FINALLY Finished RTK1 today! It look a bit longer than expected (178 days: avg. 11/day) but I did it. It's a great feeling, I've gotta admit. Here's my progress chart which I'd maintained daily on the total amount of kanji I'd covered. You can see I really pushed it towards the end, you can also see the points in time where I totally slacked off, i.e. the flat areas.

ｷﾀ━━━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━━━ !!!!!

Just under two rather intensive (and occasionally lazy) months of study later, I've completed RTK1. Huge thanks to the fantastic mnemonics and discussion on this site; I think I would have snapped under the pressure of Heisig's inane primitive names and errors otherwise - bless the man for this system, all the same!

Unfortunately, I've been slacking especially hard lately on my Anki reps, so I figure I'll take a week or two to get through those and try and transfer a chunk of those unreviewed kanji into longer term memory before moving on to the next phase of sentence-mania. Regardless, I'll certainly continue to lurk around these parts. Thanks again, everyone, and congrats to all the rest of you RTK1 graduates.

dhanyavaada wrote:

Maybe I am so slow because I enjoy this learning method so much, fearing that it will once end ... I seem to be more interested in the path than in the result.

Taking your time is fine, but don't worry about running out after 800 characters under your belt (nice accomplishment, BTW!) - the real path doesn't end with RtK.

According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanzi

2,928 人名用漢字
6,335 JIS X 0208:1997, the most recent version of the main standard
85,568 Hanzi Zhonghua Zihai Dictionary (Chinese)

That's if you are only interested in Kanji.  If you want to learn real Japanese vocabulary (熟語), I'm sure there are tens of thousands of those to learn.

Also, note that it may seem odd to add the Chinese Hanzi there, but in actuality, it's perfectly legal to "coin" new Japanese words by using Hanzi.  You will see it done in popular literature from time to time, but I'm sure you can ask a Japanese scholar how it can be done in a systematic way.

I sometimes jest about how mixed up Japanese can be, but it's often just a consequence of how flexible Japanese can be at absorbing foreign words.

In short, it would be pretty hard to "run out" of characters, so don't worry about reaching the end of the road until you get into the deep thousands or tens of thousands of characters...

One other short note: if you find that you enjoy studying Kanji more than actually learning Japanese, then consider learning Mandarin...  ...knowing characters is a much larger part of learning Chinese (in comparison to Japanese), and Chinese readings are much more systematic (monosyllabic) and cleaner (usually just one reading) than Japanese.

Last edited by kfmfe04 (2008 November 07, 1:27 pm)

dhanyavaada wrote:

You are right. Thanks for the encouragement! Unfortunately, I do not know of any extension of Heisig's method to Chinese. I don't feel competent for elaborating an appropriate set of primitives.

Remembering the Hanzi Book 1 Traditional and Book 1 Simplified by Heisig are out and shipping.  Having said that, if you finish RTK1 first, RTH becomes easier.

Good luck.

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=2153

(Sorry - didn't mean to hijack this thread - let's move these discussions elsewhere if you want to continue)

Last edited by kfmfe04 (2008 November 08, 3:43 pm)

Congratulations all!
@TheSpartan: It will never end, there is always more to learn. But... the road to fluency is a big part of the fun! The sense of making progress with 'real Japanese' while going through KO2001 is a strong motivator!

Well done.

Gratz!!!  3 Months is quick, but I see you've done your massive reviews.

Shirow66 wrote:

Now on to the hard part.. learning katakana.. ARGH! The people who made up katakana should be dug up and kicked in the balls.

Just wait and see how they use them:

ブラピ for Brad Pitt
フォーム for platform
ダイヤ for diamond, behind schedule (don't ask me!), trouble (as in dire)
ソフト for ice cream cone, but also for software
パソコン for computers (for which I always mis-type as パスコン)

...but they're actually more fun than the Chinese system for foreign words - now >that's< fugly.  Having no equivalent of Katakana, someone (I don't know who coins them) arbitrarily picks Hanzi with sounds that VERY vaguely resembles the foreign word, and everyone uses it.  It's friggin nasty...  ...makes you wish the Chinese had their own Katakana!

sweetneet wrote:

I CAN'T BELIEVE I'VE *FINALLY* FINISHED THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!! Just got thru reviewing 2,042 just now! WOOO! Wow, I almost feel more satisfied/accomplished now than when I turned in my (master's) thesis about 3 years ago.... :-)

Anyway, what can I say..it did take me a long time to go through this book (a little less than 9 months) but that's only because I took ~1 month off (twice) due to other commitments like research (trying to finish up PhD thesis), teaching (currently I am a teaching assistant for a big course here at MIT) and planning my wedding. Oh well...9 months is pretty short, considering i have been studying Japanese for about 3 years now and had always struggled with the Kanji before discovering Heisig.

I guess the proof of how well the Heisig method works can be seen by how utterly shocked native Japanese people are when they see how well you can recall and write kanji that they might not even know how to write very well. (I recently met some native Japanese people who upon looking through my notebook that i use to practice kanji, pointed to the character for "vine" and said it was a rather rare kanji that even they hadn't been tought in school, and were a bit unsure of its meaning!) They were really, really amazed that I had learned how to write all jouyou kanji in just 9 months, and commented how it takes native Japanese ~8 years or more to learn pretty much the same number of kanji in the traditional way!! The shock isn't just felt by the Japanese though...other American students trying to learn Japanese are also quite taken aback when they casually ask me "So, how many kanji do you know?" and I'm like "Well, pretty much all of the general-use kanji, which is about 2,000." That usually results in a wide-eyed response, like "Really?? How long did that take?? 5 years??" At this point I don't know whether to let them think I'm some sort of genius with a photographic memory (clearly not!) than explain to them about the Heisig method...

Anyways, I always looked forward to the day when I'd get to 2,042 and could say I finished this book! This is a major milestone!! Go me!!

Wow, i just found this old post of mine from almost exactly 2 years ago. Sadly, shortly after I finished RTK1 i fell off the kanji bandwagon. After taking (and failing) the JLPT Level 2 in Dec 2006, it was hard for me to get back into studying Japanese...i had my PhD thesis to finish. After defending my thesis and graduating in June 2007, I thot i would have more time for Japanese study but then became preoccupied with other things; in July 2007 I moved from Boston to Los Angeles for a job, and in October 2007 I got married. After my wedding I tried getting back into studying the Kanji, especially since I had a Japanese boss at the time and he was always amazed at how much kanji i knew (i hadn't forgotten it all by that point!). But then in Jan 2008 i moved to a different group and my Japanese *really* fell by the wayside. In April 2008 I finally got back into studying the kanji through this site, motivated by the purchase of a gorgeous Hermes leather notebook (i justified the purchase of a $200 designer notebook by telling myself i would use it for Kanji review ). However even still my reviews were far and in between, especially after my husband and I were dealing with the purchase of our first house. we ended up moving to the Dallas area in late August 2008, and since then I've been unemployed because I have been unable to find a job here. However, in some way i have taken it to be a blessing in disguise because now i finally have some time to catch up with things i've always wanted to do, like studying kanji! about 6 weeks ago I started getting serious about reviewing kanji, and now i only have about 900 expired kanji (i started out with all 2000 of them expired a few months back!)

anyway, sorry for rambling. i just want to note that once u complete RTK1 it is *really* important to stick with it and continue reviewing, because otherwise it is really easy to forget it all so quickly. i found that it was *really* hard to get back into it when you haven't been reviewing in a while.

Just finished 2 minutes ago! I've been at it on and off since 5-10-2007 and FINALLY finished. Now to continue with my review & start concentrating on readings and sentences in ANKI. Since I'm not that creative, thanks to EVERYONE that has posted a story on this site that may have helped me along the way! がんばります！

Herbo wrote:

6 weeks with 6 weeks break in the middle due to a motherboard failure and I'm done... only to see that I have done only 99.99% of the jouyou. Heartbreaking. Ill have to chase up that other one now.

So there's a 常用 not in Heisig? Out of curiosity, which is it? Is it the very old version of fear that was only a jouyou because it was in some obscure political document?

playadom wrote:

So there's a 常用 not in Heisig? Out of curiosity, which is it? Is it the very old version of fear that was only a jouyou because it was in some obscure political document?

It's 璽. I don't know why it was left out though, it's no more unique or weird than 暇 離 or 飛.

Another reviewer just crossing the RtK finishline here. Its been quite a journey, I can tell you. From the very first moment I came across Remembering The Kanji about four months ago, I knew it was definitely a good resource. However, I never imagined it could take me all the way to 2042 with such high retension and virtually no reliance on visual memory. I only wish that I had found this site sooner! I didn't even know what a srs was when I started, and thus had the great idea of working my way through all the kanji at once.. making 2042 flashcards with absolutely NO review. The plan was to get my stories over with to refer back to, and reinforce their memory by seeing them in context. When I finished this horribly grudging task, all I had to show for it was 2042 mediocre stories, and a retension of maybe 400 of them. So, while working my way through my first set of reviews, I decided that it wasnt going to work, and began to look online for any sort of tool to help... Of course, when I found this site I was excited, but reasonably cynical. They have a nice setup.. but I just knew the next line would be something like "all yours for ONLY 5.99$ per month!!". Needless to say, that never came, and when I found out it was free, I signed up in an instant. I am sure today that I never would have made it without the site. Heisig's system is great and all.. but there is definitely such thing as a "good" and a "bad" story and without help (and none from Heisig's odd primitives and keywords either), you will likely end up with a whole lot of the latter like I did. But two months and a whole lot of srs'ing later and here I am. At the finish line once again, yet this time feeling like I might be able to recognise a few more than those of the first few lessons. So thank you everyone here for your great stories and encouragement. And to all those people who are still working their way through: Good luck and hang in there! If you keep a regular schedule you will be here in no time. Now for me, the fun has only begun. Once I get most of the stragglers up into deck 4, its onwards and upwards into sentence mining! (and hopefully knowing more the handful of phrases that I do now hehe)

Added #2042 to Anki today, and feeling good.