I discovered RTK while taking a Japanese class last year that required me writing kanji by hand. I started out just using the book, then started using an Anki deck, and then switched the order of my deck to use "RTK Lite". This worked out well since the N5 and N4 kanji set corresponded pretty well to my class, which used Genki 2. And RTK worked well for me - the decomposition of kanji into primitives and then making stories of them helped me on my writing tests. Of course, it also helped me with recognition.

Since I'm now preparing for N3 I thought that I would just add in the N3 cards. This corresponds to how I "just add in more" vocab cards or grammar cards. But I'm seeing that these decks just aren't the same at all for me. For example, my pass rate on mature vocab cards is about 80%, but my pass rate on mature RTK cards is about 50%. The stories don't stick around very long for me, or I can't recall them when seeing a keyword, etc.

And the thing is that I don't care very much about long term retention of stories or writing for the N5 or N4 kanji. I can read them just fine and never have to write them down. For me, the lasting benefit of the process of getting the cards to mature seems to be that I am just very comfortable with them and can distinguish them at a glance.

That being said, last month I decided to unsuspend all my N5 and N4 suspended cards and work thru them. I was determined to "know them cold". But the same thing happened again: I can get them to mature, and then fail them.

Now I'm thinking that I'm appraoching this wrong. I think that I should just stop reviewing my N5 and N4 decks altogether. My only problem with kanji now is that I am running into some new kanji in my vocab lists, and am having trouble distinguishing them. They contain primitives that I don't know. For example:

味が濃い
味が薄い

So I think that I should spend my kanji time working thru my N3 deck. It will certainly reduce my study time, and making time for learning new kanji will probably help me learn new vocab.

I'm wondering if people who are my experienced than me can comment on my situation.

Thanks

My advice would be to either fully dedicate yourself to the Heisig method or don't. It sounds to me like you took a shortcut (RTK lite), which benefited you in the short run but not in the long run. I knew a few hundred kanji before beginning RTK but still took the time to re-learn them using the Heisig method and now see them in a different context. It was for the better.

I won't take the time to list the benefits of RTK, but if you're not going to complete the book, you're better off learning 'dilute' and 'concentrated' by rote memorization. Why or how those two were left out of lite, I don't know. But if you feel you've mastered N5 and 4 kanji without relying on mnemonics, you might as well concentrate on new material.

For RTK, I went through the Lazy Kanji Mod deck and read the book. After that, I dropped it. If you're still having trouble distinguishing kanji (濃 and 薄 only share one primitive...), then I suggest more practice with kanji (concentrate on the differences between kanji you think are similar; you'll find most of them to be quite different); whether you decide to just use vocabulary at this point or not is up to you, though. RTK is really only useful for beginners to learn to distinguish kanji (until you decide to practice writing), so I don't want to tell you to use it longer than necessary.
Honestly, RTK's ordering is one of its best parts, so I don't really recommend deviating from it...

As for your actual question: if you don't have any problem recognizing the kanj you've already studied, quit reviewing them; there's no reason to review stories or keywords if you can recognize the kanji in compounds.

If you were getting 100% on mature cards to the point where reviewing them felt like a waste of time, that would be reason to stop, but that seems not to be the case here

For example I am technically still reviewing 一、二、三, etc. 一 will be up for review in October 2017, shortly after 鯉. Hardly seems worth the bother suspending them.

If you stop reviewing cards without sufficient reinforcement elsewhere, you are throwing away at least some of the effort already invested in learning them.

The kanji deck is by far the hardest in my collection so I guess that's to be expected. My review burden on this deck has hardly changed for an entire year, despite adding very few new cards: pic.

Of course like many I recommend reviewing kanji -> meaning if you have no reason to write by hand. I can't even write kana despite my reading/listening being comfortably past N1 now.

Some folks seem to advise giving up reviewing kanji -> (English) meaning altogether, but I disagree. I find the mental hook it provides to be indispensable literally every time I do any substantial amount of reading, especially if there are words I don't know or don't immediately recognise. If I get stuck on a word, recalling the kanji meaning(s) is often enough to cue its reading and meaning, even when the word meaning is different or abstractly related to kanji meaning(s).

Something I find useful is adding an indication to the front of a card in cases where a hasty answer is likely to be wrong (as in the example you gave), either by adding 'hints' field or just adding (!) to the question. Of course, you don't get hints like this 'in the wild', but a flashcard is just for bootstrapping purposes anyway, creating an initial association to relate back to (possibly with some effort/stumbling at first). And making flashcards easier is always a good. Means you can have more of them.

In the case of 濃い and 薄い, in your position (with the benefit of hindsight), I would use any lame trick that works in order to distinguish them. I'm sure you already recognise them enough to think "Oh, this is that one that looks like that other one. It's either dilute or concentrated." So you just need a trick to distinguish them, using whatever primitives you recognise. Of course, learning more primitives gives you more to work with, but may not be necessary.

Flowers + water make pretty thin soup (picture the soup - this is about imagery not chanting ). Maybe there will come a time when other cards crop up that render this trick inadequate, in which case a slight rethink will be required (no big deal). On the other hand, you will be better at it by then, and will probably know more primitives anyway, so it may never be necessary to go 'full Heisig' and break everything down completely.

There are plenty of kanji in my deck I've never even bothered to figure out the primitives for, e.g. 鬮, and plenty of primitives I now struggle to identify, having not needed to do so for so long. For example, I instantly recognise 薄 in any context now, but struggled to recognise the primitive in the bottom right (acupuncturist?).

What generally happens is, I'll add a new kanji and remember it for a while by brute force association with the context I found it in, then when the interval reaches a few weeks I'll draw a blank and try to remember by figuring out the primitives, and realise I never bothered to break it down in the first place.

A recent example is 椚, which I saw on a baseball team uniform (it's fairly common in names). Though the primitives are obvious in this case, I've never tried to use any kind of imagery to associate them with the (rather obscure) meaning, and will only bother to do so if I ever fail it.

Guys, thanks for all your thoughtful replies. It'll take me a while to process all the info, but I'll post back when I figure out my next steps with kanji.

I had time to read everyone's reply now and also think more about the actual problem I'm having, which might not have been clear in my original post.

Say I have an hour I can dedicate to Japanese every day, and I'm willing to spend 20 minutes of that on Kanji. I've been finding that I fail my existing kanji cards often enough so that I am spending all my kanji time reviewing them. I think that I am confusing 濃 and 薄 because I have not yet learned the primitives for them.

As anotherjohn pointed out, this does indeed mean that I don't know them. But I'm not sure if knowing them in this way (keyword -> write kanji) is valuable to me. Last year, I had to write by hand for a class. But I'm not in that class any more, so I no longer have a need (opportunity?) to write by hand.

As an example, yesterday anki gave me the keyword for "mama", which I mistakenly wrote as it appears in 毎. Today I could not remember how to write "embrace", even though as soon as I saw the kanji I could identify it. (Personally, I loved learning all the "bound together" stories at once). I feel that failing and repeating these cards in this way isn't giving me any value anymore, and is preventing me from learning new kanji that are appearing in my vocabularly lists.

I think that anotherjohn's suggestion of going kanji->keyword might help with my problem.

Another option might be to scrap anki altogether and just continue with the book, perhaps writing each kanji as I go along.

I'd suggest switching to kanji --> keyword over following the book.

I wouldn't. The goal of RTK is to be able to produce kanji from memory. Not produce keywords.

I wound up switching my decks over to kanji -> keyword and like it so far. I had a backlog of about 50 cards in my N5 and N4 decks and failed 3 of them. I feel like this was a good use of my time. The failures meant something to me, and I look forward to reviewing them again tomorrow.

To be honest, it might be ideal if the cards started out keyword -> kanji and then switched to kanji -> keyword once they hit mature. That way you would make sure that you knew how to write them by hand at least once. However, I don't see any way to experiment with that in anki.

I found that writing them helped me to learn them. But as I said earlier, keeping that skill current via anki is a big time commitment for me, to the point where I feel that it's crowding out other, more important ways for me to spend my English time. It's also detatched from how I actually use Japanese, since I never write it by hand.

ryuudou Wrote:I wouldn't. The goal of RTK is to be able to produce kanji from memory. Not produce keywords.

I've said this in other threads, but unless your goal is to write kanji, there's no reason to waste that much time practicing when you could be furthering your other Japanese skills. Producing the kanji once or twice when it's introduced is fine, but keyword -> kanji isn't particularly useful for learning to read.

sholum Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I wouldn't. The goal of RTK is to be able to produce kanji from memory. Not produce keywords.

I've said this in other threads, but unless your goal is to write kanji, there's no reason to waste that much time practicing when you could be furthering your other Japanese skills. Producing the kanji once or twice when it's introduced is fine, but keyword -> kanji isn't particularly useful for learning to read.

It took a while, but I'm now coming over to this point of view. I now have a taste of literacy - with a dictionary, for the first time, I can read NHK Easy News and doraemon. Speeding up the "learning to read" process seems like a worthy goal. If I only have an hour to spend on Japanese a day, I'd rather focus on advancing that goal than reminding myself how to write kanji.

As I mentioned earlier, I think it would be ideal if anki had a feature where the kanji started off production and then graduated to recognition. But right now I have such a backlog of kanji to review that that seems like a distant problem.

ariariari Wrote:

sholum Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I wouldn't. The goal of RTK is to be able to produce kanji from memory. Not produce keywords.

I've said this in other threads, but unless your goal is to write kanji, there's no reason to waste that much time practicing when you could be furthering your other Japanese skills. Producing the kanji once or twice when it's introduced is fine, but keyword -> kanji isn't particularly useful for learning to read.

It took a while, but I'm now coming over to this point of view. I now have a taste of literacy - with a dictionary, for the first time, I can read NHK Easy News and doraemon. Speeding up the "learning to read" process seems like a worthy goal. If I only have an hour to spend on Japanese a day, I'd rather focus on advancing that goal than reminding myself how to write kanji.

As I mentioned earlier, I think it would be ideal if anki had a feature where the kanji started off production and then graduated to recognition. But right now I have such a backlog of kanji to review that that seems like a distant problem.

Since mature cards are noted by Anki and Anki 2 bases everything off of notes instead of cards, it may be possible to have mature dependent format changes with a plugin, but I don't know of one.

sholum Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I wouldn't. The goal of RTK is to be able to produce kanji from memory. Not produce keywords.

I've said this in other threads, but unless your goal is to write kanji, there's no reason to waste that much time practicing when you could be furthering your other Japanese skills. Producing the kanji once or twice when it's introduced is fine, but keyword -> kanji isn't particularly useful for learning to read.

Keyword -> kanji is the only point of RTK, and is a skill valuable beyond physically writing as it helps your output when just typing too.

When you read Japanese you're not reading English keywords so there's no reason to ever output keywords kia kanji -> keyword. You're not studying RTK keywords, you're studying kanji, so your cards should not be set up as such.

ryuudou Wrote:

sholum Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I wouldn't. The goal of RTK is to be able to produce kanji from memory. Not produce keywords.

I've said this in other threads, but unless your goal is to write kanji, there's no reason to waste that much time practicing when you could be furthering your other Japanese skills. Producing the kanji once or twice when it's introduced is fine, but keyword -> kanji isn't particularly useful for learning to read.

Keyword -> kanji is the only point of RTK, and is a skill valuable beyond physically writing as it helps your output when just typing too.

When you read Japanese you're not reading English keywords so there's no reason to ever output keywords kia kanji -> keyword. You're not studying RTK keywords, you're studying kanji, so your cards should not be set up as such.

You don't seem to understand my point so I'll try to say it more simply:
RTK is useful for learning to recognize kanji as individual characters and hand writing kanji from memory; one of those skills is far more useful than the other and requires much less study to make use of (that'd be the former).

And no, I've never had trouble typing out words despite only doing recognition; using an IME is a recognition task; assuming you know what word you're trying to type, you just look to make sure you highlighted the right one. There's a difference between knowing which kanji is used in a word and being able to write it from memory.

Frankly, RTK is pretty much useless for most of one's Japanese studies. After the initial introduction to kanji, you forget all the keywords and stories in favor of Japanese vocabulary (which is actually useful). After a long period of studying all the other things one has to study to improve their Japanese, one might finally decide that writing all the kanji (in RTK) would be a nice skill to have, even if they'll rarely use it (or in rare cases, you might actually need that skill for regular life).
Between that beginning bit and the ending bit, RTK is completely useless.

Anyway, by going kanji --> keyword, you quickly strengthen a skill that you'll need for anything involving written Japanese, though you'll sacrifice writing practice (not much of a sacrifice, if you ask me); the opposite has its use for kanji recall, but what's the use at this stage? Recognition is more important.

If you can output a kanji you can recognize it. The other way around is not the same. This is why keyword -> kanji is preferable and is doing it as intended.

Also RTK is not useless for most of your studies in that it's the scaffold that makes your studies easier and more efficient. It's still there working for you; the benefits just become silent and passive and you start taking the skills you trained doing RTK for granted even though it's something that's there with you until fluency and beyond.

ryuudou Wrote:If you can output a kanji you can recognize it.

This is not always true in my experience, at least not always in a meaningful way. Recognizing a kanji is really only half the battle; after you've recognized it, in order for it to be useful, you need to be able to extract some meaning out of it.

When studying keyword -> kanji, the keyword serves as a cue for the story which serves as a cue for the radicals. Going in the opposite direction is not always immediately obvious.

You could ask why one would want to go the other direction, when the skill you are apparently practicing in doing so is how to conjure up English words when presented with certain symbols. However, this is not necessarily a useless skill, especially if you are living in Japan with little Japanese ability. It allows you to operate your washing machine and rice cooker, navigate by train fairly easily, and figure out more-or-less what's in the stuff you're buying at the grocery store.

It can, however, become a crutch that's hard to get past using. So for long term study, it may not be the best idea to rely on constantly converting kanji to English in your head, especially since it's a skill that's only useful with written Japanese, and even then, only for kanji heavy material.

A compromise might be, once you are able to recall kanji fairly well form the keyword, to switch to recognition using a Japanese word contain the kanji in question that is similar in meaning to the original keyword. Preferably, this new keyword would contain only the kanji in question along with okurigana, though that may not always be possible, especially if you are trying not to use obscure words.

Thanks for all the thoughtful replies guys. I think that RtK is great. But to be honest I'm surprised that the author has remained silent on how modern technology might influence how people should use his book. His book was written in 1977 and since then

1. Computers now "write" most of the kanji in written Japanese. The value of handwriting Japanese has decreased sharply since 1977.
2. It seems that most Japanese students use a computerized flashcard system of some kind or another.

I'm guessing that he hasn't commented on it because he doesn't work as a Japanese teacher. It's unfortunate though, since since students are adapting his book to account for these changes out of necessity. And students, by definition, don't know if the adaptations they're doing are good or bad.

In my case, I learned the hard way that it just doesn't make sense for me to continue using an SRS system to drill writing the 850 kanji that I learned how to write with his system. At the very least, it takes me too long each day.

It took me 2 days to work thru my kanji backlog switching to kanji -> keyword. Some of my failures were interesting and informative. For example, I forgot that 銀 means silver. That was embarassing. But to me it was an indication that SRS'ing kanji -> keyword has some utility for me.

I suspect that all these things change as your relationship with the language changes. I'll see how things go and might make more changes in the future as well.

ariariari Wrote:Thanks for all the thoughtful replies guys. I think that RtK is great. But to be honest I'm surprised that the author has remained silent on how modern technology might influence how people should use his book. His book was written in 1977 and since then

1. Computers now "write" most of the kanji in written Japanese. The value of handwriting Japanese has decreased sharply since 1977.
2. It seems that most Japanese students use a computerized flashcard system of some kind or another.

I'm guessing that he hasn't commented on it because he doesn't work as a Japanese teacher. It's unfortunate though, since since students are adapting his book to account for these changes out of necessity. And students, by definition, don't know if the adaptations they're doing are good or bad.

If I heard correctly, Heisig doesn't really care about RTK; it's not his field of study, so he doesn't want to spend more time on it, or something like that.

elydian Wrote:A compromise might be, once you are able to recall kanji fairly well form the keyword, to switch to recognition using a Japanese word contain the kanji in question that is similar in meaning to the original keyword. Preferably, this new keyword would contain only the kanji in question along with okurigana, though that may not always be possible, especially if you are trying not to use obscure words.

This is much better than kanji -> keyword.

Aririari Wrote:Thanks for all the thoughtful replies guys. I think that RtK is great. But to be honest I'm surprised that the author has remained silent on how modern technology might influence how people should use his book. His book was written in 1977 and since then

1. Computers now "write" most of the kanji in written Japanese. The value of handwriting Japanese has decreased sharply since 1977.
2. It seems that most Japanese students use a computerized flashcard system of some kind or another.

I'm guessing that he hasn't commented on it because he doesn't work as a Japanese teacher. It's unfortunate though, since since students are adapting his book to account for these changes out of necessity. And students, by definition, don't know if the adaptations they're doing are good or bad.

He has. RTK has been updated several times in modern times.