Why do you do RTK reviews on here and on anki, that is ridiculous and a waste of your time. What benefit do you hope to gain by doing the reviews twice? It's also helping to kill your motivation. If I were you I would stop doing one or the other right now.

Aside from that, you are almost done! You can do it!

Thanks RisuMiso for the encouragement! As for doing the reviews twice, erm, well, I know it's probably a terrible idea, but I started out that way because I wouldn't have had the discipline to write down all the stories without this site, cause I'm too disorganised. So I used the stories here as a handy reference and found it made it easier to do the reviews here (somehow, I'd be able to remember little things like how the words looked visually on the website) and then have the stories all organised and compiled for me to study from once I got them wrong. All I have to do to relearn them is to click through one after the other, and then review them again.

But I also really like the way anki spaces out the cards, so I did the reviews there too. I like the anki algorithm better but I like the way the stories are organised here and how you can easily relearn the ones you get wrong. By doing them twice I found I was able to remember them better anyway. Just using anki my recall percentages went way down and then I'd have to go search for the right frame number to look up the story on here and it never stuck in my head (and I found it irritating and made me not want to do it). I know it's not that hard but it's the little things that become annoying and demotivating.

Yes it takes twice as long but at least in for the first 1000 it seemed to work out well for me since I have such a bad memory. Of course when I got back from holidays doing 1000 due cards here and on anki just about killed me. But on the other hand I think it fixed it in my head a bit better.

Am I really the only idiot who's doing it this way? Is there another way to have the great stories on this site while doing anki reviews? The problem is I don't have that much time, and I'm lazy, forgetful and disorganised. Not a good combination. ;-) I do keep a notebook of kanji I'm learning to improve my handwriting, but I found if I tried to write down stories this way I just got demotivated really quickly. And also having to look them up to restudy them is repetitive and boring. I like clicking once, seeing the story, learning it, and moving on. So I guess what I'm doing is using this site to learn, study and cram, and anki to properly store it in my memory for the long term.

I used the shared RTK1+3 deck on anki. If you click on the keyword it is a hyperlink to your story on this website. So if you don't remember your story just click on the keyword in anki and it goes right to it if you are logged in to RevTK. I never wrote out a story once, I used RevTK for all my stories, aside from the odd one I made or got from the book.

I still really think you should either just use RevTK or anki. If you get so demotivated you will stop reviewing any kanji, and that's a lot worse than forgetting some.

Gah, I'm an idiot. I totally had no idea you could do that. That makes it way easier. Thanks RisuMiso, I'll take your advice and just do anki.

I guess I kinda did something similar since I made the paper flash cards Heisig recommends (I started that before I found out about this site).

So what I did was: study them and make paper flash cards, review the flash cards immediately after finishing a lesson or however many I wanted to finish. A few hours later I'd enter them into this site and review them right away.

The next day I'd review my paper cards once more. The ones I passed I put onto the next pile, the ones I failed I'd keep for review the next day, with the new ones I'd add that day. And I'd just do my regular reviews here on the site.

The paper cards in pile two I'd review after a week or so and if I passed them I'd add them to the 'final pile' which I wouldn't review anymore. If I failed they stayed in pile two and I'd review them again after a week; by this time they'd come up on the site as well so I knew them then.

It was less time-consuming as reviewing them on here and Anki, because I'd not review them more than two or three times, but still it was 'double', though I needed it.

I'm finished now so I don't use my paper cards anymore for reviewing, just this site. I might add my RTK2 information but I find the explanation on how to add that information to the cards quite confusing in the book. Maybe it's because I haven't started it yet. We'll see how it goes!

1520 Here... and I just found 1 week ago that this site exist, so much effort in making random/bad story for nothing and the one on this site are much much better. I guess I'm going to take a one week break to bring down my review list of 170/day and to update all my terrible stories.

It`s a wonder that you had enough mental strength to get to this level on your own. Hardcore old school methods deserve respect.
When I was going through RTK, after first 500 cards, I had very strong feeling that RTK site should exist somewhere in the internets. And it did. Not sure I could finish on my own.

Just the psychological support of knowing there are so many other people also working through this book is incredibly helpful, not even to mention the story-sharing, etc.

Only 496 to go !

Come on guys! You can do it! So few kanji left!

Gah, I didn't think it would take this long after I last posted in this thread but the bloody French language got in the way. ;-) But I'm finished with lesson 40 so I'm officially 3/4 of the way through. Woots! Finally! I'm a bit worried with my French studies interfering with my Japanese studies but hum, French takes priority right now. Baby steps, baby steps.

I just hit 1540. I really, really want to finish by Friday, which means doing 170 every day. Which I can do, because I only have classes for 4 hours tomorrow and Friday, during which I do my massive-ish reviews(what do people mean by massive reviews? Mine are now around 300~ which I don't find to be too difficult to do...).

RTK is getting in the way of my life. Finals and all of the crap associated with that are coming up, I need to take my damn A+ exam before May, and I need to get a job. If I don't finish RTK now, I'm not going to.

I don't know if rushing is a terribly good idea, but I sort of don't care either. It's not like RTK is the end of kanji learning, it's the beginning, and I'm going to be constantly reinforcing it through Japanese itself. Plus, I can relearn all of the ones I forget in Anki. And one thing about doing this many is that I'm totally puzzled as to why I had difficulty doing 25 a night...

I reached the 3/4 point a couple of weeks ago. For the last quarter of the book, I decided to do the RtK Lite kanji first and then go back and finish up the rest at my leisure later.

I'm somewhere around intermediate-level and live in Japan, and I really want to focus on learning the things that are useful to me right now. The more kanji I cram into my head, the harder it is to add new ones; it feels like it's rush hour on a Tokyo train, with me as the conductor trying to push more passengers through the doors while the people already on the train haven't yet figured out that they need to move to the middle of the car to make room. It's especially difficult and painful with the less-common ones, because I haven't seen them around much IRL to get them into the "almost-learned" state, and they aren't reinforced in daily life.

So since I'm going so slowly through the kanji now and I need to be doing grammar and vocab as well in order to function in real life, I'm changing the focus to the 2-kyuu kanji which are the most useful at the moment. I'll get around to the others when I finish the lite order, but right now I don't think it's worthwhile to use up my energy forcing my way through kanji that are rarely used when I can make huge and immediately-noticeable improvements in my everyday abilities by focusing on the 2-kyuu ones and cramming vocab.

Reached around 1650 in Sept of last year, but sadly went on hiatus. Had just started Uni again and found that the spacing of RevTK was too far apart for me and was failing almost all old reviews that I had nailed a few weeks previous. Starting again with Anki this time and taking it slow, but back up to 520 now and finding it really easy to add 100+ occasionally with huge recall rates of 95%+ (very good for me)!! When my final exams are over in late May I'm going to make a massive push of 100+ a day to get back to 1600 and finally to finish RTK!

Its amazing how much of a difference RTK has made, since I have been doing modules in Japanese at Uni since Sept and right from the word go my Kanji ability has been leaps and bounds above everyone else. I was using Kanji's for words we hadn't even been taught yet and got full marks in all the essays mainly thanks to my Kanji ability!

Remember to keep at it! When I started uni again I wasn't really seeing any of the benefits of RTK until it was too late and had to start again! When comparing my knowledge (at the time of probably 1000+ I was confident with) to that of my peers in my class (most only learnt around 10-20 by the end of the year) the difference in ability is staggering.

皆さん、頑張ってよ！

Hit 1532 on the big review day... time to hit all the reviews waiting for me.

RAWR!!!!!!!! I finally made it to this point. My goodness did this take along time to get here. I started RTK June 15/2009 and 10 months and 14 days later, with a total reviews of 9071, Ive arrived to 3/4ths of the way. There have been many sacrifices I have made to get to this point... failing 2 Uni courses for one but both reeked of suck so I knew I was going to have to retake them anyways. I am so ready to be done RTK 1 and move on to bigger and better things like talking. Boy I can't wait until I can spend all this time on just talking ^^.

May It take me less then a month to post in the finished RTK thread.

Thanks everyone for the pinnacle and Spiderman stories.

Good work, everyone keep up!

Not so far away. Don´t lose the motivation now, you´ve come too far to lose that.

I don't post here too often, but this is one post I didn't want to miss. On kanji 1554 now. I've finally found my pace at 15 kanji/day, which means I will be able to finish RTK in about a month. I just hope that the pinnacle primitive won't appear anymore, I really hate it!

isselk Wrote:I don't post here too often, but this is one post I didn't want to miss. On kanji 1554 now. I've finally found my pace at 15 kanji/day, which means I will be able to finish RTK in about a month. I just hope that the pinnacle primitive won't appear anymore, I really hate it!

Oh, it's coming back again all right. But not much.
Congrats for getting to 1554!

Koos83 Wrote:Oh, it's coming back again all right. But not much.
Congrats for getting to 1554!

Yeah, I noticed that, it was just wishful thinking... Thank you, by the way.

I must admit, it's getting tough; kanji stories are becoming more and more disconnected from reality. Can't stop now though!

Well, you're almost there. And you're certainly doing better than I did. It must be the graph... I never had a graph like that.

But, yeah. Almost there! もう少し頑張れぇ！

3/4 there! WOOT! So close I can taste it ><

1500 today!
Might I ever finish this?

I'm at 1566 now. I must say this is getting exhausting. :-(

Hopefully I can finish by the middle of the month, then I can start learning Japanese with the kanjis.