i finished RTK 1 last friday but i didnt post becuasei hadnt finished the supplemantary thing. however i was will finish the supplementary tomorrow so i will post today (seeing as how i am already here)
i lived in japan studying using textbooks and normal stuff for about a year and few months. a friend had told me rtk was the way to go but i thought that since i knew about 300 already and the method seemed to need me to start at the begning that i would end up studying alot of what i already knew. so i smiled nodded my head about his ranting of how good rtk was and just kept on trucking. then in december i went toa JET seminar and a manj talking about going from no japanese to passing 2kyuu in one years time while working full time. and i thought well shit, i should be doing that, and he had used rtk, so i gave a more serious look.
i learned the first 20 (that i didnt already know) with 100% on my review and was blown away, i had only written them down 5 times !!! and it took me like 10 minutes. this book was freaking magic!. soi went through about 100 and then went on christmas vacation to thailand and didnt look at the book the whole vacation. when i came back i still knew all the first 100 but it became clear that i needed a better review system. so i created an excel spreadsheet with the number in column A and the keyword in column B with a randomly generated number in column C this allowed me to ranomize them with the sort information button and to put them back in order if i sort them by heisig number. i would do 5 then review the 5 then mix them with the most recent ten then do 5 more then mix them with most recent 15 then do five more and mix them with the most recent 20 and so on. if i got one wrong i would bold it and the do a find on bold items to review only bold. i was doing 30 to 100 kanji a day at work. depending on how many classes i had to teach. (i didnt have to teach very often... some days i had no classes at all but i had to sit at my desk all day so rtk was perfect, those days i could usually do 100) and i would often take a day to review all 100 or all 500 that i knew just to make sure the method was still working.
this worked very well for me and until heisig stopped handing me the stories and i had to make them myself, it went from 10 seconds per kanji to 5-20 minutes and some i couldnt even get a good story for, my mind wouldnt jsut draw a blank. this slowed me down considerably and now i was doing maybe 20 something a day. my study partner (the man i was studying grammer with after school) told me about this website. i resisted it at first becuase i had to make a login before i could see what was going on. but he was insistent on the merits of this site so i eventually gave in. the preprepared stories were exactly what i needed. i was back in the swing 50 to 100 a day. then the i was work picked up and went down to about 25 to 60 a day. but humming right along this sight was the best thing since sliced bread. about this time i was starting to get some wrong. i wasnt reviewing avery 5 any more and the folding them back in i was waiting longer between reviews. furthermore i was accumulating more cards than i could review in a day even if i devoted a whole day to to nothing but reviews. at this point i had learned about 1000 kanji and i had been playing around with smart fm and anki and liked the srss idea and i discovered that this site had one already built into it. so i loaded the 1000 cards a spent 2 days reviewing them all down the line. this cut my review of new cards down to about 20 a day until i got them into the week long blocks or longer. now i was using the srss every day (excpet weekends i only study kanji at work) at this point i was writing each kanji 5 to 10 times when i learned it.
but i was also still using my spread sheet to learn the kanji. i needed both. the learn them i wanted to review them and randomize them a few times in the spread sheet with the other kanji that i head learned that day. that way i could review the ones i learned that day 5 or 6 times while i was learning new cards. otherwise the srss on this site would only let me see it once and then tell me to wait for 3 days, which was great for review but no good for learning it to begin with. a few hours before i left work i would load them into this srss of this site and then go read the news for an hour and review all the kanji that had popped for the day creating a short list of missed kanji (usually about 5% miss rate) then i would review the new kanji i had added and then i would go over the missed from both piles before i left work. at this point i was only writing the kanji 1 or 2 times when i learned unless it was troublesome or i felt my story was weak, then i would write it a few extra times.
so i used the spreadsheet for daily reviews and the site for the long term srss. (i later added a column for the kanji as well which was a bit of a hassle because i dont yet know the sounds so i cant type them in the normal way i have to paste them from the site into the spread sheet, which is another reason the site was great, i cant cntrl C the book.... Then i borrowed stories from all you geniuses like mad. the best part was that you guys would warn me when heisig made a mistake. or you would tell me when a primitive of heisig's was going to turn up as a real kanji later so i might as well learn the real thing instead of the primitive meaning. or when i group of primitive would be in the same position often enough to warrant giving it a new primitive meaning. i especially liked the posts from people that gave more information about the kanji, its different meanings, words its was in, links to similar kanji, and links to similar keywords. those were the best even if i used some one elses stories to go along witht he information.
then i if got something wrong from the srss i would put it in bold in the spread sheet so that i would be thrown into my daily rotation just to knock the bugger home hard.
when doing the supplement it was a little diffficult becuase they were all out of order if you could add a supplement button that when i hit next went to the next supplement one that would be nice or even one that threw the supplements into their proper places within rtk one that would have been a nice option...
about in the 1700's or so i had a long vacation in china in which right before hand i was doing about 100 a day blasting through, and after the hiatus my percent correct went from 95% to about 65% correct. but after working through them with the spread sheet and the srss and reviewing some stories i got back into the normal groove of things. i also updated my spreadsheet so that it told me how many i knew, how many i had left to do to complete rtk 1 and supplement, and how many items on the sheet were bold and in need of extra review
during the last stretch i did less reviewing allowing the srss to be my only source of review this took my percent correct to about 80% but i was at the home stretch and i wanted to be able to say i was done!
as for updates to the site i would only suggest that you have option on if you want the supplemental grouped together or dispersed within the rtk or something.
and a flash card system where you could flip new cards without sending them to the next box so you could review them as much as you wanted while you studied and then send them into srss when you were done studying for the day.
thank you so much for making this site i think it is better than the rtk book it is based on. the only time i needed to refer to the book after finding this site is when there was a new primitive being made since this site has not cards for the primitive... or maybe an inbetween page would be nice to tell us that a new primitive was coming, in case we didnt have our books with us.
and thank everyone who provided stories and information
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. And holy crap, it's the first of may?
