I was so proud of myself, for not getting stalled at the points where people said they often did (around 100, 500 etc), and getting all the way up to frame 940. Little did I know I was heading for the mother of all stalls. 4 months, in fact. My last review was in late July. Then a new semester came up, and for some reason I totally stopped doing reviews (no, I don't know what I was thinking either). Anyway, exams finished, so over the past two days I've gone through some 800 reviews. The results speak for themselves.

To be honest, it's not as bad as it could be. Most of them clicked as soon as I saw the kanji, so hopefully they should be fairly easy to get back into the system. 700-940 I might just totally relearn, I couldn't even remember the name of the new primitives. But oh well. Guess I'm going to be spending alot of time here over the holidays.

Learn from my mistakes, guys. Don't stop reviews, not on your life. Just keep them up.

I recently restarted my studies but I didn't like restudying the ones I obviously knew, which was 800 or so 漢字. So I removed a lot of cards and I re-added cards hence the blue 320 cards.

But yes, DON'T GET BEHIND!
Just do a little a day to catch up. (Little being whatever you can do in 2-4 sessions of 15 minutes.)

頑張って下さい。

I think taking a break is good. I took about 3 different breaks of roughly 3-4 month long periods. Made me realise which stories were perfect and which ones really needed reworking. I worked through 800 expired cards like twice, it's not all that bad.

I am also ashamed that I stalled out (at about 170 cards). School started, and I started flaking out. Well, I wound up with about 110 expired cards, and I forgot a good 80% of them. I'm finally caught up and am going back to learning new kanji.

In summary: I also recommend not getting behind.

liosama Wrote:I think taking a break is good. I took about 3 different breaks of roughly 3-4 month long periods. Made me realise which stories were perfect and which ones really needed reworking. I worked through 800 expired cards like twice, it's not all that bad.

Interesting... maybe a better idea (in my opinion) for those who've finished RTK or have at least gotten through a good half of it. IE, not me.

I finished RTK once, then took a 6 month hiatus as soon as i finished it, got to about 1400 then another 6 months off.

I am in my 3rd run through of the book since I never did get the cards into the much later piles so most of them need a LITTLE work, however it is extremely easy now, I can't wait to CONTINUE with my studies after finishing this time......

Keep it up guys. I have been finished with RTK some four+ months. My reviews are now less than 40 cards/day and goes by quickly - 20 min or less.
Your efforts will be rewarded.

I'm in Dustin Calgary's boat - I'm now on my third run through, or second "kanji reboot" as I've convinced myself. The benefits of keeping all of this information in your memory is astoundingly powerful. I hit a point where I realized that I really had to go back and do my Heisig stuff over again, from square one, if I wanted to proceed at the learning pace I had hoped for (rather than wasting ridiculous amounts of time looking up strokes/elements because I can't remember which key word the kanji has...).

I don't really regret the "breaks" I took from kanji reviewing, though. This time around, my mnemonics are sticking like glue, there are very few that I had completely forgotten and I'm able to plow through at a rate of 100 new cards per day (up to 1002 now!). A quick refresh really does wonders. As liosama mentioned, I'm able to tweak some of my weaker mnemonics as well (not to mention fix a few errors I made), so it's not all so bad.

Of course, ideally, you'll do what I've neglected to do in the past and just stick with it...

If you want to take breaks, I recommend to take breaks from adding new stuff, not from reviewing.
Just set your alarm clock ten minutes earlier and do those reviews.. and if you're busy the rest of the day, that's perfectly fine. You might even pick up speed afterwards.

I think that stopping reviews for a few months and then starting again when I feel I need a refresh is really not a problem. Especially now that I read something in Japanese almost every day and review sentences.

If anything forgetting a little bit is good. It clears the mind from the extra unneeded information that just causes confusion. Forgetting is an essential part of learning.

brianobush Wrote:Keep it up guys. I have been finished with RTK some four+ months. My reviews are now less than 40 cards/day and goes by quickly - 20 min or less.
Your efforts will be rewarded.

Just started re-doing all RTK1 kanji after more than half a year break (studied other Japanese stuff though).
This comment actually just de-motivated me. 40 a day after more than four months. Maybe I'll switch to Anki for a better long term experience.
Have you done both RTK1 and 3? Was it a speedrun?

Wow, looking back, 40 a day is not much at all, and I could do extremely quickly once at that point, but sadly I haven't been there in a long time, I can't wait to get there again!

Yeah after 1048 Kanji I stopped in August/Sept and my piles have gone waaaay up.

I dont really want to start again til next week cos the JLPT is next weekend, but reading this post has motivated me to pick it up again!

Cheers

I've taken a break of several months before and it didn't really hurt -- the first time I reviewed them I had forgotten like 50%, but they came back immediately, and in the next round of reviewing I was back to normal.

I actually deleted my deck about a month after I finished it (or thereabouts).

I'm not sure if it was a mistake or not... on one hand I kinda couldn't be bothered doing those reviews every single day whilst working on another deck. They just seemed to fade into the background and I didn't deem them important anymore.

In hindsight I should have kept my reviews up as I've since lost a sizeable chunk of what was once my kanji knowledge. Although I've lost some of it, the rest of it has stayed and it's grown by way of learning to read and through KanKen study so all has not been lost, far from it.

If I could go back to that point in time, what I would do would be to do weekly review sessions of my Heisig deck instead of daily because once the last card added has become mature there is no need for absolute accuracy in timing so by doing it weekly I could have set aside one hour on one day of the week and made it routine.

At some point I might re-do RTK but use Japanese keywords and also review Kanji - Keyword. It would really just to be to sharpen my up and maybe learn a further 1000 Onyomi that I'm missing to help make reading a little easier.

Once you do something like RTK, kanji is no longer a barrier to learning Japanese but a blessing.