I don't remember too much about specific chapters, but I can tell you where I started burning out. For me, I've been on and off for the past year (hehe...it may be almost 2 years, I can't even remember when I started!). I'm almost to the 3/4 point. There are some reasons for why I'm not finished yet. I had planned on finishing by Christmas and was sure I would, but then stresses of life (and lack of willpower/laziness) prevented that.

1) Part of the problem is my willpower doesn't seem as steady as a lot of people on here :-). There were weeks/months where I was awesome and would do 10 or 20 per day regularly. And then when I got behind on reviews, I didn't want to do kanji.
2) The other problem is that I've been distracted by work and starting to plan a wedding. Stress = lack of motivation for kanji. Not to mention, having a fiance/relationship (while a wonderful thing) makes studying regularly more difficult since my schedule is rather spontaneous. But spending time with him is obviously very important to me.
3) In some ways RTK became easier as I went along, in other ways more difficult. There are too many synonyms now. I try to add a hint on the front of the card so I don't confuse it with another kanji. As I mentioned above, doing reviews every day started getting to me. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to use Anki for Core 6k. I might burn out before I finish.

It's funny, because I wouldn't say that my willpower is poor. I actually think it's above average, but even still, I have the bad habit of watching too much Netflix or Hulu and then not always getting to Japanese.

I just went to Japan a couple weeks ago though and now I'm ready to learn again! But my RTK reviews are around 700 right now....which is very demotivating. I really want to finish RTK so I can focus on learning more grammar and vocab.


My advice:

Try to do kanji/Japanese first thing. Don't say you'll watch one episode of something...or just 30 min of gaming, etc. Just do Japanese first, get it out of the way. And then relax. I find it is easier to never start something distracting in the first place, than trying to stop after I've started.

Also, don't try to go nuts with learning a billion kanji per day. As a beginner, 10/day was actually perfect. 20 started giving a few too many reviews for me. I could have easily done 20/day with better time management/willpower, but it depends on the person. Remember that the number of reviews per day will probably end up around new x 10 to new x 13 (so for 10/day, probably around 100-130 reviews/day for a medium failure rate).

Another thing: try timeboxing. 10 min chunks of review spread throughout the day is much better than 1 hour of review all at once. You just need to remember to do it, and then actually follow through :-).

Good luck! Let's finish this!

I don't know. I burned out at about ~1500 only because I got too busy and tried to do too much at the same time.

I took a break from Japanese for a year and lost about 300 Kanji, but when I picked it up again, the ~300 Kanji I lost were really easy to pick back up (only took a few days). I had to review them first, but the ones in the ~300 I had trouble with last year were no longer a problem.

Some chapters are easier than others only because you don't have to learn too many new radicals at once.

Also, I stopped working so hard on my stories when I picked up where I left off. Some of them are just a string of radicals/elements, with maybe "of," "with," or "the" in there, and they work fine for me.

Last edited by Teresina (2012 May 16, 1:46 pm)

zurisu wrote:

frony0, I'm a beginner (sort of, I started a couple weeks ago and I'm in the 300s), and I find your walkthrough quite useful. I hope you keep adding to it so that when I get to lesson 40 there'll be more!

Thanks! I will add more as I run through the last few lessons. Feel free to suggest any hindsight amendments, otherwise glad I could be of help