Currently at 508 but going over 180 I hadn't absorbed properly.

I only studied the numbers 1-10 and 100, 1000. It took me two days to get those with on'yomi and kun'yomi as well. This was before I discovered RTK. I was like: if this is how it is then I'll still be going years from now. Then I discovered RTK and I was like: I must be doing something wrong, it's going so fast and easily. XD

To those who want to just finish RTK and get to the long awaited utopia of native material, these are my two biggest suggestions for completing RTK more quickly:

1. Spend only one minute on a story.
Once you're done with RTK and begin sentence mining or reading native materials, you'll see the kanji enough in context that recalling stories will become obsolete. 

I recommend spending only around one minute on each story. I did this for the last 500-600 kanji of RTK, and I regret not having done so earlier. My retention dropped to 40-70% for a few days, but it then jumped up to more than 90% after 1-2 weeks.

2. Spend only 10-20 seconds reviewing a card.
Give yourself ~10 seconds for each card. Immediately fail it if nothing comes to mind. If you remember most of the primitives or most of the story, or if you're only having difficulty with the positioning of the primitives, then give yourself another 5-10 seconds. Fail it if you can't reproduce the kanji in that time. Besides saving time, not hesitating to fail cards encourages you to recall kanji quickly. It's almost useless to have a kanji memorized but to take more than 30 seconds to remember it.

Concluding remarks
Creating stories and spending time on reviews are the most time consuming aspects of RTK. I found it most efficient to limit myself to one minute per story and 10-20 seconds per flashcard. Goals like 50 or 100 kanji a day are quite manageable this way, as are 200-400 card review piles.

vileru wrote:

To those who want to just finish RTK and get to the long awaited utopia of native material, these are my two biggest suggestions for completing RTK more quickly:
1. Spend only one minute on a story.

For short term results just for taking a test, that would most likely work.  For long term retention, you may have problems.  I spent 20 minutes on some of the stories that had several elements.  It has been a year since my last review and I can still see a kanji on a billboard and tell the story on how to draw it.

I had 1000 cards total to review or restudy but I am finally in the groove of adding cards. 380 漢字 to go!　

Thora wrote:

Their ability to recall some stories turned out to be a bonus for kanji they write less frequently. There are occasions, as well, where stories prove useful to distinguish kanji which differ only slightly. This becomes apparent even years later.

I wouldn't expect this to differ greatly with someone who made quick stories, but kept up with kanji reviews. About a month after completing RTK1, currently 90% of my cards are in Box 4 and beyond. This seems to suggest that quick stories do not significant impact retention.

Thora wrote:

I wouldn't necessarily describe times >1 minute (or whatever time others choose or need to take) as "excruciating." (but I'm Canadian, I guess we have a reputation for being a bit more humble and indirect. lol)

I think a strong argument can be made that even a slight increase in time spent creating stories can result in a significant loss of time. 1 min x 2042 = 2042 min = 34.03 hours. Excruciating is probably the wrong word to use, "unnecessary" would be better.

Thora wrote:

vileru wrote:

Concluding remarks

But always good to have a variety of opinions...er...speeches?  ;-)

Haha, it's definitely cheesy, but I thought it'd be useful for those reading.

Last edited by vileru (2010 February 21, 3:49 pm)

@ Thora

You're right. Stories are beneficial when it comes to remembering rare kanji. However, maintaining reviews seems more reliable than spending several minutes creating a story, and then halting reviews after a few months. If you continue with reviews, you know for sure that you've remembered what you've learned, whereas there's a lesser degree of certainty if you stop reviewing. Therefore, it would be a good idea to spend more time on stories if you plan to stop reviewing. However, the purpose of spending a lot of time on a story is to increase retention, but stopping reviews negatively affects retention. Keeping up with reviews seems like the better option.

Regarding the time wasted, I find that failing and reviewing a card ~1-3 extra times ultimately totals to less time than spending an extra minute or two forming a story. A review typically takes less than 10 seconds.

I agree that those who prefer a less regimented approach should proceed at their own leisure. Likewise, focusing on speed can impact long-term language goals, especially motivation. I wouldn't recommend carrying this mindset over to studies beyond RTK, since it'll probably lead straight to burn-out. However, RTK can be frustrating for those who want to immerse themselves in actual Japanese. To them, I strongly recommend moving through RTK at a brisk pace. I did, and I don't regret it. Since I've been with my girlfriend, I've been more or less surrounded by Japanese people on a daily basis. It was tormenting to be able to write a bunch of kanji but barely speak with them. After RTK, it's been much more interesting and exciting to be learning actual Japanese and using it with my friends.

xquio wrote:

I'm at 430 and getting frustrated and discouraged. My whole goal of learning Japanese is to be able read and translate a particular series of trashy yuri light novels, and when I think about that, I get so excited and motivated. But somehow that just makes me so impatient that actually sitting down and doing RTK is...hard.

I set a finish date of April 16th, and taped up calenders on the wall where I mark my progress(and lack thereof) and doing that has helped quite a bit. I still skip too many days, though. I'm currently 94 kanji behind, I was going to do them today but as of right now I've only done 20. I just...I'm so lazy I have trouble getting off my ass and doing something.

I'm also kind of nervous because I haven't done anything this "big" on my own before. It's not that I don't think I can do it, it's just that...all of the times I've started things and then fizzled out keep coming up in my mind. And that's...irritating.

Make the finish date flexible, don't beat yourself up for being behind. I finished RTK a week later than I wanted to, because I wanted to go too fast. It's okay to slow down a bit, rather than start altogether. Make it easier on yourself. It's fine to do just one in a day.

I found it a lot easier to do more kanji when I didn't work too hard on the stories. Usually, I just took stories from here, or made mine particularly pervy/disgusting, which was fun, and also easier to create and remember. (It got really funny when the flag/pee primitive was introduced, and crotch, and shakuhachi/"shakuhachi"...)

@vileru
I completely understand the need/desire get some momentum going to get through RTK and move on to communication. Too many variables, variations and unknowns to attempt meaningful efficiency calculations, though.

Spoken Japanese:  In your lucky circumstances, you might want to consider focusing more on spoken Japanese first. RTK and this site are very reading focused. I've had friends who started with intensive spoken Japanese courses (3, 9 and 12 months) for missionary work and corp/gov't jobs. Their results were astonishing! (I even borrowed the missionary's books. Unfortunately, all the Holy Ghost vocab wasn't particularly useful for me. :-))  There are textbooks and audio resources which focus on spoken vocab, grammar and patterns. We use far fewer words in speech and some regular patterns. It's also easier to learn reading when you already have some language skills. Just a thought. Encouragement?

Stories: I don't think long-term reviewing of English keywords is a great idea.  Transitioning to Japanese prompts is better, but it takes time to customize and learn a Japanese deck. I suspect most don't do it. Also, you are already finding that your brain often goes directly from keyword to kanji, bypassing the story, as you do reviews. Reviewing doesn't necessarily reinforce the story. It's when you stop reviewing, or review so infrequently, that a lasting story image can prove useful.

Concluding Remarks:  haha   For school and work in Japan, I was gratefully surprised how often story fragments helped me out with radicals - even 10 years after completing RTK. A great perk of a component learning method!

xquio wrote:

When you don't work as hard on the stories, how badly does your retention rate drop? On a good day I'm around 90%, but most of the time I'm somewhere in the 80's. I only spend a few minutes on each story, just basically coming up with it as I type it into Anki...That's actually working better for me than trying to come up with the mnemonic and focus on it when I first see the kanji, though...

When I went from spending about 2 minutes per kanji to spending the 1 minute it took to read/copy the first or second story on her, my retention... stayed the same, might've increased. My original stories were a special kind of suck, though. Anyways, had been in the range of 80-85, definitely didn't drop. I think it went up to about 83-88.

I never took Japanese class with my friends in High School because I bought into the hype of "Japanese is waaay to hard look at all the symbols try Spanish class instead". I ended up failing Spanish because I was bored out of my mind. Fast forward a few years later and I find the AJATT website and learn all about Heisig and RTK. I'm up to 250 Kanji now and I really believe I can do it. Which surprises me since I've never had much academic confidence (was a slacker in school sad to say). But learning the Kanji and immersing myself in Japanese doesn't feel like a chore (which most of my classes did) and I'm really excited to burn through RTK. Reading peoples posts on this topic makes me want to do even more Kanji then I've done before.

Best of luck to everyone still going through RTK hope to see you all at the "finish line"

hereticalrants wrote:

Don´t even bother writing a story.  Just imagine something--and vividly.  No words are required.

I haven´t yet failed to forget the image I used when provided with both the kanji and the meaning, so the written story isn´t even needed for record keeping.

Hang on; though this method works for you, it doesn't work as well for everyone. We all have different ways of remembering best (stories or images or both). It is one way of working, but not the way.