I'm still struggling with reviews. I finished RTK 3 weeks ago and now casually add the Kanji from Heisig's RTK supplement, but if I miss reviewing for 3-4 days I almost drown in reviews, which is very frustrating.

I still have around 80-120 reviews a day.

In Anki, if I miss one part in a Kanji (e.g. mouth instead of word), but remember the story, I hit hard. If I know the Kanji instantly, I hit good. If I don't remember anything I hit miss. I rarely hit easy.

I'm looking forward to the days with only 30-40 reviews...

Last edited by truando (2010 December 07, 3:22 am)

Offshore, it's good to know that it could possibly get down to 20 reviews a day. that would be awesome.

truando, I can't imagine what that extra 1000 kanji is doing to your reviews. I'm sure it probably has added at least 5 reviews a day more than if you had just done RTK1 only.

Thurd, I have been considering stopping RTK but I just find so much value in being able to write the kanji, plus the key word can really help when learning a new vocabulary, or really understanding what a word means. I'm still not sure how much longer I'll be reviewing RTK but I know that I probably won't ever stop completely. I may just limit myself to like 10 minutes a day, regardless of whether or not I have cards remaining.

I finished the 3007 RTK kanji years ago. Reviewing them on this site gives an average of about 12 cards a day.

I finished RTK1 in April 2008 and usually have between 7 and 12 reviews a day, which are usually the ones I miss a whole lot, or kanji from RTK3 that I've come across often and added over the last two years.

I don't think it takes that long. I started reviewing fresh about a year ago. I was hitting 'hard' every time because reviews are the only time I really write the characters, and I had some inconsistent periods over the New Year, summer etc. I've been super consistent for the past three months or so, and my reviews are now between 12-20 a day. If you didn't miss a day and generally hit 'good', I think they'd be well under control within half a year.

The one thing I regret not doing earlier is adding a word on the question side to avoid ambiguity. Shoulder/shouldering, healer/healing, and keywords that are synonyms of other keywords. I have something like ユ着 (for 癒) for most of these cards now. My overall retention is 97.9% after 21,789 reviews, and a big chunk of the fails was thanks to the ambiguities, so I'm hoping it will go up from now.

It really differs for me. I haven't been done for quite a year, but in 1.5 month I will have. It feels like years. XD I don't press 'easy' a lot. I find the space between reviews is too big for me then. But I do press 'easy' at least 2 or 3 times during one batch of reviews. Perhaps that's an idea for you to get it down?

I think it also stems from me pressing 'easy' quite a lot a few months ago before I was going on holiday, as I didn't want many reviews after I came back. If you press 'easy' for a while on many cards, the ones you really don't know will come back anyway and you can just press 'yes' for those.

So I think that's the solution for you; going for 'easy' a bit more.

EDIT: Oh my review count is between 19 and 45 a day. Depending on how well it's been going.

Last edited by Koos83 (2010 December 12, 8:28 am)

I've gotten down to 10-15. Been doing it for a year+ now. The keywords start to become less useful as you get more into japanese(it get's replaced by Japanese keywords instead)

Truando if I were you I'd do one of two thing.


1) Keep at it, the reviews will eventually go down, just work even harder on the ones you miss.

2) Restart, and work through it at a much slower pace.

I am on my second runthrough and it's MUCH easier this time, I'm taking it easier, I have most of the benefit of RTK already while working through sentences, while still using RTK to remember those rarer kanji.

It was 2 years, and the first 1500 kanji were still 90%+ every review, it isn't til the last 500 that I didn't know well that the numbers started to slip, even at that, the more common kanji I come across I either still remembered, or were easy enough to revive.

It's more work to restart, but you will have better control of the reviews at that point.


I'd just keep going myself

Dustin_Calgary wrote:

It was 2 years, and the first 1500 kanji were still 90%+ every review, it isn't til the last 500 that I didn't know well that the numbers started to slip, even at that, the more common kanji I come across I either still remembered, or were easy enough to revive.

I'd just keep going myself

Thanks for your input, Dustin_Calgary. I am not sure if I understand those two paragraphs. Could you please elaborate?

I think the main asset to do RTK fastly is there is less risk you give up because you're annoyed. The main asset to do it slowly is that your expired cards are unlikely to explode.

With a mean rythm of 20 added kanji/week, I've got 20 to 60 (with a mean of 30) expired kanji a day :]

Last edited by breakies (2011 January 08, 5:58 pm)

now I understand. makes sense. I guess I just keep going: one of my goals for 2011 was to keep going no matter what. 355 days to go... I'll decide on December 31 if I continue or not

If you are doing KO to learn the readings then it might help to add readings to the rtk keywords. for example

pain -> いたい - pain
go-between -> なかよし　の　なか - go-between

as a last resort you could suspend all JLPT 1+ cards and focus on the JLPT 5-2 kanji, then add the JLPT1+ back in gradually as the reviews go down.

If you've done the hard work to finish the book I think it's prob best to suck it up though.

Anki stats shows you how many cards it thinks you will have on average for the next week and then next month, this might give you some hope (if the number falls enough )