Compared with many of you, I suspect I had a lot of available time to devote to RtK. Still, it took me about 9 months to get through it. It was important to me that I really enjoy the process, and also that I maintain some balance in my life. I admit also to having a very unattractive, smug sense of pleasure in having persisted with something for a longer period of time and completing it, compared with spending just a few weeks on it, as some are able to do. But I'm sure that is just pure jealousy on my part at other people's brainpower and focus.
Now, I seriously wish I had completed RtK 1 more quickly - so I wanted to share the 3 things that held me back:
1) About 3/4 of the way through I was desperate to learn Japanese vocab at the same time. So I began copying and pasting hiragana words from wrightak's spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...l=en#gid=0 into the keyword on the stories page, sometimes replacing the English keyword, mostly just adding to it with a Japanese word. For the words that I already knew at my beginner level, e.g. やま - a word that even my husband knows and he's not studying Japanese! - it posed no problem and felt great to be assigning the kanji to the hiragana. But all the others just remained meaningless combinations of hiragana sounds, not one of which sank in. In practice, they were a time-consuming and brain-energy-consuming needless distraction in my reviews. Yet I still couldn't resist continuing to add them! And, more often than not, I would also want to look them up on WWWJDIC to see how closely wrightak & his team's choice of Japanese word matched my understanding of the English keyword. More time spent - not actually learning kanji!!
2) From time to time the stories include the tip that a certain group of primitives gets its own kanji later on. So I thought, "why not learn it now?" And it was pretty cool on the Progress page to see the bar moving across RtK 3! But the answer to "why not now?" for me is that I would have finished at least 80 kanji sooner if I had just stuck to RtK1. That extra 80 kanji is equivalent to almost the last 3 1/2 chapters of the book. And, believe me, by the time I got to the 4th last chapter, I was really wanting it to be over, so they were tough! Of course it's great that I now know how to write 80 more kanji than I even set out to learn, since learning how to write kanji is the whole point, it's not about the numbers. I'm just saying I'd have felt less frustrated had I just stuck to my original goal and achieved it sooner - that being highly motivational in itself.
3) The third thing that slowed me down, of course, is the forum. OK, not the forum per se, but my addiction to the forum! I really love reading this stuff, and I've learnt about so many resources for future Japanese studies. And I really tried, especially from the 3/4 point onwards, to just use it as a reward for completing a chapter. But we all know the forum goes by its own time zone, doesn't it? "I'll just spend 5 minutes seeing what the "Recent Topics" are - could be something vital to my wellbeing!" - can equate to an hour back in the real world... So a greater reward would have been completing another chapter instead...
We all have our own journey, and I don't know if any of this will help anyone, but I just wanted to share what I consider are the poor choices that I made. My advice to people starting out is, Focus on RtK1 the way Heisig recommends and get it done quickly. The rest is all cream.
Now, I seriously wish I had completed RtK 1 more quickly - so I wanted to share the 3 things that held me back:
1) About 3/4 of the way through I was desperate to learn Japanese vocab at the same time. So I began copying and pasting hiragana words from wrightak's spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...l=en#gid=0 into the keyword on the stories page, sometimes replacing the English keyword, mostly just adding to it with a Japanese word. For the words that I already knew at my beginner level, e.g. やま - a word that even my husband knows and he's not studying Japanese! - it posed no problem and felt great to be assigning the kanji to the hiragana. But all the others just remained meaningless combinations of hiragana sounds, not one of which sank in. In practice, they were a time-consuming and brain-energy-consuming needless distraction in my reviews. Yet I still couldn't resist continuing to add them! And, more often than not, I would also want to look them up on WWWJDIC to see how closely wrightak & his team's choice of Japanese word matched my understanding of the English keyword. More time spent - not actually learning kanji!!
2) From time to time the stories include the tip that a certain group of primitives gets its own kanji later on. So I thought, "why not learn it now?" And it was pretty cool on the Progress page to see the bar moving across RtK 3! But the answer to "why not now?" for me is that I would have finished at least 80 kanji sooner if I had just stuck to RtK1. That extra 80 kanji is equivalent to almost the last 3 1/2 chapters of the book. And, believe me, by the time I got to the 4th last chapter, I was really wanting it to be over, so they were tough! Of course it's great that I now know how to write 80 more kanji than I even set out to learn, since learning how to write kanji is the whole point, it's not about the numbers. I'm just saying I'd have felt less frustrated had I just stuck to my original goal and achieved it sooner - that being highly motivational in itself.
3) The third thing that slowed me down, of course, is the forum. OK, not the forum per se, but my addiction to the forum! I really love reading this stuff, and I've learnt about so many resources for future Japanese studies. And I really tried, especially from the 3/4 point onwards, to just use it as a reward for completing a chapter. But we all know the forum goes by its own time zone, doesn't it? "I'll just spend 5 minutes seeing what the "Recent Topics" are - could be something vital to my wellbeing!" - can equate to an hour back in the real world... So a greater reward would have been completing another chapter instead...
We all have our own journey, and I don't know if any of this will help anyone, but I just wanted to share what I consider are the poor choices that I made. My advice to people starting out is, Focus on RtK1 the way Heisig recommends and get it done quickly. The rest is all cream.
