Ringotan was absolutely game-changing for my retention of vocabulary. When I started writing the next WaniKani level in advance of unlocking it, I started flying through the levels. Then I finished the whole WK set, added in the Joyo it doesn’t have, and started adding every hyougai / jinmeiyou used in vocabulary I come across. It’s so easy to remember the general shape of things like 喫茶店 or 弱肉強食 without actually paying close attention, or let your brain default to “if it’s a compound with two kanji and a tree on the left of each then it’s きかい,” without being able to picture 機 or 械 or even know which comes first. I noticed on my own that 械 shares a phonetic component with 戒 (i.e. 警戒)… only thanks to writing it. Once kanji feel like “letters” in your brain, it really frees you up to pay more attention to everything else: readings, grammar, context.
The research on memory shows that practicing recognition doesn’t do a whole lot for output… but practicing output does a ton for recognition. I was so shocked at how powerful it is, it has me questioning whether focusing on recognition first is the right move for anything else I study too.
