Hi all,

I'm pretty new to RTK (at about 300 kanji now). How often are you supposed to do your reviews? Only when the cards expire or are there no real set rules? Right now I seem to just review a stack here and there randomly, but after reading more about the Leitner system it seems maybe I should only review when the cards expire. Any advice? Thanks!

I would wait until the review system says the cards are expired. The timings are well weighted so you don't get bogged down with the cards you consistently get correct. And, if you keep gradually adding new kanji, it will be a very smooth progression.

Keep an eye on your failed stack. If it keeps growing, you'll have a whole bunch you need to re-review later which can be a pain. I'm working back through a 100 card stack of failures. :( Try to keep it as small as possible

Yeah I agree, don't be tempted into reviewing from the green stack..

When I first started I felt that sometimes I hadn't "learnt" some of the kanji well enough and therefore I should be reviewing them more often. Especially when they were new additions, but you've just got to give them chance to seep into long-term memory.

Thanks guys for clearing that up!

It helped me in the long run to have an idea how many % of newly learned kanji I failed on average, and then add new kanji to keep my first stack the same size every day. That way I could more or less predict my study load every day. For instance, when I was doing RTK1, I really wanted to finish soon, so I got about 100 kanji from my first stack to review per day (I'm in the habit of clearing all orange every day), got about 30 of them right usually, and then added 30 new ones to replace the ones that got to higher stacks per day. Now that I'm doing RTK3, I don't add more than 10 new kanji per day, and my first review stack is now typically around 30-40 kanji, I still get about 1/3 of them right and add another 10 to keep the stack going.

The only drawback of this method was when I went a weekend away and missed 3 days of reviewing. It took me a while to get my stacks in order again, and I still have empty stacks somewhere in my higher columns to show for that period...