Another halfwayer here.

Although it has taken me a long time, with one false start up to about #400,
once I got in the groove it has been a lot of fun. My advice to those who
feel it is a hard, grim grind is to relax and try to enjoy the process.

At the beginning I would wince, growl, or whack the side of my head
when I forgot an easy one. But that is a fixed-mindset type of behavior.
Psychology research shows that people with a fixed mindset about
intelligence have less enjoyment of the learning process -- see the
books by Carol Dweck. Once I read her books, I learned to enjoy
the learning process. Now failed cards don't make me feel bad.
Reading and choosing everyone's creative stories (THANKS!) is
fun, and coming up with the occasional very creative story that
immediately "clicks" is *very* fun.

And it is wonderful to recognize more and more characters around me.
Although I live in California, there are plenty of Chinese and Japanese
markets around, and it is fun to read out keywords for characters on
food packages, for example.

Most importantly, a BIG THANKS (with donation) to ファブリス。

がんばりましょう。
Bendyarm

Just got to halfway today! I don't think I could have done it without inspiration from this website. Good luck and congratulations to everyone else, hope to see you at the finish line!

Phew, Made it!
After more than a few false starts, I've finally settled on using a much more conservative approach. I used to try using the 100 new kanji a day method, but i would burn out each time and eventually ditch the Japanese learning.

This time has worked much better, only learning 20-40 / day maximum and even a couple of days in there where I was tired from work and just decided to get rid of all my reviews and learn 5 new cards.

Hopefully I can keep this up, and should have a nice post in the final one sometime next month.

bendyarm Wrote:Another halfwayer here.

Although it has taken me a long time, with one false start up to about #400,
once I got in the groove it has been a lot of fun. My advice to those who
feel it is a hard, grim grind is to relax and try to enjoy the process.

At the beginning I would wince, growl, or whack the side of my head
when I forgot an easy one. But that is a fixed-mindset type of behavior.
Psychology research shows that people with a fixed mindset about
intelligence have less enjoyment of the learning process -- see the
books by Carol Dweck. Once I read her books, I learned to enjoy
the learning process. Now failed cards don't make me feel bad.
Reading and choosing everyone's creative stories (THANKS!) is
fun, and coming up with the occasional very creative story that
immediately "clicks" is *very* fun.

And it is wonderful to recognize more and more characters around me.
Although I live in California, there are plenty of Chinese and Japanese
markets around, and it is fun to read out keywords for characters on
food packages, for example.

Most importantly, a BIG THANKS (with donation) to ファブリス。

がんばりましょう。
Bendyarm

hey, congratulations on making it half way and a big thanks for the donation. This site wouldn't be up if it weren't for our lovely webmaster . After completing RTK, i took a 6 month break and now I have about 1,000 failed cards so I'm right where you are .

Finally half way

I tried to go at a pace of 100 a day a couple of months ago....I lasted 6 days, lol
I'm glad I forced myself to start doing RTK again, otherwise I would still be nowhere. Need to make sure I keep up on reviews though if I think about taking a break from adding, 700 due cards is not very enticing.

Well done, now just keep on going!

Well I just hit half way two days ago. Averaging about 100 a day now. Should be done by the end of this month. Restarted just over a week ago. First started back in May at 30 a day and then had exams in June and stopped at about 800, reviews piled up and it put me off.

DevvaR Wrote:Well I just hit half way two days ago. Averaging about 100 a day now. Should be done by the end of this month. Restarted just over a week ago. First started back in May at 30 a day and then had exams in June and stopped at about 800, reviews piled up and it put me off.

gogogo! You can do it! Congrats on making it this far. Slow and steady will win this race.

Just finished lesson 27 a few hours ago, and god Im so happy, never thought I would be here as I had already tried once before and got stopped around 600ish.
The only thing I changed was moving to anki so that I could review using just my cellphone anywhere if needed and changed all keywords/primitives to portuguese as I was having a hard time with some of english keywords that even native english people need to use a dictionary to remember hehe with portuguese keywords the "images" were much faster to write/learn/remember as I was using all stories created by me, cept for a few borrowed (but translated before) from this site which is such a help even for those that use anki.

I just wish there was a portuguese RTK, using english version is really that much harder imo.

Anyway, good to be finally posting in this thread. Still 1016 kanjis to learn thou, so: 頑張らなければなりません。

Cyas!!

Just got to the half of the journey, yay!
So far it has not been so easy for me as for others (I just can't believe how anybody can add 30+ kanji a day).
I have one question, though, how hard is the second part, really? Does it have a lot of 'hearts' (I hate them)?

Congrats guys! I personally didn't think the second half was too painful, except for the last couple of hundreds. You'll have a lot of common kanji start showing up, that was motivating for me. Wait until you hit this fucker: 糸

Just got here
BTW fundy, i've been adding from 20-25 kanji a day (except for the exceptional 30 kanji days), any more and my retention rate drops enormously.
心's were my favourites hahhaa, I hated Mr. T at first, now I got him under control.
I'm just hating all these echonomy/bureaucratic kanjis (like gobernment office, municipal, etc).

To the people who add like 100 cards a day, don't you get a huge pile of failed cards per day? Let's say about 40 cards a day?

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:Wait until you hit this fucker: 糸

Ah, our beloved Spiderman, who appears in dozens of stories...

and dozens of useful kanji I still don't know

damicore Wrote:Just got here
To the people who add like 100 cards a day, don't you get a huge pile of failed cards per day? Let's say about 40 cards a day?

Usually yes, but that's counting failed scheduled reviews + new reviews.

And how much time do you wait after you've studied the said 100 kanji to add them to the reviewing the kanji site?

gdaxeman Wrote:

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:Wait until you hit this fucker: 糸

Ah, our beloved Spiderman, who appears in dozens of stories...

I just arrived at the spider-man chapter and starting to get very bad stories.
Seeing comments here should I really keep spider-man (and spider-pig for when its down) or would be better to use real "thread" as primitive? I plan to add most of the chapter till the end of the day, but I can already see lots of "misses" tomorrow...

jonuhey Wrote:Seeing comments here should I really keep spider-man (and spider-pig for when its down) or would be better to use real "thread" as primitive?

You can use any of them — all you need is to be able to make your chosen one interact well with the other primitives. Many people find that using a specific person can work better than an inanimate object, especially if it's heavily used, but that doesn't mean you have to do the same. Also, you don't have to stick to only one: you can mix them, as in using Spiderman/Spiderpig/Venom in some of your stories and thread in others if that helps you.

Just finished other half of the lesson tonight.
And I got almost perfect from the first half review today's morning, felt really good cuz I was kinda afraid of it hehe

Btw, what I really like on RTK is how characters like 機 or 懸 (and many many others that I already studied) looks easy now. Instead of Remembering the kanji the book should be named "How to not fear Kanji anymore" hehe

Finally got here! The last few lots have been an absolute breeze and almost fun thanks to Mr T - whoever came up with that is a genius. Also, my initial reviews on those cards were basically 100%, rather than a normal 70-80% I get from some dud stories I lazily didn't visualise. The hardest part for me was the slog through the hands/fingers kanji.

Most stubborn leech so far? 誕, nativity. Not going in!

For nativity, I'm using 'Upon Sleeping Beauty's nativity, words were spoken that foretold her prolonged sleep'...

Though nativity is almost only used for Christ's birth in modern day speech, I just couldn't make that work, but Sleeping Beauty worked like a charm.

(In general I find that fantastical stories work better than realistic ones, and use a lot of fairy tales and mythology, or even Tolkien or Harry Potter.)

Congratulations on half-way! I'm getting closer to that mark... upper half of the 900's anyway.

I had the exact same problem with nativity!

I just finished lesson 27
I started way back in January so I've averaged only about 100 a month!
I never had time with all my uni work going on, then I was always too tired or got distracted by other things.

This week I've started a new routine. Trying to get to bed at 21.30, waking up at 4.30, studying until 6 - 6.30 and then heading to work. It works surprisingly well. The sole reason I get up is to study and thus it gets done.

I'm currently sitting on 1085 flashcards so managed to hit half way last week. :-)

I've been studying since January so it was a releif to get this far, although I'm not taking a break because I'm on a roll now and am aiming to be done by the end of the year. I only started SRSing in May/June though so expect I'd be a lot further if I'd discovered the technique sooner.

Reading the posts above... not looking forward to spiderman >.< I'll be extra thoughtful when I get to that one...

gegenki Wrote:This week I've started a new routine. Trying to get to bed at 21.30, waking up at 4.30, studying until 6 - 6.30 and then heading to work. It works surprisingly well. The sole reason I get up is to study and thus it gets done.

I've been doing something similar (getting up at 0600, I'm not insane enough to get up at 0430). I find disturbing flatmates are a lot less disturbing at 0600 . The biggest problem is getting to bed before 2200 frequently enough not to get stupidly tired as the week progresses.

I've recently reached the half-way mark or so (1,072) which was a good accomplishment. I started studying around late August or so, and just stick to 30 a day. I tried 60 but that became overwhelming trying to juggle the kanji around. Now its a matter of reptition and getting stories in. Hoping to reach another benchmark soon!

Whooo finally halfway! I did 54 kanji today just so I could post here and get to the half-way point before the weekend ends (I normally do 10 or 20 depending on the day). I'm using the older edition of the book....so I guess I'll still have to add some kanji after finishing RTK, but that's OK.

This was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be. It mostly just takes persistence and consistency. But that takes some willpower, and that's the difficult part :-). I don't really remember when I started. After hitting around 300 kanji I was bad and didn't do anything for months. But then I started up again a couple months ago and have only missed a few days here and there.

Congrats to everyone else who has made it this far. Good luck to people who are starting! You'll get here sooner than you think.

Here's to another 1021 kanji! Soon I'll be able to post in the "finished" thread :-D.