**This thread is not primarily intended for debate, unless you have used such methods and found something to critique**

There are many variants on the concept of Reverse Flash cards - Kanji to Keyword, Kana vocabulary, English word to Japanese words, Recognition, etc. It's a method of testing the same material in a different directions.

Post methods you've used with reverse cards. Discuss some of the benefits and detriments you've found when doing these. They can be cards about Kanji, vocabulary, sentences, mathematics, country capitals, movie star names, whatever.

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For myself, I started doing kanji to keyword/concept cards back in March this year.

I recommend trying this with Anki and not a grease monkey script on RevTK, due to a couple of reasons. Anki will force spacing between cards that are from the same fact. This will prevent one card being seen too soon after it's reverse card. Another reason for Anki is if you've been doing Keyword to Kanji for quite some time, you can later create kanji to keyword cards having it match the scheduling of the existing card.

There are some benefits I'm finding. Problem before though is the kanji itself did not bring to mind the keyword or the story in some cases. It wasn't necessary for all the kanji, but for some I would not know which kanji were difficult to recognize UNLESS I tested them. Maybe (wild guess) 80% of the time I can be safe with Keyword to Kanji, but that other 20% will tripped me up when reading, but I don't know what are the 20%.

Now, I'm not sure there's a detriment here. However, I did start after a solid foundation in normal reviews. That's after 30,000 RTK reviews, with 60% or more cards in Stack 9 (240 day spacing). However, these recognition cards go fast, so there's little overhead when testing them in addition to normal keyword to kanji cards.

something I found kinda strange reviewing keyword to kanji is that 90% of the time I can write the kanji from the keyword but have much more trouble recognizing the keyword from just seeing the kanji. Has anyone else found this? Although i'm doing awesome with the sentence method so i'm not exactly finding this a huge hindrance... just a little odd.

I think its great actually. Because recognition to english keyword is so bad, I can practice keyword->Kanji while learning kanji->movie method/onyomi without getting my stories/locations mixed up.

I'm also not against this idea. Like mezbup, I've had trouble identifing some kanji while trying to read them. For me the problem is that some keywords are almost 'random'. Well, not random, but they don't represent the meaning very well. So I've been working on a more definition-like modified list of keywords for RtK1, with reverse reviewing being one of the reasons for making it.

Been at it for a while because, updating keywords, while avoiding overlap, then changing stories is a lot of work. I'll be finished in about 1-2 weeks, and I'll make a post about it.

Thanks nuke for this post. I recall recently you mentioned in some other thread that you were doing SRS with RTK recognition and was quite curious on your reasoning. I finished RTK last month and am doing well with production, but sometimes I have issues with Kanji (coming up with the keyword) that I see out in the wild or during sentence study. I will most likely do this once my regular RTK reviews become only a trickle. Thanks again.

oregum Wrote:...For me the problem is that some keywords are almost 'random'. Well, not random, but they don't represent the meaning very well. So I've been working on a more definition-like modified list of keywords for RtK1,...

I think the effort that nuke has undertaken will help in recognizing and learning kanji compounds. Each Kanji has so many underlying meanings that it is hard to pin one down to a particular meaning/term.

In my current sentence study efforts, I spend a lot of time examining each Kanji in compounds that I am unfamiliar with to try to build some mental model of the compound as it relates to the meaning. Example, 家族 (かぞく) -> [house] [tribe], which makes sense, but I spent a little more effort than I would like to derive the keywords when I first studied that compound. Even if the keywords don't make sense (in your words "random"), they are basically markers that you have learned during your studies. The mapping of 雑誌 to keywords is [miscellaneous][document] less than perfect, but I now think of a ざっし as a "miscellaneous document".

That bit about 雑誌 is a good reason with Japanese to do reverse flashcards with vocabulary, with sentence/pictures as context due to so many homophones.

There's plenty of times where I could read a word, but had I heard it, could not write it out with the correct kanji. Then there's the other times when I could write a word hearing it and seeing it used, but could not read it properly for some reason (more rare case).

I liken it to testing your ability at hearing the word and writing it down, and your ability at reading a word and saying it out loud.