Soo I finished Remembering the Kanji in September 2009, and I'm still having to do 30-50 reviews per day. Yes I mark a lot of cards as easy, but it just seems to be never ending!

Is this normal? Feels like I'll never be able to stop reviewing..

You never stop forgetting?

jcdietz03 Wrote:You never stop forgetting?

Guess so..just wondering whether other people are still reviewing, 1 or 2 years on..

Reason I stopped reviewing 2 months ago (Finished RTK at the end of november). Glad I made that decision. I didn't use RTK for writing anyway, just as a first step to learning vocab. If I encounter a new kanji (new in the sense I don't know it's reading/meaning) nowadays, I just look back at the keyword of Heisig, which I 're-remember' easily. But I had to do that also often while still reviewing RTK.

I also finished in September 2009 and my reviews still hover around 40.

Everyday I think about "forgetting" my RTK deck (backup first) and just focus on Japanese, its sooo tempting. My daily reviews begin with doing RTK and although its only around 40 it seems to take forever, I'd gladly do 200 vocab reviews in exchange for 40 kanji...

In the beginning when I was adding new vocab with kanji I didn't recognize, I'd check if I should know such kanji and add it if it was really new. Now I just don't bother and it doesn't affect my ability to remember such word, so whats the point? Also some RTK cards are misleading now since word meaning is different for them, so it actually makes it even harder.

What's worse RTK doesn't seem to be helping with anything, at least not for me and not at this point. Yesterday during my Japanese lesson I wanted to draw a map and write something simple as 駅 only to find I couldn't remember whats on the left side... Embarrassing to say the least.
It was only after a hint from my teacher ('uma' and not 'horse' so another fail for RTK) I could do it. My only consolation was that I was told not to worry since young people in Japan have huge problems handwriting kanji (well maybe not as simple as this one) and that computers degrade that ability even further and faster. I can relate to that since I can't remember the last time I wrote something longer than a sentence by hand, so my handwriting is worse than ever (and it was always bad to begin with).

Just right now I should be doing RTK reviews so I can begin my vocab reviews and look at me: procrastinating as always.

Joining the club, I also finished in September 2009 (or was it end August? hmm..).
I started getting more and more frustrated / bored by my kanji reviews so I stopped doing them ~three months ago. I'll say it is definitely *not* good for your writing skills, I can't really write out complex kanji from memory any more.
Doing RTK did however seriously help my vocab learning and my reading skill is improving at rapid pace, so I don't regret doing RTK by any means. I don't have problems distinguishing the kanji from each other and usually still remember their keyword meaning.

So I'd say for vocabulary and reading practices, it's not necessary to keep reviewing. If you want to keep a good writing skill however you'll have to stick with them (or alternatively come up with another more fun way to keep practicing writing).

Me too. I too finished RTK in late July/early September and still have about 40 reviews per day. Some day I have more, some days I have less. I continue reviewing though. And I will not stop reviewing. Sometimes I see a hanzi/kanji in class and when I get home that character appears. It doesn't happen often but it happens. It only takes 5/10 minutes.

When I'm really tired, like on friday's night I fail a lot, but on the following day I review again those same failed cards and without seeing the story I remember it. When I'm tense/nervous/worried I too forget often while reviewing.

I finished in Dec.09 and I hover around 20-30 cards a day. I hate RtK reviews more than anything, but I told myself I'd keep reviewing. I agree that it gets old fast failing kanji that you know but you only fail because the Heisig keyword is so far off from the meaning you've seen in vocabulary/sentences. Honestly, in that case, I mark the damn kanji as correct and move on.

The only reason I continue my RtK reviews is because I'd like to be able to keep a journal in Japanese one day (I currently keep one in English atm, albeit very rarely do I write in it). I also keep up the reviews because I've read too many horror stories from people on this site who stopped their reviews, came back months later, and restarted RtK or something because they had forgotten so much. May not be true for everyone, but it's a risk I prefer not to take as it took me 10 months to barely scrape by and finish RtK. I know 100% I would never be able to do RtK a second time.

I finished in late December 2008 and I'm down to about 20 a day. According to the statistics, I should have been down to 10 ages ago, but when another review cycle ends, I tend to miss some of the cards which immediately boost your daily reviews a bit. Of course, that just means I actually forgot some cards, so it proves it's all working.

That's the golden rule IMO. If you have a lot of daily reviews, that means you're forgetting a lot. If you have 5 or less reviews a day, THAT'S when you might be able to consider throwing the deck away.

If you feel sick of your RTK deck, you might wanna try adding Japanese keywords. I mainly add them when I'm going through Kanji in Context, and my goal is to eventually have japanese keywords for practically all kanji in my deck.
The other thing that makes reviewing kanji more interesting for me is adding kanji outside RTK1 (mostly from RTK3 but not limited to). However, I don't follow the book order at all, I just add the kanji I run into 'in the wild'. I don't pay much attention to the Heisig keywords, since when I'm adding a new kanji, I already have a useful word with it.

Move to Anki and you'll soon see your reviews decline rapidly, as review periods for well known kanji become larger than one year. You can also add hints and images to the front of the card to help you deal with all those "tip-of-tongue" (tip-of-finger?) keywords.

You can't loose much if you keep reviewing now. ~15 minutes/day is hardly an issue if you've already been through the entire RTK. However, if you decide to stop reviewing, getting back to it would take at lest several times more effort.

I've been finished with RTK for about a month now and I have anywhere from 45-80 reviews a day. Like all of you, I too am very tired of reviewing them because sometimes the keyword doesn't connect with a word that I know and I end up failing a very very easy Kanji. But that's how it goes. I am not planning on stopping though. If I have a day where the reviews are steep I just review about 30 and then go and add some new cards or do something else and hopefully try to finish the deck before the day ends. If I don't finish the reviews that day I don't see it as the end of the world. Eventually I have to sit there and finish the reveiws anyway. But I think its best to stick with the deck because you are still able to keep things fresh; if you stop you will basically have to re-relearn the kanji from scratch and that would be torture. If I stopped RTK now I would NEVER EVER do it again and I've already "wasted" enough time on it now that doing the reviews seems to be worth it.

I added on-yomis and kun-yomis to every card in my deck, so daily routine became much more easier. On-yomis usually signal what kind of a primitive (phonetic element) should be used in kanji, while kun-yomi (or Heisig keyword) signal what radical (semantic element) should be used.

Tobberoth Wrote:I finished in late December 2008 and I'm down to about 20 a day. According to the statistics, I should have been down to 10 ages ago, but when another review cycle ends, I tend to miss some of the cards which immediately boost your daily reviews a bit. Of course, that just means I actually forgot some cards, so it proves it's all working.

I finished RTK3 just over a month ago and average about 65 reviews a day. I look forward to the number bottoming out at 10 or so!

Tobberoth Wrote:That's the golden rule IMO. If you have a lot of daily reviews, that means you're forgetting a lot. If you have 5 or less reviews a day, THAT'S when you might be able to consider throwing the deck away.

For the time being I'm going to remain cautious and follow the advice of Tobberoth and others by keeping up the reviews.

bizzarrojosh Wrote:Like all of you, I too am very tired of reviewing them because sometimes the keyword doesn't connect with a word that I know and I end up failing a very very easy Kanji.

I use RevTK for my reviews so one thing I did on completing RTK was to create an Anki deck with all the kanji I found troublesome due to unsuitable or confusing keywords. In RTK3 some confusion is caused by keywords overlapping with RTK1. I have RTK3 2nd edition which resolves these issues but RevTK still follows the 1st edition. People using an alternative SRS would, of course, be able to fine tune their keywords from the outset. In this deck I also add new non-RTK kanji such as the additional 新しい常用漢字 and others which occasionally take my fancy. For these I make a story and put it into RevTK and I also have a document with a simple table sorted by keyword so that I can easily find the story again. For example, 炒 (stir-fry) is quite common but not in RTK. Using the table I can cross reference to my RTK story at Frame 28818.

When doing my RevTK reviews I decided to always pass the problem kanji (which I had entered into my Anki deck anyway) regardless. The strange thing is, now I have them in Anki, I no longer fail them in RevTK. I often encounter a similar phenomenon when I ditch a story which isn't working for me. On discarding weak story A for new story B, I suddenly find I can remember story A. It's almost as if, weak story A realising it's about to be ditched, starts to perform!

I have toyed with the idea of creating an Anki deck for kanji review with Japanese keywords and reviewing both ways (production like RevTk and also recognition). Then I could stop doing RevTK reviews. Although I think it would be beneficial it would also be a lot of work. In any case many on this forum have said you gradually pick up the readings and the ability to recognise kanji (as opposed to production) by encountering them "in the wild" when exposing yourself to lots of input. I'm now trying to get lots of input combined with adding sentences containing new vocabulary into an Anki deck. This seems to be working well so I'm in two minds whether to proceed with an Anki Japanese keyword kanji deck. One thing I have noticed is that if I encounter a kanji several times "in the wild" it becomes much easier to remember on RevTK reviews.