I'm sorry to ask a simple question but it wasn't quite clear from the RTK2 sub-forum or elsewhere. It also didn't seem appropriate in the "Congrats!" thread. I am nearing the end (!!!) finally, after starting and stopping RTK1 for a number of years (I registered in 2008...whereas some of you finish the whole series in a summer vacation). So I was curious...

When you all finish with RTK1, do you still come back and do your daily flashcards to remember the keyword? Or, does that get phased out as you move on?

If you want to be able to write, you should keep drilling from keyword to character, IMO. For reading, I'd still keep doing the cards, but some people stop, I think.

Taking it slow may of helped for more solid connections. I finished RTK in 60 days and that was a bit rushed so some days my reviews don't go so well and I need to take more time to concentrate on the story. 3 months later and my reviews are settling around 30-40 a day now. But i continued to to do the reviews because 3 months later my sentence deck still only has maybe 600 characters so theres about 1600 kanji that I know how to write that I haven't seen in a sentence even once let alone a couple different readings and uses. I feel its necessary to keep up the reviews at least until your sentence deck is pimped out with near all the kanji you feel necessary before moving on.

I finshed RTK1 about a year ago and I still do reviews. BUT i don't care if I get behind. Infact, I have about 500 reviews waiting for me. Honestly, if I do 10 minutes of reviews a day (usually I'll do 20) then I'm fine with that because RTK did it's job and I'm just keeping primitives fresh and whatnot. So once you finish my advise would be to continue to do your reivews hardcore for the first couple of months, but then after that just "maintain" your reviews so that you don't get to the point where you would have to start over. I mean, you came this far. Why would you want to regress to that point?

I delete a lot of the keyword that don't make sense now that I know a lot of Japanese via reading. So it's fine. It will eventually all go to place, just maintain it

I supposed once you reached a point of having learned a lot of sentences, withthin those, you should've used almost every single kanji that's actuallys useful in some way, so... as bizarrojosh said, just keeping up with them reviews should be enough. 10 Minutes every day or every other day should be enough to keep them cemented.

If you want to be able to use and retain the characters, you'll need some sort of practice, obviously, but there are lots of approaches. If you don't care about being able to write, doing a lot of reading might be fine for you. I chose to keep up the reviews. It only takes a few minutes every day now, in any case.

I keep up with reviews simply cause I cannot stand the thought of not remembering one of those precious kanji I put so much time into.

Thanks everyone - this makes sense and I really like the "10 min a day at least" approach.

I guess....I can't be done with these damn cards yet haha.