I seem to have a habit of losing interest in things after a few days. I also tend to hate having people see me fail.

This is going to be my 3rd or so attempt at using RtK Vol.1 and I'm not going to stop yet again. To keep me going, I've created an excel spreadsheet that automatically spits out graphs and statistics as I input how many kanji I have completed each day.

Here's where the 'help me' part kicks in, I would be eternally grateful if all of you were to look at my progress daily. It doesn't matter if you leave a comment or not (they aren't discouraged), but I will know that people are watching and I will force myself to continue.


Again, I thank you for your help.

Oo. I didn't know Excel could make donut graphs like that.

Hello!

For what it's worth, I am watching. Good luck and rest assured, completing it is well worth it... if only for the satisfaction of doing it for youself. (It took me two tries).

Dave.

By the way. That's a great excel sheet! Would you please like send it to me too! :-P

Something like that would help me to finish too but I haven't had time to make one.. =/

Just keep going! Otherwise the dissatisfaction when starting from the beginning yet again will be enormous!
Thanks! =D

hmmm. I have a problem with this...

I don't know your situation, but I feel that this whole "watch me to make sure I study RTK" is a little misguided.

Why do you need people to "watch you" to make sure that you are doing it? If you don't have enough of a personal reason to want to finish, are you sure you really should be studying it? If you just want to look good in front of your peers, I think your motivation is wrong.
A lot of members on this site study because knowing kanji is a benefit to their lives. I am talking about the people who live in japan and/or work with the language. Think about your own situation and why you are studying. Having to force one's self to finish seems like you don't really want to finish it yourself. Thus, when you get to that point where you, personally, have a really passion for it and are eager to get to the finish on your own, that would be a better time to tackle it. IMO

Don't praise how good the excel worksheet is until you see it... Its really kinda messy. I've never really used excel and was learning stuff as I did it.

Oh and i lied, its not COMPLETELY automated... each day i have to add 1 row to the line chart's data range (changing it from ='Graph Data'!$A$1:$D$3 to ='Graph Data'!$A$1:$D$4 to ='Graph Data'!$A$1:$D$5 etc.). I'm looking into a way to automate that, but i'm not finding a way. I'm wanting it to have the full range of my schedule ( ='Graph Data'!$A$1:$D$60 ) without it including the blank space I've yet to fill in. The idea is to have it only display from the start date to the current date.

Anyway, I don't really wanna get into it right now. I was planning on just getting the basics hammered out and refining it as i go along. If you really want the spreadsheet, there are a few things you should know about it...

But i'm too busy right now so will have to figure them out for yourself =). For the most part I find it to be pretty self-explanatory though. Here it is http://home.comcast.net/~dolseni/RtKProgress.xlsx ( *may not be up to date, i fuss with it frequently* )

edit:

Oh and yorki, I'd like people to watch because I'm incredibly lazy and the one thing that i hate most of all is having people see me fail. When I don't do as well as i'm expecting and I'm the only person who knows about it, I tend to think things such as, "meh, its no big deal... you'll do better next time" and i dont end up pushing to achieve what it is that I wanted.

The problem is that I dont live in japan and/or work with the language (but I want to eventually), which makes it hard to keep up on the studying. I know myself and i am a MAJOR procrastinator and i'm pretty darn lazy too. I feel that this is the most effective way to do it. I realize its a bit selfish, the whole 'watch my progress' idea, but the simple fact that it is out in the open where people MAY be watching will, i'm hoping, be enough.

Playing devil's advocate...

yorkii Wrote:I don't know your situation, but I feel that this whole "watch me to make sure I study RTK" is a little misguided.

The forum is here to provide some semblance of a community (which it more than readily accomplishes), which helps to provide motivation for completing RtK aside from intrinsic benefits and the usefulness of this site.

I can only speak for myself, but this is just a hobby for me: I don't live in Japan or otherwise encounter it, ever. However, I do know that I will one day complete RtK: the main question is simply of when. To this effect, having someone actively monitor and encourage one's progress could be fairly helpful since, as we all know, the RtK isn't terribly hard, simply quite long.

The real irony is that four of these topics (including mine) spawned in roughly the same time, but that probably has to do with the sudden onset of summer.

Dolseni, that is an awesome spreadsheet, indeed! If you could possibly automate that (Excel can do that?), I, as well as many others, I'm sure, would appreciate having shiny measure of progress.

fair enough. I can see how people need spurring on now and again. a pat on the back, well done, keep going etc. Without praise, people get bogged down.

But, it is also very important to be concious of one's own accomplishments and where you currently are at with your studies. Self-evaluation will be your biggest source of praise here. Look back at what you didn't know yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. keeping a record of how well your doing and you will get the most motivation to continue.

If you are not seeing the results, evaluate why not. Is it that you don't really want to learn, don't have the time to learn, won't make time to learn etc. Then there can be obvious, unavoidable reasons for not improving, such as no real-life daily access or immersion in the language, but this can of course be substituted by the internet - a wealth of information to help listening and reading can be found surely.

My personal opinion is just that one should not need to be monitored to complete something if one really wants to achieve it.

I think the whole need for external feedback or not needing it will depend on the person. Some people are more introverted learners, instinctively spend time evaluating themselves, resist external opinions about their progress and derive a great deal of motivation internally. Other people are extroverted learners who have to force themselves to complete self-evaluations but can get huge motivation boosts from other people's encouragement and feedback.

Luckily most people fall somewhere between these two extremes but realizing your learning strenths ane working with them to accomplish your goals is so important if you want to do more than just spin in circles. By nature RtK is pretty geared to introverted learners which is why this site and the forums are so great. Good on you for realizing what you need to stay motivated and going for it.

Love the charts by the way. I for one will be happy to watch your progress and see that donut graph fill up. Don't disappoint us now!

dolseni Wrote:Oh and i lied, its not COMPLETELY automated... each day i have to add 1 row to the line chart's data range (changing it from ='Graph Data'!$A$1:$D$3 to ='Graph Data'!$A$1:$D$4 to ='Graph Data'!$A$1:$D$5 etc.). I'm looking into a way to automate that, but i'm not finding a way. I'm wanting it to have the full range of my schedule ( ='Graph Data'!$A$1:$D$60 )

I'm surprised that excel isn't adding the extra row in for you automatically. The chart I have to keep track of my daily test percentages does. I just add in the date, correct and total columns in the new row, and excel automagically copies the formula from the row above, and includes it in the graph for me. I didn't tell it to do that, so perhaps if you try it it'll also do it for you...

He probably has a formula in a separate cell that takes in all the other information and does something with it. And he has to adjust that to include one more cell each day. I would take a look at it, but my version of Excel can't open .xlsx files.

For those that aren't using MS Office 2007, there's a patch available on the MS website that will fix your older version of Office to allow you to use the new file formats.

I've taken the liberty of completely ripping off Dol's idea using Excel 2003. Took out some of the stats that didn't seem to make any sense to me (for example, a daily running count of an overall average of new kanji... it will change very very little day to day, and all I really care about is the current average), and added a couple other graphs.

Added a bunch more formulas so that people really only have to type in 4 numbers to set up their study schedule. It gives people the option of saying that they've learned a bunch of kanji prior to what the log would consider the 'first day', which is useful for the averaging stats. Also, you can input the total kanji you're working towards, if it's more/less than the 2042 in RTK 1. Then once you've input your study profile, the only thing left is to put in the number of kanji that you studied today, and the math takes care of the rest. Tada!



Granted, excel 2003 is not nearly so pretty as 2007, but if you can put up with the not-quite-as-sexy donut graph, then this should take care of all that pesky typing that you didn't really feel like doing. The realistic estimates for things take the number of new kanji you're averaging into account, to show you what your progress will look like if you keep slacking off (for shame!) or alternatively, how fast you'll blast through things if you're actually working faster than what you set as your goal. Of course, you can always update your goal speed at any time if you're consistently ahead of your original goal. Your call.

(If any of these formulas or whatnot are any use to you, Fabrice, feel free to steal them. I have no idea what your plans are for future site updates, but I *do* know I can't claim copyright on math. *grin* Go nuts.)

Dol, please don't be offended by this. I think you have a great idea, and I felt like adding some to it and taking it out of the new excel '07 format. I suppose you could always just export yours as something compatible with the older, fuglier versions... or copy-and-paste my formulas into your sheet. *shrug* Whatever.

Anyway, enough yammerin' from me.

JimmySeal Wrote:He probably has a formula in a separate cell that takes in all the other information and does something with it. And he has to adjust that to include one more cell each day. I would take a look at it, but my version of Excel can't open .xlsx files.

You can install an option pack to be able to read them in previous versions:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/produc...61033.aspx

I changed quite a bit of the spreadsheet in order to get stuff working... sadly i've been spending more time reading information on excel than i have been studying the kanji (and it shows).

It turns out I was trying to use a few features that are no longer working in excel 2007 which was giving me some problems. Mainly I was using defined names with in conjunction with the offset and count functions in order to dynamically change the chart data range. It was working perfectly untill I saved the spreadsheet and reopened it. It would then change my =RtKProgress.xlsx!DataLabels (or !goal, !average, !completed, etc) to =[0]!DataLabels (or !goal, !average, !completed, etc), which, needless to say, messed my chart up.

I figured out another way I could have the chart setup though, I'm having the chart's data range be the whole duration of my schedule and simply having the cells I dont wan't to appear on the chart show up as #N/A (which the chart ignores). The reason i didn't try to do that first was because I didn't know that i COULD do it and having the cells appear empty by using "" in formulas would show up on the chart as all 0s instead of being null.

Anyway, I dont really have time to go through my whole process... You can look at my spreadsheet if you want to see what I ended up doing ( http://home.comcast.net/~dolseni/RtKProgress.xlsx *may not be up to date, i fuss with it frequently* ) If you are so inclined.

fragileshards, sorry but I opted to remove the donut graph and put a plain ol textual percentage in. If you really like it that much I may toss it back in there, haha.

Mighty_Matt, I'm having everything update based on wheter I've input the kanji completed for that day; but if i haven't, everything below that shows up as blank. the chart was interpreting that as 0 instead of being null so i switched over to having 'blank' cells show up as #N/A which the chart ignores. I'm tempetd to setup some conditional formating on the cells to change the text color to match the background color if a cell is #N/A, since its pretty ugly. For now I've opted against it since its all on a seperate page that you aren't really even supposed to look at anyway. I might even just make that page hidden..

Anyway, it appears that i've gotten quite good at rambling on so i'll let this be the closing of this post. If you have any suggestions as to how I can improve my spreadsheet then by all means, have at it! I literally knew nothing about excel before I started this.

amthomas Wrote:I've taken the liberty of completely ripping off Dol's idea using Excel 2003. Took out some of the stats that didn't seem to make any sense to me (for example, a daily running count of an overall average of new kanji... it will change very very little day to day, and all I really care about is the current average), and added a couple other graphs.

Dol, please don't be offended by this. I think you have a great idea, and I felt like adding some to it and taking it out of the new excel '07 format. I suppose you could always just export yours as something compatible with the older, fuglier versions... or copy-and-paste my formulas into your sheet. *shrug* Whatever.

Nah, thats great. I'm all for people using others' ideas and improving upon them or modifying them to fit their needs. You ninja edited your post and since i dont usually look at past posts, I almost missed it. If it weren't for your picture, I probobly would have. [edit: besides, my version is really only intented for my own uses... Its kinda just thrown together anyway, not very pretty at all =( ]

It came to me while I was sleeping, but I've come up with a good idea to automatically create flashcards. I'm not sure exactly how I can implement it, though. The Idea is to keep track of what kanji you have completed in the last 3 days and to create a flashcard file including them. After kanji have fallen out of the 3 day range, it would keep a list to be used with whatever SRS flashcard program you are using (wheter it be this site, mnemosyne, supermemo, etc). In the spirit of me being lazy, I would like for it to be completely automated, but I don't know how I could do that...

The only way that i currently know how to do that would be to have a complete list of all the kanji with their keywords, frame numbers, etc included into an excel file. Then, using various methods, you could have your progress statistics spit out what cards are currently in your 3day window and the highest frame that is behind your 3day window... at least i think i know how to do that... we'll see

Anyway, as always... suggestions are encouraged and feel free to take my ideas and make them your own (but please share them).