For me, reviews are more important than adding new kanji.

So review kanji throughout the day (a smartphone is great for this) and when you are done review add a few kanji. It's ok to slow down your pace when school.

Just keep reviewing and if you have extra time, a few more kanji. Even at a slow pace, you're good to go. The important thing is to keep up and keep pushing ahead little by little.

You'll finish eventually.

Also, you'll get more advice from Heisig as you get further into the book.
So just pay attention to the advice he gives you.

I'm gonna give opposite advice to chamcham above. Always push forward exploring new territory rather than getting bogged down in reviews. This keeps things interesting. Once you start reading or textbook study, you're gonna be getting massive recursion on your kanji anyway. Also if you have forgotten a kanji, no big deal. It's easy enough to check if you have a decent dictionary. Review/refresh only as necessary,  don't just go through the motions out of a sense of duty.

Last edited by nadiatims (2011 December 26, 11:24 pm)

I don't think Nadia's advice is right for this poster - it's true that you don't need to push your RTK reviews out to a multi-year interval before you stop reviewing ... -if- you are actually reading native material (without furigana) on a regular basis. As long as you are only in basic textbooks + RTK, I think it's a good idea to keep up your reviews. Once you dive into native material and are getting that constant reinforcement, Nadia's advice becomes relevant.

I think 1-2 times is plenty for writing Kanji when learning if you write them on each review - writing them a few more times than that might be good if you don't write them with each review.

Personally, I think writing them on reviews is important as it prevents tricking yourself with a 'yeah, that's what I meant' answer. Unless you have very strong short term memory -and- visualization, you can easily deceive yourself into thinking you thought out the right stroke order in your mind when you actually left an entire element out. Of course, when you're flipping through them on your cell phone in idle moments, you are likely also going to have to review them mentally... can't really bring out a pen and paper standing in the checkout line! If you visualize the right stroke order, though, it doesn't take any more or less time really compared to actually writing them.

I agree with Nadiatims; you should forcus on learning new things and avoid getting bogged down in reviews. In addition to what she said, I also find that learning new things makes everything else easier since it's all connected, so to me learning new things is always the priority.

And yeah, writing each kanji 15 times is completely unnecessary. It's hard to believe when you haven't tried it, but the amount Heisig recommends really is all you need.

I think you don't need to write the kanji down more than one time.
I think you really learn a kanji when you find it in real context, but heisig is useful because when you will encounter the kanji you will feel somehow already used to it.

Last edited by Max.89 (2011 December 27, 2:13 pm)

Anki costs some money but is excellent and many people use it for that very purpose. You do need interent access to be able to download the RtK deck though, plus the app itself of course lol.