Gz, last poster!

Yeah me 2 !!!!, Finally finished it, I feel like a 賓 now.  I have to thank destiny for bringing me to this site , because without it I would still be at the 200 mark and remember only 50.

Ok, deep breath ,  deep breath,  time to start RTK3 ( I keep finding kanji that I don't know , but are located in rtk 3).

And for those still trying hard on RTK1, がんばれ！！！！！

I just finished too. WOW. I just finished all my reviews now. Of course I will continue reviewing, but i am so excited that i finished this small step in learning Japanese.

This site has helped me so much in thinking of stories, and creating motivation for me. Thank you everyone.

I just finished the last lession of RtK1 and it took me 3 months to go through the whole book. Just can't describe how happy I'm now, wow. Working the kanji with Heisig's method has been one one the best decisions I've made in my life. Just three months ago I was a complete beginner in Japanese and the kanji and I could have never thought I could get this good in such a short time.

I really want to thank this site and all the people who contribute to it. Without your help I would still have many more months to go. I will still be reviewing here and go through RtK3 later.

Thanks to you all!

やった！
Took me 101 days!  Hopefully by the end of the month I'll have box 4 90% full...

Thanks to all of you, but especially:
... fuaburisu for the wonderful site
... dingomick, Nukemarine, and bodhisamaya deserve special mention for their great stories
... Katsuo for pointing out when and where combinations show up later, so we can make primitives out of them ahead of time

... everyone for their great attitude!

Last edited by joxn_costello (2009 February 09, 9:17 pm)

Good job guys.  Now snake巳 around the corner.  But don't stop to spoon this here 此 kanji.  You have a mandate 掟 to reach 3007. Only 20 a day and you can have them all in 7 weeks!

Finally finished! Just over 2.5 months.

Had been studying Japanese for a year before I got round to starting RKT1 and I really, really wished I had done it at the beginning. Oh well, that's it done now. Got a rather large pile of fail to get rid of over the next few days.

Thanks to everyone whos stories I stole, pilfered and pillaged. I hope the ones I created can be used to help others. Thanks Fab for the site, tis brill.

WHOOOEY

Man that took a long time.  2042 today.  Old snakey pants.

I thought about what I was going to write for this thread actually, but I am so kanji'd out atm that I don't know what to say.  This took me about 9 months, much longer than I wanted it to.  I kept up with reviews pretty well except for a month long lapse before moving to Japan, and I learned how much a lapse will hurt!

My methods are pretty simple - didn't use the site after the first 100 kanji because I wanted to be able to review anywhere, anytime.  At first I used mnemosyne on an Asus Eeepc, and then I switched to Anki because it has the web and keitai interface and a better algorithm for short term memory than this site or mnemosyne, in my opinion.  Having things down to the hour saves a lot of unnecessary work with practicing.  I really love what resolve is doing - he is ultra hot right now...

EXCEPT - where would I be without ファブリス and this amazing, amazing resource - man, having the stories just made the whole process go so much faster, and reading the forums and stuff really kept my motivation up and gave me a break from studying.  I will use this site for new kanji in the future.  Also, major kudos for the site design - I always think about how damn attractive those flashcards look here.  Nice work, you are a genius to me!  I am happy to see so many people serious about studying one of the best languages in the world, and we have better tools now than anyone who came before us - let's make the most of it and keep going! 

Cheers to us!  Now, finally, on to reading my piles of manga I bought from Book Off and AJATT sentence collection and environment.

km

Omedetou!  Great job!  Enjoy the light but don't forget your reviews Reading the posts from people finishing is a great inspiration as I continue to slog through.

I finally finished RTH1 today! Taking into account that there were a few stretches of 4-5 days that I did not do any cards (review or add new ones), I finished in about 6 weeks. I now need to keep going with another character list since volume 2 is not out yet and probably won't be for a while. I need to get to 3000 hanzi (at least), so I need 1500 more! Rick Harbaugh's dictionary should come in handy.

I found that I was able to blaze through the last 400 or so with ease. I am amazed at how well I have trained myself to come up with extremely vivid scenes and imagery. I usually learned around 30-50 characters per day (though I learned ~80-100 a few days and 109 the day before finishing). I now find it plausible to go for 100 per day since the imagery comes somewhat naturally.

Thank you Heisig and Richardson for such a valuable learning tool. I can't wait to add volume 2 to my collection for the complete set!

Last edited by Tak47 (2009 March 03, 10:06 pm)

Those of you who finished: Any lessons learned for those of us still working our way through it? What did you wish you had done from the beginning? What worked really well/poorly for you? Any tips on overcoming particularly difficult problems?

ThomasJ02 wrote:

Those of you who finished: Any lessons learned for those of us still working our way through it? What did you wish you had done from the beginning? What worked really well/poorly for you? Any tips on overcoming particularly difficult problems?

Rely more on visual, more of characters. Stuff like thinking about spiderman instead of thread. If you can think of a good character which still keeps some form of connection to the actual meaning of the character, it will become much easier to create memorable stories.

joxn_costello wrote:

Today I just passed the "90% in box 4" mark, which is my criterion for "done with RTK1".  Naturally, reviews will always be ongoing, but hopefully I can stay in a steady state with box 4 always > 90% full.  My reviews are consistently coming in 92% - 96% remembered, so I feel good about the prospects.

Congratulations Joxn. That too was my criteria. Took me two months past the time I added the last story to RevTK.

So what's your next milestone for Japanese?

Thanks, Nukemarine.  My next milestone is to finish the iKnow Core 2000 and 6000.  I'm finding that a lot of the native Japanese vocabulary is review, but the kanji compounds are almost all new and actually quite challenging.  And somewhere along the line I'm going to come back and do RTK3... once I've managed to dig my copy out of storage.