It's been about a year since I last used any Japanese, but I'm working on getting back into studying in the hopes of going back there in a year or two.

Since starting to study again, the biggest thing that I've noticed is that my kanji recognition has dropped enormously, which is pretty much due to how long it's been since I last reviewed RTK (incidentally this has given me a new appreciation for how helpful going through RTK was in the first place). I tried cherry-picking the characters that were giving me trouble and reconstructing stories for them, but this was frustrating and inefficient, as I'd then have to dig my way back through other characters and primitives to get all the pieces back. In the end, I've decided to just start over from the beginning.

My problem is how fast I'm moving. Because I'm just reconstructing stories I already knew, I'm able to blaze through the book at 200+ kanji a day if I push it. I'm worried that in a week or so though, when all those characters come back, the review load will be crushing.

I'm wondering if I should hold back in anticipation of that, or if I should go even faster, get through the book in 10 days, and hope that my previous familiarity with the stories will carry me through the 3-400 reviews per day. I'm leaning toward the latter, but I'm wondering if anyone else has done something similar and found it unmanageable.

3-400 reviews per day is easily managed if you timebox it. Since you're already familiar with them I don't think it will be a huge problem. Besides, after you've finished, if you can't manage to get through all your reviews per day you can still try and get through as many as you can. Over the course of a few weeks you'll be able to slowly beat back the review pile.

Yeah as long as you have the time to dedicate to re-learn 200+ then you should be able to manage 3-400 reviews in a day, worst case scenario, you don't keep up, but after a few weeks you'll be back on track anyways ^^

300 or 400 card reviews shouldn't be too hard, but they would take a lot of time. my guess is, if you keep it up, eventually the amount of reviews vs. the time you have to study will slow sown your adding kanji, so it shouldn't be a problem.
plus, 300/400? my usual daily review is of about 200 kanji... going up to 500 depending on how much time i've got... 500 takes about what... 2.5, 3 hours? not with the prettiest handwriting, but still...
on a side note: reviewing kanji flashcards while watching anime/films becomes addictive, kinda like eating popcorn.

For me, 100 RTK reviews take about 1 hour. So 300-400 cards a day would just be too much. 4 hours of studying every day? Maybe if you're a student, jobless or have got no social life it's doable. But if you work 8-12 hours a day it's almost impossible to handle in the long run...

stoked Wrote:For me, 100 RTK reviews take about 1 hour. So 300-400 cards a day would just be too much. 4 hours of studying every day? Maybe if you're a student, jobless or have got no social life it's doable. But if you work 8-12 hours a day it's almost impossible to handle in the long run...

I think it mostly depends on person to person how quick you can do them, how quick your handwriting is, how quickly you decide you don't know it and fail etc.

I timebox my reviews in periods of 2 minutes, and usually can do around 8 to 10 reviews in that time. It takes me around an hour to do 200 reviews. So at that rate it would only be an hour and a half to 2 hours for 300-400.

EDIT: Just finished today's reviews. I've done 463 reviews in 2.4h according to Anki. A lot of those are KO2001 recognition cards, but since I listen to the audio they take about as long as writing out a kanji. So yeah, its possible to do that many reviews :-)

It depends how fast your writing is. When I was starting out RtK, 400 reviews would take me ~2.5 hours. Now they'd take me about 45-60 minutes.
Try writing the kanji out really fast, and cursive-y. Use a smooth pen instead of a pencil Your natural speed will get much faster, it shouldn't take long before 300-400 reviews can be done over lunch break.

In threads like these, people usually advise someone who has stopped RTK for awhile to do the largest number of reviews to get through the book again as quickly as possible. I would like to approach it in a different way.

For most of us, learning Japanese is a long-term project. (The folks attempting "JLPT1 in 3 months" are an exception.) Taking a week versus taking a month to review and relearn the book won’t make much of a difference. I think the most important thing to ask yourself is why you stopped using Japanese a year ago; address that issue. If you stopped studying because you got sick of daily reviewing, it might be better to go more slowly and have a smaller number of reviews each day than to try to push through with hundreds of reviews and getting overwhelmed if you miss a day. If you quit because you got busy with work or school, timebox your Japanese studies to fit your situation and make sure you put in some time everyday, even when work/life/school puts other demands on you. Monitor yourself for feelings of fatigue or boredom and change things up when you need to.

This is your second time around so RTK1 will seem like an old acquaintance. Go at the pace (slow or fast) that will allow you to maintain a really high passing rate (I would try for 95+%) on your reviews so your time spent failing and restudying kanji is minimal and so you will feel like a kanji god. Good luck!

Today it took me 34 minutes to do 164 reviews, and that was with a lot of hesitations on some kanjis, and fully writing it out etc. I'm very surprised to hear the 100 reviews = 1 hour bit. Go faster people! If you can't recall a kanji within 30 seconds MAX, fail it!

kioku Wrote:I think the most important thing to ask yourself is why you stopped using Japanese a year ago; address that issue. If you stopped studying because you got sick of daily reviewing, it might be better to go more slowly and have a smaller number of reviews each day than to try to push through with hundreds of reviews and getting overwhelmed if you miss a day. If you quit because you got busy with work or school, timebox your Japanese studies to fit your situation and make sure you put in some time everyday, even when work/life/school puts other demands on you. Monitor yourself for feelings of fatigue or boredom and change things up when you need to.

This is solid advice. I definitely didn't quit because I got sick of reviewing, but I will have to be careful that it doesn't eat up too much of my time needed for other things. Timeboxing is a good approach. Based on how I've been doing so far it looks like I'll be able to get about halfway through the book before the reviews start rivaling the time spent adding new cards, at which point I'll have to reorient a bit to get a proper rhythm going that includes both.

From what scuda and others have been saying I might be able to handle the reviews more easily than I thought though - I don't really remember how long they were taking my last run through. If that's the case I shouldn't have any problems keeping up adding 100 cards per day; 200+ only seems reasonable when I have no reviews to do, given my time constraints.