Codexus Wrote:And this is fine until, you can't keep up anymore. Then the SRS has the opposite effect on many people. It acts as a demotivator. All you see is that xxxx due cards.

Instead the software should use all the information available to it to make a realistic schedule that includes learning new information (an important factor for motivation) and be flexible about the schedule of revision of long interval cards that don't need immediate attention.

Hmm, this is available in Anki; you can set it to show you a maximum number of cards each day. It'll get rid of that demotivator effect, right? And you'll still be fighting the review pile, though slower, of course.

Hey, thanks for all the replies and ideas... as always there seems to be no clear consent. It would be to difficult to answer in detail to every reply so I only try to clarify some points. Besides that Codexus seems to have the same story/opinion like me, so he sort of answered a little bit for me.

I was a little bit surprised that some people think in much more fundamental (or fanatic) terms and see only black (don't do RTK or stop it at some time) or white (do it to the very end). This leads to the strange opinion that everything you did for RTK is lost (and wasted effort) at the moment you stop your reviews. The big picture for me is Japanese, not RTK. RTK is just a tool that already has proven as very helpful.

Some people said its going to sort out.. "magic of srs" or something like that. I think the magic was gone with my motivation. Besides confusing more an more vocabulary with keywords and keywords with other keywords, I am forgetting stories. And I don't relearn them because of my motivation - so I don't see a good end here.

Loosing the ability to write is nothing that bothers me that much, RTK was never thought to teach writing, anyway. There is always the possibility to "relearn" writing with some of those Nintendo DS Kanji Games for native speakers, given the ability of knowing the needed vocabulary. Besides that, I think its more usefull to train writing with the vocabulary/sentences - something I do from time.

I am not 100% sure how if I continue but when i continue i think I am going to do it this way:
- RTK has only low priority (compared to sentence/vocabulary learning). Better for motivation I hope.
- I stop trying to rush without motivation the due cards to 0. That is going to result in a big due pile but I hope its more efficient in the long term.
- I replace the keywords of all the kanji I "know" from my sentence deck with some Japanese keyword . This seems to be a little bit time consuming but perhaps i could write some sort of simple plugin that automates this somehow (parsing sentence deck for kanji -> exporting -> e.g parsing whrightaks list ->putting into RTK deck)

The big question remains: Is it more efficient to continue RTK and sentence mining separate or to make the switch to sentence mining only and to relearn/review the kanji as I encounter them in the "wild" (only some hours learning per day)?

I don't know, man. I'd say keep reviewing on the side as you do sentences. Otherwise, what was the point of doing RTK? You'll forget what you learned. You say you can relearn stuff that you need to remember as you go along, but then you'd have been better off just not doing RTK and learning the kanji as you go using heisig's mnemonic method. Just wait it out, give yourself a few months till your reviews wane, and then make the decision. If anything, it'll give some of the kanji that you reviewed during those extra few months a longer lifespan in your memory.

thorstenu Wrote:The big question remains: Is it more efficient to continue RTK and sentence mining separate or to make the switch to sentence mining only and to relearn/review the kanji as I encounter them in the "wild" (only some hours learning per day)?

That's difficult to say. In the short term, getting rid of the RtK review will help go faster and you'll get to see more of those kanji in context so it might even help with kanji recognition.

In the long term, it may be more efficient to solidify your knowledge of all kanji including how to write them. If you switch completely to only recognizing the kanji the risk that after a while, when RtK isn't so fresh in your mind you'll start confusing similar kanji.

thorstenu Wrote:This leads to the strange opinion that everything you did for RTK is lost (and wasted effort) at the moment you stop your reviews. The big picture for me is Japanese, not RTK. RTK is just a tool that already has proven as very helpful.

This sums up a great deal of my confusion as to many of these responses.
Although more confusion comes from the seeming need for nearly personal attacks just because we're doing something else. Calling us lazy, saying we 'don't understand the srs,' and worst, that we should rethink why we're even studying another language. Apparently you have very amazing powers of insight, to read us this way.
Perhaps you might consider turning those sleuthing powers toward introspection, however. I certainly don't want any of it.


@Igor,
You only forget part of what you learned. You learned a lot. And you don't actually stop reviewing. You're reading every day, which means you're seeing kanji every day. I also remember all of the primitive elements and continue to use them nearly every day to learn new kanji outside of the RTK list, as well as to identify those I already know. Sometimes I even use the stories. Remembering the Kanji is still very much in practice. It's only Reviewing the Kanji that isn't.

I'm betting on a gradual switch.
As soon my reviews dropped to 3-4 kanji/day, I stopped reviewing RTK.
I know I am forgetting a lot, but that's not a problem, because I am already getting more review from sentence mining than from RTK.

The "absolute" type responses are the ones I disagree with even if they mesh with what I'm doing. We're all here for different reasons with different methods, needs, and sometimes goals. Most I should respond is "This is my opinion, here's where I kind of disagree with you, you may want to try this, etc."

My opinion is that keeping up reviews allows you to catch kanji that might fall through the cracks during your real Japanese studies. These are the ones that won't come up in for awhile, or just won't come up unless you're reading A LOT of Japanese material.

My other opinion is that it's in an SRS. The nature of the system means that as long as you're not adding new stuff, the reviews should become less and less. It may get to a point where you can do it once a week without much of a hick-up.

Now, if reviewing Kanji via RTK is demotivating maybe it should be stopped. If it's not fun, you're only going to think of reasons to avoid it. Let your normal Japanese studies carry the load.

It's all a give and take. What you lose by not doing one thing (RTK reviews), you can gain in another (extra time for Japanese sentences). Pick you path, don't regret the choice. Change as the situation dictates. If anyone's read my past posts can tell, my path has changed a number of times.

My 2 cents to the discussion:

I think reviewing is nessesary, but it seems that Anki is better suited for this purposes than this site for one big reason. Anki cards are customizable, you can add on and kun-yomi and rare componds to it.
The paper cards that Heisig suggested to make in RTK1 (and developed the idea in RTK2) are better suited for the reviewing purposes (because they have readings and compounds), than just relying on an english keyword in the long run.
While concentrating on a single keyword is good to make a mnemonic and memorize all RTK1 kanjis for the first time, for those who already studied them once, sticking to the RevTK cards after that (as they are currently represented on this site) can be not overall efficient.
I think it will be only beneficial for this site, if some day there is an option, that will allow to switch to full Heisig-card representation with japanese readings and few rare compounds included.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I'm betting on a gradual switch.
As soon my reviews dropped to 3-4 kanji/day, I stopped reviewing RTK.
I know I am forgetting a lot, but that's not a problem, because I am already getting more review from sentence mining than from RTK.

Just reading kanji isn't the same thing as actively recreating them from memory though. Trust someone who learned over a thousand kanji by traditional Japanese methods. If you're doing more than recognition I guess that's not a problem, but I'm guessing you don't have production cards for all the kanji in RtK since many of them are so rare.

Just saying that I wouldn't personally call sentence recognition kanji reviews.

o.O

I find it kind of strange that people are giving up writing for reading. (What?!) Sure, it's possible to live in the U.S. and read manga, newspapers, online stuff. But what about actually being in Japan? I'm just curious. My opinion, is that if you give up writing for reading, you're giving up the aesthetic essence of Kanji.

"I'll just pick it up later."

I've seen this quote, A LOT.(referred to almost everything in Japanese). Like "Writing? I'll just pick it up later." "Middle of RTK? I'll just pick up the rest later while doing sentences." "LearningJapaneseandit'sallfeelingtoohardformerightnow,muchmoreimportantthingslikemyjob,school,blah,blah,blah? I'll just pick it up later." Well, my opinion on this, is just take small sections when they are small. Leaving small dirty laundry on the floor is fine, and can easily be picked up. But when it has become a huge mass of dirty, stinky, ick-conflobbery(), you don't want the trouble of cleaning it all, do you?

Have X number of RTK reviews, and feel it's to big? Break it up into chunks, or just start doing them. I find that just starting them gets my will back into the game. 1 turns into 2, and into 4, and into 8, and finally I realize I have the energy to do more after many, many reviews.

Of course, I'm assuming the people who are questioning if they should stop reviewing after RTK, have a giant number of reviews to get done. If not...why stop? Is it really that much hassle to do 1-20 Kanji in a day, just to keep them fresh in your mind?

Just my 2 cents on this all....or 4 cents...or 6 cents... my god. Sorry for the wall of text if it becomes so.

Surely if you've been studying Heisig properly you won't have that many reviews to do when you finish the book? If you find yourself having to review 150 Heisig cards each day for several weeks afterwards then it's clear that your stories aren't working.

I stopped reviewing after a few months and regret it. The main reason was because I do most of my Japanese studying while at work which doesn't allow me to review on this site (no Japanese fonts and my admin won't install them). I think there is a way to convert your reviews from here into an anki file but I never looked into it.

I'm going to start over with the movie method ASAP and use Anki for reviews. I'm hoping I'll be able to fly through it pretty fast having already completed RTK1.

And like others have said if you do it right it shouldn't be an issue as you won't have that many reviews after a while. If you DO have tons of reviews even months later then that means you don't know those Kanji very well.

Brokenvai, everyone does less writing than reading, not just language learners. But it's especially important for a learner that you always read (slightly) above your level and write below your level so you don't cement mistakes. At the start that naturally means all reading and no writing, with an eventual, gradual move to a more natural ratio.

But....There's a difference. I'm just wondering if we can just cut down on having to master writing later rather than now. The time is now. Many forget that writing is important, and then have to go back and research their way through writing again. They realize it's a lot of work. Then proceed to believe they don't need it anyways.

But really, this site is about writing and remembering Kanji...

My point of view is...I'd rather be able to write something, and not have to check back 24/7 for the stroke order of everything I'm writing.

I stopped my kanji reviews for about a month, and I'm now going through my Heisig deck from the beginning, reviewing all 2042 over again. Granted, it's about a billion times faster (200+ kanji per hour) than completely redoing everything again from scratch (which is a good deal faster and easier than doing RTK the first time), but this refresher course wouldn't have been necessary at all had I kept up on my daily reviews.

At the same time, I was finding it difficult to remember how to write even a lot of the more basic kanji, which are likely still not scheduled to come up in my old Heisig Anki deck, so perhaps a refresher course would have been in order anyway? Food for thought. I was also getting lazy with my writing, so I've chosen to transform my sentence deck into a recall one (kana to kanji) because I'm a glutton for punishment, AND because this greatly helps me hone my writing and kanji production skills. (Though in all honesty, despite the added difficulty in reviewing, it's fun!)

So there's my little anecdote, YMMV.

I stopped RtK at the halfway point in favor of Remembering the Simplified Hanzi some months ago. It really hasn't been difficult to keep up with it at all, after 2-3 weeks or so my reviews dropped to only 10-15 minutes a day (50 chars or less), and to be honest I halfass a lot of my stories into more skeletal sentences. 10 minutes a day (or 30 every 3?) isn't really asking much, I just piggyback it on my Hanzi study. I don't think I'll do them *forever*, but until I pick up Japanese study again I don't think the time commitment is asking very much.

Being currently near the end of the first book of RtH, I know that if I miss a review the next day's is going to be pretty long, which in turn motivates me to study every day. It generally takes about an hour to learn 25 new characters and do my review. Last weekend I missed two days in a row and on the third my review was about 400 characters, which was daunting. I told Anki not to give me any new cards and plowed through the whole thing in about two hours and some change. I left myself about 10-15% leeway for my deadline to finish the book, so I didn't need to make up the new characters I didn't review.

Even though I don't plan on resuming Japanese studies anytime soon, I'm considering picking up RtK again and finishing the rest of the book by the end of the summer while I'm waiting for RtH volume 2 to come out. It'd be nice to have the whole thing waiting for me when I do go back to Japanese, and like I said, I don't find the continued reviews that bad.

I kept going for a long time, but now I stopped reviewing RTK and I keep a separate deck with all RTK1+3 suspended, and whenever I have trouble remembering any kanji when reading, I unsuspend it and start reviewing it again. Sometimes I also unsuspend kanji that are primitives used by that kanji too. It takes little time to remember again.

My reviews for each kanji were getting so infrequent, that moving to an on-demand system seemed to make sense.

vosmiura Wrote:I kept going for a long time, but now I stopped reviewing RTK and I keep a separate deck with all RTK1+3 suspended, and whenever I have trouble remembering any kanji when reading, I unsuspend it and start reviewing it again. Sometimes I also unsuspend kanji that are primitives used by that kanji too. It takes little time to remember again.

My reviews for each kanji were getting so infrequent, that moving to an on-demand system seemed to make sense.

I hope you write a lot of Japanese. Otherwise you might find yourself in a situation in the future where you suddenly need to write a lot of Japanese and realize that you can't do it. You've learned to recognize the kanji, but not to write them.

If you regularly train production, I don't think this matters much though.

Vosmiura, not to try and bag on you too much...but I completely agree with Tobberoth. And more.

Wouldn't it seem that recognizing the Kanji immediately, knowing how to write it without thinking, would be so much more rewarding then looking up a lot of Kanji and study them all over again?

You guys are right, but I guess writing by hand is less of a focus of mine.

Also I think that if you want to be good at writing you need to practice writing, not keyword -> kanji, don't you think? I mean, I can write most of the kanji from keyword, but writing words with the right kanji takes it's own practice.

I understand, I understand.... But definitely after a while, reviews get slim and you find that remember almost everything in every shape and form.

And thank you so much for understanding. It's nice to confront somebody, without them being defensive. Small things make me happy.

vosmiura Wrote:You guys are right, but I guess writing by hand is less of a focus of mine.

Also I think that if you want to be good at writing you need to practice writing, not keyword -> kanji, don't you think? I mean, I can write most of the kanji from keyword, but writing words with the right kanji takes it's own practice.

I don't think so. It's true that you won't be able to write a word just because you put it in your SRS and review it 2-3 times, but exposure does remedy that problem. After 5-6 reviews in your SRS and seeing it a few times "in the wild" you should be just fine writing it out by just remembering the shape of the word. The shape isn't enough to write words properly for "normal people", it wasn't enough for me when I studied in Japan. But when you've finished RtK and keep reviewing it, you know how to write each kanji, so just remembering the basic shape of a word tells you all you need to know to write it out perfectly.

Tobberoth Wrote:

vosmiura Wrote:You guys are right, but I guess writing by hand is less of a focus of mine.

Also I think that if you want to be good at writing you need to practice writing, not keyword -> kanji, don't you think? I mean, I can write most of the kanji from keyword, but writing words with the right kanji takes it's own practice.

I don't think so. It's true that you won't be able to write a word just because you put it in your SRS and review it 2-3 times, but exposure does remedy that problem. After 5-6 reviews in your SRS and seeing it a few times "in the wild" you should be just fine writing it out by just remembering the shape of the word. The shape isn't enough to write words properly for "normal people", it wasn't enough for me when I studied in Japan. But when you've finished RtK and keep reviewing it, you know how to write each kanji, so just remembering the basic shape of a word tells you all you need to know to write it out perfectly.

How long do you think it takes to reach that point?

Personally, I've only just finished RtK (about 3 weeks ago) and starting on KO2001. I haven't done any production cards so far; its all been recognition. I'm finding that I can read words just fine but am unable to actually write them from dictation or from just the kana. Or sometimes I know *vaguely* what kanji to use, but not in which order. I've seen before that you think pure exposure will solve this problem, but how much exposure?

I too am considering dropping RTK, I finished it about 3 months ago and I'm sitting on a average of 30 reviews a day... but boy does it go slowly. I'm taking up to a minute to remember some of these kanji and I'm often just frustrated at how long it takes to remember it. I'm also having an internal battle in my head of whether I should fail it or click 'yes', because I do remember it, it just takes quite a lot of thought. And I hate the fact that it'll be another half year before it reaches box 7. My retention rate is still about 90% but often reviewing feels like a headache/chore, especially when compared to ko2001+iknow+anki which is miles more fun. In anycase, I'm still trucking. Right now, I'm thinking I gonna do 3 more months then drop it completely.

It's just like anything in life really. If you want to stay good at painting, playing the piano, remembering kanji or whatever, you have to keep practicising. And take it slow.