I have 1048 cards total. I got lazy and stopped doing it for a month or so, and ended up with over 700 expired cards. I finally buckled down and cleaned them up but failed about half of them in the process (many of which were already in boxes 4 and 5). I've almost caught up, and I have about 80 cards in my failed, "study" box.

I'm reeaaaaaallly lacking the motivation to get my wheels turning again after such a big setback. Anybody have any words of inspiration? Would really appreciate it.

terebijoke Wrote:I have 1048 cards total. I got lazy and stopped doing it for a month or so, and ended up with over 700 expired cards. I finally buckled down and cleaned them up but failed about half of them in the process (many of which were already in boxes 4 and 5). I've almost caught up, and I have about 80 cards in my failed, "study" box.

I'm reeaaaaaallly lacking the motivation to get my wheels turning again after such a big setback. Anybody have any words of inspiration? Would really appreciate it.

I didn't get as far as you, I had gotten up to about 600 when I stopped and left it for several years. I started back up again from scratch about a week and a half ago and I'm back up to 150. The motivation was really lacking at first but I've found that as long as I do a little each day the motivation gets stronger.

But look at it this way, I quit for about 2 years. If I had just found the time and motivation to do TWO kanjis per day I would be done right now instead of starting all over. The time is going to pass anyway, just do at least a few a day, even just 1 if you're having a crappy day. 1 per day is 365 at the end of the year. 0 per day is still 0 at the end of the year. Just do something.

Just hit 1000! Sure, it's not *exactly* midway, but it still feels pretty damn good all the same. I've been doing 20 a day for the past 2 months, (with a few breaks at the beginning slowing me down) ... which means I'm in for another 2 months + of study, I guess. Ah well. On the bright side ... I HIT THE (sort of) MIDDLE POINT! FULL SPEED AHEAD!

Finally passed the halfway mark! It's taking me longer than expected (I started in mid-December and originally wanted to finish it in 3 months), but anyway I'm happy with my progress and pace. Let's see if I can finish it by mid-April/early May.

Good job, guys! I finished RTK on february 20th there's no need to tell you it is great to be finished. You can recognize pretty much every kanji you come across in the wild and things just start to make more sense, especially if you are living in Japan. Keep going, the weather's really nice up here

YES! 1021!!! Now only 1021 more to go

It shocked me for a second when I opened this thread and noticed I have a post a few people up from here talking about how I was at 150.. wow, that was less than 4 weeks ago. I didn't realize how quick I was going through this.

Feels great. Of course the back of my mind is saying "yeah well, there's the supplement... and you don't really have all 1021 *mastered* yet... " but I'm ignoring all that.

I'm halfway through this book, period.

Hit the 1000 today Took me 4 weeks. Hoping to do another 1000 in 4 weeks but the orange pillars as well as highschool will start in a few days so... anyway, ill do my best. congrats to everyone who has made it 4-digit. Keep it up!

yay for me, I hit 1042 today! Only 1000 to go It took me 35 days.

This spring I'll be very busy but I hope to finish the rest by mid-May and start working on vocab and grammar. I have also ordered Genki, it's already on its way from Japan.

Good luck everyone, がんばって！

I hit the half way mark about 2 weeks back and right now, I'm at around 1500. So close to finishing it. After this, I'm not sure if I should go dive into the readings or do vocab.

I hit the half way mark at the end of last week. It took me around 40 days which is slower than I'd hoped but I did take 3 holiday's in that time (i'm on Spring break) so it's not all that bad considering.

I'm now up to around 1125 and will be aiming for 100 a day. I did try that once before and burned out after a day and had a terrible review the next day as a result but this time i'm breaking the workload up which has helped massively!

As another member on here suggested, i'm now doing around 30 reviews, then learning 10 or so new kanji, 30 reviews, 10 kanji and so on.

I noticed it took me much less time to get everything done, and I could do more kanji a day and finish much earlier in the day which left me eager to study even more.

Granted, I do have a lot of time off now from work so can afford to commit the time but I think that this system of timeboxing generally can work for anyone to get their productivity up.

I used to start reviews at around 1pm, finish around 3pm (I write out the kanji on paper for each card while reviewing) and that's usually around 250 or so cards. I purposely score cards lower to try to see the cards more frequently (I'm going to ween myself off doing that too as otherwise the cards per day is going to be astronomical).

Then after around 30 minutes or so i'd get to work on studying new kanji for the day. I'd usually be able to manage around 50 or so, but i'd be spreading them out for hours throughout the afternoon and evening - often finishing up at around 10pm. Not fun at all.

It took so long as I was taking so many breaks after getting burned out / bored / distracted.

Today, I started at 1pm and finished at around 6pm - which included a 30 minute or so proper break and a couple of 10 minute tea breaks. I found the other breaks I was taking between reviews and learning were just being substituted with switching tasks, so my time was much more efficient and instead of 50 kanji, I went up to 100!

I'll see how I get on again tomorrow but I feel genuinely confident I can maintain this rate as this time around I don't feel burned out at all as I could finish so early in the day. Also especially as I am so eager to finish the book and get onto sentences.

Just an update to my previous method.

So, on the 2nd I posted and said that using the tweak to my study I managed 100 kanji. I managed to keep up the same pace on the 3rd too and yesterday I managed 90 (could have hit the 100 but had a few other commitments on which meant that I was unable to study for as long).

It's an absolutely wonderful feeling to see the progress going so rapidly although the downside is that I woke up this morning and have 457 reviews due in my deck. I'm not really worried about that too much because I will just do around 40 reviews or so and then learn 10 cards to make sure that it's not taking as much time. Coupled with the fact that I won't be studying any new cards after another 7 days - I don't mind having huge rep counts for a week or so because after then I can focus on just getting that number down to a more manageable count.

So if anyone was considering the slight change in study method, or not sure if it'd be maintainable, it is! The point isn't to find a way to do 100 a day, it's just a way to find the maximum number of new kanji you can learn within the same space of time you were devoting to study anyway.

I'm up to around 1300 now, hoping to finish RtK1 by the end of next week - so off to study for the day

Good luck!

19 days, 1050 kanji and finally, finally I'm half way there, and on my first try to boot. But my main concern now is to just stick with it and get through with it while maintain a good retention rate of above 80%, lol right now I'm at 79.4% for new cards and 85% for young cards. I think this is pretty reasonable.

But honestly I never would have even made it this far if it wasn't for all the great stories various users have contributed onto this site(The titanic story especially made my heart clench). MR T this is for you too, with you there would have been no way, (well there would be, but it would have been much less fun
For anyone who is still getting to the half way point, just keep going day by day. get in as much as you can each day. What i usually did was i would wake up around 5am get in around 30-50 in about until 6:30am, on weekdays. Go to school(while in school i studied random kanji that i felt like studying but it wasn't for official review) sometimes, then come back and review those new cards and my regular reviews. On weekends that's when I went crazy with kanji usually doing above 60-70+.

On a final note good luck to those who are still climbing the climb, and I hope to see you all in the at the finish line

Just broke 1000! This feels like such an accomplishment for me hitting that mark after all my failed attempts!! Definitely the farthest I've gotten.

I had to change my study habits during the 900 block, about a week ago. I started to fail at least 50% of my cards, which meant something was terribly wrong. turns out I was doing what I told myself I wouldn't do, and that's rush, rush RUSH! I've been pressed to keep up this "at least 50 cards/day" goal, even if it meant to just look at the kanji, think of a story and expect to memorize it somehow. Totally doesn't work. For the past week I've been adding about 10 new cards while through the rest of my reviews I've been re-learning the ones I'm failing. A trick that helps me is to write down the stories now. For whatever reason, it slows me down mentally enough to really let my imagination work and retain the story. Now I'm back up to 90% pass rate, and ready for the second part of battle! Best of luck, all!

And halfway there as well! Second attempt, I admit, but having good hopes that making some changes to my study strategies will pay off, especially if I remain patient.

I think I posted here a while ago, but since then I had a break at around 1044, because I was just lazy with reviews. They piled up to about 900, and that just seemed daunting, until I realised that most of those were cards that I'd already reviewed several times, and knew really well. The trick is to review the easy ones first, metaphorically kick them out the window... (Anki can be set to show you cards with the largest interval first; the maturest cards) Once that's done, it's just a matter of refreshing the few mature cards that you forgot, and semi-relearning the old new cards. I say semi, because by that time I seemed to have internalised so many more kanji than I had previously thought, it was easy to burn through the 900 in 2 days. Now I'm refreshed and raring to go, and just hit 1183 Looking forward to the three-quarter mark!

Tl;dr: No matter how many the reviews you've built up, it's always far easier to burn through them than you think, so long as you do the easy ones first. Good luck peoples!

at 1154 now, so 54 over halfway through 6th edition. hooray! keep feeling like i'm punching through a brick wall, but doing at least one a day really does lead to doing at least another, which is just dandy candy.

A bit late since I didn't come to the forums until I actually needed something from it (), but 1250! And still enjoying (almost) every day of it!

Lesson 27 finished; 1026 kanji done and the seesaw finally tips over with less than half of the book left!

Congratulations and good luck to everyone else who made it here!

Well, I'm at 1,050 kanji now, after a month and 2 days!

My first few weeks weren't too painful, but now I've got myself on a very strict 50 kanji per day diet, and now I feel like there's NO stopping me!! If I continue on at this steady pace, I'll be done just as July begins. And that's not far off at all, so I'm really encouraged.

I don't know how many other people do this, but I've been doing both kanji->keyword and keyword->kanji SRS reviews (the first on Surusu, the second on this site) and I feel like that's really helping me cement the newer kanji into my brain. Double the reps is kind of a drag, but hey... I think I'll drop the kanji->keyword reps once I start digging around in actual Japanese, since that'll do the job of reinforcing recognition.

Anyways, congrats and good luck everyone!!

zurisu Wrote:I don't know how many other people do this, but I've been doing both kanji->keyword and keyword->kanji SRS reviews (the first on Surusu, the second on this site) and I feel like that's really helping me cement the newer kanji into my brain. Double the reps is kind of a drag, but hey... I think I'll drop the kanji->keyword reps once I start digging around in actual Japanese, since that'll do the job of reinforcing recognition.

I did both, and it's fine. It does help you remember them better. Reports of the world ending for drilling kanji to keyword on this forum are greatly exaggerated. Stopping when you start learning real words is a good idea, though.

wow, made it to 1,100 yesterday. I posted on here back in March that I made it to 500. I burned out shortly afterwards and then started back up three weeks ago. What I found encouraging was that I remembered almost all of the first 500+ very well after only a little bit of review.

I'm taking a week off of adding new cards to go through Heisig's "Remembering the Kana" and to just review what I've learned.

It does feel great to go through a newspaper w/ my wife and be able to pick out kanjis. I realize you don't get the "true" meaning of them with RTK, but I'm still able to get the just of quite a few sentences.

Hi, I'm officially half way!! Three years ago, when I was first enrolled in a J'ese language course, I came across Heisig's books in a bookstore and just knew that the rote repetition method of learning kanji in the traditional course was never going to work for me. I bought Vols. 1 & 2 - and was thrilled when my husband brought home the flashcards from an overseas trip (I didn't know about this website...).

I wholeheartedly believed in the Heisig system - and yet I attempted it three times without getting beyond about 500 kanji.

I equate my failed attempts to being on a diet: "I know this method will work - why can't I stick to it?" It was like the deprivation-binge thing that accompanies diets - if you deprive yourself of something you want, you'll eventually give in and often binge on it. Likewise, by just doing RtK where all the input is (in my case) in English, I'd start to think, "This is taking too long, I've got to get back to Japanese vocab, grammar, etc." (I felt so much pressure from other people assuming I could "speak Japanese by now", who weren't at all interested in my desire to read and write it - but that's another topic...)

So I knew the ideal way to do RtK was to do it quickly, but once I got to Pt Two and had to make up my own stories, I'd close my eyes for a few moments to try to imagine something - and I'd just want to go to sleep! (Embarrassing, I know...).

When I came across this website I developed another reason for taking too long - and that was getting caught up in reading the forum posts!! They are fascinating, and I could spend (have spent!) hours, days, weeks of my life reading about RtK - and not actually studying it myself...

A few months ago I finally made RtK a PRIORITY in my life - and that has made all the difference. Your stories have helped enormously - keeping me awake because they're so funny, and inspiring me to make up some of my own. Now, time spent on reading the forum posts comes as a reward for small goals achieved along the way.

Completing RtK 1 will remain a priority for me until I hit that 2136 mark - by Xmas 2012 - or sooner, if I can manage it - and in the New Year I'll start on Vol. 2!

Congrats scarby dancer and others! I'm in a similar situation. I've taken way too many breaks and should have finished a long time ago! Let's push forward towards the end. Hopefully we'll be posting in the 3/4 done post soon :-).

I just hit halfway a little while ago, and I'm really excited about it!
I'd been kind of lackadaisical about reviews, etc. when I first started RTK, but when I got more dedicated about keeping up my comprehension increased a lot. I was hoping to finish RTK 1 by the time my next semester of school started, but it doesn't look like that will happen so I'll just try to get as far as I can.

Finally hit the halfway mark. Now that I've started seeing more everyday-use kanji, I'm beginning to appreciate RTK a lot more. Congratulations to everyone before me, and to everyone who will come afterwards.