I don't understand why you'd study RTK but then not continue. You will surely forget a lot of them and have to re-do large parts of it. It seems like such a waste of your progress. I currently do 20-30 kanji a day to get it over with within 2-3 months and on the side I immerse in japanese. I want to get to the point of attaching vocab to these kanji asap. I can't understand the reason for quitting after all that work.
Motivation comes and goes. I admit at one point I was more interested (should I say obsessed?) in learning kanji than Japanese grammar. I find grammar is boring past the very initial stage and I like to become fluent in a language before I revisit grammar and reinforce what comes naturally to my head. For the past years I haven't been able to go to Japan and thus my motivation has been low. Nevertheless I plan to go back soon, and once I do all of this work will be very useful again. But even if I never studied Japanese (or Chinese) again, I don't regret one bit having learned 2200 kanji. I have learned a lot of stuff about popular culture, mnemotechniques and learning techniques along the way. Apart from being a discipline challenge that I was able to conquer. Ideally you would want to continue studying the language when you're done and I wouldn't recommend doing Heisig if you don't plan to learn Japanese. But I do understand if some people do it out of curiosity or as a hobby. There's so many more worse ways of wasting your time than learning Chinese/Japanese characters.
I agree with your assessment that it's much easier to relearn something you've already learned, so it's not too sad to "forget" some. But I think Heisig's method is really slippery, it's easy to think you're doing it but to get lazy and stop creating good images. I bet you have higher retention rate for the first 200 than for the last 1000. He holds your hand in the earlier stages, but starts the weening process quickly. You're not meant to brute force it with endless reviews, you're meant to engage episodic memory (what he calls imaginative memory) but it's really hard and easy to screw up or go astray. The keyword is supposed to trigger an image and story in your mind. If you only have the muscle memory but have no idea the story, you'll lose the muscle memory too without consistent exposure. Same reason that writing 100 times each kanji is a fragile way to get the kanji.
Hey! To be honest at this stage I don't think I have a higher retention rate for the first 200 kanji given by Heisig. I have a higher retention rate for the most common kanji and the primitives, because I see those all the time. I know I have failed kanji like "chant" and "gall bladder" if I haven't reviewed them in months, whereas I have never ever failed "horse" or "west". The stories are great to stick the kanji in your memory in the short term, but then you're hoping to associate the kanji with the words and cases it appears in. Still, when I fail a kanji I do my best to remember the associated story first, i.e. do the whole Heisig method all over again, but only for this kanji in particular.
Thats why it's important to continue. Even if the stories are great and you do recall them all the time, you will forget what you have no use for. But the eventual goal is to forget all these stories anyways and just recognize the kanji + the reading by looking at it. So it's not that incredibly important to have the craziest stories that you'll never forget, as long as you continue after RTK. Which in this case... well he didn't continue and he probably forgot a lot already.
If you're not going to immerse yourself in the language, the best way to remember them is to do your Anki/SRS reviews religiously. I did that for the first 2 years after finishing Heisig and I had a retention rate of 70-80%. Since then I have slacked off and I hate to admit that I have forgotten a lot. When I do reviews now most of the time I can call at least one of the primitives and parts of the story, but I'm not recalling them well enough any more. :( I'm planning to do a full review of Heisig sometime (which hopefully lasts 2 months instead of 2 years lol), and I really want to move to Japan at some point to immerse myself in the language.
Well the average was more like 5 Kanji/day on the days I learned new Kanji. I learned 600+ on the first 3 months. Then stopped learning any new for about a year, then retook it and did an average of 5 Kanji/day, with the last two months doing a bit more. I honestly believe the speed of learning is not the important factor for your retention. The fact that you come up with your own stories, or that the stories are memorable enough for you, is the biggest factor in your retention, at least short term.
Wow, you can write 2200 kanji but you can't read Japanese, what was the point? It's not an achievement it's just a first step in learning Japanese. So.. Why do that?
Well first off I have a basic-intermediate level of Japanese so I definitely CAN read and understand a fair chunk of Japanese. But in any case even if I didn't know anything else of Japanese except for the characters, or even if I didn't plan to learn the language in the near future (which I do plan to do), I wouldn't regret doing Heisig one bit. It's been a wonderful ride where I've learned a lot about popular culture, mnemotechniques and discipline. Would I recommend people do Heisig if they don't plan to learn Japanese/Chinese? Obviously not. But there's so many more worse ways to waste your time than learning Japanese/Chinese characters, so there's that.
Can you read everything from all books in Japanese after learning from a different book that teaches you kanji? Heisig is meant to be a good introduction to get familiar with the characters. Once you have that it makes learning the readings much easier rather than learning them all together.
