Hi everybody,

I've just finished the first part of the book (276 kanjis). Now I'm moving to the second one, I've just read some of the kanjis and I found it very similar to the first part. I'm a visual person, so it's easy to me to create images in my mind.

This second part of the book is very different from the first one? Would you give me a helpful advice I should take before proceeding? Is it easy to get used to the second part of the book?

Thanks in advance!!

The idea in the book is to help you get used to making your own stories, so instead of giving full stories the second part just gives you some ideas that you can use to make full stories, and the third part just tells you the primitives with few hints here and there.

armando_amaya Wrote:Hi everybody,

I've just finished the first part of the book (276 kanjis). Now I'm moving to the second one, I've just read some of the kanjis and I found it very similar to the first part. I'm a visual person, so it's easy to me to create images in my mind.

This second part of the book is very different from the first one? Would you give me a helpful advice I should take before proceeding? Is it easy to get used to the second part of the book?

Thanks in advance!!

The second part can get a little bit harder than the first if you don't make the stories more vivid. I didn't do that, so I had to take a couple of days off at the end of Part II to firmly get a grasp of all those kanji, and even then I still occasionally forgot them (there was a time where I couldn't even recall any kanji between #400 and #500 because I didn't spend enough time on the stories!). It was demotivating but I eventually pulled through - now I sit at 1100 kanji with about 74 failed cards, so I'm somewhere around 90% retention. One thing you have to make sure of is that all your failed cards are sort of spread thinly/randomly and not all in one big sector - if there's one big chunk of cards in a chapter that you didn't do good on in your SRS of choice, then you know there's something wrong.

Anyway, you should try to get through Part II like you did with Part I, but use RvTK for stories that don't work or try to make stories more vivid (like I said in the last paragraph). If you learn at about 50 to a hundred a day like I do, you should finish Part II within a couple of days.

Just so you know: Part III is, believe it or not, not all that hard (at least in my experience). It's actually quite fun, since the stories on this site can become imaginative and unique. I'm currently on chapter 30 in Part III and it's a blast.

vosmiura Wrote:The idea in the book is to help you get used to making your own stories, so instead of giving full stories the second part just gives you some ideas that you can use to make full stories, and the third part just tells you the primitives with few hints here and there.

But like vosmiura (and Heisig himself) points out, you can also choose to make your own stories. Remember, there's a lot of ways to get to the end of RtK, just don't have your sights set on doing it 'one way' because you'll need all the ammunition you can get.