Just to reiterate: Quitting your RTK deck doesn't mean no longer writing kanji, nor does it mean no longer using the keywords/stories (I maintained the latter as mostly-dissolved-stitches that I used less and less to help learn vocabulary words, but now I have enough Japanese words that I don't even need to do that, and only reference the rare keyword via Rikaichan in passing to recall the story, and that only when I can't immediately make up a story via the definition, which is rare, and even then it's a barebones story because I've mastered the method, which occurred at some point partly through RTK and only became more fine-tuned afterwards). If you're doing individual words as active recall cards like I mostly did for single word cards but now only do occasionally because even that's unnecessary when I'm already doing multimodal learning (which includes incorporating muscle memory/motor processes via 空書, mentally writing, or actual writing), it doesn't even mean no longer doing kanji as active recall, either (likewise with cloze deletion).

In other words, I echo and take one step further concerns about 'writing' by emphasizing motor skills to supplement encoding and facilitate recall regardless of an interest in handwriting, without continuing RTK but instead keeping keywords/stories in mind and maintaining kanji via words and sentences, especially those that are systematically learned for readings post-RTK.

Last edited by nest0r (2010 May 11, 10:51 pm)

This is a really old thread, but @Jarvik:

What do you think that Japanese people do? They do not write every single Kanji every day, or even every week or every month.

Why is it that we, as learners, have to do it every day, but natives don't?

Why not just make the cards well known, practicing for 6months-year and then stopping and just letting exposure do the trick? Japanese people can write Kanji that they haven't written in a whole year (say, for an essay on an obscure topic) without doing SRS.

Well, I'd imagine it's similar to how I can write the word "Anaheim" even though I haven't written or typed the word in a whole year.

Or perhaps Pittsburg.

Maybe Cockatoo?

Inalienable.

Darjeeling.

Unfathomable.

Antidisestablishmentarianism.

I stopped reviewing kanji for about 5 months and I regret it. At best I can remember half of them.

I should have done 20 reps per day until they would have settled down.

zachandhobbes wrote:

This is a really old thread, but @Jarvik:

What do you think that Japanese people do? They do not write every single Kanji every day, or even every week or every month.

Why is it that we, as learners, have to do it every day, but natives don't?

Why not just make the cards well known, practicing for 6months-year and then stopping and just letting exposure do the trick? Japanese people can write Kanji that they haven't written in a whole year (say, for an essay on an obscure topic) without doing SRS.

I'm first to admit I can't write Kanji very well. I've forgotten. I was a bookworm and can still read better than most collage graduates, but my ability to write Kanji is that of a 3rd grader. I've been abroad for a long time so my case is probably a bit extreme, but I guess it's not just me.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id … _article=1

Natives DO need to write.

harhol wrote:

From the above article:

Character amnesia matters because memorisation is so crucial to character-based written languages, says Siok Wai Ting, assistant professor of linguistics at Hong Kong University. Forgetting how to write could eventually affect reading ability. "There is no way we can learn the writing systematically because the writing itself is not systematic -- we have to memorise, we have to rote learn," she says.

Heh.

Heh.

Last edited by truando (2010 November 07, 3:37 pm)

Asriel wrote:

truando wrote:

harhol wrote:

From the above article:

Character amnesia matters because memorisation is so crucial to character-based written languages, says Siok Wai Ting, assistant professor of linguistics at Hong Kong University. Forgetting how to write could eventually affect reading ability. "There is no way we can learn the writing systematically because the writing itself is not systematic -- we have to memorise, we have to rote learn," she says.

Heh.

Heh.

Heh.

Heh.

I recently started up dojng reviews again and learning kanji after a 6 month break just after finishing RTK1. I figure I had forgotten about 600-700 kanji or so, but it seems now I can do RTK quite easily at about 100 kanji per day. When I was doing RTK1 the first time it was more like 25 per day. I'm at 1400-1500 right now, and we'll see how things are when I'm done. I think this should work with anyone, if they've studied hard and then took a long break and then came back, it should be much easier to redo RTK than before.

Of course not taking a break would be much better, but if you do, it's not the end of the world.

I stopped doing RTK review about 4/5 months ago. I regret nothing. It was boring and took a lot of time.

Now I only do sentences and have no problems remembering the kanji.

I quit RTK months ago and do sentences. But simply having RTK, I can break down new kanji I find, and if necessary I can come back to this website and look up the keyword if I've forgotten it. But I can write kanji and remember them easily thanks to simply having gone through RTK. I no longer see the point in continuing RTK reviews, as long as I continue to write kanji regularly in sentence reviews.