Crazy thought, but if reviewing less than 20 cards a day is too irritating, maybe it would feel better to review them once a week instead? (The exact interval shouldn't matter so much for maintaining old cards.)

Wow, I find it surprising that some folks had trouble when they stopped doing RTK and went on to studying Japanese. I guess quitting or not depends on what methods you're using for sentences, and how fast you rushed through RTK. I took 6 months doing RTK, so maybe that's why I didn't forget much or have trouble relearning them? Shrug.

nest0r Wrote:Wow, I find it surprising that some folks had trouble when they stopped doing RTK and went on to studying Japanese. I guess quitting or not depends on what methods you're using for sentences, and how fast you rushed through RTK. I took 6 months doing RTK, so maybe that's why I didn't forget much or have trouble relearning them? Shrug.

Forgetting or not depends on reviews. If you stop reviewing, you will forget the kanji. That much is quite clear. Relearning isn't hard, it's just a waste of time. The idea is to keep reviewing so you don't have to relearn anything. If you've already invested 6 months into RtK, i'd say It's a pretty big waste to let it go when it takes almost zero effort to keep up with the reviews...

Huh? I'm saying that you don't need to review in a separate deck, if you're doing the sentence method in a certain way, ie the way I do it. So in that sense, you're right, do the reviews and you won't forget. I would recommend, however, just don't bother doing them separately unless you went through RTK quickly, and/or will be picking up the kanji from RTK in new words on a slower basis.

The tradeoff is that on rare occasions, you'll be fuzzy on kanji that you encounter, and you'll decide whether to relearn it in a matter of seconds, or just learn it by rote as you do the sentence. That, in my opinion, is better than continuing to review cards in the RTK deck. But if you'd rather keep having those cards pop up and hit 'Easy' 'Easy' 'Easy' till they eventually disappear, or get frustrated with keywords that get in the way of your reading/vocab knowledge (vice versa, I mean -- I can't tell you how many times I'd fail an RTK deck card because the keyword was meaningless to me after learning the kanji in words), or want to spend time replacing keywords, that's fine for you.

I think you're a little too fixated on the polished concept of the long arc of the SRS, it sounds nice and efficient to imagine those cards just disappearing when you know them well, but it's not perfect for a diverse self-study method, where decks and cards are overlapping. Keep in mind, I will boldly assume that most people on this site, myself included, did/are doing RTK *before* learning Japanese.

Oh! And I meant to use as an example: I took 6 months doing RTK, with some breaks. There were kanji that, after I quit doing RTK, I didn't see for almost a year in sentences/words (I'm slow), and I still recognized their basic meaning, could remember the story, could write them, etc. I don't think my memory is that amazing, I just learned them *really well* during that 6mo. With the rare ones I didn't recognize, I could still write them (muscle memory, baby!), and I either shrugged and just learned the word, not worrying about the story/keyword, or I would just look it up when learning the word w/ Rikaichan (since next to definitions it shows kanji keywords), or I would spend less than a minute restudying it, and I never had trouble with those kanji again.

@ nest0r.... my experience has been exactly the same. I also took about 5/6 months to finish RTK though and always wrote out the kanji every time.

I currently have similar problems as FutureBlues, even though I've only gotten up to about 800. My problem is I already knew most of the Kanji already, and the words that use them. I've recently just been doing some harmless "cheating" which seems to solve the problems. If I don't know the English word, mix it with something else, etc and write the wrong kanji, but actually know the real one; I just click "hard" and edit the card with the Japanese word, or a hint (such as "Fall (not autumn)". After that point I don't get it wrong again. How important are the keywords for the stories?

On an off-topic note, I'll probably be stopping RtK. I'm a Japanese-American who's living in Japan attending a university prep-school (so I've had a lot of exposure to Japanese, and have a lot every day), so RtK might not be the most ideal book for me. I find myself getting confused with the English keywords, and kanji I already know. Of the 800 I've studied, I probably already knew ~500, and 200 of the others I simply just modified what I already knew. For example I knew water, but not ice. So I just think in my head "If I add this to water, I get ice". I really like the order of kanji in RtK, matching similar looking kanji, but I'm just not able to utilize the stories or keywords.

I bought Kanji in Context, so I'll probably try going straight into that. On the flip side, the 800 only took me a week, and it was pretty effortless...

kyeenak Wrote:I find myself getting confused with the English keywords, and kanji I already know.

Not that I knew that many kanji, but I find that already knowing kanji disturbs the method. Perhaps you can still use what you learned from RTK, breaking down all kanji into primitives and using stories, but make up your own (Japanese) keywords and stories.