Hey all,

So I've been studying Japanese reasonably intensively at university for two years, and I now have five weeks at home before leaving for a year in Japan. I just discovered RtK and this site and I must say, I really like this method.

Anyway, my plan is to learn all of RtK 1 before going to Japan, and then using my time there for some All Japanese, All The Time study (I'll also have classes, so I should get some Japanese out of them too), and hopefully be fluent in a year. Right now, I can work on RtK full-time as I have no other commitments, so according to Heisig the 5 weeks I have should be enough to complete the book. I'm just looking for people who have done it/are doing it this way to share tips and experiences, like how many you learn a day, how often you review, what was the hardest etc.

I've been learning 85 Kanji a day for 4 days, so 340 in total. That is 595 a week, which I'll try and round up to 600. So if I keep this up I'll be finished in 3 and a half weeks, which means I have some leeway if it gets harder later on or if I need to devote a few days to reviewing. I don't really have a set reviewing pattern yet, but I read through the day's stories every night before bed and review them for the first time in the morning. I review things for a second time after a couple of days.

Provided you're using an SRS (which I assume you are) you actually don't need to dedicate time to having pure review days. You can review and learn as you go. I'm at 1500 and moving at about 100 kanji a day and I can personally say from experience that pulling off anything from 75 to 100 a day is really difficult.. I spend at least an hour and a half on reviews and then about 3 hours of new cards. But it's still do-able.

Anyway, if you're persistent enough and can keep up your pace, I'd say that you can finish the book in less than four weeks. Just don't take unnecessary breaks.

KaitouJS Wrote:Anyway, if you're persistent enough and can keep up your pace, I'd say that you can finish the book in less than four weeks. Just don't take unnecessary breaks.

I agree. I wish I could devote all of my time to RtK, and finish at the end of the month. But considering how lazy I am, and how I have trouble getting motivated, I'll have to keep going on at 10 Kanji/ day. Maybe one of these days I'll kick it into high-gear and knock down 100 or so. Just keep at it and stay focused and you can finish (as KaitouJSさん said) in less than 4 weeks.

I did 20/day and took ~4 months. I thought that was a lot of work since the brain can only consume a limited amount. You might want to try RTK-lite and then fill in later the other kanji as you need them. I think 1k characters might be easier to consume than all 2k.

See: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid14605

Certainly possible. But under no circumstances must you slack on your reviews or failed cards. It leads to anger -> hate -> suffering -> dark side.

And finishing, reviews are that more important. While you're studying new cards, you are kind of half reviewing kanji/radicals you have already learnt. Once you stop that goes.

The fact you're coming to Japan will mean that you will see kanji everytime you step out your door and you can have fun trying to read every single shop sign you see (honestly.. it's fun!), but even then you MUST NOT slack on your reviews.

I'd done some of RtK previously and had the first ~500 down by heart, so when i picked it up again this summer I started around frame 500 (whatever frame 'Part 3' of the book began) and did ~50/day for 1500 over a month. You could add about 15 to that number and knock out the entire thing in that timeframe.

Like zoletype said though, you can't slack off on reviews. Pushing them through that fast results in 120-150 cards due/day near the end, so miss 2-3 days and you're having to review 1/4 of the book. Not fun at all.

You don't have to work on it full-time to finish in 4-5 weeks but there are some factors that could slow you down along the way. Reviews keep snowballing and the faster you add the more you have to review later on. Fatigue will affect your performance in memorizing new cards. Temptation will affect you when your friends figure out what you are doing and they will try to find you something more fun to do

But if you overcome those problems you will definitely finish before you leave.

lerris Wrote:Like zoletype said though, you can't slack off on reviews. Pushing them through that fast results in 120-150 cards due/day near the end

I'm really surprised it's not even more than that.

I'm on my second pass through RTK (stopped reviewing, bad idea).
I'm taking it slow, after 4 months I'm up to 1600. I have only added 100 in the last month and a half (been busy), but I have over 1400 in the last pile, and I have 95% pass rate on reviews.
So my pace is [i]way[i] slower than you guys.
I still have 60-80 reviews a day.

Are you guys using the RevTK for reviews, or Anki?

dinmamma Wrote:I've been learning 85 Kanji a day for 4 days, so 340 in total. That is 595 a week, which I'll try and round up to 600. So if I keep this up I'll be finished in 3 and a half weeks, which means I have some leeway if it gets harder later on or if I need to devote a few days to reviewing. I don't really have a set reviewing pattern yet, but I read through the day's stories every night before bed and review them for the first time in the morning. I review things for a second time after a couple of days.

If you're not using the study section of this site to review, do so immediately! Manual reviewing will be too cumbersome and you will forget everything in the long term.

As for 100 a day, it's doable but you will be hit with massive numbers of reviews. Basically it's best to break the task into blocks i.e. do 50 reviews, study 25 kanji, have a break, then do that again 3 times that day.
Also using stories on this site is alot quicker than making up your own (or using Heisigs, which are quite poor)

dinmamma Wrote:Hey all,

So I've been studying Japanese reasonably intensively at university for two years, and I now have five weeks at home before leaving for a year in Japan. I just discovered RtK and this site and I must say, I really like this method.

Anyway, my plan is to learn all of RtK 1 before going to Japan, and then using my time there for some All Japanese, All The Time study (I'll also have classes, so I should get some Japanese out of them too), and hopefully be fluent in a year...

Slightly off-topic, but how fluent are you after two years of univeristy study? How many kanji do you know/how much vocab? I'm just curious.

aphasiac Wrote:If you're not using the study section of this site to review, do so immediately! Manual reviewing will be too cumbersome and you will forget everything in the long term.

As for 100 a day, it's doable but you will be hit with massive numbers of reviews. Basically it's best to break the task into blocks i.e. do 50 reviews, study 25 kanji, have a break, then do that again 3 times that day.
Also using stories on this site is alot quicker than making up your own (or using Heisigs, which are quite poor)

Yes, I am using this site, don't worry... It took me a while to understand that cards "expire", and what people meant by reviews "snowballing", but I think I'm good now. Thanks for the advice about organising work and using stories from this site, it sounds good (I've been using Heisig's/making my own so far)

aphasiac Wrote:Slightly off-topic, but how fluent are you after two years of univeristy study? How many kanji do you know/how much vocab? I'm just curious.

Hmmm... Hard to say. But not much. I study at a very prestigious, full-of-itself, academia-for-academia university in the UK and the teaching is as far as it gets from the RtK/AJATT style of self-study. You spend the first year plowing through a huge grammar textbook with a lot of technical explanations, doing sheets of "fill the gaps/translate" exercises and learning vocab/kanji lists before the let you near a short-story in Japanese. They seem to only believe in the "ascetic" method of learning kanji and never ever mentioned RtK. And some of the study time is used for Japanese history, classical Japanese (from Heian-jidai), Japanese sociology or politics, what have you... which distracts you from the language. Then in the second year you have to plough through pages of adult material everyday, to be translated in class... You're always told that you suck and never given any support or even "teaching" - nobody tells you how to work and you always feel terribly thick. Because we had only learnt 500-600 kanji in the first year, I was very dependent on Japanese-English dictionaries, and before I got a denki-jisho, I would spend five hours a day counting strokes and looking up words like an automaton with 2 big dictionaries. FUN TIMES. So after a very good first year and a lazy, less-than-motivated 2nd year, I'd say that I understand most of J-pop songs, can recognise about 600 kanji and make myself understood on basic topics (for example, what you need when you travel), but with a lot of mistakes. I passed my exams this year mostly thanks to my ability of remembering the English translations of the set texts and blag through history essays...

Heisig said he learned all the general use じょうよう kanji in under a month. Although, the amount of kanji was a little less in early 1980s. ~1850 of something

From my experience RtK is like this:
0000-0300 - very easy
0300-0700 - medium (difficulty doubles)
0700-1200 - hard
1200-1700 - medium
1700-2042 - boring

Anyways here is my progress copied from an old post about 100 kanji a day
10/26/08: 249 (end of week 1)
11/23/08: 514
12/20/08: 766
12/25/08: 1394
01/04/09: 1926
*01/14/09: 2546 (stopped b/c I burned out)

In the last 30 days I covered about 2000. So I can tell you it is possible. However, including making stories and reviews, I was spending about 10 hours per day. On top of that all the kanji after 1700 are boring.

Fortunately, you are aiming for the first 2042, so if you have the time you can do it. Just remember, that reviews will pile up so fast you won't know what hit you.

avparker Wrote:

lerris Wrote:Like zoletype said though, you can't slack off on reviews. Pushing them through that fast results in 120-150 cards due/day near the end

I'm really surprised it's not even more than that.

I might've understated the number, honestly can't quite remember. Due cards + new cards was about ~200/day I think. Part of it depends too though on your passing percentage, as if you have too many cards hovering around stacks 1/2 they'll come up for review much quicker (obviously) and only add to the problem.

I did. But they were 3hs/day and it took me 3 months.

But many people here did what you want to do, RTK in 1 month. If you search it well, you'll find their ramblings.

Also I recommend you check this out:
http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com/

The guy did it in 50 days, but he did it with the onyomi. Maybe it will work even better for you that know a lot of Japanese already.

I've been doing about 100/day, and I'm at 1000 now. Last time I tried Heisig I managed to get through the first 900 or so, so I've just barely pushed into new territory. I've also been studying Japanese for many years and have already passed ikkyuu, so I'm familiar with almost all of the kanji even though I couldn't write them to save my life. (I'm doing Heisig as part of an attempt to push my Japanese to the next level.) I've taken a couple days on the light side (about 50/day), and my expired cards are now pushing 170/day. I have a feeling that number is going to increase substantially in the next week, and might top 300/day a few times if I keep this up. Still, even 300 reviews is only about 90-100 minutes' worth of work; it's manageable.

nebusoku Wrote:I've also been studying Japanese for many years and have already passed ikkyuu, so I'm familiar with almost all of the kanji even though I couldn't write them to save my life.

The fact you couldn't write them despite being able to recognise and read them is interesting to me. I think many gaijin in Japan suffer from that. After a while you learn to read a lot of stuff, especially station names etc. I'm sure almost all gaijin living in Japan could read their own station name, but a lot less could write it!

zoletype Wrote:

nebusoku Wrote:I've also been studying Japanese for many years and have already passed ikkyuu, so I'm familiar with almost all of the kanji even though I couldn't write them to save my life.

The fact you couldn't write them despite being able to recognise and read them is interesting to me. I think many gaijin in Japan suffer from that. After a while you learn to read a lot of stuff, especially station names etc. I'm sure almost all gaijin living in Japan could read their own station name, but a lot less could write it!

There is *no* doubt about that IMHO. Recognition is much easier than written output.

100 a day? Some can do it, some avoid it. I am not sure it makes much difference. Eventually, you have to convert them all to mature cards. It takes about the same time I guess, although undoubtedly some are faster.

I can't do 100 a day anymore, because at that pace I'd have less than 12 hours remaining. ^_^

zoletype Wrote:

nebusoku Wrote:I've also been studying Japanese for many years and have already passed ikkyuu, so I'm familiar with almost all of the kanji even though I couldn't write them to save my life.

The fact you couldn't write them despite being able to recognise and read them is interesting to me. I think many gaijin in Japan suffer from that. After a while you learn to read a lot of stuff, especially station names etc. I'm sure almost all gaijin living in Japan could read their own station name, but a lot less could write it!

If you learn kanji by the traditional method it's pretty much par for the course that you'll be able to read a lot more kanji than you can write. At some point in my studies I've probably learned to write at least 1500 kanji through rote memorization. I don't live in Japan, however, and Japanese is not my main field of study so I'm not kept in practice through constant contact with the language. As a result, I could probably write only 500-700 kanji before I started Heisig this time around. There are also a number of kanji that I've learned to read but never learned to write. For example, I recognized your avatar as "うつ," but if you told me to write the kanji for "うつ," I wouldn't be able to remember even the first stroke (seriously).

If you have Japanese friends in the States, you'll probably hear them start to complain about losing their kanji writing ability after about 6-12 months. It comes back to them very quickly when they go back to Japan, but even they begin to forget how to write certain more complicated kanji.

I also tend to get similar kanji confused, especially when skimming materials. Heisig has been really, really helpful for that problem.

After having worked my way up to about 700 kanji through encountering them as I studied, I finally decided it would be better to memorise the RTK 1 list before going further.

I'm comfortably doing 40 a day, so I'll have it finished up in my summer break.