If you can dedicate an entire day to going through the expired cards you should be able to get through them. After that just go through whatever you failed a few hundred at a time to mark them as learned.

I never had to do all of RTK that way, but I did do about 800 over a weekend.

If you really do stay on top of reviews they take virtually no time. Unless I let them pile up a bit I only have to spend maybe 5-10 minutes a day. Falling behind is a real snowball effect.

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if you have a lot of kanji that are not expired and you are not confident with your memory of them, just delete all your cards and re-add them. When you review use 'E' liberally for kanji that you know.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2008 April 08, 11:45 pm)

I got to around 1800 the first time through, which is close enough. The second time was about a half year later. I removed all cards, then started adding cards at a rate of 40 a day excluding weekends, when I would only review. I didn't do any rehearsal beforehand, just reviewed and then went through the failed stack.  My recall rate (on the first stack) was 60% around 1000, at which time I lowered to 30 a day. It dropped below 50% around 1300 cards, which practically means that I did not recall the new primitives, but the clustering makes it possible to still succeed a few. The last few 100 that I still needed stories for, I added at 20 a day. I finished in 3 months. I'm now continuing with RTK3 at a leisurely pace (40 a week perhaps), focusing now more on RTK2.

Since most of it is refreshing your memory, and since you don't need to make up new stories, it's far less time consuming, far more enjoyable even, than the first time. Give it a try.

You don't have to create a new user if you want to start over fresh. Just delete all your cards and you are ready to go.

Thanks for your input everyone.

Right now my plan is to switch to Anki and go through the book in order again, so that I can get a refresher on all the primitives and rebuild my stories.  I can do this pretty quickly - I had to take a day off from work today for illness and got through about 500 cards - so I'll be able to get the kanji roughly in order of difficulty in about a week at the outside.  After the first review I'll start getting the kanji in random order, so I can pin down specific stories that need work. 

I set up the scheduling so that 1-3 follow normal intervals (1 day and 3-5 days), but 4 puts the card about a month in the future.  This lets me filter the list down to just the troublesome kanji very quickly.