Glad you are enjoying it
Try not to give up when your stack has 300 reviews and you fail half of them ;p

Yeah...I've been having one of those weeks. I haven't failed half of my cards and I only had 60 reviews today, but I'm pretty sure I failed half of the NEW cards I just learned yesterday. At least overall I'm still around 75%, which isn't terrible. I have also realized what a terrible idea it is to do RTK while tired. I need to force myself to do this right after dinner!

nadiatims wrote:

I think you mean mnemonics

btw although I did RTK in the past I'm no longer convinced its necessary in the long run, as long as you write down words regularly as part of your study. For that reason, don't be too bummed out if you don't remember every kanji perfectly. Just get RTK out of the way in a couple of months and start learning real Japanese. From the stories on this site of people quitting and  restarting RTK multiple times, I sometimes get the feeling that RTK can just be a big distraction from actually learning the language unless you just bang it out of the way relatively quickly.

Yup. I never finished RTK (got as far as about 250). The important thing to take away from RTK is the method; I personally don't think it's worth going all the way to the end, it just seems like a distraction from the really important thing which is consumption of native material. Come across a kanji you don't recognise? Learn it there and then, by learning the word it's in. What's the point of learning a character before you've ever even come across it in the real world?

I was amazed at how well the Heiseg method was working at around 400+. I always thought that the only way to learn that many characters was just to have learnt it as a child. I'm now at 1520 and the lowest review % I have gotten since I started was 70% (averaging about 60-80 reviews per day).

RTK really is amazing. I started sometime in January and I'm now at 1183. I took a break for a month or two, from reviews and all. It was against my will. However, when I started reviewing again, I was amazed at how much I still remembered. I can't imagine why people restart RTK, honestly. It's not like you forgot everything, right?

Although, I admit that some of the primitives are puzzling. o_o;

sol0fate wrote:

Also I like how RTK uses some english words I never use daily,making me look up the meaning when I'm susposed to be learning Japanese anyway. More work indeed.

This is true. I just think of it as expanding my vocabulary. But things like 里 will be encountered regardless.

Daichi wrote:

fakewookie wrote:

I personally don't think it's worth going all the way to the end, it just seems like a distraction from the really important thing which is consumption of native material.

A year ago I might of thought differently, but I can't disagree with this anymore. It's way to easy to get tired of RtK, I got halfway in, got bored. Then decided to move to RtK Lite, then got halfway from where I was through that... Then I gave up, moved to doing vocab with Core2K while upkeeping my RtK deck, only adding RtK cards as I saw new stuff in in my Core2K deck. Which worked rather well for a while.

Now I'm strictly doing a sentence deck I generated from some of my favorite anime with Subs2SRS. With the Morphology plugin, I'm finding this the funnest SRS reviews I've ever done. Period.

Anyway, I really now think that not learning any Japanese alongside with RtK was a big mistake for me. A Japanese keyword goes a really long way. I started doing this rather late on my way through RtK, mostly on just the things I had the most trouble with. But I could of been doing it on everything, I could of been boosting my vocabulary a little the whole time I was doing RtK, for very little extra effort. And it makes some of the things that are confusing like homonymns and synonyms in RtK a lot easier.

I just noticed that...if you can input the kanji in search and get a story while learning vocab for lets say　飛行機　then there is no point in studying only RTK for 2-4 months. With all that time you could of learn so much vocabulary.

Last edited by Ginmanm (2011 July 18, 9:38 am)