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+--- Thread: The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. (/thread-95.html)
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - Whiskeyjack - 2014-01-16
Congratulations to everyone who made it here!
I just finished RTK1 today after starting 1.5 years ago. Next plans: I've still got about 125 supplemental kanji to learn in the Anki deck I'm using, and I also have to finally get around to learning katakana. But mostly, I plan to jump into Core 2k/6k.
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - ATWA5000 - 2014-01-18
Finished. I'm out!
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - afterglowefx - 2014-01-22
Finished yesterday. Started Core2k and RTK1 at the same time. I placed the most emphasis on the Core deck. I finished Core2k in 83 days, RTK in 111 days. Retention rate for RTK is currently 96% new / 95% review / 98% mature.
"Finished" isn't exactly accurate, more like I added my last new card yesterday. Still have to rep the deck into the ground, I'm only at 34% mature.
I also just added a second card type to my deck with the kanji on the front and the keyword on the back. Nothing like doubling the size of your deck in about 10 seconds. I know Heisig claims that you don't need to study this way and that it'll "take care of itself", but--at least for me--no effing way. I see kanji in the wild everyday and I remember the story, but the keyword? Maybe 60-70% of the time, and slowly.
I used almost entirely stories from this site. It was really, really fun deleting thousands upon thousands of quotation marks. I mean, seriously, some stories had three damned tiers of quotation marks, a la:
"""Magic trees" are magical!", said the magical man!"""
Jesus Christ. Also fixing the hundreds of obscene grammatical errors. That was fun too.
Next up, Core6k @ 200 cards/day.
EDIT: Oh also I need to add hiragana to my kanji deck, because it's re-God-damned-diculous that I can write 2,200+ kanji but I can't write half the hiragana. I can read it at near-native speed, but writing? Nope.
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - timaki - 2014-01-23
It's done! A friend gave me his lightly-used copy of RTK 15 or so years ago, so it hasn't been a quick process. I never got past about the 200-card mark during those early years, but thanks to the stories on this web site and the encouragement found in these forums, I've finally gotten through all 2,200 characters in the Sixth Edition! It took me nine months of consistent 10-new-cards-per-day progress. Plus, I was able to get much of the way through Core2K during that same time, and start a reverse-RTK (kanji-to-keyword) deck. Yeah!
Congratulations to everyone else who finished much earlier than I did, and to all those who will succeed after me.
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - DGensix - 2014-01-31
Finished RTK 1, up to 2042 ... so I still need to do the supplement ones (I got edition 4), but I just HAD to come here and post about this. It's a milestone. A bloody huge milestone.
Started RTK 1 early November, and it is now January 31st (Chinese New Year, coincidentally!!!). So it has taken me about three months of putting off my reviews, inconsistencies, turmoil, excitement, frustration, satisfaction, pain and every other emotion out there.
I'm probably not even forming natural or coherent sentences here because I am just in such disbelief that I've made it this far. (I'm a native English speaker, honestly!)
I wish I could just give everybody here a big bear hug for all their creative and really hilarious stories (I pretty much never needed to make my own stories, thanks to you guys) because without them, I would've given up on RTK a long time ago.
How do I feel right now? Exhausted. But over the moon that I've put some sort of control over my learning of Japanese ... and this is coming from a Japanese student of three years in university - but honestly, as anybody would tell you and what I will tell you, three years of formal training can mean absolutely NOTHING if you can't put it into practice, and this is EXACTLY my situation.
Kanji has always been the biggest obstacle for me and still is. However, Kanji doesn't look like unidentifiable bunches of strokes anymore and I'm not intimidated to read a news article in Japanese or whatever.
Coming from somebody like me, who loses motivation easily, if I can do it, everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY can do it.
Again I say I feel exhausted. I should be jumping for joy but jeez it just feels like another day for me. It's probably because my journey has JUST STARTED. I still need to do the supplementary kanji and also RTK 2 and 3, but man it feels great.
Yeah I'm probably rambling on about nothing or talking in circles, it's because I'm still in disbelief.
I'll wrap this up before it gets too long with a final message.
Those studying Japanese on your own, self-teaching yourselves, without formal classes or anything - KEEP. AT. IT. Your abilities will ramp up even further than your fellow Japanese students with RTK. And it may be difficult to motivate yourself and it may feel like a waste of time, but trust me, you'll be happy in the end and if you're doing it because you like it then tell me how that is a waste of time?
I'm done. And I f**ken love you all!
Thank you for everything!
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - calabresa - 2014-02-06
I did it! I did it! After 7 months I finally did it!!
I feel so good, I just can't believe I've made it!! I'm so happy *--*
On the other hand I really have nowhere to go now... What have you guys done after you finished? I've been following the AJATT method but I ain't really gonna pay for all those sentece packs and stuff he tells you to buy.
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - EratiK - 2014-02-06
calabresa Wrote:On the other hand I really have nowhere to go now... What have you guys done after you finished? I've been following the AJATT method but I ain't really gonna pay for all those sentece packs and stuff he tells you to buy.You can start by downloading Anki and the Japanese Core 6000 deck to increase your vocabulary, and learn some grammar with a method like Genki or books like the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series.
And congratulations!
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - Aspiring - 2014-02-06
Congrats calabresa !
Yea don't buy into methods
Take the minor/major points.
Use the blogs and the forums as guideposts
Conventional guidepost after rtk:
emphasis on structural coursework
:nouns and verbs (+nonrigid grammar review)
Ajatt/Jalup's guide posts
an emphasis on input
a thousand fundamental sentences
to learn words in context, method of lesser importance
***
Four areas to consider:
meaningful input
meaningful output
language-related learning (nouns and verbs)
fluency practice*
Nation writes that each strand is of equal importance and should take approximately one fourth of a learner's coursework, but may vary depending on a learner's level. Nation argues that even beginners and advanced learners may benefit from coursework that balances the four strands.
*Here fluency does not refer to that abstract state of fulfillment, but to the learner's efficiency using what he knows.
Also note the repetition used in the first two strands "meaningful input" and "meaningful output".
The Four Strands, Paul Nation
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - calabresa - 2014-02-10
Hey guys thanks for your time, but I'm still really confused.
I've tried some of the things you recomended but none of them made any sense, I guess I'm still in a very low level. I only know the 2042 RTK kanji and the kana, nothing else. I have no vocabulary nor grammar bases.
I'm really frustrated, I need somethng really "begginer-level" I think
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - EratiK - 2014-02-10
calabresa Wrote:Hey guys thanks for your time, but I'm still really confused.Ah yes, it's true, something like the Japanese Core 2000 deck (on the software Anki) can be overwhelming at first (which is why my first vocab deck didn't have example sentences). Well a lot of books are aimed at beginners so they can start to learn vocabulary and grammar: Genki, Japanese the Manga Way, Minna no nihongo... Buy or download one, read the lessons, do the exercices... Studying is a big part of learning a new language.
I've tried some of the things you recomended but none of them made any sense, I guess I'm still in a very low level. I only know the 2042 RTK kanji and the kana, nothing else. I have no vocabulary nor grammar bases.
I'm really frustrated, I need somethng really "begginer-level" I think
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - PotbellyPig - 2014-02-10
calabresa Wrote:Hey guys thanks for your time, but I'm still really confused.You are primed now for a beginner textbook. I would recommend Genki I. You can try Tae Kim's Grammar guide which is free online but I would personally go with Genki as things are explained more thoroughly, especially for a beginner.
I've tried some of the things you recomended but none of them made any sense, I guess I'm still in a very low level. I only know the 2042 RTK kanji and the kana, nothing else. I have no vocabulary nor grammar bases.
I'm really frustrated, I need somethng really "begginer-level" I think
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - ehhhh - 2014-02-16
It took me 3 months to do the first 1200 kanji, and then I said screw it and did the rest of them in the last 6 days. I have the 4th edition of RTK1, so I guess I'll do the supplemental kanji now before Japanese the Manga Way and Core6k.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the stories on here, what a fantastic resource.
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - Eminem2 - 2014-02-17
Congratulations to everyone who made it here! And many thanks for all the great contributions by those who came before me! I hope some of my ideas will help those who come after.
"Wow!" is all I could say at first, just "wow!". I finished(*) RTK1 this morning (6th edition, so 2,200 Kanji cards). And frankly, although I tremendously enjoyed some aspects of it, it almost feels like I've just been released from prison. (Not that I have ever been in jail for real, but still). This "prison feeling" probably had something to do with forcing myself to finish adding all the backstories/logical associations within 4 months of starting, next to the daily restudies and reviewing expired and restudied Kanji. And that worked: I started on October 17th, 2013 and I finished this morning on February 17th, 2014.
(*) So with "finished", I do not yet mean having 95% of all cards in Box 5 or higher. Just coming up with all the stories was challenging enough as it was, since I always strove to come up with somehow seeing a logical connection between keyword and Kanji (be they in functional terms or in the form of an illustrative reference to a movie, book or song) instead of going for some of Heisig's infamous (for me, at least) "shocking" stories, since I did not believe in simply throwing all the primitives together in an insane story, stamping the keyword on it and then somehow expecting my memory to be impressed by this orgy of nonsense the way Heisig advocates. A prime example of this is #188 (6th edition) "carp", where Heisig recommends the image of a son flying a kite with two computers attached, in the hopes that this will somehow transfer the memory and efficiency of a computer to this son. Indeed "ugh", as Heisig himself comments.
So I made it hard on myself by raising the bar for the stories, making things more labour intensive and adding to the "prison feeling", especially over the past month. I added the final 600 RTK1 Kanji in that month, on the one hand to meet the self imposed deadline of today and on the other hand to get out of a strange mudpool I had gotten myself stuck in. Each day I would faithfully do all the restudies and reviews of expired Kanji that this website's SRS required, but even though I scored quite reasonably I barely had time left to write logical backstories for new cards. And even though I diligently did all the restudies and reviews, the daily load always seemed to hover around 180 expired cards. So eventually I decided to make adding at least a lesson's worth of new cards every day a priority and limiting the number of reviews of restudy cards so that in all no more than 100 cards would flow into Box 2 each day. Anything above that would simply have to wait another day as "expired" or "restudy". Strangely, even doing that for a week has rarely brought down the number of expired cards to under 140 a day.
I already recognize many Kanji in anime and on the pews of Chinese restaurants I pass, so it definitely hasn't just been "book learning" for me. It's also been a fascinating experience to try and get a background in a language that uses a partially pictorial notation.
Anyhow, from now on I can focus on eliminating the backstack of expired and restudy cards. And aside from that I will be going back to the grammar book that recommended I separately pursue Kanji studies ("Japanese the Manga Way").
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - Givala - 2014-02-20
I finished yesterday, and I couldn't be happier even though I still have a loooong way to go.
Thanks to everyone for the stories, you made it possible!
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - Northern_Lord - 2014-02-22
Congratulations to all of those who have finished! お疲れさま！
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - afterglowefx - 2014-02-22
Congrats all! You've now got everything you need in your toolbox to conquer the rest. Just make sure you put those tools to use!
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - quanticism - 2014-03-14
Finally finished on my second attempt of RTK. On the first try, I got to frame 2025 over ~2months but I was too trigger happy with the "good" button. The end result was taking about 30 minutes to go through 100 cards. When I got lazy and reviews piled up, I just gave up.
Started again on 1st December 2013 (~9 months after giving up the first attempt). Went through the initial chapters at around 25-35 kanji per day. Reduced it to 21 kanji/day at frame 600ish. Reduced it again to 11 kanji per day at frame 1800ish. My main focus on the 2nd attempt was to keep review times short (~100 cards in 10 minutes) so it wouldn't feel as much as a chore.
Here are some graphs of my progress.
At frame 1065:
http://i.imgur.com/ZuAd8IL.png
At frame 2042:
http://i.imgur.com/rvx1Iqr.png
Now I'm going through Tae Kim's grammar and then it's vocab building I guess.
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - Bukudos - 2014-03-19
Done!
Thanks all!
Now the fun can start!!!
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - Eminem2 - 2014-03-19
Congrats to all those who have also made it through RTK1!
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - john555 - 2014-03-23
Hi everyone, I finished RTK1 last week. The main feeling I have is...relief!
I didn't find this site till I was almost done, so the stories for the kanji starting with #509 ("dye") are pretty much all my own (except where Heisig provides hints). I didn't use any of the stories from this site. ("Mr. T. blah blah....Spiderman blah blah.").
I stuck always to Heisig's keywords with few exceptions. So the "thread" primitive was always "thread" in my stories but in a few cases I used the word "threads" in the sense of stylish clothing in my stories.
In a very few cases I combined a few separate Heisig primitives into one of my own; e.g., rice seedling/spikelette + soil I referred to as "must" (sub-story: "you MUST plant rice seedlings in soil"), as in "there MUST be land at the top of the pinnacle"; "you MUST use force to move a fat person" etc.
The fact that I struggled sometimes to make up all my own stories (and not simply copy other peoples' stories like on this site) probably helped cement the kanji more firmly in my mind.
I have a big, battered 200 page spiral bound Hilroy notebook where I wrote down the stories for each kanji from #509 to #2,042 (sign of the snake). Each story is a couple of sentences long.
There are many instances throughout my notebook where I had to paste a blank address label overtop and re-write the story when the story needed to be tweaked!
All my work was done manually (spiral bound notebook, Heisig paperback, paper flashcards--yes, I actually made a flashcard for each of the 2,042 kanji in the book. I keep the cards in a cute fabric covered miniature chest of drawers I found at Walmart). I didn't use my laptop at all for this, on the theory that doing it all with paper and pen (or sometimes different colored sharpies) would more firmly impress the kanji on my mind.
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - andikaze - 2014-03-23
Congrats
You did it in "hard mode", while I'm still stuck at 3/4 or so, with the book and ANKI and stories from here >.<
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - riogray - 2014-03-23
My congratulations. I do think making up your own stories helps a lot, I have done so for the last 200 Kanji and it works better that just copying a story. But I stopped writing flashcards after about 600, because Anki is just a lot more handy than a huge chunk of paper, which you have to carry everywhere with you. But I salute you, over 2000 handwritten cards is quite an achievement
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - john555 - 2014-03-23
Thanks!
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - Eminem2 - 2014-03-24
john555 Wrote:Hi everyone, I finished RTK1 last week. The main feeling I have is...relief!.That was my feeling as well when I finished! And congratulations, of course!
john555 Wrote:The fact that I struggled sometimes to make up all my own stories (and not simply copy other peoples' stories like on this site) probably helped cement the kanji more firmly in my mind.Again: likewise. Making up your own stories (and the same goes for primitives) is like making them your children, whereas stories copied from others will generally be stepchildren at best.
john555 Wrote:All my work was done manually (spiral bound notebook, Heisig paperback, paper flashcards--yes, I actually made a flashcard for each of the 2,042 kanji in the book. I keep the cards in a cute fabric covered miniature chest of drawers I found at Walmart). I didn't use my laptop at all for this, on the theory that doing it all with paper and pen (or sometimes different colored sharpies) would more firmly impress the kanji on my mind.That's a really impressive feat! What kind of review frequency did you use with your paper flash cards, BTW?
I'm curious, because electronic SRS systems (the one that this website provides, at least) use a repeat frequency that I have found to be way too high so that about 90% of the cards I saw were already so fresh in my mind that it became annoying to have to reproduce them all over again so soon. And this annoyance actually began to hurt my memorization efforts, because I wanted to make progress with either learning something new or relearning something I had forgotten, instead of constantly regurgitating what I already knew.
The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread. - ajnaj - 2014-04-11
I finished RTK1 2 days ago. It took me one year, 9 Apr 2013-2014. Didn't stick to my initial goal, which was 6 months, but then I decided that it shouldn't be more than 1 year. Hahah. Thanks everyone for the awesome stories. It was fun. :D