ogee89 Wrote:Yosh!
Thanks all this site made kanji studying so much easier.

Just finished, took 71 days. Time to set new study goals and of course not to forget reviewing
Maybe primitive signal from RTK2's first chapters and then to Core10k.

Grats, you were pretty quick.

Finally done! . Took me around 97 days of on and off studying.

Im amazed by how much Japanese I can understand just from reading the kanji. And my parent's (who are Chinese) minds are completely blown by how quickly you can learn them using this method. RTK rocks!!

After 5 fricking months and 2200 Kanji I am finally done.

I guess this was just the beginning though, now I can actually go back to learning actual Japanese.
Just hope I don't forget all the Kanji one day now.

I finished the RTK1 book after 1 year and 5 months. My pace was 5 kanji a day, but if you do the math it was less than that, Saturdays and Sundays I could not keep it.
The only regret is the line that says that after the two third, it is downhill....to me it was hard until the last one!
By the way I cannot find anymore where it was the link that open the webpage for reviewing the card, and let you write your own story. Has it been removed?

Finished again. It took about a month and a half, it was much, much easier this time around. Stepped it up around the halfway mark, IIRC the most cards I added in one day was 160, and at one point was maintaining 80-120 cards per day.

My ability to familiarize with kanji had rusted badly, hence why I had to do it again. Well worth it. Now on to prepare for the load of reviews.

Finished!!! Finally!!!

3 years and 3 false starts with several long breaks in between since I first attempted it, I've finally made it through to the end. I don't know what I'm going to do with the time now!

Finally done! Took me 136 days, which averages to 16 kanji per day.

I'd like to thank all of you, who shared their kanji stories with us who came later. It was big help, even though most of the time I tailored the story to my personal taste, they were great as an inspiration.

Done!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Koohii community for supporting an excellent forum and creating some very helpful stories for each Kanji.

Additionally, special thank you for Fabrice, whose vision and efforts have made this difficult task so much easier.

I have a few recommendations and questions that I will be posting in the coming days...

I've finished RTK1 today!!!! So happy!! ((:
Congrats to all the others!

I'm from Brazil, and just wanted to leave my mark too!

After almost 1 year (23/06/14 untill today, 08/06/15) I finished RTK 1 + Supplement, totalling 2203 Kanji (3 are some I personally added).

Thanks to each and every one of you, there were so many time I thought "How can I come up with a history for this?", and then someone had nailed the kanji with an awesome idea.

I tried my best to help in some kanji, I hope they will help someone in the future. I got some "favorites", that is enough to make me happy.

It's a shame the Portuguese Edition only came out at March of this year, day 25 to be precise (last month, lol). I had many troubles figuring out which words not to use to prevent similar meaning, and still had to alter my previous "keyword" many times.

It's funny also that I learned so many new words, not only in English but also in Portuguese. Not to mention some nice cultural stuff, thanks to you guys with your histories, images, videos, songs.

Again, thank you very much.

Congrats to everyone who did it before me, and to everyone that's still in the process of completing it.

My turn to write my name on the wall. Started December 8, 2014, "finished" June 25, 2015. (Finished in quotes because I'm going to continue reviewing for quite some time).

Many thanks to all the great users of this site, to Fabrice, and to Mr. T. I don't know if I could have doe it without this site...or at least not as easily!

Thanks, everyone, for the stories. Like I've posted before, this is less of an ending and more of a beginning.

I started on 1/11/15 and finished 6/28/15.

Initially I added 12 per day, until the 10th week when I increased to 13 per day. I did that for 12 weeks, then I kicked it up to 15 per day for 3 weeks. I just did 24 on my final day, which means I probably didn't learn much! But that's what the reviews are for.

If you have the patience, I think 10-12 per day is a good number. My old brain wasn't cooperating at 15 per day, that's for sure.

Also, I have another deck that does kanji-to-keyword that lags by one week. So I'll be done with that next week. I like exercising my brain in both directions.

Good luck everyone, happy trails, and to all who read this… Keep Swimming! (That's the catchphrase I latched onto as my motivation, having picked it up from Niko at nihongoshark.com).

EDIT: I forgot to mention… If you haven't already done so, please consider making a contribution to this site. I have no idea how I would have gotten through it without my daily trip to http://kanji.koohii.com!!

First of all, thank you guys for all the great stories, only very rarely did I have to make up my own.

I started on the 28th of may 2015 and finished just now (30th of june). I usually did about 85 new Kanji per day.

For anyone else attempting this, frankly quite ridiculous, pace: I had huge retention issues whenever I did not cram newly learned kanji in the evening. With cramming I had a 95% retention rate on the next day on average. My retention rate overall was about 80-85% percent I guess, which I am quite happy with. I spent about 6 hours a day on RTK, but I am pretty sure its possible to do it much more efficient, I was procrastinating alot and taking a lot of breaks.

I didn't do much else this past month except work, running a few kilometers twice a week, and RTK. No social life possible really, whenever you skip a day the reviews just keep piling up. I think the exercise was really important though, I had my best learning sessions after running.

Good luck to anyone still at it and have fun!

congrats all. jeez, you all powered through at breakneck speeds. If you can, would you check in for all of those who are considering going at a 3month or less pace, and how your retention was after a few months, and what you did to keep your levels of retention?

I have friends who I want to help through this method, and there's no better resource than the people in this thread. hopefully we can make it into a wealth of information, as well as a back-patting and [THE ULTIMATE GOAL] thread.

also, from time to time if you still review using this site, especially on the first 500 frames when they come up and you have an amazing story that works even 1,2,3 years later, posting tips about it why its awesome might help out the community. I feel like I would have been more efficient with my time if I had more advice from sempai, let's spread the knowledge :3

It took me five months (+1 day). Feb 21st to Aug 22nd. It's done.

F*** me that was difficult. I am so f***ing excited to get started on learning the readings and vocabulary! This has been an adventure .

NekoDesu Wrote:It took me five months (+1 day). Feb 21st to Aug 22nd. It's done.

F*** me that was difficult. I am so f***ing excited to get started on learning the readings and vocabulary! This has been an adventure .

Congratulations NekoDesu for this great achievement!

It took me 24 days of full-time studying to get here! Finally I can begin with the real language! Thanks to you all!

Almost there two weeks and then I go to rtk3 instead of rtk2. I am so glad to find anki it really helped out a lot in the long run. I used study blue but burned out there around three hundred doing every one every day for review is no effective like anki. I did get to 1400 last year and stopped for half a year now I am back at 1700 just less than two weeks at thirty new kanji a day.

I'm happy to announce that I've completed RTK1 again!

Six years ago I was a physics grad student and while being under a rigorous rhythm of work I had confidence in working Heisig's book fast. Confidence also came from having visited Japan for a few weeks after learning myself in 3 months enough Japanese to be able to speak, read, and write in kanji. Previous to that, I didn't know any Japanese.

At that time I wrote 100 stories every day and began reviewing them after having written 2042 stories. An estimate of 90% or more were my own stories. It took about 3~5 hours a day in consecutive days.

This is the message I wrote the last day of work;
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...8#pid53028

After that, life and work got in the way and I stopped reviewing. As a consequence of rushing, while some stories were never forgotten regardless of its frame number or complexity in the strokes, must of the stories were not effective enough. Only with time I was able to understand this. Things done well from the beginning take more effort and time but last longer.

When I decided to redo RTK1, I had to make ‘deliberate practice’ my fundamental goal for the day. That is, to make my story writing perfect each time and only for this day. It takes effort to forget about the number of frames remaining and to focus on one day and one story at the time. As the chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen said on winning the London Candidates Tournament —“More than saying ‘check’ (mate), the satisfying thing for me comes from the battle leading to an advantage, the more time they spend on their next move, they begin struggling. The end (of the game) is a matter of wrapping.” Wrapping RTK1 comes from a series of individual efforts.

Fortunately I’ve been documenting all steps during RTK1, which I call the First Phase of remembering to write the kanji, keeping the reviews alive and applying to Natural Japanese are the following phases. I will publish an illustrated essay soon on Phase 1.

Today I've completed RTK1 by rewriting 15 stories per day in 137 consecutive days. The total time spent reviewing is 52 hours with an average of 23 min/day (I’m adding the standard deviation to these and other data from my notes in the essay). The percentages for correct answers in Anki are; Learning 99.01; Young 92.04; Mature 89.26.

Contrary to my steady journey, my advice is not to pass over 15 characters per day, 8 characters per day being the ideal, and fluctuate according to the difficulty of the book. For example, the first 500 characters are a good opportunity to start by writing 15 stories a day. For the last 600 characters in the book is wise to reduce to 8 stories per day. By the time of reaching frame 1442, past characters and primitives will reinforce seamlessly giving you a tremendous advantage.

As a project, completing RTK1 is nothing mystical. If done properly and with a moderate pace, not only you'll complete the book but also your confidence will benefit from working consistently.

Done but extremely slow at recognizing kanji, a lot of things which have several together don't make much sense. I will now do kanji from rtk3 and who knows what's next what should I do then?

Just finished 5 minutes ago! So proud of myself and I thought it would NEVER happen. Completed in 6 weeks with a full time job. I feel incredibly accomplished and it's a great motivation booster. Thank you to this forum for all the help and congratulations to all who have recently finished! Good luck to those still making their way through it!

I just finished!

I completed RTK1 a few years ago, when I was in high school; I went on and studied for another while after that, and then college started and everything fell to the wayside.

I dropped out earlier this year - hopefully temporarily, but I won't go back to the same place - and I'd been feeling pretty garbage about it. I was sick, studying a subject that just didn't want to stick in my head, had some mental health problems... I felt like an idiot, all the time. The people around me were so good, and I couldn't understand anything that came out of their mouths.

A month and a day ago, a friend posted on facebook that they were looking to start learning Japanese. I'd just moved into a new apartment in a new city; my books were still in boxes, I still hadn't unpacked my computer, I didn't even have a desk - I'd left it on the other side of the country. But I dug through and found my copy of RTK, got my desktop running, and started going through at steady rate of 40 a day. Except I had a lot of free time, so 40 turned into 60 turned into 80 turned into 100, and now it's done.

That felt good.

Just finished!!!! Aargh, so excited and relieved.

It took me 22 days, so it was a sprint, but I went into it having already done a big chunk of the book many years ago, and already being able to understand and/or read quite a few kanji. One reason I stopped the first time was that I started having trouble coming up with stories, so many, many thanks to everyone who shared their great ideas. I don't think I could have done it without them, and certainly not as fast.

I find a lot of Heisig's keywords and primitives silly or confusing or just plain wrong. So for every unfamiliar kanji, I checked the meaning using Rikaichan and/or Midori and/or JDic. I also used Henshall quite a lot as well. Although I mainly stuck to English keywords, it also made sense to change some of them based on vocabulary I already know in Japanese.

I used Anki to go from kanji to keyword using Nihongoshark's RTK1 deck, and the RTK iOS app to go from keyword to written kanji. My retention rate seems pretty good--this morning, with 100 new kanji left to add, it was at about 92%, if I read Anki's chart correctly. Obviously now that I've added all 2200 I'll be switching to pure review mode with Anki, and refining and improving any shaky stories. I'm a little frustrated with the limitations of the RTK app, such as not being able to change the keyword, and the lack of an easy way to delete cards from flashcard mode, so if anyone has suggestions for an app I can use to practice writing keyword to kanji, that would be great.

The next step is RTK2. I've read some criticisms of it, but it seems worth using it for at least some readings, while I move on to actual reading. I'll probably consider RTK3 but the first priority is to start using the kanji from RTK1 in real Japanese, so that's for the future.

So, any suggestions for next steps?

Finished today. Took about 18 months.
I still remember the look on the face of my Japanese teacher when I told her I was going to learn the whole Jouyou set.

I have just finished RTK after almost four months of agony xD

I'd like to thank everyone who shared their stories. I'd never make it without your help, guys ^^