Having spent the vast majority of my sober time over the last 7 weeks religiously grinding out the
RtK, I am, thank God, finally
finished (well no more new kanji from Heisig anyway).
The first 500 or so were fun, I was still in the early stages of the romance and young love is always blind. At 600 or 700 I abandoned most of the far too expensive daily Japanese lessons, for which I am unfortunately still paying, in favour of an increased Heisig schedule of about 50 new kanji per day, except for those days where I was too hungover to do anything but sleep and eat Macdonald's. Christmas, my birthday and new year came and went and I hardly noticed, but for the massive review piles that were the natural consequence of my alcoholic negligence over this period. At about 1000 with the new year upon me I moved up to 70 kanji per day, with the qualifications about time off due to liver abuse, progress was rapid, but brutal. I think 70 is about my hard limit, but I've been making up all of my own stories and this requires a fair amount of imagination. By 1500 I felt like, as chess players say; "the rest was simply a matter of technique." And although this was true, it did become harder to cram the characters into my head; a lot of this had to do with the backlog I had created due to the sprint between 1000 - 1500 yeilding confusion between many similar words. The final 500 have been a bit more relaxed and probably took me ten days. I imagine that a month from now, when the reviews reach a managable 30 or so per day I will have really solidified my knowlegde of them, now they feel somewhat ephemeral, but with me.
I would say that finishing this book is probably one the things I really proud of. It's a hard book, more from the point of self discipline than actual content.
Anyway, big props to everyone else who has got through it, and also to everyone still working through it. I have extra respect for the people who have got a long way through, then abandoned it and restarted later; not sure I would have had the will to retackle the monster!
Thanks to the community on this website, I've really enjoyed reading the forum and the stories as I've been working through
RtK, its nice to get other peoples opinions and see other people struggling and succeeding. And a special thanks to ファブリス for putting this site together and running it so well; there is a copy of the Aphex Twins on it's way to you.
Starting tomorrow I'm going to be grinding out minna no nihongo I & II and the Japan Times basic Japanese grammar dictionary. I've already done a fair bit of the first book of mnn so I'd like to be done with them by the end of Feb. From there who knows... I suppose I will have a better idea after I get my Japanese bearings.
Just one thing that I've learned from
RtK: 哺乳動物 (note 哺 = suckle or to feed). And it turns out to be true
http://www.nhm.org/mammals/page006.html. Since 哺 is a very rare kanji then it can be ommitted, so 乳動物 = ほにゅうどうぶつ, also, but that is a non standard pronunciation of 乳.
Edited: 2009-01-20, 5:37 am
