I'm coming back and starting RTK1 over again after quitting more than a year ago. There seems to be no shortage of others who have quit only to retry later.

So I'm interested....what has your experience been? How far along were you, for how long did you quit, how many times have you restarted, and so on? Did you start all over again and did you find it was easier? Why did you quit, and why did you come back?

My last review here was something like May '08. I was up to Part III by the time I even heard about this site and roughly frame 530 when I quit. Part of it could have been the transition to being "own your own" in part III, but mostly I was just burnt out on it by then. However since then I've found myself looking back on it fondly from time to time, and sort of craving learning kanji. Even outside of the practical value of learning them to learn the language, I found that it feels good to feed these funny little symbols to my brain and I'm hungry for more, I miss it.

At the time I quit, there were a number I was having trouble with and I found it was having an effect that was cascading through the process, making me struggle with more and more kanji. To be on the cautious side, I'm starting all over again from frame 1. I'm surprised actually that I don't have more familiarity with the characters left over from back then. It's almost like they're brand new all over again, except they are just a bit more solid in my mind. I expected to have stronger memeories of the stories from before, but there's only a very faint remnants left in my mind to hook the characters to, although there have been a number of times where I'll glance across a combination of keyword and character and some vague outlines of the story's distinctive will flood back to me.

I think it's even tougher going to quit though, having to slog through what you've already done

So to anyone out there who might be doing it for the first time.....for the love of god, don't quit!

Anyway, that's my tale. Kanji feel good on my brain and I want to go to 3,000 this time, and beyond. I love these little symbols and I'm actually glad there's an overwhelming body of them and their compounds Sometime, some years in the future, I think I'll want to learn Chinese too just so I can learn more characters!

I've quit and come back so many times I've lost count... and each time for a different reason. I have to say the difference came the last time when I quit adding new cards but still kept up with the reviews. It's been a very long while and I still don't have the time or motivation to restart RTK... but at least this time, all that knowledge is there, and with my reviews now down I can maintain it with just a few minutes a day.

I don't know what that has to do with anything, but it's just what I was thinking about when I read your post.