killazys
Member
From: New York
Registered: 2011-02-28
Posts: 18
I've read quite a few posts about the best way to tackle RTK. Some say it doesn't matter how many new cards you do a day, as long as you do at least a few. The "slow and steady" approach is what I used when I first picked up RTK1 a year and a half ago. Although I began with fervor, once I hit around 500 I slowed down considerably, to the point where I was really on and off with even doing reviews in Anki. This went on until around 10 months ago. Back then, I quit for 10 months straight. Didn't touch Anki at all.
This summer I have quite a bit of free time on my hands; with it, I finished RTK just earlier today. I did this over the course of 6 and a half days. Two of those days were allotted to reviewing all of the kanji I had studied up to previously; this was frame 1533 in the sixth edition (keyword "entertain"). My deck was a new deck, so it treated those as "Learning." The other three and a half days I learned all the kanji left in RTK1 and did my reviews as the days progressed. That's around 190 new kanji per day.
At this pace, someone could learn the entirety of RTK1 in two weeks with serious study. The below is a link to an image of my Anki deck statistics. As evidenced, this regimen takes a maximum of around two hours for reviewing and, based on my memory, around an hour to two for 166 new kanji.
http://i.imgur.com/K0fl8.png
So my conclusion is, get through RTK1 as fast as possible. Do reviews only after learning all your new cards and going through the "learning" reps for the day, and even then if you feel like you can do more new cards, do them. After finishing RTK1 one can then focus on reviewing the cards; the stories should be strong enough to cement the characters in your memory for the 2 week period(Anki 2.0 Beta's new learning system is pretty awesome for this, actually).
What are your guys's thoughts on this? Did you do it differently? The same? Would you recommend following the same method for RTK3, or not even bothering with it at all?
Tzadeck
Member
From: Kinki
Registered: 2009-02-21
Posts: 2484
killazys wrote:
So basically I want to learn readings for different kanji, but I don't like Core 2000 from what I've seen so far, as they're not actually sentences in the shared decks I've downloaded from Anki (they're just phrases). Also, none of the vocabulary is foreign to me.
They're just phrases? The Core deck I used had sentences, but I didn't download it from Anki. But, I had the impression that a proper sentence deck is available on Anki downloads.
Core 2000 has super basic words, but as soon as you hit card 2001 and get into Core 6000 you start getting words that are common in newspapers and they are a lot harder. My Core deck has all 6000 cards, but they are divided up so you can start studying from wherever you like. If the first 2000 are too easy you could always keep them suspended and then unsuspend starting from 2001.
There are plenty of other options, like Kanji in Context, or mining your own sentences, but Core is already there and it's easy to use so it might be worth another try on the more difficult side of it.
Last edited by Tzadeck (2012 July 25, 7:46 pm)
