As I approach the end of RTK (frame 1450), naturally I am thinking about what happens next. I've followed threads on here for the past year and seen many people advance through RTK and Post-RTK stages. I think two points in post-RTK study are interesting: at 6 months and then for a year or more. At 6 months you've probably worked out all your bugs and developed a study protocol. 1+ years is a significant amount of time.

I wanted to request stories from those who have finished RTK and are now at or near the 6 Month mark, and those with 1+ years of post-RTK studying.

Thanks! I hope this turns out interesting and helpful!

I'm not at neither of those marks, but I'm pretty sure most people just keep reviewing. I mean, when all your cards are in the last box on this site, it takes over 200 days before you have to review them again, so eventually you will be fine just reviweing once a month or so. Hell, if it has passed 1 year since you finished RTK and you've done your reviews diligently and studied other japanese, I'm pretty sure you're not going to forget the kanji even if you don't review them for several years.

http://onhowtolearn.blogspot.com/

I'm on 4 months.

Just about 8 months here. I'm still reviewing RTK, but not doing it every day, because I'm too busy. (But I mostly keep up with it. I don't get too far behind.)

My approach is a bit different because I already had 6 semesters of Japanese at university a while back, then forgot a lot of it. But when I learned Japanese the first time, I used Genki I and II, so I used those for review. (I bought the answer key for mining sentences-- very useful.)

I've been doing the Kanji Odyssey stuff, but I've been a bit stuck with those, as my Anki deck has ballooned to about 5500 cards, with about 175 due a day. All that time spent reviewing hasn't really left me enough time to add new cards, so I'm not as far ahead as I'd like to be. I agree with Khatz about short sentences. Long sentences suck. They slow down Anki reviews. Writing out sentences is good to do in short spurts, but I don't do that anymore, either. I either draw them in the air with my finger or visualize the kanji in my head to save time.

I like Kanji Odyssey for the most part, even if the sentences are a bit long, the vocab is great, and it really is in a solid order of usefulness for grownups. But you need a certain amount of grammar background before you can make use of it.

I've also been adding other stuff to my Anki deck as well, so that's been bloating it up a lot, too. Lots of stuff from Yahoo and Kenkyusha online dictionaries.

RTK has made it a LOT easier to plow through vocab. Before I did RTK, I just saw kanji as random squiggles. Now they make sense to me, and even if I don't know what they mean, I'm familiar enough with them to know how to look them up properly. (That is, I can draw them on my electronic dictionary's kanji input pad without having to look back at the character I'm looking up.)

There's a lot of stuff I've been wanting to do, but I just haven't had time to do because of real world obligations. I've been wanting to replace my RTK deck with a RTK deck using Japanese (sort of a modified RTK2 deck) to kill two birds with one stone. I've also been wanting to finish Kanji Odyssey, and finish reviewing Genki II. (Just haven't had time for that. I've had a busy Fall.)

Most importantly, once I finish going over Genki II again and feel a bit more comfortable with my grammar, I think it'll be time to go full J->J. I've avoided it for now because I don't have time to figure out how to set it up, and it's just faster for me to go J->E for now. (Minimal E these days.)

I post a lot less on the forums now. Now that I know what I need to do, and what works for me, I spend a lot less time talking about studying, and more time actually doing it when I can. The iPhone is somewhat handy for that. I use Anki and the basic web interface on the iPhone for now.

So yes, RTK is worth it. Finish it off already. There's a lot of stuff out there to try. Try stuff, see what you like. If you don't like something, there's always eBay to get rid of it.

I think I've been finished for about 6 months now. I'm still seeing between 30-40 cards pop up in my RTK reviews every day, and to be honest, i eventually began cheating myself somewhat by frequently marking cards as passed when I couldn't really recall the kanji. But, when I look at the answers, its always one of those "oh, right, I knew that" moments, so it's not as I have forgotten the kanji itself, the links between the keywords and the kanji have become really weak for me. I don't necessarily think that this is a big problem though, as I still feel much of the benefit from completing RTK... that is, when I see kanji used in real Japanese, I can simply recognize them.

While RTK has probably been my biggest success, I haven't had a ton of luck outside that, primarily because I'm really really busy right now. It's my final semester of college, so hopefully in a couple months when I'm done, I will be able to properly focus on my Japanese studies again. Anki was causing me a lot of grief for a while because my reviews kept increasing above what I was able to handle sometimes. What mainly annoyed me is that my daily number of reviews would fluctuate greatly, like I might have 50 cards come due one day, then 20 due the next day. I eventually stopped adding cards to anki because I didn't feel like I had time, with school and everything. In the past couple weeks though, I have compromised and decided to add 3 cards from Kanji odyssey (so basically 1 kanji) every day.

Most of my "studying" has taken the form of reading. I've probably seen the most of my improvement in actually understanding Japanese come from this.

rich_f Wrote:There's a lot of stuff I've been wanting to do, but I just haven't had time to do because of real world obligations. I've been wanting to replace my RTK deck with a RTK deck using Japanese (sort of a modified RTK2 deck) to kill two birds with one stone. I've also been wanting to finish Kanji Odyssey, and finish reviewing Genki II. (Just haven't had time for that. I've had a busy Fall.)

I don't know if it'd be useful to you, but I've been setting up some flash card sets on Quizlet, with jukugo in an RTK1/2 spliced order. So, RTK1 order except with phonetic groups added. The problem is it's specialized for me; most of the words go word>reading, with some random word>translation, and the words aren't necessarily common.

Yeah, I actually had a proto-replacement RTK1 deck in the works, but it's starting to look more and more like RTK2. I actually went through RTK2 and analyzed it with Excel (not fun) and only found that #518 Snake isn't in RTK2.

So really, if you want to replace RTK1 with Japanese keywords, just do RTK2, I guess. But I don't like some of his vocab choices in RTK2.... but then that means reinventing the wheel. Ugh. RTK2 has some useful stuff in it. It's one of those rabbit holes you can wind up wasting a lot of time on if you're not careful, I guess. It might just be simpler/faster to go through RTK2.

11 months here, but unfortunately I have this cycle where Spring/Summer I tend to get very busy & swamped with more urgent work (lame excuses), and so I had about 5 or 6 months where I didn't learn much, and then in fall I get serious again.

I SRS'ed "All about particles" and I'm also 2/3 of the way through Kanji Odyssey volume 1. I really think KO is great for learning readings and building up vocab.

I find that KO is getting progressively easier to work through, as there are fewer new kanji introduced in each sentence & its more about learning more vocab for kanji that were already met.

My sight is on JLPT2, but my vocab & grammar are far from a pass. For vocab I find it roughtly correlates to where I am on KO (1/3 the way through both volumes). My feeling is that finishing all of KO will cover 90% of kanji & vocab in JLPT2.

For JLPT2 grammar, I find it hard to find ideal learning resources. Things like Kanzen Master grammar for JLPT2 have all the grammar points but they use any & all JLPT2 vocab in their examples, so that means I have to learn the vocab before I can really make good use of it. They should think about making materials that can be studied in parallel.

vosmiura Wrote:For JLPT2 grammar, I find it hard to find ideal learning resources. Things like Kanzen Master grammar for JLPT2 have all the grammar points but they use any & all JLPT2 vocab in their examples, so that means I have to learn the vocab before I can really make good use of it. They should think about making materials that can be studied in parallel.

Do what I do. Screw Kanji Odessy and mine from Kanzen Master instead. The grammar is harder (of course, that's the whole point) and the meanings are advanced but useful. Kanji Odessy is great for learning readings and common words, but if you need JLPT2 grammar and KO isn't supplying it, go with Kanzen master instead.

vosmiura Wrote:My feeling is that finishing all of KO will cover 90% of kanji & vocab in JLPT2.

I really would like to believe this but there is a guy from another thread saying he has been taking JLPT2 practice exams and ALOT of vocab from the test is not found in KO....can't get around throwing vocab lists into anki eh?

saizen Wrote:

vosmiura Wrote:My feeling is that finishing all of KO will cover 90% of kanji & vocab in JLPT2.

I really would like to believe this but there is a guy from another thread saying he has been taking JLPT2 practice exams and ALOT of vocab from the test is not found in KO....can't get around throwing vocab lists into anki eh?

Yes, I read that, too, and I totally agree with that person.

KO vocabulary is pretty basic - it will not cover 90% of the kanji & vocab in JLPT2 - probably more like 60%. Kanji in Context is more advanced. I think if you go through the first 1300 in KiC, you may cover about 80-90%.

kfmfe04 Wrote:KO vocabulary is pretty basic - it will not cover 90% of the kanji & vocab in JLPT2 - probably more like 60%. Kanji in Context is more advanced. I think if you go through the first 1300 in KiC, you may cover about 80-90%.

Hate to change subject of this thread but quick question..Is it productive to finish KO and then go to KiC? It says somewhere on japanshop.com that is covers 一級 vocab(almost all of it)!

KO's kanji cover about 90% of those on JLPT2 test, but maybe its too early for me to tell about vocab. Certainly, I don't know about non-kanji vocab.

KiK supplies more words, but it doesn't have examples for all of them. The Tanuki list on the other hand has tons.

KO covers most kanji used in the JLPT2 but it covers few of the compounds, though it covers many compounds which are not in the test. The best is to buy a book specifically dedicated to passing the JLPT2, like one of the Kanzen Master or UNICOM books. I have the UNICOM book but even that only covers part of the vocab.

I'm around the 6 month mark.

I reviewed for about 1 month after finishing, and haven't since then.

For many of the kanji, if I see the kanji I have trouble recalling the exact keyword. These tend to be either very uncommon kanji, or ones which were near the end of Heisig's ordering (and thus got less review time). Some I remember the general meaning, some I have all but forgotten and can make a good guess at best.

Keyword to kanji is also weak for many of the keywords. But that's not important to me.

Despite not reviewing, I can still learn new kanji/vocab at a very quick speed. If I see a kanji, I can still write it out in its correct stroke order and order the kanji in my mind via components (primitives).

Yes, if I took a Heisig test I would suck. However, learning new Japanese words and retaining their writing and reading is very easy, and that's what I care about.

sutebun Wrote:I'm around the 6 month mark.

I reviewed for about 1 month after finishing, and haven't since then.

For many of the kanji, if I see the kanji I have trouble recalling the exact keyword. These tend to be either very uncommon kanji, or ones which were near the end of Heisig's ordering (and thus got less review time). Some I remember the general meaning, some I have all but forgotten and can make a good guess at best.

Keyword to kanji is also weak for many of the keywords. But that's not important to me.

Despite not reviewing, I can still learn new kanji/vocab at a very quick speed. If I see a kanji, I can still write it out in its correct stroke order and order the kanji in my mind via components (primitives).

Yes, if I took a Heisig test I would suck. However, learning new Japanese words and retaining their writing and reading is very easy, and that's what I care about.

Same here. After a point, I found that Heisig reviews were just insufferable when compared to sentences. Heisig served a purpose, in that it totally transformed the way I see kanji, and made Japanese materials infinitely more accessible for study, but there's no point in torturing myself.

Besides, it's not like I don't get writing practice from other places.

kfmfe04 Wrote:KO vocabulary is pretty basic - it will not cover 90% of the kanji & vocab in JLPT2 - probably more like 60%. Kanji in Context is more advanced. I think if you go through the first 1300 in KiC, you may cover about 80-90%.

I decided to check roughly how they match based on a list I found of about 5000 JLPT2 vocab. KO's example sentences covered 54%.

Though that percentage could be adjusted higher by discarding specific and basic number words like 五つ and 五日 for example.

Later, I think I'll make a list of KO sentences that are not useful for JLPT2.

vosmiura Wrote:I decided to check roughly how they match based on a list I found of about 5000 JLPT2 vocab. KO's example sentences covered 54%.

Though that percentage could be adjusted higher by discarding specific and basic number words like 五つ and 五日 for example.

Later, I think I'll make a list of KO sentences that are not useful for JLPT2.

Dood nice work どうもありがとうございます。。本当に感謝しています！

I took the list of JLT2 vocab minus JLPT3 vocab, and pruned the KO list of sentences that don't use any of that vocab, or that is a duplicate (i.e. an earlier sentence already used that vocab).

Total pruned is about 25% of Volume 1 and over 50% of Volume 2.

Looking at it another way, half of Volume 2 should be a gimme.

I'm at about 5 months. I still review, but one thing I have started doing is suspending cards that I already know as actual kanji well. I think this is an important step, as you want to get rid of the English link between the kanji when you have a stronger link to the actual meaning and usage. As long as you wont forget the kanji then suspend it.

I technically finished RTK in Nov 2007 and really finished in Jan 08. I have kept up my reviews in addition to adding about 300 more cards from RTK3.

I say keep up your reviews even if you're doing sentences. The kanji reviews get less and less every day you do them. In addition, it brings up kanji you just will not see in Japanese sources in any reasonable manner (吾 anyone?). Plus, it keeps the temptation in the back of my mind to add in more cards (easy to put off, but will come about).

Plus, I'm not writing mine out on paper anymore, just the finger on the desk. So 30 cards (my average review amount at the moment) take about 5 minutes at most.

Yeah, I never could make the jump from RTK to Anki.