I just read the first 2 pages of the thread and it was so uplifting, so many happy comments, I am at 1655, hoping to finish very soon, unemployed, studying very very hard! See you in the finished thread soon I hope!

Just hit #1531 after a brutal weekend (50 in two days). Gosh, it is getting harder and harder, my reviews are killing me and I am in great doubt that I can survive till the end But hey, I made it this far, and only 511 of these suckers are left, giving up is absolutely no option at this point.

Now if you excuse me, Doctor Who: The Water of Mars is waiting for me :-)

I've been looking forward to posting in this thread for w few days now. Finished up my story writing at lunchtime today at 1532. Momentum is sky high because I want to be able to finish mid December so I can redo the kana in time to start sentences over my Christmas break.

At my current trajectory I should be done by about the 15th of December. I'm currently doing 45 stories every weekday and maybe 200 reps to keep my virgin cards to a minimum but still stay on top of the older stuff.

My advice to others is just to move fast, score rough and rep as much as possible. I don't even bother trying to learn characters when I write their story, I just make.sure the story is something my future self will accept and after 1 or 2 fails 99% of characters stick.

Technically I'm only at 71.84% of the book (frame #1467 if you need a less scientific explanation) but still, I hope you won't ban me because of this message, I'm just pretending to belong to the group of those who completed 3/4 of the first book

Edit: 1550! It's 3/4 of the first volume for me, and more than 1/2 of RTK1+3

have hit 1539 today! personally had quite a few troublesome characters to think up stories for in the last 30~ but yeah, have to keep going.

anyone else find it hard to stop doing probably more new characters than 'recommended'? i have university deadlines coming up and the reviews are mounting but i keep feeling like i should be be spending every free moment learning new kanji anybody gone through this and come to regret rushing it in the end?

i guess im just impatient >_<

I always rush the end

Worst case scenario your retention drops and you do a bit more relearning, who cares.

As long as you are willing to do the reviews, get the new kanji in as fast as possible

Yippie, 1531! Hope to be finished with my stories in about 2 weeks. Merry Christmas to self!

I will get to 3/4 before the end of this month! I'm on 500 at the moment but damn I want that quadruple figure!!!

2 weeks after halfway done. Not bad, not bad at all. Now at 1573. Just about 470 more to go!

Staying at home for Thanksgiving's really boosted me up. I had like 400 kanji up in that 5 day weekend.

and at JohnLugh, yes, I get that too.

Only during free time though. When it's time for a deadline I'm still able to hold up with only old reviews without going through new kanji, although the desire is still there.

I guess I just passed this point. Didn't really take too much notice since it doesn't seem like that great of a landmark. I have been in a rut of failing a lot of kanjis recently and going very slowly through the learning of new ones, but I seem to be coming out of it now. It was probably due to Thanksgiving break, when I hardly studied the Kanji at all.

Woot, finished my reviews after passing 1531 today. Two weeks left until the end of the book

Just passed 1510 so will hit the 3/4 mark tomorrow. (had learned the kana ages ago before I knew about Anki/AJATT/here but not studied them for a couple of years and never taken Japanese any further than that).

Have been really motivated since the 1/2 way mark, I had a slump around 800-odd and added a Kana deck in the middle (had done Kana years ago but forgotten about half of them, and wanted some SRS juice to remember them again), but it's getting much more of a set process now.

I'm currently doing about 35/day in anki, most days adding an extra few on top of that if I clear out reviews. I find if I go over 40-50 then the reviews start piling up and I end up needing to cut back to just reviews for 2-3 days which can be counter-productive. 35-40 is enough progress and I can stick to < 150 reviews / day - this is learning everything direct in Anki + the stories on this site + writing Kanji out, but I don't really separate learning and reviews much - just answer failed, grab a story, then pay attention to ones I keep failing if and when that happens.

Should have everything done by around 26th December, definitely by New Year even with a day or two off adding cards - started Mid-September so that takes me to 3.5 months all in, I'd aimed for 3 months so that's pretty close.

Probably going to do the Tae Kim deck next. Considering KO2001 but I'm on Ubuntu and don't want to be going into a Windows VM just to run the CD, so not sure how to approach that.

Can't thank people enough for all the stories / alternate primitive names on here, must have saved dozens of hours already, doubt I'd be past 500 trying to write my own stories, and doubt I'd be past 100 without an SRS.

1570ish here. I was going to take it at a faster pace to be done before now, but I found that it's such a downhill slide at this point that I'm not even worried. I'll be done before New Year's. I was meaning to go at a pace of at least 32/day, but I keep slacking off for a couple of days when I feel ill, then binging on adding 60 - 100 a night. I'm surprised it isn't hurting my retention at all.

Can't wait for Tae Kim's guide and KO2k1, though I'm still a little lost on how I'll efficiently study either of them...

Pulse Wrote:1570ish here. I was going to take it at a faster pace to be done before now, but I found that it's such a downhill slide at this point that I'm not even worried. I'll be done before New Year's. I was meaning to go at a pace of at least 32/day, but I keep slacking off for a couple of days when I feel ill, then binging on adding 60 - 100 a night. I'm surprised it isn't hurting my retention at all.

Can't wait for Tae Kim's guide and KO2k1, though I'm still a little lost on how I'll efficiently study either of them...

Oh man, you and me both about that downhill slide. When I hit the half-way point, I thought it was going to be forever before I hit the 3/4, but here I am at 1535 and man does it feel good. I am really pushing, hoping to get into an all-review mode by 2010 but I have so many kanji left to do.. Doing 600 reviews and 60-80 new kanji a day is kind of fun though, gotta love that Anki

1530 by today. It took me about 5 months. I had a rather big slump due to other commitments before the Christmas holidays, but I went back to par over the last week. I hope to finish the book by end of Jan and then continue with 2001KO and Anki and Tae Kim. Systematically acquiring readings is not my top priority, I think it's little use without learning compounds and vocabulary at the same time.

1530 as well! It was my goal to get to this mark by the end of these holidays, so today, on the last day, I managed to do 87 and get to this mark!

I'm very pleased that I passed this goal in the time frame I set myself for it. I hope when I start working again tomorrow, it won't be so tiring I can't do at least 10 a day.

Only downhill from now on!

A little later than I'd hoped, but I've also reached 1530 today! So far it's been 3.5 months. Not sure how long the last 500 are going to take me, but I'm definitely slogging through at a slower pace than what I started with. At least retention is still up. I'm getting impatient, though!

Just got there, and then some. Stopped at 1586* for the night... not sure the marginal benefit from doing more tonight would be worth it**. I'm pleased with it, because on my last/first try at RTK, I didn't even get to the 1/4th mark.

I was intending to get to the 3/4ths mark on Saturday, but that didn't pan out. I was dead tired, and slept over half the day away. I don't mind it, I needed to catch up on my sleep, but then I wasted-ish Sunday, too. I mean, I did watch about 8 hours of non-subbed, non-dubbed anime, and caught a few words here and there ( [kana]yuki da[/kana] means "It's snowing", doesn't it? ) but I wished I'd done more than 50 kanji over the weekend.

But after I got in gear today and tried out the alt-focus thing (review some, add some, review some, add some...) I got 160 today, with pretty good retention until the last 20 or so. The review took forever, too, I had 200 or so... I knocked out 30 in the morning, but still. Nonetheless, if I can keep this pace up until the end of the week (school's in the way, but meh), I can be done with RTK1.

After that, I guess I'll get RTKana (I've learned the kana before, but... ehhhh... I suck), get those out of the way, and then I'll have to figure out if I want to take the Core/KiC/KO route, or if I want to go the all-out AJATT way. Looks like a trip to Japan in on the horizon, so efficiency is the key.

*It's a sign! I did through 1586. 1586/2042 is about 77.7%, if you round.
**I say, reaching for RTK to see how many are in the next chapter.

On what has to be probably the 5th time(?) I've attempted RtK, I reached frame 1575! I can see the end of the tunnel now, partially because this time around I've been way more consistent and following through on my Anki reviews. I really hope I'll finish by the end of March .

みなさま、負けないように頑張ってください！

1530 down, 512 to go. Goal completion date is April 15th. Within sight!

1530! Yippee! Those Spiderman kanji were just torture since unlike most people I thought "thread" made more sense. I was forced to spend a lot of time making up or adapting stories, and I just suck at making up stories. Oh well, it's (hopefully) history now! One more hard week and I'll be done except for reviews. Whew.

robin Wrote:1530! Yippee! Those Spiderman kanji were just torture since unlike most people I thought "thread" made more sense. I was forced to spend a lot of time making up or adapting stories, and I just suck at making up stories. Oh well, it's (hopefully) history now! One more hard week and I'll be done except for reviews. Whew.

Ugh I had the same problem. Someone posted a story in the 'thread' kanji that mentioned 'old sweater', so I decided to go with that, but that person never posted any stories for other kanji and I had to come up with really random stuff myself. :S

I just got to 1550 the other day, this would be my 3rd attempt to finish RTK vol. 1. Now that i'm out of school i've had more time. I've been going a lot slower this time around and it's been working. I'm starting to feel the end being near and I want to speed up a little bit, I guess I can afford to add more new Kanji a day. And everyday I read I see more and more Kanji that are in RTK 3, so I think I may have to go up to 3007 =P

Hello everyone,

This is my first post here. It's great to read about how you're all progressing. I've been lurking for a good while, but never thought I'd post anything. I'm currently on frame 1426 and I'm actually stalled at the moment. For the past few days I've done my reviews but haven't really had the motivation to move forward. My motivation, I can't find it!

I started around the end of October and managed to do 1000 in a month before taking two months off to travel. I tried to keep on reviewing but it was kind of hard and in the end I let it slide and had mountains of reviews piled up by the time I got back. I cleared that and hit the halfway point soon after (yay!) but then since then I've been finding it a little difficult to gain momentum. I read a couple of posts about how it was all downhill from the halfway point but gah! maybe I was expecting it to be too easy, and now I'm struggling because it's just as hard as the first half (for me anyway)! One of the problems is I don't like seeing the orange due cards so I do my reviews on here as well as anki, which stupidly doubles my work.

Anyway I just figured if I posted something public in this thread it would give me a bit more incentive to finish purely out of embarrassment!

So, er, hi everyone, and thanks for a great community. I really wouldn't have got this far if I hadn't been able to read about everyone's experiences!