1009!

2nd run through of RTK made it to midpoint again

Reached 1126 today !!!

passed Kanji 1100 yesterday. I am doing kanji to keyword as well at the same time, so essentially double the reviews as you would have normally, but I find that they stick better in my mind if I do both ways. Hope to keep this up and see you all at the ¾ mark in about a month!

Rivvie Wrote:passed Kanji 1100 yesterday. I am doing kanji to keyword as well at the same time, so essentially double the reviews as you would have normally, but I find that they stick better in my mind if I do both ways. Hope to keep this up and see you all at the ¾ mark in about a month!

Agreed. I also found doing both ways helped me to remember the kanji.

Whooooo...just reached the half way point today. I'm feeling pretty good about it. There are good days and bad but I'm excited about the downhill journey. I'll just float on down from the umbrella that Heisig conveniently placed at the end of that middle chapter.

Keep going all of you that are just reaching the half way point! We got this!

clinttw7 Wrote:Whooooo...just reached the half way point today. I'm feeling pretty good about it. There are good days and bad but I'm excited about the downhill journey. I'll just float on down from the umbrella that Heisig conveniently placed at the end of that middle chapter.

Keep going all of you that are just reaching the half way point! We got this!

Let us know how it's going when you get to 1,500. I found that starting at 1,500 I really had to push myself to finish. Near the end, desperate to finally be finished, I was spending all my free time just to get through the last 200.

I still remember the moment I finished "sign of the snake". For some reason I was thinking of the song Swamp Thing by The Grid. Now whenever I play that song it reminds me of doing RTK1.

Just hit the half-way mark in RTK1 today. I'm officially doing this pass as an "RTK-Lite" pass, but I'm still studying every character along the way; the difference is that I'm only activating the "RTK-Lite" cards Anki for now. Hopefully most of the non-lite characters are still fairly fresh in my mind when I go back later for the second wave.

At 1199 as of today. (Didn't find this thread until just now). At a rate of 25 per day, hope to be nearing the end in the next couple of months.

And here I am, one month and 500 Kanjis later.
Nothing really too hard so far, even the 100+ Kanji Lesson wasn't that bad.

I suppose now comes the point where it gets hard though, so I'll see if I can reach 1.500, I definitely hope I will.

I'm on 1000 yayyyy as long as I adhere (giggle) to my studying I will make it!!!!!

1015!

As employed, married man I am happy to do scant 100 kanji per week. And as I expect that it becomes harder and harder I will be happy with 50 kanjis per week. So .. 5 months to go? I hope I will be able to endure till the end.

Anyway, gratz anyone who got here!

Yay! Reached 1100 mark today.

Sitting on rotten umbrella while meditating, to celebrate the graduation... bah! Must say there are few crazy kanji around the 1100 mark. Looks like bad portent to me. :p

Reached 50% last week but didn't know this post existed. Good luck everyone!

Going at a bit slower pace than I intended, but I'm at half way! Definitely feeling the benefits now. Hopefully I can pick it up and finish in the next couple of months!

Reached 1,100 today. Whew.

Some things I learned along the way: as Heisig suggests, it's better to spend the extra time making stories vivid. It's also much more fun that way than trying to speed through learning and reviewing the characters. Whenever possible, it's also better to make the primitives concrete. If I had to do it again, instead of using "word" or "saying" I might visualize a spoken word poet on stage.

Looking forward to continued progress, and good luck to everyone on finishing RTK1.

Hit 1,100 Kanji today!

I've tried this a few times without success. So I will note what seems to be working and what seems to be causing issues for me. Your experience will be different.

==> Two key success factors:

* Consistently studying, every-single-day.
* Separating the memorization & the reviewing processes.

==> A few observations:

* 40 new kanji per day seems about right for me. I can memorize a lot more on a given day, maybe a few hundred. However, even a small increase in the new Kanji caused the failure rates for the following days' reviews to skyrocket. Those tough days were demotivating. They also knocked the consistent rhythm for a loop.

* I try to to study in the morning as I think my memory is best then. Surprisingly, my Correct % is about the same throughout the day, according to Anki. I sense that I can absorb more new information (and faster) during the morning. Perhaps reviewing older information is less dependent on the time of the day; maybe not.

* Learning and young correct rates were about 86% and 76%, respectively. I would like to bump up that second number. Just doing the same number of cards every single day makes a difference. Also actively emphasizing the visual memory imaginative memory helps. "Mr. T" as the proxy for "person" is incredibly helpful - he really helps kanji stick to the memory.

* My study tools are the physical Heisig book, the Koohii site, and Anki (Heisig RTK 6th with stories deck).

* For most every Kanji, I review the stories on the Koohii site to get a feel for potential stories. The collection of stories here is a staggeringly good resource. I rarely make up my own stories from scratch.

* I have practiced writing Kanji with pencil in class, so my penmanship and stroke order is OK. For the RTK reviews, I write every kanji with my finger on the desk, every time.

* Anki is rather complex and non-intuitive. Unless one has a burning desire to learn how to use Anki, I think it makes more sense to use the flashcards on the koohii site.

* I really liked using physical flashcards. They are fantastic for NEW words...but my vocabulary piles got too big and unwieldy. Reviewing a few hundred cards by green-yellow-red piles is easy. Keeping a few thousand cards organized for review is a nightmare... So I killed the physical cards for RTK. For learning new vocabulary in the future, I still want to use flashcards, but writing the cards, then inputting the info into Anki for long-term review is so inefficient...

Anyways, I hope some find these observations useful. Good luck!

Half Way Day… although, is one ever done?

To celebrate, I made a donation to the site and I encourage everyone to give what they can.

My tools: Heisig, Kanji Koohii, Anki, and daily routine (morning reviews, evening additions).

I am only doing 13 / day but it's all I can handle.

derosier Wrote:Half Way Day… although, is one ever done?

To celebrate, I made a donation to the site and I encourage everyone to give what they can.

My tools: Heisig, Kanji Koohii, Anki, and daily routine (morning reviews, evening additions).

I am only doing 13 / day but it's all I can handle.

Yes, it certainly is possible to finish the RTK1 book, as I and many others have done. Note: you won't know how it feels to finish it, until after you've finished it! (cf. Shakespeare, LLL, III, i).

Whoo~! Hit the halfway mark today! 1026/2042 :3
Now that I'm doing ~150 retest and the same amount of restudy kanji per-day, my days are filled with mostly just Kanji now X3 Especially since all my rates are around 50%, new, old, and restudied.

Chipping away at one lesson/day, regardless of its length, with everything broken down into groups of 20.
Been trying out different schedules to see what works the best in the long term.
The biggest problems so far are:
-I can remember the stories for the kanji, but can't get the primitives right for the life of me.
-With so many similar kanji, it's getting incredibly difficult to tell them apart.
-My mind gets confuddled with words that usually trail off to different thoughts, or words I already heavily relate to other things, such as Formerly, where my mind automatically goes to "The villain formerly known as...!" for some strange reason, and other such examples.
-With such a reasonably low success/retention rate, it's incredibly demotivating when I hit a string of Kanji I just can't remember for the life of me, leading to even longer strings of failures.
-My internet becomes unusable at random for over half the day, limiting my ability to study
-The dang noise everywhere around me makes it nigh-impossible to make strong stories, especially since my memory's pretty darn bad as-is, and I've not really used imaginative memory before this!

So, 28 more days/lessons to go, assuming I stay on-track! Hope to see y'all in 11 days in the 3/4ths thread~<3

john555 Wrote:Yes, it certainly is possible to finish the RTK1 book, as I and many others have done. Note: you won't know how it feels to finish it, until after you've finished it! (cf. Shakespeare, LLL, III, i).

Yes, I can see it is possible to finish the book (and I am looking forward to joining the club). What I meant to say (or imply) was that I think I'll be Anki'ing forever, even if I'm not adding 13 new kanji every day. So I figure I won't ever be 'done;' I will have just moved on to another phase.

If I may ask, what do your Japanese studies include these days?

Sweet woot!

I posted in the 500 and counting thread on April 8th. Three weeks later I made it here. So maybe in 6 weeks I'll be done? Maybe sooner? One of my struggles the past few weeks was that I was using a lot of Heisig's stories in the beginning the first time I did this and as a consequence, had forgotten everything.

Now all the stories I'm using are already inputted into both the magic white binder of kanji hell and RTK's story database, so I'll save time having to type most of those until I hit 1500+ which is when I may have to start refining them again in case I've changed keywords on anything.

Now I say good bye to my favorite band, especially their drummer and all his crazy tattoos which got me through lesson 27, and march on through 28 and then 29- banners and flags. Always nice to mark a few more off the magic bookmark.

derosier Wrote:

john555 Wrote:Yes, it certainly is possible to finish the RTK1 book, as I and many others have done. Note: you won't know how it feels to finish it, until after you've finished it! (cf. Shakespeare, LLL, III, i).

Yes, I can see it is possible to finish the book (and I am looking forward to joining the club). What I meant to say (or imply) was that I think I'll be Anki'ing forever, even if I'm not adding 13 new kanji every day. So I figure I won't ever be 'done;' I will have just moved on to another phase.

If I may ask, what do your Japanese studies include these days?

I'm working my way through this reader. I'm half way through and it's perfect for my level. I've learned a lot of grammar points from it.

http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Reading-W...se+reading

I WAS working through this one, but I've put it aside for now because it's a bit too advanced for me:

http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Reader-Le...ese+reader

Yay! I just reached the 1026/2042 mark today!! Actually I find it a little bit discouraging that several months have passed and I still have to study the other half but I don't want to burnout, so I will keep going at a sustainable review pace.

EuPcsl Wrote:Actually I find it a little bit discouraging that several months have passed and I still have to study the other half but I don't want to burnout, so I will keep going at a sustainable review pace.

I think 'sustainable review pace' is one of the keys to success. Some days I have 100 reviews and that's about all I can handle!

I'm entering week 18 of 26, so I know what you mean by 'several months' and still having several more to go… Ignore the discouragement and, like my Japanese studies mentor would say…. Keep Swimming…

Good Luck!