I recommend you use the Reviewing part of the site as it's intended to be use. In other words, visit every day or two, add any new kanji you've learnt, and review the kanji that it asks you.

The time period between each time it asks you the same kanji is designed to help you learn it effectively. It's not a good idea to press the green boxes because reviewing them too early or too often can actually prevent you from memorizing them.

So the idea is to review "smart", not "more". I hope this answers your question.

I would say go hard.  Forgetting is not a problem.  If you've seen a kanji before but have forgotten it, you can easily remember it again.  If you've never seen a certain kanji before, well that is worse.  Every new kanji you look at you will never be able to forget in the long run, because it will just keep coming up, in your SRS, and in your private reading.

You can't remember things you haven't learnt.  Remembering 90% of 2042 kanji beats knowing a few hundred well.

Raichu wrote:

I recommend you use the Reviewing part of the site as it's intended to be use. In other words, visit every day or two, add any new kanji you've learnt, and review the kanji that it asks you.

The time period between each time it asks you the same kanji is designed to help you learn it effectively. It's not a good idea to press the green boxes because reviewing them too early or too often can actually prevent you from memorizing them.

So the idea is to review "smart", not "more". I hope this answers your question.

I just started recently and have only 70 kanji down.  When do different colored boxes start showing up?  I've been doing a full review each day.

Yeah synonyms is a real problem for me. I already knew several hundred kanji before I started RTK and the meaning I associated with them is sometimes Heisig's keyword for a different kanji.

The other thing is that I prefer to learn kanji by their real meaning where possible. That means that while I know both "secret" and "secrecy", I don't know which one is which. Perhaps it doesn't matter as far as learning those kanji, but it does interfere when they're used as components of other kanji. I know "every", "each" and "all", but I have trouble distinguishing "every" and "each" when they occur as part of another character.

you guys are stressing too much i think >_< after you go through Rtk 1 & 3 all you gotta do is just learn the kanji with some vocabulary and then put the vocabulary in sentences and then it will all just kinda comes naturally afterawhile... if you forgot which kanji is which when you align them to the vocabulary all you gotta do is just hit the enter-key with rikaichan and look up the kanji via kanji.koohii.com 's study section and review the stories... the key here is to study your vocabulary on the internet where rikaichan can be used and then once you learn some words then you should be able to read them in real books and enforce them more that way...

I guess there's no single point in time at which you will start forgetting. But I would say, just go as fast as you can in the beginning until you start getting confused. But don't rush it so much that you make up bad stories.

Synonyms/similar keywords are indeed the number one problem with RTK. It would be a great thing if someone made a list of all the similar keywords. Then learners could make a story that differentiates between the two keywords right from the start.

Another related thing that would be very useful would be to specify the intended meaning of all those ambiguous keywords. I believe that doing those two things (and integrating them into this website) would be a big step forward for the Heisig method.

Someone who is doing RTK right now could do this pretty easily. It would be useful for their own learning anyway. Just a suggestion anyhow.

Last edited by Magnadoodle (2008 May 24, 10:44 am)

I have to say I usually don't confuse keywords that go with a warning, in the book "Don't confuse with keyword X!" or in the stories on the site ("Be careful not to confuse with... X"). I only seem to confuse other kanji... which don't get a warning I guess because just the warning makes my mind more alert, or something.

For some kanji, I don't even understand *why* I confuse them, or how I could confuse them, but I do...

cerulean wrote:

When do different colored boxes start showing up?  I've been doing a full review each day.

If you keep reviewing *everything* every day then the cards will never expire. So don't do that, it's missing the point ;-) Just do the ones you've just added (blue) and the expired ones (orange); ignore the green stacks (except for watching them get bigger and move to the right).