Just wanted to share my comparatively small accomplishment to what’s been achieved by some of you guys. Just finished by last new card on my RTK deck, did the whole thing and wrote out all the kanji everyday. Just hype that it’s finished! It’s been quite a journey, one of which seems to have some criticism around here but all in all I think it was definitely worthwhile. Now I look forward to finally learning some actual Japanese!
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Great job, congratulations! How you done any other work during this time or have you focused solely on RTK? I’m about ~500 kanji in but try to combine it with Genki and Anki, otherwise I fear I might get bored and never complete it
I would suggest moving on to the Tango N5 deck now that you finished RTK. A pace of 10 new words is the standard suggestion but you can go up or down by 5 depending on how you feel after the first few weeks. I wouldn’t go higher than 20 a day and I would suggest trying 10 for those first few weeks.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/866090213
I also did all of RTK before learning any real japanese and I’ll be honest I do regret it, however what might help keep at least some of your hard earned knowledge is switching the tango deck to full kanji. You can do this manually as you learn the cards, or you can try and use the update for the deck that Nukemarine has.
ご苦労様でした、御目出度う御座います。I think you probably should’ve started learning the language earlier than the kanji but whatever works in the end. Nice work!
Nice! Such a great feeling, you’ll thank yourself when you’re flying through learning new vocab since you’ll be able to skip the step of learning the meaning and how to differentiate the shapes.
Might be crazy but if I were you I’d go through as much new vocab as possible in the beginning (like 2-300 per day if you can handle it/no life it) while you don’t have any vocab in your Anki. Don’t even put a limit on it and see how much you can cram into your SRS! Just know that natives have between 30k-50k vocab in their repertoire, so if you can get through 300 in a day that’s an entire 1% of a natives vocab (which at least I think is cool and feels like good progress but it might only be possible once you’re familiar with kanji readings).
Anyway, congrats🎉
As someone who did RTK a little later than you in their Japanese career, I want to say a big congratulations, and it 100% can supercharge vocab learning, my only regret is not doing it sooner.
I know how big the commitment was, but it can definitely pay off. I have one piece of advice and one warning. For advice, lots of general recommendations are for people who aren’t familiar with kanji, so if you find yourself outpacing recommended study limits, I wouldn’t be afraid to ramp things up a bit.
As a warning, doing RTK tends to spec you naturally pretty hard into reading. How much you want to address this is up to you, but there’s a trade off between the super efficient reading gains, and the lack of listening/speaking side of things. I personally have found it fine pushing forward with reading seeing how fast it’s moving, and catching up my listening later, but if that sounds like it bothers you make sure to do a lot of audio work as well (JP subs in my experience don’t count)
Regardless, good luck! There’s a long road ahead no doubt, but you’ve already proven what you can do when you try
Well done for completing it.
Am I right in thinking that although you’ve “completed” it, you still have a long time before you’ve “mastered” every card right?
Congrats, I too have completed my RTK deck. Keep up with your reviews. You’re now kind of caught up to speed to where Chinese speakers start with your basic kanji knowledge. It’s a good place to be.
That’s honestly so cool. I bought my RTK in 2017 and im only up to like #650 hahahaha. Absolutely amazing dedication
Congrats! How long did it take you to get through? Did you study japanese vocabulary and grammar at the same time, or wait? Do you have any opinions on RTK in retrospect? Like how it helped or things you wished you’d done sooner?
It’s an awesome goal to reach! I never managed to get through RTK, though I saw the value. I ended up brute force studying vocabulary through nukemarine’s memrise decks, taking a break and learning Chinese for a few years (and hanzi as part of that), then coming back to japanese with the hanzi familiarity which made remembering Kanji easier (I could associate them with hanzi in my memory a bit so nothing felt so unfamiliar and hard as the first time around).
Congrats! Did you make your own deck?
Nice work, my dude!
I did RTK years ago before even thinking about vocab or grammar. I’m glad I did. Later on, it made plowing through vocab soooo much easier.
Hey, remember to do your daily Anki reviews without fail. You spent time and energy clearing RTK, keep those skills sharp!
I stalled around 2050. Still doing the deck after three years. Had to realize I can’t do all them 100% all the time and that’s fine. You are inspiring me to finish those last 150, congrats!! RTK does get criticism, but it is the first thing that I actually DID everyday and I think there is great value in being able to write the kanji properly. Thanks to RTK and the koohii community around it!
Awesome job! A lot of people claim they want to fluent in Japanese but won’t take the time to do a bunch of the hard work up front especially when the gains don’t come until far in the future.
After living here for 17 years I’ve gained infinite usage from the study of RTK although I did ditch the writing part of it almost immediately. (I think I could probably get the majority of it back in a few months but so far it hasn’t become a priority.)
Congrats! I’m almost a year post finishing RTK, and it continues to help me massively. I’ve slowly moved away from my stories into just knowing the kanji as I’ve focused on vocab (I’m about 4700 words in mature or learning rn). It feels very unrewarding in the moment, but it pays off!
Congratulations! Now you can start learning Japanese and then regret doing cRippling The Kanji later