Hi. I started RTK around the start of July and did the first 300 in two days, then stopped to do the first book of Genki. I got to around chapter 11 by the start of August before I was fed up with sort of just guessing at what the squiggles meant for kanji I hadn't done in RTK yet, so I decided to go back and complete RTK.

I'm using 6th edition ordering, and am at frame 1930.

I may have been doing it wrong, but here was my process:

I used a memrise RTK course, for 5th edition I believe. It didn't have the new 196 kanji, but it was in order and had the same keywords for the kanji it did include. Each level of the course had 15 kanji, so I added kanji on this website 15 at a time, chose/made mnemonics for them, and then planted them in memrise (going from kanji to keyword). After that I would do another set of 15, and then I would review the 15 from before in koohii by writing them on paper.

Using this method I usually always had 90% success, even days after, but I suspect that may have been due to me doing recognition reviews in memrise. I decided to stop using recognition reviews in memrise completely and just use mnemonics and just writing them for reviews.

Since starting this, my success rate has been around 65%, and I'm even forgetting some old cards that were in box 3 for instance. This is partially due to new kanji stories and primitives ruining the uniqueness of old ones, but also probably because I stopped doing my recognition reviews.

Should I just keep going like this with a horrible rate of attrition (I almost never get two successes in a row on new kanji unless it a really good mnemonic), or is it okay to do recognition reviews to boost production? It really felt like the old way was working (one example is the "den" kanji, I got it wrong like 5 times in memrise, and now I will never forget how to write it), but maybe it was just in my short term and never was actually firmly in my memory.

Another problem is that I believe Heisig talks a bit about "imagery", but I was always using word association. Images don't come into my brain unless I really try, so it was more making little word associations in my head rather than "imagery". I have the same problem when I read books, I don't really imagine it as pictures, in fact anything beyond basic descriptions bores me. Is vivid imagery really necessary, or is merely memorizing little stories or story fragments okay?

One more thing! I've been doing my reviews WITHOUT looking at the mnemonic, so I have to remember the mnemonic and the writing of the primitives and which way they're ordered. Is this masochistic and unnecessary, or should I continue doing it this way?

I'm amazed if you read this far.
Any advice?

Regarding imagery, yes I think it is important for the reason you mention - too many similar keywords. Take a look here:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=12927

And also some good advice here:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=12803

I think it's fine to do recognition for kanji, in fact that's what I'm doing. I don't have any data to back this up, but I highly suspect learning to write kanji is much easier(faster) to learn once you can confidently recognize them. I think it ultimately depends on your goals and how much of a priority you put on writing now v later.

yogert909 Wrote:I think it's fine to do recognition for kanji, in fact that's what I'm doing. I don't have any data to back this up, but I highly suspect learning to write kanji is much easier(faster) to learn once you can confidently recognize them. I think it ultimately depends on your goals and how much of a priority you put on writing now v later.

I think you're right yogert! Once you recognize kanji it's way easier to learn to write them... I still believe in the value of being able to produce a kanji from memory, but this doesn't mean you must do it in the beginning of your studies... It's way easier to do recognition, it's faster and easier. Then learn a lot of vocabs and after that one can switch to production if he feels he need it.

You're definitely right about being able to recognize kanji makes them easier to learn to write. I've definitely used visual memory as a crutch in some cases, like in the kanji for vapor and spirit.

I continued with my new method of just doing writing reviews and cutting out all recognition practice, and my rates have gone up at least. Now I'm getting 80-90 percent retention in my reviews once I've actually "learned" a kanji, which for me takes sometimes 1-2 fails before it actually is learned, as I blaze past kanji while "learning" them.

On kanji 2108 right now, should be finished (adding cards) by the end of September.

I've not gone in depth using heisig keywords on learning vocabulary, so I'm not sure how important recognition is or how it plays a role exactly. Unfortunately the anki decks for RTK that I've found are all outdated, with wrong order or incorrect keywords that have been changed in recent editions

Does anyone have an updated 6th edition RTK anki deck? Using the export flashcards function I get things like "・ｺ・" in the kanji column.