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The "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread.
Index » RtK Volume 1
YES YES YES, I FINISHED TODAY 16:00 TUESDAY THE 15TH OF DECEMBER
Thanks guys, it took me 2 attempts and a year off between those attempts to finish, I've loved the stories and hope you found some of mine useful, I LOVE YOU ALL.
I'm smiling so much my jaw hurts 
Congratulations to all the above! Feels (damn) good, huh? 
As for me…well, I finished RTK like, last month but couldn’t get round to writing this post, but…better late than never, eh?
Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiihaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, I’ve finished!!!! HOOOOAAAAAARRRRR!!! I'M PART OF THE CLUB!!!!
Okay, glad I could get that out. Don't wanna sound like a geek but honestly, the day I finished (November 22nd) it felt like Christmas had come early...
As for stats…it took my just over 4 months and an average of 20-something kanji a day to get done, and by the time I got to the 1900’s I could barely bring myself to look at Anki; I expected to get a huge adrenaline-charge-and-finish-the-last-100-rush and it just didn’t happen 
throughout the whole process I never managed to do more than 50 a day…don’t know how those 100 a day guys managed it!
Part of the problem I had was total lack of internet access. I have no imagination and so was using this site for most of my stories, then I went to Ghana and net access became almost non-existent and so had to make up my own stories for the last 500 (dun dun DUN, shock, horror). I was staying in some village and the electricity would go off something like every two days so I couldn’t review, grrrr. And with no dictionary I didn’t know some of the keywords and I had to make up definitions; turned hedgemony into the phrase hedge money featuring a story about a cowboy from the west loosing his money on a hedge when he took off his leather pants () condor I made some flying machine for the mountain king and cinnabar is just some weird funky thing I had to mem by rote.
But enough complaining! What matters is that I’m done, finally, though in some ways I don’t feel finished at all coz even though it’s been almost a month I’m still getting a mega chunk of reviews a day :S (okay, right now I have average of 85 reviews a day but I want something like 30 – asking too much?). It’s still better than having to learn new ones though (that was just exhausting) and I’ve noticed my retention stats are improving now I can just concentrate on reviews.
Right so what’s next? I’m doing the AJATT method so planning to mine sentences from a few manga I like, namely Kuroshitsuji and Naruto (skipping lines like “dattebayo!” and “kage bunshin no jutsu” of course 
) also downloaded a subs2srs deck from a link on this site of the Bleach movies and Death Note which I may give a shot (though I keep hearing that Death Note is really difficult :S) I was leisurely going through Tae Kim’s guide as I waited for the Heisig reviews to become a little reasonable but doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon (though they have improved from the 200 a day ridiculousness they were last month :S) so will probably start proper sentence reviews in the next week or so.
So thanks so much everyone for all your stories (some were really clever, it’s amazing what people can come up with ) and a HUGE thanks to whoever runs this site (Fabrice? you are amazing too ) and anyone reading this who is at 312 or 1576 or something…I think the most important thing is to be consistent. At risk of stating the extreme obvious, if you keep doing even just 10 a day you’ll eventually finish whether you like it or not. And if a lazy sod like me can do it, so can you. All the best
Well, about 10 months after I started this little kanji journey, the first part has come to a happy conclusion. I've always been hard on myself, and was always aggravated at my lack of progress with RtK. Yeah, 10 months is "slow" for many, and I wholeheartedly agree that RtK is a task that can be done easily in a 3-5 month period. I just lost the thrill of learning kanji after awhile.
I started out at a decent pace of 20 per day, and had made it to 600-ish kanji in probably 2 months. After that, I really started to burn out and almost never put in new kanji, although I did keep up with reviews everyday. Ultimately, it took me nearly 7 months to make it to about 900 kanji. After that, I realized I had to pick it up if I was ever going to finish. I began a new habit of trying to do 50 a day... which only semi-worked. I ended up doing 50 one day, and maybe 50 throughout the rest of the week, lol. Ultimately though, I went rather fast (for me) through the last part of the book. I finished kanji 900-2042 in just under 3 months, despite having many lazy setbacks.
My experiences with RtK:
1. For me, keeping up with daily reviews was never much of an issue, and I didn't hate it per se. But adding new kanji after doing 40-100 reviews was just painful alot of days. Seeing as I work fulltime and go to school fulltime, plus like to spend a bit of my spare time running and playing games. And many times, after exhausting myself with reviews, new kanji just didn't even enter the picture.
2. Although I began losing interest in learning new kanji at about kanji #600, without a doubt from #1500 on it was an absolute struggle to even look at this review page anymore. I became discouraged with falling retention rates, not really due to bad memory, but moreso due to the confusion with keywords and such. For the last 600 kanji, there are so many keywords meaning basically the same thing, but I would always remember the stories for all of them, and mix up the keywords. Another problem I had was Heisig really seemed to run out of ideas with primitives, and alot of them became more complex. This really hurt my studying because I would remember stories without a problem and usually one part of a kanji, but would keep forgetting the central primitive.
In conclusion:
Looking back, I've come a long way. From someone who had a shaky grasp of hiragana/katakana and didn't even know what kanji were, I think I made good progress 
RtK does work. It may not work for everyone, and (in some cases) it may lose its "fun" appeal, but if you stick with it, you will finish. I'd like to thank Fabrice, because I am almost certain had I not stumbled upon this site, I would have never finished this book. I also used MANY of your stories! A big thank you to all of the other very creative stories, especially dingomick. You really were my savior for the last 300-400 kanji, haha. I added some of my own stories here and there; hopefully some of you guys still studying will find some of them useful
A final note:
To anyone who is still on their RtK journey. keep at it! As many others have said, don't worry about speed and retention rates too much. Unless you are in a major rush to learn your Japanese, take it at a comfortable pace. I agree 100% that you should do your reviews everyday, but if you just don't feel like adding new kanji, then don't. I realized that if I tried to force-study when I had no intention of wanting to learn, I would fail miserably on my reviews the next day.
As for me, once my reviews lighten up a bit, it's off to Tae Kim and KO2001. I'm happy to be done, and proud. If I had told myself almost a year ago that I would voluntarily finish this book to the end, I would've laughed. I never thought I had it in me to finish. As a nice reward for finishing RtK, my copy of the JP version of FF13 should be in in a few days, so I can celebrate with that, and have no idea what is going on in the game! It will be a great learning tool (one day) and an excellent motivational tool, to keep me going when I lose sight of why I really want to keep studying Japanese.
Good luck to all the current RtK studiers, and see everyone in Japan! (one day)
*Cue Monday Night Football theme song
Done done done doooonnneeee
Done done done done dooonnneee
done done done done done dooonneee
Done done done done doooooonnnneeee
done done done done done
In other words.... I'm done!
Very similar story to Offshore... only it took me 9 months. Original goal was 4 months but life, school, and laziness got in the way and it more than doubled that time.
Oh well.... What's done is done and I'm done
Thank you everyone for your wonderful stories. I couldn't have finished this book without them. I hope mine help many others as well.
So congrats to me, you, those who finished before me, and all those who finish after me!
Keep it up guys! You can do it!!!
Last edited by BooBooQ88 (2009 December 20, 9:55 pm)
Finished a few days ago, and it felt great! Thanks to everyone for your wonderful and inventive stories, as they helped me so much. This thread also gave me a lot of motivation to continue on when I felt like the end would never come.
Though probably nobody cares, I'd like to share some advice that I felt was useful...
1. Create some kind of avatar. Whenever I had to make a story out of pieces that didn't feature Mr. T, I had an avatar who could fill in. For me, that avatar was Goofy. I don't know why, but Goofy was easy for me to place into stories, because he could be funny, or serious, or anything else I wanted. Of course, when applicable, I chose a more appropriate avatar.
2. Take stories from here, but make them your own. I found that during reviews, I would want to change details (to incorporate somebody I know, or a movie character) that would make it more memorable for me. Sometimes I would rewrite the story in a way that my brain would easily process it.
3. Don't be afraid to make small tweaks in your stories over time. The first time you write a story, you don't actually know what is going to stick. That comes with time.
4. Use cartoon characters. This isn't based on anything but my personal experience, but I found that using cartoon characters in cartoon settings was easier for my brain to imagine. Using reality was tough! A snowy forest in a cartoon is far easier for my brain to imagine than a real snowy forest.
5. Learn a set amount per day, then SPAM them like crazy for 3 days. Of course, the number of days isn't a set thing, but if you continuously test yourself on just learned materials, it has a greater chance at setting into your long term memory, or so I've experienced. Afterward, such constant spamming is unnecessary, as it will have taken it's place in your brain.
It took me a while, but the time it took is irrelevant. I know them now. And with 2010, I begin book 3!
I'm happy, I finally made it. December 25th is when I saw all the kanji, all 2041 of them. Still carrying on with my reviews though, and moved on.
I started in August. My graph shows lots of up and down periods in my life.
Now it's time to build a vocabulary so I can actually read something interesting!
done. finally. 5 and a bit months of it and it's done. I have heaps of reps to do on the last 400 or so, but i have about 10,000 (slightly sporadic) reps on the first 1500-1600 so they're stuck in there pretty well.
vileru, you make some very good points. If i had a do-over i'd get rid of all the days where i didn't do any new reps and instead just do a couple of minutes every day. i finished by timeboxing 10mins of "storytelling" time every day without fail for 2 weeks and i flew through it. you'd be surprised how many stories you can write in 10 minutes...
I have katz's my first sentence pack parsed in excel and ready to be added to my SRS along with a whole bunch of other sentences that i've collected over the past few months to go on to. can't wait
