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Well, I'm a fairly new learner and started with RTK. I'm comfortably memorized up to 750ish.
I started doing the Smart.fm KO2000 step 1. I'm about 25% of the way through and am having no problems.
I find Smart.fm more enjoyable than RevTKing.
At this point, is finishing RTK necessary. If so, why? What does it give me? I understand that it makes learning the real kanji definitions easier, but learning them with smart fm hasn't been difficult to begin with.
Any advice?
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Joined: Mar 2008
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Well, there have been tons of threads on this board about WHY people do RTK, so I'm going to assume you have read at least some of them and so you already know the reasons that people would suggest you do RTK.
Apparently you are feeling that RTK is not very useful to you, and that you can get along fine without it.
Maybe you're right, I don't know. But if you are convinced that you aren't getting much out of RTK, then stop adding new cards, and focus more on KO2000.
I would recommend that you DON'T stop reviewing the cards for the kanji you have already completed. This way if you change your mind in a couple of months, you can pick it back up right where you left off. If you stop adding new cards, RTK reviews will take less and less of your time each week, until its almost negligible.
Edited: 2010-06-13, 9:44 pm
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Having taken language classes while in college since I was learning Japanese anyway and I figured might as well take the nice 5-credit classes they offer and get easy As, let me tell you that doing RTK gave me a CLEAR advantage over everyone else in the class. When it came to having to know kanji, no one in the class was able to get close, and often stumbled on writing simple characters. However, having done RTK, I was not only capable of writing those characters from memory if I had to go up to the board, I was also able to learn the pronunciations much faster than any of my other classmates.
I'd say those are the benefits of RTK.
Joined: Mar 2010
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Those guys said it well. I'd just add a couple points in favor of RTK.
I have used smart.fm through Step 5, and while I do think it can be a good tool, I don't think it's great for learning kanji. You certainly won't learn how to *write* them using smart.fm, and writing is a more important skill than you might think, even in the age of word processing. For one thing, it's sometimes the best way to look up a new word (say, a compound of two or more kanji) in a dictionary, as you may have no clue how to pronounce the word. There are other methods (entering components, say), but these too are often easier if you know how to write the characters. For another, writing strikes me as a basic skill. We may not hand-write essays any more, but we still scrawl down names and addresses on occasion, and we may be using hand-writing more as tablet computers arrive. I think writing is still an important part of literacy.
Also, smart.fm presents them to you for "recognition" only, which means your kanji learning is passive, not active; by contrast, RTK forces you to produce them actively, which is tougher but also more rewarding, in my opinion. Even if you are passively recognizing kanji now in smart.fm, I don't think that program does a great job of teaching kanji. In fact, I've become a bit disenchanted with smart.fm and am now studying its word list in Anki only, which gives me more control over what I review and when. (Smart.fm assumes I need to review stuff I already know, and conversely it sometimes waits too long to review stuff I don't know.)
Still, I do think keeping things fun is important, and if smart.fm is more fun for you, that might argue for suspending RTK for a bit. Personally, I found RTK more fun. Smart.fm gets old pretty fast. I studied by using the "Reviewing the Kanji" portion of the website, which introduced me to a whole amusing cast of "characters" to help me remember the kanji: Spider-man, the love-doll, Mr. T (well, Jedi in my case), Pepi LePieux the silver skunk, etc. I found it all very entertaining.