On the upside, stories through 2005 written. Woot! Victory never tasted so sweet!

That’s how I put it anyway. Anytime I need some encouragement I do the math and figure out how far I’ve come or how little is left to go.

From my last two posts it’s easy to figure out that I hate writing RtK stories. On the days I’m writing them I don’t do anything else japanese wise because it takes too much time.
So I did the math on my stories.
I don’t write more than 70-80 stories in a sitting (day) so if you split up the chapters I have left (39-56) I only have nine more days of writing to do and ITS OVER. FOREVER.
Hallelujah!!

Sometimes you just need that little extra push. Never mind that there are hundreds of kanji left to study in those seven days of stories. I don’t think of it like that. No, I have nine days of writing left and at this point that’s all that matters.

I figure maybe a month left total. A little longer if you figure on getting all those kanji to four or more reviews.

Eventually they might even move beyond five reviews. Won’t that be nice.

Now off to the gym like a good little monkey.
Woohoo!

Today I wrote 100 stories even. At least, that’s the way I figure lessons 35 and 36 together as.

Now I’m telling myself that I can do lesson 37 today as well. What’s another 30 something stories when you’ve already done three times that number in one sitting. I started out to do just lesson 35. You can see how this one goes.

I’m tired, cranky, sweaty, and my hands hurt, but I’ve accomplished enough today to keep me going for many to come.

And I’ll keep going. Because if I don’t that will mean I wasted an entire day off doing nothing laundry and something I didn’t enjoy. And only the laundry would have a point.

Sometimes, it really is pure spite that keeps you going. I’ve reached the point where I’m terrified to stop, terrified to lose the momentum. Who knows if I’d ever get it back.

My happiest day on this journey won’t be the day I put that last word into my SRS, it’ll be the day I finish my last story. Because once you’ve done your stories you’re more than halfway there. The rest is all window dressing.

I’d also forgotten how much I was going to have using my iPod touch as my only dedicated computer resource. My PC is in pieces and this thing doesn’t even a keyboard.

On the upside, the park I study in during nice weather now randomly has free wifi and the desktop wouldn’t have done any good there anyhow.

So, I’ve written stories up to 1265 and I’ll be finishing up through 1320-40ish before the day is over.

It looks like a three day schedule is going to be the best way of going about this. One day to write stories, the next to transfer to kanji.koohii and study, the last to add them into Anki and k.k.
Never more than 50ish at a go, never more frequent than every other day. Any more than that and I’ll get buried under reviews again.

So, that’s our up to the minute update. With apologies for any typos or freaky autospell corrections that I didn’t catch.

I restarted my RtK journey on 3/24/11. It’s 5/12/11 now, and I’m almost completely caught up.

Because I had over 1000 cards in the kitty, so to speak, I decided that trying to refresh my memory via SRS reviews was stupid. I would be fighting an uphill battle the entire way. Instead, I started over from scratch.

I’ve been keeping my adds low to avoid the 200 reviews a day I was getting hit with around Christmas last year, and I’m sitting pretty right now at around 70 reviews a day.  Every other day or so, I add another 50 in.

Still using the flashcards (have a blister where I finished cutting up the final thousand or so cards in just 2 days!) and they’re still an integral part of my study process.

No way in hell am I gonna crap out again. Not gonna happen.

And now I’m off to work again. I’ve annoyed the poor librarians for long enough!

P.S. Finally got AnkiOnline and AnkiUSB working together. Which is important since my computer is in more pieces than I can to think about. Hence the annoying the librarians line.

All sorts of personal stuff got in the way of my kanji studies, and before I knew it, I’d lost much of what I had.

Now I’m redoing things, one step at a time, and speeding through for the moment. I expect the first 4-500 to go fairly quickly, and to have to do a bit more study on later ones.

I fully intend to be all caught up to where I started slacking in… two weeks? Give or take. The reviews, of course, will kick my ass, but I’m well able for them.

So long as they don’t take more than an hour at a time!

Don’t forget to make sure you keep both up to date! I wasted a ton of time yesterday typing in around 300 stories, but I’m getting myself right now!

On to lesson 31, Axe Murderer! Run!

Also, I’ve found that putting on my favorite TV show to talk at me in the background helps me to focus more. I’ve seen SGA so many times that I glance over during the interesting bits, and then go right back to RtK when I get bored. I’ll be a good girl now and go wash dishes, but I’m determined to at least make a dent in the next chapter tonight, possibly even finishing it.

I’ve done the math. If I can manage 50 new Kanji a day, I can still be done by Christmas.

My present to me! Off I go, study a little more!

I wasn’t all that terribly bad, I kept up with my reviews, I started a ‘big bloody mess’ test, which takes several days at this point, and I kept my books handy for when I had a moment.

Even when you can’t add new material to your studies, you can still plan ahead. The new lesson I’m on in RtK is the ‘people’ lesson. It carries you past the halfway point in the book, and you get several different ‘shapes’ for the 人 kanji.

Heisig suggests choosing a specific person instead of the generic ‘person’ or ‘people’ since the words are used ‘generically’ in lots of stories (I just made myself laugh). Part of the planning ahead I did was to try and choose a person.

I decided it would be best to chose one for each ‘shape’.

My favorite band in the whole world is Japanese. I ended up using each of the members for a particular shape, except for the guitarist who’s name is Take. He was featured in the kanji containing 竹, All of which had something to do with Take, my bamboo loving panda.

For those who are curious, take is the kunyomi reading for the kanji in question.

So now that I’m able to start trying to study new material again, I’ve got the names of the guys marked down in the book next to the kanji/primitives that they’ll be introduced in, and I’ve been looking at it off and on for a while. Trying to associate each name with that particular stroke order/shape so that I don’t have to brute force them when the time comes.

I’m off to do another 2-3 pages of that transcription (gotta finish by Wed.) and then I’ll come back and try to write stories for 5-8 kanji, and just switch back and forth for the rest of the evening.

Here’s to hoping that I can wade through today’s 80ish reviews, half of the transcription that’s left, and another 40-50 kanji tonight. Not to mention all the failed cards that I’m likely to get reviewing. I’ve gotten to where I don’t worry about those as much as I once did.

Most of my screwups are from similar keywords, and I’m finding that unlike a lot of people who view that as a problem, I view it as a non sequitor. My end goal isn’t those keywords, so why sweat it? So long as the kanji I’m thinking off is related in meaning, not writing, we’re good. Quasi and Semi are excellent examples of this.

They mean the same damn thing. Is it any wonder that I can’t keep them straight? So I’m not worried. At some point I may go in and switch keywords around, or maybe change one to kunyomi, but for now, so long as I can remember how to write them both, I don’t worry when I can’t remember which keyword belongs to which, so long as I know the actual meaning of both.

Another long night here we go.

Edit: I’m apparently the queen of runon sentences when I’m tired. You have my apologies and my refusal to fix them

I started studying Japanese ‘for real’ again in the last week or so of September this year. In the 7 or so weeks since I started, I’ve learned just over 900 kanji.

The method to the madness is so simple that I’m surprised no one’s thought of it before.

My particular study method is as follows:

I sit with the RtK book and the binder I’m working out of (wide-rule paper for the win) and work up my little stories or pull them from the koohii site.

I write up the stories (including the ones from the site) and once I’ve completed a page from the book, or a page of stories, whichever is longer, I review the new ones.

Unlike most folks, I’m a proponent of the paper flashcards. I use them with my stories to study and later, to review and test myself, no matter where I am.

Every so often, I do a review I like to call the “big bloody mess”.

I take alllll the paper flashcards I have and shuffle them around and then review them all. You can imagine what a mess it is trying to shuffle 900 pieces of cardstock around, which explains the name of the excersize. I test myself keyword to kanji with these, and pull out anything I screw up on.

You’d be surprised what you can figure out doing this. Sometimes, it’s the keywords that are screwing you up, other times, look-a-like Kanji. You start to recognize the kanji that come up a lot, the ones where the story just isn’t sticking.

Be patient with the kanji that aren’t sticking with you. Sometimes you just need a few more reviews before they start staying put in your brain. Other times, you ‘ll learn which ones you need to just brute force.

I’m still surprised how few I’ve had to do that with considering how many I’ve learned. It’s typically the simple ones you have trouble with.

Like the numbers one through ten. Well, Four through ten anyways.

I would happily strangle someone for nice hearty heaping helping of Arby’s curly fries. Or Burger King’s fries.

Does not want to continue studying this RtK lesson. One of the biggest problems with learning a lot of Kanji with the same radicals is that you end up with a lot of similar stories. They all blur together after a while.

Then there’s that whole thing with the needing to look-up words in your native language. ‘Appellation’. I’ve never used that, and I think I’ve only read it in SAT study lists.

Also, if you’ve never seen the T.V. show Daybreak, check Hulu.com. I think it’s there. Awesome beyond all awesomeness.