It's been like 5 months since I finished RTK1. I get like 50 to 60 kanji reviews a day now. I've been doing sentences for a while as well. I still fail a few Kanjis sometimes but since I am trying to remember compounds and words now I kind of feel that reviewing the kanji is a bit waste of time.

short answer is yes. you gave the answer yourself, you forget some... and you're still reviewing. try stopping for 2 weeks or a month, see what happens to 踏 and 聴.

not only will you forget tons, but you also need to be able to recall the meaning in less than a half-second in order to read decently.

I also did RTK3, and 18months after starting to study RTK1 I have about 10 kanji reviews a day... not a big deal.

dtcamero Wrote:short answer is yes. you gave the answer yourself, you forget some... and you're still reviewing. try stopping for 2 weeks or a month, see what happens to 踏 and 聴.

i have no idea what the keyword is for those two but i do know what 踏む and 聴く and 聴解 mean and how to pronounce them, which i know because i studied their japanese meanings, not their RTK keyword.

i do have my doubts on whether RTK is worth keeping or not but it's really up to you. i finished RTK january 2010, but i stopped reviewing march 2010 because i just got so bored of it and i felt like it didn't help at all when i could be using my time learning new vocabulary and grammar.

It really doesn't matter if you forget a bunch, you'll be constantly reminded of them when start learning actual Japanese. 踏 and 聴 are far from uncommon.
踏む、踏破、盗聴、聴衆 etc.

People will bang on about the need to continually review kanji but the fact is once you start reading you get constant review of the characters + readings + meanings and nuance (not just a vague keyword) anyway. And if your study/life involves any amount of writing in japanese you'll retain that skill too. RTK is over rated. RTK3 in particular is a total waste of time.

nadiatims Wrote:RTK is over rated. RTK3 in particular is a total waste of time.

It's really surprising to see someone say that on this forum. I lurked on this forum for a long time, but was afraid to sign up because, to be honest, RTK didn't work for me. I consider the two months I spent with RTK to be a learning 'black hole', so I ended up quitting it after 600 characters. Seeing as how this is a site for RTK users to get together, I was afraid that I would be chastised for not finishing the book. It's a bit of relief to know that that might not be the case.


As for SRS reviews, you probably won't need to keep reviewing for the rest of your life. Once you reach a certain level in your Japanese, using native materials such as movies, games, or books should be enough of a review. Not to mention that picking up words in context and learning them that way would become more natural.
Keep in mind that I'm still plodding along with KO2001, and have a loong way to go with my Japanese, so I might be way off base here. I'm hoping that's not the case though, as I feel the same as you - I don't want to use SRS forever. Using SRS for the first few years is fine, but I'd much rather progress to learning though reading, conversation, TV and movies.

nadiatims Wrote:RTK is over rated. RTK3 in particular is a total waste of time.

Things aren't as clear-cut. It depends if you did Japanese before, what type of memory you rely the most on, how you feel towards systematic learning...

worthwhile postscript: Nadiatims' 'rtk is overrated' is her opinion. maybe she had a better way to do it. lots of people have used rtk to get to get past the kanji wall, who were unable to do it before so i think overrated can only be interpreted personally in this context.

for my opinion, in my experience it was vital. the magic of heisig is that if you know the meaning of a huge amount of kanji, you can charge into real-world material (without your L1 dic ;D) and know what's going on. I also found RTK3 super useful for this because before I did it I would encounter 2 characters I didn't know per page usually. After RTK3 its more like 1 every 3 or 4 pages.

Also it's worth mentioning that by the time you are able to remember 踏む and not 踏, your card for that kanji probably has an interval of 3 years. you'll likely see it once more in your life and never have to worry about this stuff again... what we're talking about is continuing RTK reviews before you get to that point.

quark Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:RTK is over rated. RTK3 in particular is a total waste of time.

It's really surprising to see someone say that on this forum.

I think mostly we don't bother to bring the topic up because it's been done to death in the past; but not everybody here is an RTK fan, no (and I suspect that even many people who did find RTK useful would agree that RTK3 is well into "diminishing returns" territory). You can probably dredge up the threads from the forum archive if you're interested in reading both sides' opinions...

Personally for me, once I reach my goals. I will most likely stop adding a good amount of cards and just start adding 10 a day(per deck). Once my goals are complete in a few years. I will probably keep srsing forever but, the reviews will go down to an amount that's easily maintainable in the long-term. Plus your adding 10 a day, so you get to learn new things+keep the past things in your head(80%+)

Well, RTK was essential for me to break the Kanji wall like dtcamero said, but now that the wall is 'broken', doing RTK is like grinding rubble. I am not tired of doing reps, what I am tired of is doing RTK and trying to remember half-accurate keywords. Maybe what I need is start learning and reviewing actual words. Is there a ready deck with words based in the RTK order or similar? That'd be nice.

bcrAn Wrote:Well, RTK was essential for me to break the Kanji wall like dtcamero said, but now that the wall is 'broken', doing RTK is like grinding rubble. I am not tired of doing reps, what I am tired of is doing RTK and trying to remember half-accurate keywords. Maybe what I need is start learning and reviewing actual words. Is there a ready deck with words based in the RTK order or similar?

I started to delete a lot of kanji. I used to have 3007 and now I'm down to 2400 and it's still going down more and more. There is kanji that doesn't have the correct meaning+rare ones. I'll leave my sentences+vocab deck to fill in anything that isn't useful kanji for RTK

ta12121 Wrote:

bcrAn Wrote:Well, RTK was essential for me to break the Kanji wall like dtcamero said, but now that the wall is 'broken', doing RTK is like grinding rubble. I am not tired of doing reps, what I am tired of is doing RTK and trying to remember half-accurate keywords. Maybe what I need is start learning and reviewing actual words. Is there a ready deck with words based in the RTK order or similar?

I started to delete a lot of kanji. I used to have 3007 and now I'm down to 2400 and it's still going down more and more. There is kanji that doesn't have the correct meaning+rare ones. I'll leave my sentences+vocab deck to fill in anything that isn't useful kanji for RTK

It's not in RTK order, but KO2001 is a great book. It gives you about 3-6 words per kanji, and 3 sentences using those words. The great thing about it is that you keep seeing those words in other sentences, so in a round-about way, you are constantly reviewing material you've seen before, and are also exposing yourself to future words.
Either that, or you could SRS vocabulary or sentences from a textbook, an easy manga, or some interesting material you might find online.
If you've finished the book, and are getting tired of doing reps of English keywords, you might as well just take the jump into getting some Japanese readings to replace the English keywords.

quark Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:

bcrAn Wrote:Well, RTK was essential for me to break the Kanji wall like dtcamero said, but now that the wall is 'broken', doing RTK is like grinding rubble. I am not tired of doing reps, what I am tired of is doing RTK and trying to remember half-accurate keywords. Maybe what I need is start learning and reviewing actual words. Is there a ready deck with words based in the RTK order or similar?

I started to delete a lot of kanji. I used to have 3007 and now I'm down to 2400 and it's still going down more and more. There is kanji that doesn't have the correct meaning+rare ones. I'll leave my sentences+vocab deck to fill in anything that isn't useful kanji for RTK

It's not in RTK order, but KO2001 is a great book. It gives you about 3-6 words per kanji, and 3 sentences using those words. The great thing about it is that you keep seeing those words in other sentences, so in a round-about way, you are constantly reviewing material you've seen before, and are also exposing yourself to future words.
Either that, or you could SRS vocabulary or sentences from a textbook, an easy manga, or some interesting material you might find online.
If you've finished the book, and are getting tired of doing reps of English keywords, you might as well just take the jump into getting some Japanese readings to replace the English keywords.

Oh yea, I hear people do switch to Jp keywords, as it keeps there mind in Japanese when doing reps. I've found that it's not really useful to do it(unless it's automated to switch to jp keywords). It's because you've been using that keyword for how long?(depending on your reps, a few months, few years). For me, it's a few years now. So I find it not that effective instead, I just add monolingual sentences+learn J-J from there(into my sentence deck).