Can anyone direct me to the threads about switching RTK keywords to monolingual ones? I seem to be forgetting the stories so much at this point. Sometimes I can write the kanji from the keyword+the story but sometimes I can't even write it well. The last part is: I can recognize it so easily though. I remember reading somewhere here that it's appropriate to switch it up, since English keywords become ineffective after a certain point.

amillerchip wrote:

ta12121 wrote:

Can anyone direct me to the threads about switching RTK keywords to monolingual ones?.

2nd sticky at top of RTK1 forum - Japanese keywords.

Thanks, I'll check it out now

Just Finished . It took me around 3 weeks I did about 100/day so was pretty intense but a good way to spend the summer holiday.

Congrats guys, and good luck with the rest of your studies. You've set yourselves up well, and if you finished RTK, you've proven to yourself that you have the drive to do it. Keep it up!

I'm through! Checking back in Anki, I've been at it for a little under eight weeks. Now it's time for the fun part of language learning!
I'll probably do the supplement, too (which shouldn't take more than a few days) and after that just learn the bloody things as I come across them.

Thanks to everyone that came before me and helped me with their stories. It'd have taken me much longer if I'd had to think all of them up on my own (although I did wonder at some point how the hell you guys keep all the sexual ones from melting together into one massive orgy ).

Congratulations to everyone else who has finished, too!

Last edited by alizarine (2012 January 18, 7:31 am)

Started in October and finished today. My clear rate is about 80% so I am going to do some more review before I go on to learning more obscure kanji. I don`t post much but I do read the forums often and I am very grateful for all the help and support I found on this site. Good luck with the rest of your Japanese journey.

So I can now officially say that I am done with RtK 1 on January 30th, 2012. I started way back on October 28, 2011, so it’s been 94 days (or 3 months and 2 days). I started because I was unsatisfied with my level of Japanese and the class I was taking at the time was going absurdly slow (It would have taken me 4 semesters to finish Genki 1). At the time, I was reading a lot of Japanese blogs, like Tofugu and AJATT, and it seemed like everyone in these communities were circling around RtK and RevTK. Once I started doing the first 250 kanji included in the little sample, I knew that this was a much better use of my time than sticking with conventional methods. At first I planned on going slowly, learning the language at the same time as RtK. I went from adding 8-10 per day to 20 per day. At this point, I decided to burn through the rest of the book without pursuing any other aspects of the language. I moved on to adding 30-40 per day after that. I didn’t start moving quickly until this month, when I realized I had to add quite a bit more if I wanted to finish before February. So for the better part of January, I’ve been adding 50-60 per day. It worked out quite nicely, I ended up with exactly 50 kanji to add today (didn’t have to go on a 100+ kanji adding binge to finish the book). Hopefully that will keep my reviews from being awful. They’ve seemed to stay pretty consistently at ~250 reviews per day. I’ll be happy to see this get smaller over the next few weeks.

After this, I have a rough outline of where I’d like to focus my studies. It involves tackling Subs2srs/reading a lot with sentence/vocab acquisition. I didn’t want to dive right into more pre-mined material after RtK because I think it will be too boring for me and burn me out faster. I’m confident I’ll see some results, whether they be good or bad, within the next few months.

I want to thank everyone who shared their stories on this site. I know I’d still be plodding along in the middle of this book if it weren’t for this amazing community and the amount of knowledge that you all are willing to share.

I finished too, in about a little less than 4 months. I don't know what to say, so... I just want to say a big "Thank you" to all of the members here for their stories, I could not have done it without them. Thank you guys

I also finished this book in a little over 3 months which was a few days ago. On average, with the 6th edition book with 2200 Kanji, that would be about 25 Kanji a day which is a bit low for my liking but still better than the 100+ in 6 months or whatever the average foreign Japanese class student does. This average includes days where I did nothing and days where I did 50 or even 100.

The last quarter proved to be quite fast and that was because the finishing line was so close, I had to rush towards it as fast as possible even if it hurts reviews (which is my weak point right now). Actually when I reached number 2200, it felt kind of anti-climatic for some reason.

Regardless, I can sort of visualize the entire book and its 2200 Kanji in my head, or at least have a feeling of the structure of the book and the overall groupings of Kanji, so reviews from here should be easier now that I know what to expect (the 2200 Kanji that I've seen at least once each) and what not to expect (Kanji that is not in this book).

Heisig's strategy of giving each primitive/radical a unique keyword, and offering a specific Kanji order that only builds Kanji based on primitives/radicals/Kanji already seen, will probably prove to be the book's best asset as well as being the Japanese Kanji learner's best asset.

Now with RTK1 done and with the benefit of hindsight, looking at the standard way of learning Kanji, which is learning common words (like time) that have often what can be considered difficult Kanji (時) instead of learning the parts that make up that kanji, seems completely illogical. Which is also brings me to RTK's next asset that relates to my previous paragraph: Being able to differentiate between similar looking kanji that have the same radicals. Sure, anyone can rote-learn the strokes of 時 but when one starts encountering 持, 侍, 寺, 特, 詩, and 待, he/she will forget which one stands for time. A RTK reader would be prepared for this scenario.

As written in the 3/4 thread, from here on, I will mainly be focusing on reviewing and memorizing the 2200 Kanji for about a month before moving on to RTK3. I did a quick flick through RTK3 and when I saw 拳 in it (a Kanji I consider common) among other things, I decided RTK3 was necessary for better Kanji comprehension.

I finally finished RTK with the supplement! It took me almost exactly a year, although I stopped for a few months in between and went rather slow at times. But I'm glad I finally pulled it through! I have already learned some Japanese besides that, but I really notice the effects of Heisig, knowing the Kanji helps with remembering readings and compounds as well.

And I won't stop learning new Kanji, they are just too interesting. Although I won't go through the whole RTK 3, I will just add Kanji I encounter while reading. And for everything, this forum with the helpful threads and all the collected stories have helped me often, so thank you for all that!

Congrats everyone!  I just finished today with RTK1 and the supplement!  Woo hoo!  I started in mid-October so it took me about 4 1/2 months, although there were times along the way I didn't do any studying (due to busy work schedule or travelling during vacation).  Other than that I was pretty steady, working at it almost every day.

Also thanks to everyone who shared their stories - some of them were really helpful!

I finally finished RTK. As you can see by my reg date on this forum I'd been at this for a while. The first time I tried to do RTK when I was at beginner level I made it up to around frame 1300 in the span of about 30 days before getting burnt out. I then proceeded to languish for a long time.

I tried to pick it back up again a few years later when I was on study abroad. I made it up to around frame 1600. Last year I applied to JET, quit my job, and started studying Japanese full time while waiting for information about my future employment to come back. It was almost exactly a year ago that I started doing RTK again. My goal was to do it extremely slowly, extremely methodically, and to have it done after about a year. A year later here I am. I've finally finished.

It's such a great feeling to finally be past this part of my studying. I think before I tackle the supplement and RTK3 I'm going to focus on kanji kentei. I kind of did a sprint to finish the last 120 kanji from RTK today. That's going to gob up Anki for a little while. It's less crazy than it sounds because I could already read the entire 常用 list thanks to finish Kanji in Context a few months back. So there were lots and lots of kanji I already knew quite well.

Next step, slowly tackle the supplement first then RTK3 while studying for the kanji kentei.