I've been finished with RTK for some months now but I still have about 40 cards due, more or less, each day. I have been consistent is keeping up with the reviewing, but weekends for me are really really busy and I rarely ever review RTK on Saturday or Sunday. This always gives me a nice built up pile to plow through during the week. Since RTK is very very low on my priorities list (I want to learn real Japanese damnit!) and I just review to maintain what I've learned I want to spend the least amount of time possible on it. BUT I want to make sure that I spend enough time to help me keep up with the stories and primitives etc.

So here's the question FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE DONE WITH RTK AND HAVE BEEN DONE FOR OVER A MONTH AFTER COMPLETING THE BOOK (I know so many people who get through the story making part but have like 600 reviews waiting for them, haha).

How many reviews do you have a day?

I would really like to hear from people who have been done with RTK for over a year or so. I'm sure it's low, but do you really remember all your stories? I'm guessing that the answer is no and for cards that you haven't seen for a year or two you probably forgot, right?

Also, what are your tips? I'm more interested in the ways that you all are grading your cards. What is a failed card for you? What is a hard card for you? I hardly ever hit easy because none of them are really easy. What do you do?

10-20 max. I've been done with RtK almost 1 year exactly now (a little less actually). I still fail more cards than I should, but I attribute this to the fact that I haven't really done any Japanese for almost 2 months now. Only thing I've kept up with is RtK reviews and Anki reviews, and listened to JP music still. I attribute my forgetfulness to my lack of JP immersion recently.

EDIT: I mark nearly all my cards as "normal" or w/e the middle setting is. I only mark cards easy if I see the keyword and the kanji visually pops up in my mind immediately without effort.

I'm still struggling with reviews. I finished RTK 3 weeks ago and now casually add the Kanji from Heisig's RTK supplement, but if I miss reviewing for 3-4 days I almost drown in reviews, which is very frustrating.

I still have around 80-120 reviews a day.

In Anki, if I miss one part in a Kanji (e.g. mouth instead of word), but remember the story, I hit hard. If I know the Kanji instantly, I hit good. If I don't remember anything I hit miss. I rarely hit easy.

I'm looking forward to the days with only 30-40 reviews...

0, stopped reviewing after about 3-4 months. At that time I was around 100-120 and really hated doing them.

I don't regret it at all, I've added tons of new words with kanji outside of RTK and don't see a difference in retention (other than that I don't know a "keyword" for that kanji). The way I see it I spent too much time toying with RTK (around 6 months) while writing Japanese by hand was never my goal, I should have done light or just "read" the book two times and remember just the easier/more interesting kanji.

Offshore, it's good to know that it could possibly get down to 20 reviews a day. that would be awesome.

truando, I can't imagine what that extra 1000 kanji is doing to your reviews. I'm sure it probably has added at least 5 reviews a day more than if you had just done RTK1 only.

Thurd, I have been considering stopping RTK but I just find so much value in being able to write the kanji, plus the key word can really help when learning a new vocabulary, or really understanding what a word means. I'm still not sure how much longer I'll be reviewing RTK but I know that I probably won't ever stop completely. I may just limit myself to like 10 minutes a day, regardless of whether or not I have cards remaining.

bizarrojosh Wrote:truando, I can't imagine what that extra 1000 kanji is doing to your reviews. I'm sure it probably has added at least 5 reviews a day more than if you had just done RTK1 only.

I'm not doing RTK 3, I am doing the supplement with the new Joyo Kanji http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/publications/...lement.pdf and am only adding like 2-3 a day. So far I am at 2074 Kanji, so it doesn't make that much of a difference.

But eventually I'm aiming for RTK 3, and I intend to never stop reviewing RTK. It must be possible to get stuff down to a dozen a day which would make it really easy to keep them all in your head - a big advantage IMHO.

But we'll see how I feel about that in a year or so...

[Katsuo]

I finished the 3007 RTK kanji years ago. Reviewing them on this site gives an average of about 12 cards a day.

Katsuo Wrote:I finished the 3007 RTK kanji years ago. Reviewing them on this site gives an average of about 12 cards a day.

I dream of this! You just made me decide to never ever stop reviewing (and doing RTK3).

I finished RTK1 in April 2008 and usually have between 7 and 12 reviews a day, which are usually the ones I miss a whole lot, or kanji from RTK3 that I've come across often and added over the last two years.

so it's looking like most people who have stuck with it for a year or more seem to have really light reviews. That's nice and it encourages me even more!

I don't think it takes that long. I started reviewing fresh about a year ago. I was hitting 'hard' every time because reviews are the only time I really write the characters, and I had some inconsistent periods over the New Year, summer etc. I've been super consistent for the past three months or so, and my reviews are now between 12-20 a day. If you didn't miss a day and generally hit 'good', I think they'd be well under control within half a year.

The one thing I regret not doing earlier is adding a word on the question side to avoid ambiguity. Shoulder/shouldering, healer/healing, and keywords that are synonyms of other keywords. I have something like ユ着 (for 癒) for most of these cards now. My overall retention is 97.9% after 21,789 reviews, and a big chunk of the fails was thanks to the ambiguities, so I'm hoping it will go up from now.

I hope it doesn't take very long to get it down that low. I've been adding Japanese words ALONG with the key word at this point to get rid of some of the ambiguity, but I often still fail those! RTK isn't a vocab production deck for me just yet.

Is there anyone out there who's been done with RTK for a while now and still has a ton of reviews? like more than 40 a day?

It really differs for me. I haven't been done for quite a year, but in 1.5 month I will have. It feels like years. XD I don't press 'easy' a lot. I find the space between reviews is too big for me then. But I do press 'easy' at least 2 or 3 times during one batch of reviews. Perhaps that's an idea for you to get it down?

I think it also stems from me pressing 'easy' quite a lot a few months ago before I was going on holiday, as I didn't want many reviews after I came back. If you press 'easy' for a while on many cards, the ones you really don't know will come back anyway and you can just press 'yes' for those.

So I think that's the solution for you; going for 'easy' a bit more.

EDIT: Oh my review count is between 19 and 45 a day. Depending on how well it's been going.

Yeah Koos83, I guess I'll try to hit easy a bit more, and by a bit more I mean start hitting easy.

I'm surprised by the lack of people who have finished RTK and maintained their reivews for an extended period of time. Did most people just finish RTK and give up maintaining the reviews?

I was looking at my graphs and anki says that if I can get through this next month with an average of 40 reviews a day I will only have about an average of 25-30 reviews with that number steadily decreasing. I guess this graph assumes that I won't fail any....

I've gotten down to 10-15. Been doing it for a year+ now. The keywords start to become less useful as you get more into japanese(it get's replaced by Japanese keywords instead)

Got to be honest here: I'm having a hard time reviewing. My reviews just don't go down. Thinking of stopping reviewing. I feel my time is used better on KO2001. I'm steadily moving on with KO, enjoying it, but my RTK reviews use too much time and are getting in my way.

3 scenarios:

1. Stop RTK

2. Reschedule and start fresh from the very beginning

3. Limit the time to 20 minutes and just do what I can do and no more.

Any ideas?

Truando if I were you I'd do one of two thing.


1) Keep at it, the reviews will eventually go down, just work even harder on the ones you miss.

2) Restart, and work through it at a much slower pace.

I am on my second runthrough and it's MUCH easier this time, I'm taking it easier, I have most of the benefit of RTK already while working through sentences, while still using RTK to remember those rarer kanji.

It was 2 years, and the first 1500 kanji were still 90%+ every review, it isn't til the last 500 that I didn't know well that the numbers started to slip, even at that, the more common kanji I come across I either still remembered, or were easy enough to revive.

It's more work to restart, but you will have better control of the reviews at that point.


I'd just keep going myself

It goes down after a while but, the key is to time-box those reviews. Then it won't feel so bad. Or maybe I've just gotten too used to the srs reviews.

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:It was 2 years, and the first 1500 kanji were still 90%+ every review, it isn't til the last 500 that I didn't know well that the numbers started to slip, even at that, the more common kanji I come across I either still remembered, or were easy enough to revive.

I'd just keep going myself

Thanks for your input, Dustin_Calgary. I am not sure if I understand those two paragraphs. Could you please elaborate?

Oh, just saw your post after I posted, ta12121. Thanks. Timeboxing, I might go for that. 20 minutes. BTW; I got used to reviews, too: I did 1065 cards in 3.80 hours today (that's for various decks, not just RTK)

I think the main asset to do RTK fastly is there is less risk you give up because you're annoyed. The main asset to do it slowly is that your expired cards are unlikely to explode.

With a mean rythm of 20 added kanji/week, I've got 20 to 60 (with a mean of 30) expired kanji a day :]

truando Wrote:

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:It was 2 years, and the first 1500 kanji were still 90%+ every review, it isn't til the last 500 that I didn't know well that the numbers started to slip, even at that, the more common kanji I come across I either still remembered, or were easy enough to revive.

I'd just keep going myself

Thanks for your input, Dustin_Calgary. I am not sure if I understand those two paragraphs. Could you please elaborate?

It had been 2 years since the first time I did RTK and the first 1500 kanji, I still had VERY good retention after a quick review.

Since the last 500 kanji in the book had much less review ( I stopped reviewing shortly after completing the "book", life got in the way and I went through too fast, 1300 reviews was too much to climb out of ) **my retention rates fell dramatically near the end of the book.


**just realized I didn't finish the above statement, fixed now.**

You'll still have a huge benefit having finished RTK, so I would continue reviewing, whether you start over and enter them slowly, or just keep on going with the reviews you have as is, is up to you, but you've done most of the work, I'd just keep going and they will die down

now I understand. makes sense. I guess I just keep going: one of my goals for 2011 was to keep going no matter what. 355 days to go... I'll decide on December 31 if I continue or not

If your reviewing in Anki, I'd say set your leech number to a rather low number to just let Anki suspend the ones your having difficulty with, You will see those kanji again later when you start learning vocab if they are important enough. Also no point in grading to hard on yourself, if you were close or had the right idea why fail it at this point?

If you are doing KO to learn the readings then it might help to add readings to the rtk keywords. for example

pain -> いたい - pain
go-between -> なかよし　の　なか - go-between

as a last resort you could suspend all JLPT 1+ cards and focus on the JLPT 5-2 kanji, then add the JLPT1+ back in gradually as the reviews go down.

If you've done the hard work to finish the book I think it's prob best to suck it up though.

Anki stats shows you how many cards it thinks you will have on average for the next week and then next month, this might give you some hope (if the number falls enough )