RobotsAnger Wrote: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.

Since you are doing all that other studying, you should do what I do. Switch to anki, and when the due date for "hard" or "good" is more than 3 months, change it to the Japanese kunyomi from wrightak's list and reset it. Puts the fun back in learning kanji.

slivir Wrote: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.

I'm pretty sure he made the number up based on his own experience, but my guitar teacher once told me that you need to play an instrument for 15 minutes a day just to not get worse at it. I've found this to be the most (and maybe only) true statement based on completely anecdotal evidence that I've ever encountered. Especially since it applies to all things which are complex skill sets, including things like languages.

welldone101 Wrote:Since you are doing all that other studying, you should do what I do. Switch to anki, and when the due date for "hard" or "good" is more than 3 months, change it to the Japanese kunyomi from wrightak's list and reset it. Puts the fun back in learning kanji.

Interesting, I remember reading about wrightak's list while still inputing words for RTK but I've completely forgot about it until you reminded me. Guess I'll try it out on a new deck and see how it goes.

RobotsAnger Wrote:

welldone101 Wrote:Since you are doing all that other studying, you should do what I do. Switch to anki, and when the due date for "hard" or "good" is more than 3 months, change it to the Japanese kunyomi from wrightak's list and reset it. Puts the fun back in learning kanji.

Interesting, I remember reading about wrightak's list while still inputing words for RTK but I've completely forgot about it until you reminded me. Guess I'll try it out on a new deck and see how it goes.

What I did was download his excel spreadsheet. When I hit a word I already know the Japanese word for, or when I hit a word with a 4 month jump till the next repition, I swap out the English for the Japanese (i've added a field in my deck for the invisible example sentence too). Then I reset the card. It changes reviewing kanji into learning Japanese! Super fun again, organically fits into my current process, and doesn't feel like I'm doing extra work added onto RTK since they are integrated.

I am not replacing the english keyword for the Japanese one. I just leave them both.
Besides, I try to use a Japanese word that I already know. If I don't know any, I look up in KO2001's deck. I don't add Japanese words for kanji that are not in KO2001.

Hi,
as I was the one starting this thread, I thought about giving some feedback how things are going since then.

First, I didn't stop.
I wrote some lines of code, that continuously replace all keywords from Kanji I encounter in my sentence deck with the Japanese keywords from wrightak (without resetting the cards). So I hit new keywords from time to time, that I have to learn first. Given they are too difficult I replace them with "keywords" from my sentence deck (as Tobberoth suggested).

As I encountered around 700 Kanji in my sentence deck, I introduced a lot of new vocabulary in my heisig deck. This makes things really difficult as I fail a lot and have around 120 cards per day for over a month. There is no sign that this number decreases within the next month. As a side effect it eats my time I can spend with sentences.

But I don't care that much. Having Japanese keywords is a major motivating factor and it helps me really to not think about the whole procedure as some waste of time (comparing to sentences).