The longer I work with my sentence deck, it seems the less production cards I make – less kanji writing, more recognition. Not that I’ve actually added new cards in probably close to two months now, having been chasing (white) rabbit trails (quite productively I may add). But since I was thinking of starting to add sentence cards regularly again, I’m curious what balance others have arrived at, so if you would be so kind, cast your vote, and even kinder still, comment and let me know how you’ve arrived at your current personal ratio.
Lan'dorien's Mysterious Journey
A cookie crumb trail through the kanji.
Lan'dorien's Mysterious Journey 
Because I’m using the overlapping cloze-deletion cards now, it just makes sense to write the character being recalled since its usually only 1 or 2 characters (two kana or 1 kanji and 1 kana at most). This has been a really nice balance as its not as slow as trying to write out entire sentence cards or even words for each card, but it helps me be sure I “really” know what i’m recalling, on a deeper level than simply recalling the reading in my head would be. Also, i only trace them on my palm, i’m not writing it on paper. much faster/easier/more convenient but just as effective for memory purposes (though its certainly not improving my horrible handwriting).
That’s fairly similar to what I’ve been doing up till now, having the reading highlighted in the question, and writing the word for the answer. About half my cards are like that I guess.
I’m still on hiatus from my kanji-production deck (Heisig). It has recently occurred to me that handwriting kanji probably isn’t as valuable as it used to be, with the ubiquitousness of パソコン and 携帯. And since I’ve completed RTK1 on two separate occasions now, only to stop reviewing and subsequently forget almost everything, I’m hesitant to do it a third time, especially considering that I seem to be learning kanji-fied words just fine through regular sentence exposure and listening. Hopefully that won’t come back to bite me in the ass later on…
Very true that since almost all writing is done by pushing keys these days, the old art isn’t very necessary. Still, I enjoy it …
0 production cards here. Just not a priority for me right now, and I have no current need to practice it. As long as my recognition is top notch that’s good enough for me.
And your results are hard to argue with. I wonder if, providing one is sufficiently able and careful to pay attention to detail, reading a kanji five times might not be better learning than writing it once. I think this would be highly individual.
I voted “less than 10%”, which is actually 0% now that I quit reviewing rtk. The thing is, I’m not one bit happy with my current productivity/recognition ratio, and I feel that I would benefit a lot from having written production cards in my anki routine, but it becomes really hard to get back into it when you don’t write for a while. I don’t have the confidence to write from memory even the most common words right now (quit rtk over a year ago), so… my advice is to keep going at it! If you lose the habit it gets progressively harder to get it back.
If I could force myself to do things properly, I’d probably aim somewhere around a 15-20% production/recognition ratio (for standard vocab/sentence cards, that’s all I do), any more would probably be too tiring with my current review load.
This also I am concerned about. I’m redoing RTK now, with Japanese keywords; I think (hope) that would take care of much of the problem even without production cards in the sentence deck.
< 10% → 0% here, too. I had some production cards in my original Core 2k deck, but they were just E-J, no writing or anything. I've actually *never* done any serious writing/character recall, so I'd be hard-pressed to write more than a few words by hand without switching to pure kana.
I've never really needed to know how, so it's just not part of my routine. It might become one sometime in the future, as necessity dictates.
Currently 0% dedicated cards. Kinda thinking about doing the old “put romanisation on the front and write down whatever Hanzi you feel like” technique, but… [and this is a terrible reason not to have started] I don’t have a scrapbook to doodle in at the moment. XD
My production (and reading) skills go up whenever I write Chinese on Facebook and both down whenever I don’t, so it’s something I need to make an effort to do.
I do wonder though if it’s just something that you can’t easily or usefully train through SRS use…
if you just did nouns, you could fairly easily put an image along with the phonetic representation to clue you in to which homophone you’re trying to recall the writing for. With Japanese, at least, you’d be able to cover a fairly large percentage of the kanji in this way, even without verbs, adjectives, etc.
Mmm… finding and importing images takes a while though. If you’re googling them, then it can be up to 15 or 20 seconds each… that’s 40-50 hours for a 10000 card deck. (Actually that’s not too bad, just a single week of full-time work)… hmm…