Hi there RTK Warriors!! I just wanted to say this:

I've arrived here... twice. Freaking TWICE. 3030 kanji all over again, but this time around under four months.

I want to ask you only one thing:

NEVER - STOP - REVIEWING

If for some reason you have to put on hold your Japanese project, if for some reason you just can't immerse yourself enough in the language, or learn vocabulary, or practice with sentences, or whatever Japanese related... keep reviewing the kanji and kana on your SRS anyways. Keep reviewing even if you don't clear all pending cards each day. Keep reviewing even if you can only do it for 20 or 15 minutes a day and even if you can't clear all your cards by the time limit.

Take a little bit of time each day to review. Make it the first thing you do when you fire up your computer, even before checking email, Facebook or whatever. And if you miss a day, whatever, just review the next day and keep doing it.

Why? So once you decide to re-start your Japanese project you can get started on immersion, vocabulary and sentences (and maybe grammar is that's your thing) right away. So you don't have to spend from 3 to 6 months or a year getting through all of RTK all over again. So you start your Japanese game from your kanji Save File instead of having to hit New Game

That's it. Don't make the same dumb mistake that I made. Use your SRS, and your future self will be forever grateful. And now I'm off to finally learn how to read in 日本語.

Muchas gracias a todos!!

NeoGlitch - well said! I totally agree with you. I made the same mistake and stopped reviewing one month after finishing RTK 1 and here I am starting again, after a one and a half year break. Had I reviewed just 10 minutes a day I would be rock solid by now.

But I am going at a steady rate of 100 a day and I'm at 900 today, so it will take just 12 more days, after which I will immediately start with RTK3 at a slower rate of maybe 20, depending on my review load.

Never ever will I make the same mistake again!

I just finished the full 3030 set this morning! RTK1 took me a little over two years with some very slow times in there (I think I went entire months without adding a single character to my Anki deck). I have no good justification for that except laziness and lack of structure.


Since I didn't want a repeat of that, I was far more focused with RTK3. I started on January 1st (and finished today, 200 days later). I even had a buddy start the same day in a friendly competition; he'll be posting here soon. My rule was one character every day. More than that, great, but if I didn't do at least one character I was hard on myself. I missed only one day due to simple oversight. But that stricture meant that I learned kanji at theme parks. And in conference talks. And on airplanes. And drunk.

The bulk of the book went by just fine. But man does the book get really hard at that "Miscellaneous Kanji" section. Being able to learn a bunch of kanji that use the same primitive together is a huge advantage. Miscellaneous Kanji deprives you of that advantage so it's just plain exhausting to get through.


I picked up about 50 stragglers along the way, too: 湘鐳茹楚叒蜀圜匊娄杰尞囮箒澤隕鼡禺罠來餃氣敖贅淒其戔殘孵叕矮炙雹呻疼珀蠅蜘蛛婁髑髏頷埃阡竏竓竰晄會枷躰. A lot of these were pointed out by RevTK folks in their stories as primitives that Heisig didn't point out, but also quite a few of them I just encountered in my reading. You can probably figure out some of the content I consume just by that list.

I think I'm done for a while. I will probably wrap up the 人名用 set next. Next year.

Congratulations Miyumera!  (I didn't realize you were so close to finishing.)  
I share your interest in calligraphy, but unfortunately couldn't find the time to keep taking lessons. Hopefully you can find a class or teacher near you. The Japan Foundation on Bloor might have some information.

I finished RTK 1 and 3 since starting in late April!

Do I get a cookie from anyone?

Finally, after almost 6 months, I have finished memorizing the kanji (all 3,030 RTK kanji plus 10 more I came across that weren't in RTK).

Welp. Now it's time for vocabulary, I guess.

Done. Today, I finished the third edition of RTK 3--taking me from 2,200 to 3,000 Kanji.

There seem to be a lot of people that do RTK 3 at the very beginning, but it was a little different for me. I actually finished RTK 1 back in June of last year, and immediately after started learning grammar. Four textbooks later, I decided to finally go through the book. I started late January, and finished earlier today.

Benefits? I feel like going through the book has done a lot for me. It helped reinforce a lot of Kanji that I learned before. It's also made me more aware of Kanji in general (I was surprised to see Kanji like 鞄 popping up--it's such a common word that I always thought I learned in in RTK 1!). Working through the new primitives and more complex Kanji in the book has also improved my writing ability.

Another thing I did while working through the book was adding vocabulary hints for each Kanji while creating the cards--inspired by Japanese LevelUp's articles on RTK. Example:

front: carefree - のん気、流ちょう
back: 暢

Doing this allowed me to see every Kanji I was learning in action right away. I think this was what made the difference between the book being a boring slog and genuinely interesting.

Now it's time to start looking forward. My immediate goal is to get ready for the upcoming Tadoku in March. This will basically be sentence mining to iron out some grammar that I still find troubling, while maintaining my daily internet reading requirement. When Tadoku comes, though, I have some raw manga on the shelf ready to come down and be read.

More towards long term goals, I'd also like to shift my focus towards vocabulary. If one considers the "divide and conquer" approach to be something like: kana -> kanji -> grammar -> vocabulary, then I'm approaching the last piece. My hope is that this will be the point where all of that knowledge "comes together" and the language starts to become more comprehensible.

Thank you to all of those that read this, and best of luck to all of the current and future learners out there.