I started on December 14th, 2008 and finished (TWO MINUTES AGO!!) on June 23rd, 2009.  A little more than sixth months.  I was shocked at home fast it was to start and how just a few delays adding new cards can add up months onto your total.  There is truth to "an object at..." Newton's laws.

Here's to all you married people going through Heisig.  (Huuaahh!!) I had her support all the way through and it was so tough, I can't imagine having an ambivalent spouse, but I'm sure that it does happen.  Keep plugging away and remember, even if you have to give up adding new study here and there get the reviews done every day and you'll always be able to pick it up where you left off!

blackmacros wrote:

Woooohoooooo! Congratulations! Celebration time!

Spot on.  And my first celebration, 25 due reviews.  It seems so.. fitting..

blackmacros wrote:

I, on the other hand, was repayed for my impatience with a review load in the 300's

ouch.  How do you find the time?  I'm not really sure how the graphs in anki work but I think my due date shows about 750 cards in box 4+.  So hopefully my reviews will stay manageable even though I rushed the last 600 rather hard.  Although I have a deal on no housework for the next 6 weeks just in case...

Last edited by welldone101 (2009 June 23, 9:47 am)

w00t here as well. Finished last night adding my final cards into Anki, with the total time from beginning to end being a little shy of four months. Josh (r3dragon above) was the one who introduced me to Heisig's approach and as he stated working in pairs was an excellent approach to staying motivated and sharing techniques/stories. Much thanks goes to this site, all of the story authors, ファブリス and of course Heisig's book.

After all these years, I finally found Kanji nirvana: 2042. Now, onto my plethora of Anki reviews.

Cheers,
Brian

Last edited by brianobush (2009 June 24, 3:45 pm)

Woo, just finished my last review of 'new' cards. This was probably my 3rd time trying to go through the book, one of which died out at around 1000, the 2nd at 1900ish (school starting back + a bit of travel = skipping out on reviews and falling too far behind), and finally now.

May 25th this year, I added the first 508 to do as part of a mass review (I still remembered at least that many w/ 95%+ accuracy), then downloaded sunbird and planned a schedule, working out to approximately 50 kanji/day, though realistically I tried to end things at new lessons so I'd have a fresh set of primitives to learn the next day. I lost a few days due to another short trip but made sure not to let it destroy my progress this time. Just over a month later.. success. Now I just have to clean up a bit in the failed pile and push everything to the last stacks.

Thank you to everyone that contributed stories, some of the ideas I got here were a major help. This would've been much harder without them.

wio_dude wrote:

I'd say it's worth doing the RTK 3 if you're one of those monsters than did RTK 1 in two months.  However, I've enjoyed just cherry picking kanji as I learn new words.  That's one thing I like about anki that you can't do with this site.

Hehe, I did it the first time around in 6 weeks, and then fell off my reviews a week later, for about 4 months i think? now I am back at it, 2 weeks in and I'm at 950 I am hoping to get through this time around in less than 6 weeks though I am on pace to do it in 4 if I push myself just a little harder.

Maybe I will do rtk3 then as well, only like 10/day and get done in 3 months? wow that will seem easy in comparison

I've just reviewed the final kanji in RTK 1, very happy about that. This is my third attempt and it's a great feeling that i've done it. The first time I got up to 700, second time to 1400 and now i've done it. Lots of reviews to do until things settle down and then i'll get going on reading something.

Thanks to all the people who put up the stories that I used and thanks to Fabrice for the site.

Finally did it, after more than a year of dillying around with the book, I finally entered frame 2042 into Anki yesterday and drank two 40s of malt liquor to congratulate myself haha.

Now, since I did admittedly rush through the last part of the book, its all about getting stories to stick and getting my reviews down. Just so happy that I don't have to add anything new for now!

I can't believe I finally finished, since joining this site on April 12 it's been almost exactly 3 months. Actually, I added Sign of the Snake about 2 weeks ago, but it took me until now to get all my cards thoroughly memorized and into Anki.  Anyways, without this website it would have taken me far, far longer to do this.  A few months back, when I had still only made it through a couple of chapters in the book, I actually started to write my own SRS software with a MySQL database backend and entered a couple of hundred stories into it. Then I kind of gave up for a couple of months since the overhead of writing the software or keeping a pile of paper flashcards seemed too daunting.  Eventually, I figured, surely there must be something better. And I stumbled upon this website in early April, and found out about Anki from this very forum.

So a HUGE thank you to ファブリス for putting together this incredible resource. I'm sure that a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into it. And thanks to everyone on  the forums for your support and encouragement.  And of course, a big thanks to the granddaddy of them all, Mr. Heisig himself. 

皆さん、おめでとうございます。元気で！

Last edited by digicult (2009 July 09, 7:59 pm)

Finally finished RTK1!!!! A long time of 10 months but of course I had month long breaks in between parts... I just polished off the last 730 Kanji in 3 Weeks after cracking down! Really excited to be on the road to fluency...

Interestingly my JLPT plugin in Anki says I still have 1 Kanji to go out of 1945 putting my progress at only 99.95% which is just a crying shame...

Didn't imagine along the way that I'd want to post to this thread upon 'finishing', but, well, it does feel good enough to want to say something.

Fwiw, 107 days start to finish, average of 19 / day, slowed by full-time job, 15,911 reps on this site (which shows how many cards were missed along the way), average of 90.6 reviews / day, overall expired-card reviews correct only 75% but rapidly and considerably increasing by the end, upon entering the sign of the snake 1345 cards in box 5+, about 2/3 of these in box 6 or 7.

I first completed RtK1 twenty years ago, home-made cards, no community, no koohii.com, of course. Took a year of doing nothing else.

Many thanks to all on the site for marvelous stories and overall good cheer, and especially to Fabrice, hat off, deep bow, for this labour of love.


Edit: For the record, it was 21 years ago that I first completed RtK1, 1988, a testimony to the need to keep reviewing: took a year to get to 95%+ retention and not much longer to forget half or more, & then more lost every year.

Thanks again, Fabrice. 御蔭様で. . . .

Last edited by dewick (2009 July 13, 7:45 am)