You ran into the same problem I did. Although many here advised against given them up, it was at the point where it was making me actively do another stuff than study Japanese. So, I gave them up. It's been about a month or so now and I have to say I don't regret dropping them at all.

All and all, it's your choice, really. You won't actively be writing them anymore, so that skill will go down. But, if you can live with that, and you are still reading Japanese and encountering the kanji often, nothing else will really suffer.

sikieiki wrote:

20 or so would be fine, but 100 every day is painful.

If 20 kanji reviews are fine with you, do that because I think dropping it cold turkey would really hurt your writing skills.  Also by just doing 20 kanji a day, you would at lease maintain your writing ability to some degree.

Last edited by wulfgar (2010 May 07, 10:28 pm)

wulfgar wrote:

If 20 kanji reviews are fine with you, do that[.]

I'd agree with this. Just do what you are comfortable with, no more. Don't let some imaginary teacher in your head stress you out over reviews. It's just a tool, not your master.

Developing an internal motor program to facilitate recall and supplement encoding through gesture, on a spaced schedule.

Absolutely, the motor strip, especially for the hands, is a powerful chunk of neural material.

I have the same problem as the op. I hate my RTK reviews. I know its good to have on hand and being able to recall an english word is nice if I have no idea what it is that I'm looking at, but I just hate doing the damn reviews. I've only been done with RTK for a few weeks now, but I'm getting about 60 reviews a day. I might just take everyone's advise and just do a few a day or timebox or whatever. I've been using the Japanese keyword thing as I discover readings of the kanji so it helps things to stick better rather than using an arbitrary word that I haven't used or encountered yet. I just want my reviews to be down to like 20 a day and I think I can manage.

I've only recently completed RTK1, so I'm hardly the best person to give advice, but my feeling is that you should stick with the reviews, at least for now.  You've invested all this time to learn the keywords and associated writings; if I were you, I'd want to retain all that knowledge, even granting that the keywords aren't always optimal.  And yes, writing may be a less important skill these days in the age of the computer, but I still think it's a vital component of literacy.

Are RTK reviews really so bad?  Maybe I'll get sick of them after another year, but after 3-4 months I still enjoy them.  Also, I'm very conservative about using the "easy" button, but I still see a steady decline in my daily reviews.

I think maybe you are trying too hard? I average about 15 seconds per character (includes writing) in my reviews. I have about 70-80 a day, so it takes me only about 20-25 minutes to finish my reviews. If I don't get a clear mental picture of a character in 10 seconds or less, then I fail it. I do it all during lunch at work while eating a burrito or something. And since I would have had to spend that time to eat the burrito anyway, it's like I got the kanji reviews done in no time at all! And then I can look forward to the other 500 reviews waiting for me when I get home

I think a really important thing is not having performance anxiety towards reviews (which I struggled with for a while). It's not a test. It's OK to fail characters if they are taking up too much mental stamina to review. Sure, you may have more reviews as a result, but you will spend much less time per character. So as opposed to having to do a lot of thinking, it's just telling the system if you know the given character or not.

As far as "similar characters" go, yeah they can be annoying. But then I realized it's pointless to penalize myself for not being able to distinguish synonyms (the keywords are just approximations of the meanings anyway). For characters like that I just write out everything that has a similar meaning, and if I included the "correct" answer in my set, then I count it as a success. RTK3 has stupid high number of characters like that and memorizing the differences for things that are essentially the same is a huge waste of time in my opinion...

Last edited by FooSoft (2010 May 09, 8:06 pm)

I can't say what is best, but I dropped my RTK reviews as well, because I felt the time was better spent on real japanese, and I just lost motivation for it. All the work I did on RTK was really important as far as getting me super comfortable with kanji, and having some basic keywords is good to have, but continuing to review the english/confusing key words got to be a situation of diminishing returns. I don't regret it.

I do train writing in my anki decks though. I do it a lot (for all vocab words - my sentence deck is reading only to see grammar, and all words in the sentences are trained in my vocab deck separately). So being RTK free at this point I just learn each word, the way a non RTK'er might(?). From writing/seeing kanji so damn much I just find I am able to remember the kanji for new words, wether they are from the RTK set or not makes little difference - I am familiar enough with the primitives to skip the key word/story mnemonic - kind of like the way I would at some point drop the story during RTK reviews, and just know what was in the kanji to match the key word - now I just do that with each japanese word (sans keyword) and it goes well.

Last edited by TaylorSan (2010 May 09, 10:50 pm)