I've tried the Heisig method once before, and it went pretty well for a bit--but then life got in the way, and I put it down. I've just finished a summer Japanese intensive program at the University of Pittsburgh, and I'm feeling a lot of happy momentum in my Japanese acquisition, so I decided that I'm going to be one of the madcreatures who goes for completing the book, cover to cover, in three weeks; 100 kanji a day.
I'm posting this here so that I have eyes on me, just in case momentum alone isn't enough. Now I *have* to work hard.

The book arrived at the library today, and I walked down in the heat to pick it up; I'll be beginning after lunch. Wish me luck!

Good luck on trying 100 a day! Watch that you don't burn your self out, and if you feel as though you are getting bored/tired of it just do the reviews for a day or two, then slowly make your way back up to 100. I've found between 50-90 a day is manageable for me, any less and I feel I'm taking too long and any more and I get burnt out and have to take breaks .

Good luck! I couldn't do it, lol. Most I could manage was 50 a day and that was only a few times

Ow yeahhhhhhh

You can do it!!

Hohoho!!!!

congratulations on coming back to RTK and good luck doing a 100/day. I must say that to do 100/day with reviews will probably take between 8-10 hours per day of real study time. It might more or less depending on how "creative"/"imaginative you are with your stories. I would recommend using a lot of the stories on here if you want to breeze through because they are less dense than heisigs and you might get more out of the ones here.

Good luck.

If you do 100 per day, you can finish RTK1+3 in 30 days

I recommend taking breaks, a lot of it.When I was doing RTK, I did take breaks just to relax and then come back and take a crack at it

Good luck, pal!
And to all the newcomers, everywhere, everytime, good luck too!

Good luck, and be sure to give yourself some time to rest! Lofty goals are nice in theory, but if you feel yourself getting burned out, you should probably take a break. Remember that you should be having fun throughout this process, and it's not a race to the finish line.

That being said, I'm rooting for ya! Let us know how your kanji journey goes

Remember, 100 a day took many people about 8 hours per day. Just like work, rest 10 minutes every hour or 5 minutes every half hour. Eat well and exercise a bit every day on top of that and get plenty of sleep.

Your brain will thank you for it.

Oh, how I know about life getting in the way! Anyway, good luck with your study plan!

Welcome to the forum and good luck!

A couple of tips that I would've loved to take into account when I started going through RTK.

- Use a lot of characters, places and all kind of concrete images for the primitives. For example, Chuck Norris or Mr. T for 人 (person), Spiderman for 糸 (thread), etc. They will help you a lot both at creating memorable stories and at getting motivated to create new stories in a faster and funnier way.

- If you get stuck in a kanji, just do whatever seems best at the moment and let it go. Sometimes the SRS used in this site (or Anki) will be enough, and sometimes the right story or image will just hit you when you are doing something else.

- You know yourself better than anyone else, so if you see that something in your strategy isn't working, adjust it as many times as needed. If you want to go 100 a day you'll have to be creative and efficient.

- Probably there'll be moments when you'll feel burned out. It happens to lost of people and it's normal. Relax, get distracted, do something fun and come back when you feel better.

- If you created this thread so that you feel you "have" to follow through, bookmark it or add this thread as an RSS feed to your RSS reader. Keep an eye on it and come back at least once a week to share your progress. If for any reason your progress is not as much as you expected, come back anyway. If you stop checking this post you can lose your motivation. You can use this link to see this topic's feed. If you don't know what RSS is, check this explanation: RSS In Plain English at The Common Craft.

Thank you so much for your encouragement, everyone! And thank you also for the tips on how to do it efficiently and without burning myself out; I'll take those well into consideration.

I did my first 100 after kendo practice last night (though if we are being entirely honest I didn't need to spend much time on twenty or so of those, since the numbers are easy and I knew a few others; I did stories for them anyway, of course) and in a couple of hours I'm going to go into a coffee shop and do my next hundred. It feels really good!

Though oddly it was hard to get to sleep after the first set; probably the combination of hard physical labor (I've had to miss practice most of the summer due to classes; it's the longest I've been out of the dojo in years), and then all this new knowledge put into my head, kept my brain spinning for a lot longer than usual. I'll have to take this into account and *not* learn new kanji right before bed after this; if I don't sleep well, I won't retain anything.

At any rate--once more unto the breach! Thanks for all your advice!

How you managing there?

Doing pretty well! Was sick for a couple of days, which knocked my study down to almost nothing (like 25 on those days) but on average I'm holding to my goal. And I'm having a lot of fun, actually!

Pitt has a great Japanese program. Does Takabatake-sensei still teach there?

Good luck with your studies.

mushishigen Wrote:Doing pretty well! Was sick for a couple of days, which knocked my study down to almost nothing (like 25 on those days) but on average I'm holding to my goal. And I'm having a lot of fun, actually!

Wow, great effort! I remember getting flu during mine, I couldn't even bear the thought of looking at a single card. Had so many reviews to do after I got better. Best of luck to you.

I started around the same time as you. I'm just starting "Part 2" of the book and I noticed the reviews get more and more fun for some reason... I just enjoy them.

Like if I'm writing an essay and then feel like a break, I just hop on my SRS and do some reviews. It's great!

Good luck! I just started today as well, actually. I'm shooting for around 100 a day as well, since I have little else to do on weekdays until school starts. I'm still shocked at how easy (and fun/addicting) this is.

I only do 5-10 kanji every couple of days, but I have past Part 1 and have just about finished chapter 15 (1 kanji left) so I think that if you don't have the time to do 100 a day, it is still accomplishable. I do, however, review on Anki every day so I don't get piled up with reviews and I can remember the kanji better.

Going slow now just means you'll have to spend less time after you finish to review your Kanji.

To each his own

yeah, I kinda struggle to see what could be gained from going at this soo quickly. It's not so simple as learn them all in 3 weeks. Once your 3 is up you'll still have reviews to do, and unless your brain is superefficient, your pass rate on 2000 reviews in such a small amount of time will probably be terrible. I'm at the other extreme end of the scale. It's taken me about a year to get 1860 Characters. But then, I know those characters well, including readings, compounds etc, and have put a lot of effort into grammar etc. At no point have I really felt that 'not rushing rtk' has crippled me in any way.
But as has been said before, it's each to his own, and if works for you then that's truly awesome. 100 a day would sure have killed me though.

squarezebra Wrote:It's taken me about a year to get 1860 Characters. But then, I know those characters well, including readings, compounds etc, and have put a lot of effort into grammar etc. At no point have I really felt that 'not rushing rtk' has crippled me in any way.

As I'm going through RTK1, I find myself moving from a fast style to a slower one. I went through the first 1000 in about a month, and after another month, I'm at 1300. Part of the reason for the shift is because after I got to know most of the RTK1 kanji, I found that I could recognize a large proportion of kanji in the wild, which tempted me to start focusing on readings and compounds as well, as you have. And I think that's fine.

The worst feeling for me when going through RTK1 was being at frame 400-500 or so, and after all that work, only being able to recognize only about one in five kanji. I'd advocate trying to get through the early frames quickly. And probably more efficient for me would have been to just blow through the last half as well, as that facilitates going on to other materials, such as Henshall or KO.

I was never able to learn more than 25 kanji a day. 100 is just insane, for my brain at least.

Mushi Wrote:

squarezebra Wrote:It's taken me about a year to get 1860 Characters. But then, I know those characters well, including readings, compounds etc, and have put a lot of effort into grammar etc. At no point have I really felt that 'not rushing rtk' has crippled me in any way.

As I'm going through RTK1, I find myself moving from a fast style to a slower one. I went through the first 1000 in about a month, and after another month, I'm at 1300. Part of the reason for the shift is because after I got to know most of the RTK1 kanji, I found that I could recognize a large proportion of kanji in the wild, which tempted me to start focusing on readings and compounds as well, as you have. And I think that's fine.

The worst feeling for me when going through RTK1 was being at frame 400-500 or so, and after all that work, only being able to recognize only about one in five kanji. I'd advocate trying to get through the early frames quickly. And probably more efficient for me would have been to just blow through the last half as well, as that facilitates going on to other materials, such as Henshall or KO.

I completely understand where you are coming from, but I think it also depends a little on your studying method.
When I started RTK, I was also using the Japanesepod101 podcasts and PDF's which has Japanese, kana and romaji transcriptions, so I could pick up a lot of new kanji and their readings from studying those transcripts. It's true that until you reach the first 1000 Characters you are very limited in what you can understand, but there are always ways around that if you search for them. I think for me, it was important that I did RTK along with a number of different Japanese activities, so I could use what I was learning from the start, and that accounts for why it has taken me so long to 'almost be done with rtk'. I think if you rush something, you'll end up having to pay for it one way or another later on down the line.
That said, everybody has their own methods, and so long as they all lead to the same end of being able to read Japanese then that's great. I'm not qualified to say what someone should or shouldn't do in the least; I'm still a learner too.