I am at a point with sentences that RTK review seems lacking. I dont even really remember the RTK associated keyword for the new kanji that come up, rather the kanji becomes a sound or lesser meaning of a vocab word.

Im about 2500 kanji deep into RTK and a lot are at months+ review. The ones that I cant seem to stick are the ones whose meanings are vague or share a similar meaning to another word. Mountain peak, mountain top, rugged mountains, tall mountain, mountain pass, mountain this mountain that. I am about 3 months out of adding new RTK cards but still sit in the 100 range for daily reviews. When I get some troublesome card out of the way, something I haven't seen in 2 months pops up and its time to fail another card.

It takes about 40 minutes to review these, and it is causing me grief. In that time I could go through 250 sentences, which are considerably more interesting. Is anyone running into this problem? Will I regret ending my RTK reviews?

The way I see it, I have several thousand sentences under my belt and am reading the kanji all the time. Is RTK really that beneficial anymore? I feel like killing myself when I have to review RTK. 20 or so would be fine, but 100 every day is painful.

You ran into the same problem I did. Although many here advised against given them up, it was at the point where it was making me actively do another stuff than study Japanese. So, I gave them up. It's been about a month or so now and I have to say I don't regret dropping them at all.

All and all, it's your choice, really. You won't actively be writing them anymore, so that skill will go down. But, if you can live with that, and you are still reading Japanese and encountering the kanji often, nothing else will really suffer.

Here's my perspective: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid89307

Worked for me.

sikieiki Wrote:20 or so would be fine, but 100 every day is painful.

If 20 kanji reviews are fine with you, do that because I think dropping it cold turkey would really hurt your writing skills. Also by just doing 20 kanji a day, you would at lease maintain your writing ability to some degree.

I pointed it out in the above comment already but stopping RTK does not mean stopping writing ('writing' being writing with finger, mentally writing it, handwriting, tablet, etc., whenever you're feeling fuzzy on it or learning something new).

Whether you want to write the kanji or not, it's very valuable to continue incorporating motor processes: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...2#pid81142

Developing an internal motor program to facilitate recall and supplement encoding through gesture, on a spaced schedule. &c. ;p

wulfgar Wrote:If 20 kanji reviews are fine with you, do that[.]

I'd agree with this. Just do what you are comfortable with, no more. Don't let some imaginary teacher in your head stress you out over reviews. It's just a tool, not your master.

The feeling I get with RTK is that I will be forever chained to these god forsaken english keywords which are often confusing in vocabulary itself. For example, when I think of "a is behind b" I think of 裏 and not 後. The english keywords are back, and behind - in this case not intuitive. When I think "back" I think 背中 and not 裏. This is the kind of confusion I am getting which is very frustrating.

nest0r Wrote:Here's my perspective: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid89307

Worked for me.

I am going to try this out - referring to JRTK. It seems exactly the kind of thing I need to maintain the usefulness of RTK while also helping sentences via pronunciation and recall. Huge thanks.

Quote:Developing an internal motor program to facilitate recall and supplement encoding through gesture, on a spaced schedule.

Absolutely, the motor strip, especially for the hands, is a powerful chunk of neural material.

nest0r Wrote:Here's my perspective: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid89307

Worked for me.

I clicked the link but I'm not sure which you are referring to. Were you referring to ruiner's post or switching to Japanese Keywords? Thanks, I'm a bit confused!

I have the same problem as the op. I hate my RTK reviews. I know its good to have on hand and being able to recall an english word is nice if I have no idea what it is that I'm looking at, but I just hate doing the damn reviews. I've only been done with RTK for a few weeks now, but I'm getting about 60 reviews a day. I might just take everyone's advise and just do a few a day or timebox or whatever. I've been using the Japanese keyword thing as I discover readings of the kanji so it helps things to stick better rather than using an arbitrary word that I haven't used or encountered yet. I just want my reviews to be down to like 20 a day and I think I can manage.

bizarrojosh Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Here's my perspective: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid89307

Worked for me.

I clicked the link but I'm not sure which you are referring to. Were you referring to ruiner's post or switching to Japanese Keywords? Thanks, I'm a bit confused!

I think they were referring to the JRTK thingy Delina recommended.

Or maybe this perfectly succinct and clear comment? http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...6#pid81476 (in the JRTK thread)

I've only recently completed RTK1, so I'm hardly the best person to give advice, but my feeling is that you should stick with the reviews, at least for now. You've invested all this time to learn the keywords and associated writings; if I were you, I'd want to retain all that knowledge, even granting that the keywords aren't always optimal. And yes, writing may be a less important skill these days in the age of the computer, but I still think it's a vital component of literacy.

Are RTK reviews really so bad? Maybe I'll get sick of them after another year, but after 3-4 months I still enjoy them. Also, I'm very conservative about using the "easy" button, but I still see a steady decline in my daily reviews.

Get an iPod and review them when you'd actually appreciate the distraction. I'm not disciplined enough to do them every day at home, so mine are constantly building up, but I catch up on a long train journey, when I'm waiting about, or during whatever other random intervals I have throughout the day. I'd actually get nowhere with SRS without it.

I think maybe you are trying too hard? I average about 15 seconds per character (includes writing) in my reviews. I have about 70-80 a day, so it takes me only about 20-25 minutes to finish my reviews. If I don't get a clear mental picture of a character in 10 seconds or less, then I fail it. I do it all during lunch at work while eating a burrito or something. And since I would have had to spend that time to eat the burrito anyway, it's like I got the kanji reviews done in no time at all! And then I can look forward to the other 500 reviews waiting for me when I get home

I think a really important thing is not having performance anxiety towards reviews (which I struggled with for a while). It's not a test. It's OK to fail characters if they are taking up too much mental stamina to review. Sure, you may have more reviews as a result, but you will spend much less time per character. So as opposed to having to do a lot of thinking, it's just telling the system if you know the given character or not.

As far as "similar characters" go, yeah they can be annoying. But then I realized it's pointless to penalize myself for not being able to distinguish synonyms (the keywords are just approximations of the meanings anyway). For characters like that I just write out everything that has a similar meaning, and if I included the "correct" answer in my set, then I count it as a success. RTK3 has stupid high number of characters like that and memorizing the differences for things that are essentially the same is a huge waste of time in my opinion...

sikieiki Wrote:The feeling I get with RTK is that I will be forever chained to these god forsaken english keywords which are often confusing in vocabulary itself. For example, when I think of "a is behind b" I think of 裏 and not 後. The english keywords are back, and behind - in this case not intuitive.

My advice is to start adding on-yomis and kun-yomis to your cards and to keep reviewing. Particularly on-yomis (signal primitives) will help you to distinguish between kanjis with similar meanings.

I can't say what is best, but I dropped my RTK reviews as well, because I felt the time was better spent on real japanese, and I just lost motivation for it. All the work I did on RTK was really important as far as getting me super comfortable with kanji, and having some basic keywords is good to have, but continuing to review the english/confusing key words got to be a situation of diminishing returns. I don't regret it.

I do train writing in my anki decks though. I do it a lot (for all vocab words - my sentence deck is reading only to see grammar, and all words in the sentences are trained in my vocab deck separately). So being RTK free at this point I just learn each word, the way a non RTK'er might(?). From writing/seeing kanji so damn much I just find I am able to remember the kanji for new words, wether they are from the RTK set or not makes little difference - I am familiar enough with the primitives to skip the key word/story mnemonic - kind of like the way I would at some point drop the story during RTK reviews, and just know what was in the kanji to match the key word - now I just do that with each japanese word (sans keyword) and it goes well.

so another thing that I want to add is that RTK reviews should only take up a minimal amount of your time. if they are bothering then don't do them. Seriously, why did you do RTK? To get familiar with the Kanji. You should be damn well familiar with the Kanji at this point so get your ass into native material and just do that. You know primitives. Who cares if you can't remember a god damned story? Just learn the god damned Japanese word and your set.

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RTK in the ass if you want to. Just do it.