The Chinese class out of all the other classes I have (except for auto where you basically never have homework at all AND in addition can do homework in the class. Hence giving me lots of freetime at home to finish the book.) is probably the least stressful of the courses I take. Currently this is my 3rd year in the Chinese class.

However, even though I've spent 3 years learning Chinese at school I don't know much Chinese. I know plenty enough for tests and homeworks, yes, but hardly know much beyond that scope. If I was to be talking with natives I would probably be struggling for words and have trouble keeping up. My speaking and pronunciation doesn't seem to be much of a problem though oddly.

Even then, the class is mostly based on doing stuff I don't think most other class would do. This would include doing making word poster (Start with a Chinese word and connect it with a different word. So lets say I have the word 'large'. I would connect this word with different word that either starts with 'l' or 'e'. Only in Chinese), making stories out of vocab words we know, watching lots of Chinese videos, and doing projects every month and so; whilst missing a bit of poster part here and there. That said, yes the class inevitably has school books and all those shiny trinkets, and I am required to read it, understand it, digest it, and do it for homework and what not. Basically listen to tapes, read up on grammar rules, and other mentally demotivating stuff.

I expect my Japanese to be better then my Chinese in order of magnitude after I've gone through summer vacation. Never believed in classes myself since I could never ever by the name of Tech, what I did last year for chemistry or what in the world was that all about funny smiley shapes in geometry and why two eyes are there and a semi circle on the bottom just because some funny French looking phrases says so? Anyway there's the Chinese 101 class for you.

FINALLY! Never thought it would be my turn to post in this thread as a self proclaimed king of kanji.

Whew... My weekdays will feel kinda empty after this though.. No staying up late because "I have to finish this chapter" or anything like that. Now there's only me and Japanese left.
My rate was pretty up and down, doing good at the start (a good 50/day), but then started to drop at around 600 where I just lurked for a while, before deciding I'm not gonna give up (yeah, that post got me motivated to continuing. True story!). From there it went slowly upwards untill I decided to finish by today, when the pace upped abit as well. The real kick for finishing though was the idea of the "race towards the end" with Thunk (cheers!), making me reach a peak of 125 kanji yesterday, all towards the ultimate goal of adding the last 65 today.

Took me exactly 3 months (started Jan 27th, finished April 27th =D), which was what I was aiming for. Now off to lern teh japaneez.
Did a quick skim through RTK3 as well, noting down the frame numbers of characters I already knew, or figured it might be useful later on (I mean, who doesn't want to know the kanji for anus? ^_^). I'll most likely add those later this week when I sort out the massive reviews from adding close to 100 several days in a row.

Finally my turn to post in this thread, too! I started all the way last year, just before I started on my year studying abroad in Hirosaki, Japan. But life there got in the way and it really hampered my study of RTK, although in retrospect finishing would have made kanji class (and daily life in general) much easier.

But I just put the last card into the SRS! Since I have a good grounding in grammar and such from studying in Japan last year, I'm going to give the sentance-mining technique a la All Japanese All the Time a try. Good luck to everyone else!

Congratulations!　\(^__^)/

Codexus Wrote:Congratulations!　\(^__^)/

Great m8!
make sure you publish your progress and experiences with the language on your site!

やったー !

Start date was January 2nd...added 10 kanji that day.
I think I found this site the next day (thank the kanji gods!) and started the RTK1 ride.
Had big dreams of a 2 month finish, but experienced some burn out around the 1100 mark.
March was weak....only added 144 new :/
As April rolled around I said "that's it, I'm finishing by the end of the month!"-kanji count was 1426 on April 1st....
Still....I slaked a bit, not doing the ２0 a day pace to get here on April 30th.
So this last week I added 395 to make it by my goal.
I know I'm not "done", but a nice landmark as you all know well. I am facing some not so small reviews for some weeks to come (199 review to do after this post LOL), but that's fine.

What's next.....

I bought RTK3, so I will carve away at that, but just keep a slow, steady pace (maybe 50 a week?).

Catch up on my SRS! I began sentence mining about a month and a half ago (slowed me down here, but no regrets), so I am super excited to get in a flow with anki.

Polish up my Katakana! My Hiragana skills are nice and polished due to repeated use, but less than frequent Katakana in the sentences has shown me that I need some more work here (plus, is it just me, or is Katakana a pain in the ass LOL). 問題ない。

Polish up my kanji in reviews, and anki, specifically stroke order and beauty/balance of 字.
I was a bit lax here up to this point, but I have all the time in the world to improve this aspect. RTK1 was a "get 'er done" project. Now I can refine what I've gained during the creation and application of adding stories, especially as reviews here trickle down.

Learn how to freestyle in 日本語....seriously LOL!

A Huge thank you to everyone here at koohi, and Fabrice.....you are AWESOME! People....hook up the cash!!! If we all show Fabrice some financial gratitude (all 14219 and growing) then.....well that would be a good thing!

頑張ってみなさん！

AAAhh! You beat me! I'm still 3 days away! Congratulations. I'd better get hustling!

Ah, feels good to finally make this post. I started at the beginning of January this year and just now finished. I managed a pace of 20 per day for the first month or so, then I went to 30-40 a day for like, two weeks, until all the reviews caught up. For the last dozen lessons or so I just went through the entire lesson in one sitting. Except for the really big ones, which I did half of. I'd have finished about two weeks earlier if I hadn't had these horrible headaches from some kind of bronchitis or something that made me really not want to sit down and concentrate on kanji.

87.8% retention overall, according to my Anki deck, and there's no way I would have been able to do it without this awesome site and all its great users and their encouragement and resources. Thank you, everybody. If I had money I'd donate to the site.

おめでとう　Ryajinor! Yeah I had the same thing, nasty illness made me miss about 4 days.
Thanks Thunk. I was a few hundred ahead of you a few weeks back, when we were messaging in the 3/4 post, I think. Your doing well! 三日!

YES! I am DONE! Or rather, I just added kanji 2042 to my Anki deck.

Anki tells me that it took 1.2 months from start to finish. I started around the 25th of March and ended the 2nd of May so thats...5.5 weeks I think? About 38 days.

Over that entire period I've averaged 55.7 cards/day added. It took me about 2.5 weeks to add the first 400, and then I had a week of holiday where I added 100/day and jumped from 400 to about 1200. When Uni started again I initially went back to a slower pace of 30-50 a day, but only put up with that for a few days before going back to my 100/day pace for another week and finished off the book!

So all in all for the first ~2.5 weeks: I did around 30/day.
After that: ~100/day

I must admit, I've been so keen to finish these past few days that I haven't been doing my reviews properly. ~400 unseen kanji to review and 200 older kanji to review sitting in Anki right now. Ooops! I had to get this done though, because I can't afford to ignore my other Japanese studies for much longer because I'm taking Japanese at a University level. Plus I figure I'll be able to ride out the wave of reviews and the SRS will smooth things out over the long run.

I discovered Revtk about halfway through my journey and all your stories were very, very helpful. Thank you all!

おめでとう blackmacros & TaylorSan & Ryajinor & Doorknob & jrkester Big crowd sliding into the finish line right on top of each other!! High fives to all of you

I'm so so happy to be finished. Except I can't stop to savour my achievements- a Japanese listening test looms on this Monday, and I've done no study for it :-( 100% of my time has been devoted to RtK, 0% to vocab. Why oh why couldn't it have been a reading test?

Hello,

I am (kind of) finished, at least I don't have new cards left, just about 140 failed ones (they just won't dissappear). I can't do them all at once, since I'm already swammed in reviews.
Thanks for helping, would have been hard without everyone's stories.
Now what I could use some help with:
My course has proceeded to Genki II. I'm trying to learn the new vocabulary along with the fitting kanji. It's quite fun to combine kanji and make a story of that too, I must admit.. But should I do that for Genki I as well now?

Second question: Do you make one card or two for kanji and pronounciation?

Good luck to ppl who are still on the way, its definetely more fun studying jap. when your finished, and doesn't feel (quite) as hopeless anymore.

TaylorSan Wrote:おめでとう　Ryajinor! Yeah I had the same thing, nasty illness made me miss about 4 days.
Thanks Thunk. I was a few hundred ahead of you a few weeks back, when we were messaging in the 3/4 post, I think. Your doing well! 三日!

DDDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!! HUZZAH! Oh hell yeah! TaylorSan, I had to laugh because when I saw 三日, I was in distraction mode, and wondered if it was some cool kanji compound. But nope! You just meant 3 days, because that's the time left I had given myself! HA!

I didn't review yesterday's massive batch of like 90 kanji, but hey - all I got left to do is review, and that's cake compared to burning a story in my head to begin with! YAY! I can't wait to start the kana...actually, I can't wait to start Tae Kim's grammar, and sentences. I don't have to go at this breakneck speed for those, and can just enjoy the process.

I knew learning Kanji would be grueling, so I had to hurry through it! 8 weeks, start to finish. I've been doing it manually, and will add all 2042 to this site within the month when the last few batches are etched good and well into my brain...or should I say ricefield! Doh!

Yes, that was lame.

Congrats to blackmacros and lanval, too. Yippy!

Congrats, Thunk!
Only 8 weeks and you've got young kids too. Impressive!

I should've posted on your "parents" thread but I didn't 'cuz my ex's kids (native Japanese speakers) are young adults now and my initial kanji-learning days are over. But I swear by the Heisig method and I've been reading the forum a lot these days trying to get myself re-fired up for learning more kanji as well as hanzi and I've been rooting for you all.

Congrats to all who've finished RTK1 as well as those who've continued on beyond RTK1...whatever that may be.

Chadokoro_K Wrote:Congrats, Thunk!
Only 8 weeks and you've got young kids too. Impressive!

I should've posted on your "parents" thread but I didn't 'cuz my ex's kids (native Japanese speakers) are young adults now and my initial kanji-learning days are over. But I swear by the Heisig method and I've been reading the forum a lot these days trying to get myself re-fired up for learning more kanji as well as hanzi and I've been rooting for you all.

Congrats to all who've finished RTK1 as well as those who've continued on beyond RTK1...whatever that may be.

I agree, not only is it very impressive in its own right, but even more so for a parent with young kids...and doing it manually too! Wow! Congratulations Thunk!

Alright Thunk!!!!

Fells good, even with big reviews looming (問題ない！) I've had reviews of 250-200-197, the last few days....LOL. Not the best pass rates either, but the stories ARE in there, and it's only a matter of course that things will gel.

Learning Kana is fun, It has helped me so much with listening and speaking. The syllabary is one thing that simplifies Japanese (thank the Kami!)

I did look at the thread about having kids, but didn't remember that was you.....
double Omeditou! One of the reasons I'm learning Japanese is so I can go teach kids in Japan. Working with kids is one of my passions in life (don't have any of my own yet).

Big respect to Harrow! You're always here, supporting the troops! And way to represent my home State (I'm from Ashland)!

lanval, blackmacros, and everyone else, Omeditou! RTK3 anyone LOL?!

I'm impressed with everyone's blazing finishes! And I look forward to posting, and following everyone's progression in 日本語の勉強！

Yayyy RTK 1 is finished. Oh hello people out there! I've been kinda preoccupied with doing my 100 kanji a day (... up till the last week) to say much of anything on the forums. I appreciate all the sample sentences and quite a few useful primitive names as opposed to Heisig's suggestions, and maybe after a few days of dealing with these 300-340 reviews a day I'll be around here more to see about the next stage of learning Japanese; which I think for me will be learning a bunch of sentences the AJATT way, since I've gotten kana taken care of in my two semesters of Japanese in school. Considering maybe doing the first few of those Kanji lessons that people here put up on smart.fm, seemed like a pretty good source of starter sentences. Anyway talk to you all again some time in the near future.

おめでとう klaoth!! 100 kanji a day is some impressive pace, you are going to be surfing some huge review waves but they will eventually calm down. Good luck with your next step...

Finally. I finished. Now I may drown with the countless reviews but the thing is, I finished. I wonder for how long I will have to review 120~ a day.

I've finished as well! Congratulations everyone!!
２０４２ kanji in 2 months and 2 days!
I just kept repeating a quote to myself everyday I learned new kanji.
It was "A jug fills drop by drop" -Buddha
It really does, I hope everyone else feels the same!

Finished inputing Lesson 56 into my anki deck! I'm so glad to have finally accomplish this goal of mine. I started RTK1 on 12/21/08 so it has been almost 5 months. It took me so long because I made the silly decision to start taking Japanese courses for ~2.5 months where I barely got any RTK in since I was concentrating on other aspects of Japanese (although I did keep up with my reviews).

When I first started I was had planned to finish in two months at the rate of one lesson per day. This was a bad idea since I quickly burnt out after a few long lessons (60+) and lead to the huge break. When I came back to RTK I split the huge chapters into primitives and went at a steady pace of around 30 kanji per day.

Before inputting the kanji into anki I wrote it down 10 times in a notebook to get the stroke order correct and then wrote one or two example words in hiragana (which was kinda worthless since I barely ever remembered these). For anki I wrote the story in white on the question side so I could highlight it for help but whenever I used this I still clicked fail for the card.

Anki stats:

deck created: 4.9 months ago
correct first time: 74.6%
total correct: 87.8%
avg added: 13.8/day

FINALLY finished formulating all 2042 kanji!!

14 calendar months, about 12 actual work months with time off. Slow, slow, slow. But finished. These last couple of months I allowed my study pile to pile up, so it's going to take a couple of weeks to beat that down completely.

Thanks so much for everyone's contributions to this site.

Basically, I crammed yesterday and did the last 100 stories in a day. It took quite literally all of Sunday, including reviews and stuff. If I had done that just 2 other Sundays during that entire year I could've finished maybe a month and a half sooner. So, my advice is to try cramming maybe one weekend day every couple of months and you'll be surprised how much sooner you'll finish.

Next up, continue SRSing vocab and beat down the study pile to the point where I can clear it each day. Then, onwards.

Grats guys! I'm looking to join you on June 13 if my brain doesn't melt again. I'm gonna do 50 aday so that I can finish during my vacation and have some time to relax a bit while catching up on reviews before I have to get back to work.

Good job, plumage! After having RTK1 hanging over your head for the past 14 months, you must be stoked!

barrik - yay! I also wrote a primitive several times upon learning it, so now that I've got them all in anki, I just picture them in my head instead of writing them out. I'm sure the Japanese classes in between helped a little? Maybe?

Dayvad - we took the same amount of time, you and I!

I just bought RTK1 for a couple friends of mine. One of them has started the process, and is totally excited after seeing how many I've learned in such a short period of time. Hopefully they'll be posting on this thread, too, in the next few months. ^_^