Hi there !

I was wondering for how long people who finished rtk (1 or 3) continued to do daily review, and how much daily time does it take.
I started rtk1 on september 2014 and reached the sign of the snake in february 2015.

Once "finished", i had roughly an hour per day review time. It decreased slowly and now, a year after having "finished" rtk1, i still have 15 to 30mn of review per day.

Anki tells me for the last month, my retention rate was 74% for mature card and 92% for cards i was re learning.
I still have 325 cards in "young and new" state (it oscillate but alwasy stay bigger than 300).

What about you ? any one still reviewing for more than 5 year ?

I did RTK1 in March 2013. Reviews dropped to 1 hour (or about 700, with how slow I was back then) / week in May. Kanji to keyword. I sporadically added more kanji from RTK3 and "RTK4" for a total of about 3100 but stopped reviewing in... August, I think.

I dropped off fairly quickly, it just wasn't really something I wanted to do and I felt that I got what I wanted out of it (familiarity with the majority of kanji shapes I would likely run into), and I moved on to just doing the Core deck.

I continue to review them today, 6 years later. I have about 1 or 2 per day. but if I stopped reviewing I would stop knowing all those obscure kanji, and they do pop up not infrequently.

i know it's a pain but the day you stop reviewing you start forgetting.
One thing I learned acquiring japanese and now chinese is that the key to learning a language, something that amazes people that I can do, is to practice it everyday and not make big mistakes that cost months of time relearning things I already learned. it's a huge project and big mistakes really hurt.

when I finished RTK i did try putting away anki and not reviewing, and it was a disaster.
sure I knew the easy ones I saw everyday, but I soon lost many of the important yet rare and confusing jouyou kanji such as 喩 膳 拶 畿 艶 羅 etc.
these examples are not obscure characters, they are all jouyou (everyday use characters) totally fundamental to a working knowledge of the language. did you know them all? if not it's time to do some reviews!

In my experience those who say it's ok to stop doing kanji reviews will probably argue that when you finish RTK you don't have to keep reviewing 踏 because you will start learning 踏む.
Sure that's true, but it may be 6 months or longer before you get from sentences that use 歩く to ones using 踏む. In 6 months of no reviews you may get lost in the desert of many many forgotten kanji.

I'm not saying there is no use in reviewing them, I just had other reviews building up, along with other stuff that took higher priority for me, so dropping something that was taking a huge chunk of my time so that I could keep doing what I felt was more important (instead of trying everything and quitting for nearly a year) made more sense to me. I guess it also depends on what you are doing/reading/where you are. I live outside Japan so I worry less aboutwritten place names/ people names in my everyday life, and at the level where I am now getting my vocabulary and grammar structure knowledge up is more important to me than some of the rarer kanji. It might come back to bite me later, but at least this way I keep studying.

^^Just a different viewpoint/different set of language priorities, do what works best for you (or, as many say, whatever you can keep doing consistently)

(2016-03-16, 4:05 am)nightbreak Wrote: Anki tells me for the last month, my retention rate was 74% for mature card and 92% for cards i was re learning.
I still have 325 cards in "young and new" state (it oscillate but alwasy stay bigger than 300).

Maybe there's a middle road between quitting and keep going forever.  I notice your relearning is 94 percent which is quite high and not very time efficient.  Perhaps dropping the number of relearning steps would decrease your workload while not letting you completely forget any kanji.  I've found that once my cards get a bit past the initial learning phase I don't need as many relearning steps as I'm not truly relearning, but more likely confusing with lookalike kanji.

When I finished RTK3 in 2011 I did daily reviews for a year, then weekly, then monthly, and I've been doing yearly reviews for 3 years. It's alright because most of my kanji have Japanese keywords by now, and I keep adding new J-keywords for words I've learned during the year, like 鞘　when I watched バケモノの子.

I learned RTK by going from kanji to keyword. Finished about a year ago.

Now I get about 10 cards per day and it takes me about 30 seconds to finish it. I answer correct if I know any japanese word the kanji is used in or if i can recall the keyword or a synonym of the keyword.

I started exclusively creating cloze delete cards a few months ago and it makes doing RTK very easy.

Another suggestion I just thought of would be to switch up your keywords to Japanese keywords or to switch up your kanji font to a brush font to get used to reading them in different forms.

As an intermittent studier... I finished RTK a few years ago, then intended to keep going with reviews but had a massive backlog a lot of the time. (I mostly kept up with reviews on my vocab and sentence decks when I wasn't learning any new stuff, but not so much for RTK.) Nearly a year ago, I wrote a plugin to add Japanese words out of my vocab and sentence decks, and that made me more motivated for a few months. But a couple of weeks ago I decided RTK review (and putting off doing RTK review) was sapping my motivation for Japanese more than it helped, so then I officially quit RTK

You can review them forever. A few of my kanji are starting to get into 10+ year intervals so I won't see some of them again until 2025 or later. Not very hard to keep up with that.

failure here! I stopped almost immediately and it's gone now : 3 ideally I would have liked to keep up a few days a week on it. I moved onto other SRS flashcard decks.

I stopped pretty soon after completing RTK in 2006, I think. Couldn't produce the majority of characters if I saw the keywords now even though I was performing well at the time. What I find interesting though is that some mnemonics that seemed strong at the time really weren't particularly powerful once I stopped reviewing. Whereas others really have stood the test of time and still feel "locked in", even though I haven't reviewed them.

[fuaburisu]

A revenant! Hehe, hello synewave =)

synewave Wrote:(...) some mnemonics that seemed strong at the time really weren't particularly powerful once I stopped reviewing. Whereas others really have stood the test of time and still feel "locked in", even though I haven't reviewed them.

Same here.

I've stopped twice now and need to get the deck back under control. The more obscure kanji are fading... Maybe if you read enough you won't need to drill, but an hour a day on a novel won't do it for me.

I think I stopped reviewing RTK after passing JLPT1 around 4 years ago. I don't live in Asia, and even if I did I suspect that I would almost never need to write things on paper. If I do, I can just pull out my phone as an aide.

Otherwise, reading and talking every so often seems to be good enough for me. I have no idea if I could pass the same test today, and I can definitely feel my Japanese level dropping a bit when I go for longer periods without much use, but it also feels pretty easy to pick it back up.

I lasted around 3 years then started using some reproduction software on 3DS(Kanken training). I quickly found out that although I could recognize kanji instantly (English/Common reading) producing them from memory was almost impossible. It was at that point reviewing RTK lost its usefulness.

The 3DS software mentioned above tests both directions and requires handwriting.