It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but I’ve just very recently started actually reviewing sentences, despite that supposedly being the cornerstone of my entire method.  First there was the kanji to learn, then core2k on smart.fm to go through, and the tadoku month in the meantime, and once I finished core2k I wanted to finish sentence mining Chino’s Sentence Patterns book before actually starting to review.  Well, that’s done now.

So initial impressions then.  Highly effective, yes, and especially (at this point) for learning kanji readings.  I still want to go through RTK2, but I need to figure out how my daily routine will play out with the new things I’m doing.  (It was easy before. smart.fm till done, kanji reviews, kick back with an anime.)  My card shows me the sentence in kana, and my task is to write it with kanji and, of course, understand it.  This is according to Khatz-dono’s thinking in this post.  It might get a bit old after a while, but so far it is no problem to do them all like that.  I think though, once my kanji knowledge has solidified, I’ll review more reading cards, and do less writing, simply because of the time requirement.  If you’re not familiarizing yourself with any new vocabulary or kanji there isn’t much point in writing the sentence, I’d guess.  So far it seems that about a minute and a half is required per sentence, so I can comfortably add about 20 cards from the core2k deck (sigh) and 10 from my main sentence deck, which is about 400 strong, all from that one book so far.

I think I’ll carry on exactly like this for about another week and then post a set of not-quite-so-initial impressions.