When going through RTK reviews on anki or through misc SRSing, is it advised to recite the parts of the kanji (primitives I think) while reviewing each individual kanji/keyword card? Or just review kanji/keyword?

I find that I end up forgetting the primitives if I don't explicitly try to recall them on occasion. However I don't do it for every card. More like how I'm feeling that day. So if you like one word answers...."sometimes".

yogert909 Wrote:I find that I end up forgetting the primitives if I don't explicitly try to recall them on occasion. However I don't do it for every card. More like how I'm feeling that day. So if you like one word answers...."sometimes".

Thank you for your input, that's probably what I'll end up doing then. I just needed someone's personal experience with it to influence my decision.

I used to highlight the primitives in my stories, and it did help to an extent yes ; however, it has its pitfalls. You might end up paying more attentions to the primitives than to the story itself.

You'll simply have to try it out for yourself and see how it works for you.

TsugiAshi Wrote:

yogert909 Wrote:I find that I end up forgetting the primitives if I don't explicitly try to recall them on occasion. However I don't do it for every card. More like how I'm feeling that day. So if you like one word answers...."sometimes".

Thank you for your input, that's probably what I'll end up doing then. I just needed someone's personal experience with it to influence my decision.

Just to clarify, I usually I don't pay attention to primitives if I already know the kanji. But maybe 10-15% of the time I will, just to make sure I don't forget the primitives. And I forgot to mention here's also a primitive deck.

It looks like I might just have to see how it goes when I start up.

Initially, I guess I'll just add everything while going through each kanji in RTK, and then after a certain point just see what seems necessary and what seems unnecessary and alter it from there.

Thanks again.

TsugiAshi Wrote:It looks like I might just have to see how it goes when I start up.

In his book about competitive memory "Moonwalking for Einstein", Joshua Foer talks about the sport is driven by an "arms race", in that each year someone discovers an improved way to memorize shuffled decks of cards or random digits or whatever (all based on the visual story-mnemonic technique expounded by Heisig!) and everyone has to then reverse-engineer their technique. It's the same story in sports: a 4-minute mile was considered a natural barrier, like the speed of light, until it was run---now all pros run miles in less than 4 minutes. While RTK learning isn't competitive, I think a similar kind of thing applies. In the 892 kanji I've learned so far, there have been a number of things I found myself doing "wrong" and had to fix in order to learn better and faster. Autodidactism seems to be heavily reliant on experimenting and iteratively correcting one's technique. Meta-learning.

About your question, my two yen. With recently-learned kanji as well as kanji I haven't reviewed/seen in a while, producing the kanji from the keyword requires me to mentally say/see the story in order to identify the primitives and reconstruct the kanji. So identifying the primitives is an automatic part of that process. In kanji that are in "short long-term working memory", i.e., that I've learned not too recently and seen not too long ago, I can often go from keyword straight to kanji with the barest recollection of the story to remember the primitives. Maybe I'll find that that's not the best way and correct it.

Best of luck when you start. What, you've already started? Good work! See you at 2200 !

TsugiAshi Wrote:When going through RTK reviews on anki or through misc SRSing, is it advised to recite the parts of the kanji (primitives I think) while reviewing each individual kanji/keyword card? Or just review kanji/keyword?

You should review as fast as you can. Only bother with recalling the primitives or story when necessary.

The goal here, after all, is to learn to recognize the Kanji instantly. If you're already there, then you no longer need the story or the primitives. If you end up forgetting and need them later, then you'll just go back to them then. But, if you're reading and doing vocab, odds are you'll never have to do that for most Kanji.