I did RRTK, but my kanji ability still feels shaky. Should I do the JP1K?

Decks like RTK, RRTK, KanjiDamage and Ankidrone Foundation are designed to give you training wheels so that you could practice kanji in a modified environment for a while and then transition to reading real Japanese and learn real words. The goal is to achieve kanji fluency, an ability to recognize kanji the same way you recognize people's faces. If you can look at a kanji and reliably tell if you have seen it before or not, then you have it. It doesn't matter if you don't remember its name.

If you have completed one such deck, you don't need to do another one of the same kind. What you have to do from this point is to learn to associate words written in kanji with how to read them and what they mean. Move to the next level and do Ankidrone Essentials. Eventually your goal is to start sentence mining while consuming native content.

Even if you feel like you lack kanji ability, just continuing to learn words is going to improve it. Remember, many people never learned kanji through a dedicated deck, they learned words right from the start.

Tags: faq