I've looked at Wrightak's method a while ago and I was reading this thread. http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=929&page=1

I've been "doing" RTK on and off for about a year and a half, since March 2009, and I'm only at about frame 500-something, and I keep burning out.

I've been studying Japanese since I was eleven, so about six years now, and I have a good-sized vocabulary and can read and speak at an intermediate level.

This way of learning to write the kanji is very frustrating for me. I don't like associating the kanji with English keywords, because I know I'll have to go back and learn them all over again with Japanese keywords anyway. (Even if I did finish RTK with English words, how would that work out? How would I learn the Japanese readings? Sentence mining is not very appealing to me, so I'm not sure what to do...)

I've been burnt out for about four months, so I came back and failed all my cards. I have 566 to study. (I failed the easy ones, too. I'm gonna try and start over.) The thing is, I want to start over using the Japanese keywords so I can learn to read and write at the same time. Killing two birds with one stone and all that. Problem is, I'm not sure how to go about doing this.

Because wouldn't I have to go through it the RTK way anyway? The primitives and the stories that are used to remember the stroke-order, how am I to use those if I had a Japanese keyword as a prompt?

I thought of putting on the front of a card the Japanese prompt (word in hiragana), the stroke-order story, and an example sentence, then have the word in kanji with a definition on the back. The goal is (1) to produce the kanji using a Japanese prompt instead of an English one; and (2) to produce a vague meaning of the word.

My only problem is how I am to use stroke-order stories if I have Japanese prompts? Would this even work at all? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You could have just posted this in that topic. Anyway,

There is an anki deck with Japanese keywords floating around somewhere on the forum. I believe that to do this effectively you'd need some sort of Japanese experience to speed the process up (so you're not learning too many things at once). You're intermediate so that's good.

Also, making the stories in Japanese would be even more beneficial. Or turning the readings and primitive into characters.

It would essentially be no different from using English keywords. The problem of homophones can be remedied by replacing a it with a similar word. For example, 日 and 火 are both HI. One could be changed to nichi, taiyo or kaji. You could even incorporate both meanings into a single story, though it might lead to some confusion.

At some point, you're going to have to go back a relearn something. There are no all-in-one shortcuts, that I know of. Perhaps someone else does, though.

Here's the thing. You can learn On-yomi, kun-yomi, meaning, stroke order, and a mnemonic all at once.... and it might work. But you're juggling 5+ things in your head for each character. And that's if you're lucky enough to find a character with just 1 on and kun yomi. Some have 4-5 readings. Some may have just 1, but it's variable as hell.

The reason why RTK1 is the way it is is because you're breaking up tasks to go easier on your brain and cut down on the noise-- you're only trying to stuff in a meaning, stroke order and a mnemonic for each kanji. That's only 3 things to remember. Much easier than 4-5+.

You can add readings later on as you go along. If you already know a few readings, that's great. Slap on Japanese Keywords to kanji you already know readings for to make things go faster. As you learn more readings outside of RTK, replace the EN keywords with JP keywords.

But if you're having problems just trying to learn 3 things at once and stay motivated, how are 5-7 things at once per kanji going to get any better?

If you set aside 2 hours a day and don't skip a day, you can plow through RTK1 in about 3 months, probably even sooner. (That's what I did. I set an iron rule that from 9-11 p.m., that was RTK time.) That means by January, you'll be done with it, and ready to blow on through to the real stuff. You've already done 566, so even if you've failed them, you've already seen them. So they'll be easy to relearn.

And if you're having problems with motivation, there are tips all over this forum for dealing with motivation, spicing up reviews, and other alternatives. You could just do RTK Lite, or the Movie Method, or a dozen other things people have tried.

But whatever you do, I recommend picking something and just sticking it through to the end. The most brilliant method won't work if it isn't executed to the end, but even a mediocre method will work if it's executed thoroughly and diligently.

I was at a similar situation some time before. I knew words for lots (if not most) of the kanji in RTK, so wanted to test myself not only at recognizing and writing the kanji from their English keywords, but to actually be able to use those learned kanji in real Japanese words.

I don't know if this would work for you, and certainly some people will think that this isn't a good idea, but it has worked amazingly well for me. What I do is always reviewing in this site, one box at a time, and setting different "levels" of knowledge for each box and using Rikaichan ans [url=http://wakan.manga.cz/]Wakan[url]for checking words containing each kanji.

For example, for each kanji in the "1 review" stacks, I actually write it, but don't carry too much if I don't get the stroke order right, or if I can't remember a single word containing each kanji. At this point I may use mainly Rikaichan to check the readings, and if I feel like, I may also check some words containing some kanji I'm studying with Wakan.

For the next stacks ("2 reviews" and "3 reviews"), I don't write the kanji. Instead, I spend that time checking readings with Rikaichan and kanji containing each kanji with Wakan. Here I start paying more attention to readings and words, and are more "serious" about failing to recall the English keyword and Japanese words.

For the next stacks ("4 reviews" and beyond), I write each kanji again. Here I keep on checking with Rikaichan and Wakan, but at this point it mainly means confirming I recall 1 or more Japanese words for each kanji. The process is basically the same for all these stacks (I always use the "advanced" view in the review page). The difference is that at higher stacks I am more and more rigorous about recalling not just the character or the English keyword, but also Japanese words. For example, for kanji in the last stacks, I would fail them even if I write them and remember perfectly well the keyword and 1 or 2 Japanese words, if I feel there are important, useful or interesting words with that kanji that I haven't perfectly learned yet, or if I get the stroke order wrong.

This "system" may sound too convoluted or hard to implement, but it has worked great for me. I know that no kanji will get to the highest stacks before I actually can use it. At the same time, I don't punish myself too hard when studying kanji in the first stacks, since I know I'll end up mastering them later anyway. And RevTK for me now isn't just about practising how to recognize individual characters anymore, but about learning vocabulary.

Just think how cool is having the 2042 RTK kanji in an html file and challenging people to find one for which you don't know at least the meaning and/or a word containing it. 8)

Of course, I know that bilingual dictionary entries aren't the definitive source of vocabulary. I also check monolingual dictionaries when studying vocabulary, but not when using RevTK, since that would be overkill for me.