on those kanji. I think I can do just fine having only between 32 and 50 kanji to review per day, which is average if I do it every day, but sometimes I, for some reason, don't have the time or the will to do SRS at all. I think it's important to take breaks from it once in a while. But the problem is that as soon as I don't do reviews for the kanji the amount of reviews stacks up to between 80 and 90, which is on the brink of being too many for me, and so I might convince myself that I'm just not in the mood that day. Then next day I have 150, etc.

In the past I've been able to just deal with it and do 150 or more kanji in one sitting, but I had classes then and a special card for students that allowed me to go many places with public transport for a fixed, monthly fee, so often I would take the train, sit in the quiet zone, and just ride the train all the way to the end stop and drill kanji. But even then it would be immensely draining and it would take me a very long time, and now I'm getting sick of it! Just SICK! The problem with reviewing kanji as opposed to reviewing vocab, which I also do, is that one card can take a lot longer to answer because you actually have to write the kanji, either on paper, on the smartphone screen (AnkiDroid has a blackboard feature) or traced in your palm, and it takes a long time. Hell, even imagining the whole kanji in your head takes a long time and is very important, because once you just press "good" because you feel "yea well, it was close enough" is when I feel that I'm doing it half-heartedly and that it's taking a detrimental toll on my kanji writing abilities.

So the suggestion to myself was to limit the amount of kanji that I have to do every day to 50 at the onset, so that I don't burn out myself and have more time to do other slightly more important things, and then perhaps limit that number if it's still too much. What do you guys think of this idea?

I'm sorry that I couldn't be of more help Kasugano. Just know that you're not the only one with this dilemma

I'm sorry I don't have a good tip for how to quit RTK reviews, but I will warn you that you may forget all the writing if you don't practice it. I did that, and over the years went from knowing them all to almost none and then had to redo RTK.

Errol, it's surprising to hear you have that many daily reviews long after finishing RTK. Do you have a lot of leeches, i.e. cards that you never seem to remember?

Yes, what vosmiura said is exactly what I've read happened to so many other people. I don't want this to happen to me. I can't imagine ever doing RTK ever again, it was one of the most frustrating and challenging things I've ever done. So perhaps limiting your reviews is the only option.

At least this way it's as if you do one day's worth of reviews every time, even if you didn't do reviews yesterday, and you avoid burnout. Practicing at least some kanji every day is probably for the best.

You don't want to stop reviewing RTK. You'll forget how to write kanji, and you'll waste all that effort you spent to learn it in the first place. I stopped reviewing...and now I have to start from scratch again. It sucks. Just keep practicing.

It sounds like the similar keywords are confusing you...but now that you know so many actual Japanese words, you don't need those keywords anymore. Change the keyword from an English word to a cloze-deleted Japanese word (ie "goods" becomes しな物). Or better yet, just download the JALUP mod where this has already been done for you here (as a bonus, unnecessary kanji like the 12 different trees have been deleted for you, to purify what you're learning). This way you can keep systemically practicing all the kanji you've worked so hard on, without being held back by the training wheels from 2 years ago.

And when you come across a new kanji you need to know?
Add it to the deck.

I know it's hard. I'm working on the core6k right now and it kinda freaks me out to think that every time I add a new card, I'm making my work for myself 5 years down the line, even 10 years down the line. You don't learn it and it goes away, you have to keep practicing it. And sometimes it sucks. But it's AWESOME that you know kanji, you should be proud of that, and be willing to give them 15-30 minutes a day. And the amount of daily reviews will just go down and down and down as the months go by. You can do it!

Thx for the feedback... I am considering putting a limit to my reviews to 50-75 but would that make me not review my due cards?

Man..... I got like 279 recognition on RTK 1 + new kanji I added myself. This 25 minutes will be living hell. Maybe it's because I redid RTK 1 recognition from scratch in anki so I still have 51 unseen cards, 731 learning and new and 1419 mature. So if I matured all my cards would my kanji reviews be below 100. . . .

I guess you're having review hell because you've reset all your interval progress by restarting in Anki, and are adding new cards at a rapid rate.

When I finished RTK1 at a regular pace I had reviews in the 10~20 reviews per day range, so yeah your reviews will go down.

I don't know for me personally the RTK deck is like a sweet break from vocab / sentence cards .

Edit: So you're doing recognition; have you done RTK production already?

Instead of stopping reviewing completely, you should just set a low leech threshold. It will make reviewing easier, and you'll only be giving up on a small percentage of the Kanji (which is no big deal) instead of all of them.

And no, putting a limit on your reviews is not a good idea.

What about stopping RTK when I'm doing RTH (Chinese Hanzi) right now? I'm writing by hand Kanji a lot in a whole sentences or words, because I want to be able to write this way too. I'm thinking about stopping RTK, because the keywords only confuse me.

meeatcookies Wrote:What about stopping RTK when I'm doing RTH (Chinese Hanzi) right now? I'm writing by hand Kanji a lot in a whole sentences or words, because I want to be able to write this way too. I'm thinking about stopping RTK, because the keywords only confuse me.

Good. You deserve to be confused. It's what you get for being arrogant enough to try and learn two languages at a time.

Good lord, you don't even need RTK to learn Japanese or kanji, what keeps you from stop reviewing? There's no need to learn how to write them by hand at such an early stage. It's like you were trying to write chemical compositions before being able to read John's little locomotive. My advice is to scrap that RTK deck, learn a decent vocabulary base and start reading as soon as possible.

[RawToast]

Stansfield123 Wrote:Instead of stopping reviewing completely, you should just set a low leech threshold. It will make reviewing easier, and you'll only be giving up on a small percentage of the Kanji (which is no big deal) instead of all of them.

And no, putting a limit on your reviews is not a good idea.

+1. Set your leech rate nice and low (I think 6 or 8 is the default and works fine), and set it to suspend the leech cards. I believe Anki just tags them if you don't change the settings.

Don't worry about those cards for now. Start working on your vocabulary (by any means) whilst continuing with your RTK reviews. After you've reached some sort of goal (for example, 1000 words or sentences into Core) go back into Anki and reset the suspended cards.

There will be some of those items which you now find easier, because you will have seen them in vocabulary items. Some will still end up as leeches, but again don't worry -- you don't need them yet.

Sorry to post here but maybe even kasugano has the same doubt: what if you don't mind writing the kanji by hand? I've done RtK Lite and it was pretty useful to know how kanji works, to gain confidence in them etc.. but now stories are fading away, there are kanji I know but the english keyword doesn't trigger them in my memory anymore. For now I'm only interested in recognition, I'm doing vocabulary in recognition and, also thank to RtK, I have not difficulties with them. What to do? Suspend RtK and do only words? Or do both but flip RtK in recognition mode, with kanji on front and, instead of a keyword, put the "real" meaning of the kanji on the answer side? Because for recognition it's not that RtK keywords are so useful to be honest, maybe at this point it is more useful to do something like:

FRONT:

館

BACK:

［音］カン（クヮン）（漢）（呉）　［訓］やかた　たち
［学習漢字］3年
１ 大きな建物・屋敷。「館舎／帰館・公館・商館・洋館」
２ 宿屋。「旅館」
３ 役所。「大使館」
４ 公共の建物・施設。「映画館・図書館・博物館」
５ 学校・道場などの名に添える語。「弘道館・明倫館」
[補説]「舘」は俗字。

(or the english equivalent)

Maybe when one encounter new words with that kanji, this knowledge is more useful than to know the RtK keyword (but I know it's not his role to be useful in this way), in understanding why that particular word has that kanji and in retaining better the meaning of the word itself.

Why is putting a limit on kanji reviews not a good idea?

cophnia61 Wrote:What to do? Suspend RtK and do only words? Or do both but flip RtK in recognition mode, with kanji on front and, instead of a keyword, put the "real" meaning of the kanji on the answer side? Because for recognition it's not that RtK keywords are so useful to be honest, maybe at this point it is more useful to do something like:

You don't need half of that information.
Do you know what the following means?
（クヮン）（漢）（呉）
「館舎／帰館・公館・商館・洋館」
５ 学校・道場などの名に添える語。「弘道館・明倫館」
[補説]「舘」は俗字。

Knowing the individual meaning of a kanji, without AT LEAST a word (sentence preferable) to associate it with is close to useless. I would use sentences from actual resources.

vosmiura Wrote:you that you may forget all the writing if you don't practice it.

Because I freaking love writing kanji, more often than not I find some pen & paper to write the answers while doing reps. So, my plan: occasionally hand-write sentence decks.

Discuss?

After looking at the comments again my views on limiting review I think Ill just endure. But until when ? I wonder how long should we keep on reviewing kanji. In my case I did 3 months of production till the end.

After moving to Core 10k I realize it was very difficult for me to recognize from kanji to keyword. So shouldn't I do recognition cards in the first place?

Umm I also have another concern.....I have 2 decks in my anki which are Core 10k and RTK1 + new kanji from Core 10k. Which do you think is better to do first. Should I do the more fun Core 10k or the less one RTK.

I also dont understand what you mean with increasing the "leech" number. So you mean ill be having more suspended cards? Also is there anyway on how to make a card status not leech because my Core 10k dech have leech cards from the previos user and not mine's

Errol246 Wrote:But now ... I'm beginning to feel my mind burning out a little on those kanji. I think I can do just fine having only between 32 and 50 kanji to review per day, which is average if I do it every day

My 2 yennies:
After a year of doing this most days, you still have that many reviews every day? You might be caught in the "SRS Death March". At some point rather than remembering the character, you brain remembers "I don't know this one", and every time you miss it, your brain reinforces that connection.

I'd suggest when you miss one, spend at least 10-15 minutes re-learning it, either by browsing more stories, writing it over and over (and over), or whatever you need to do. The investment required to solidify your memory on it will save you many times over in the future.

Odin89 Wrote:Good lord, you don't even need RTK to learn Japanese or kanji, what keeps you from stop reviewing? There's no need to learn how to write them by hand at such an early stage. It's like you were trying to write chemical compositions before being able to read John's little locomotive. My advice is to scrap that RTK deck, learn a decent vocabulary base and start reading as soon as possible.

Good Lord, please ignore this guy. Abandoning RtK after having put in the effort and worked through it is the worst advice I've seen on this board.

kasugano Wrote:I also dont understand what you mean with increasing the "leech" number.

It means cards will be suspended after an x amount of fails. My recommendation, given your predicament, is to change it to 4. Maybe even 3, if 4 doesn't make a big enough dent in your workload in let's say 10 days.

It's not like those Kanji have to stay suspended forever. You can always just reset them later, when you feel like it.

And do RtK first. It makes sense for three reasons: 1. hard stuff should generally get done early, while your mind is rested, 2. having the Kanji fresh in your memory for when you do vocab recognition is a good idea 3. Kanji reviews are faster, so doing them first will set a quick pace for when it's time to do vocab, and hopefully help you speed up those reviews too. Going as fast as you can is always a good idea with Anki reviews.

Speaking of this, is there anyway to transfer the srs data from this site to anki?

learningkanji Wrote:Speaking of this, is there anyway to transfer the srs data from this site to anki?

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3857512054

If you limit your reviews, I suggest setting the order to "shortest interval first", that way you see the ones you are more likely to forget and the ones with intervals like a year or something can wait till tomorrow.

Also, I set my "new interval" on lapses to something like 15%. That way if I fail a card with an interval of a year, it's set back to a more sensible interval than 0 days. Saves a little time and frustration.

[s0apgun]

Don't stop. You will forget them all like I did. xD

Stansfield123 Wrote:Good Lord, please ignore this guy. Abandoning RtK after having put in the effort and worked through it is the worst advice I've seen on this board.

He doesn't seem to be enjoying it, that may end up in frustration, I don't think language learning should be a torture. RtK works for getting used to the kanji and seeing them as a combination of radicals, he finished the book so he already knows that. Keywords and stories are eventually dropped.

For instance, I don't know if these are included in the book but even if he studies 微 and 徹 isolated, he is gonna have a hard time knowing which is which until he learns words with them like 微量 or 微妙 for the first and 徹夜 徹底的 or 徹甲 for the second.

To TC, set yourself short term goals, starting with something simple you may want to read, work up its vocabulary and keep going.