Saturday, April 25, 2009

1021 Kanji characters

Yay! I just got to character number 1021 - half way - in the super book Remembering the Kanji. I can write all of these characters from memory. Actually my success rate is 89.8% but that's fine, it's remaining stable as I add more characters. Striving for 100% success would be far more work for only 10% more reward. The tricky characters will eventually stick.

You can see from the progress graph that certain periods have been more productive than others - 600 in the first 4 weeks, 16 weeks for the next 400! What a difference having kids around makes. I accelerated again recently and hope to finish in about 3 months, although the last 2 weeks were pretty poor due to everyone around in my house being ill in a variety of sticky, gooey ways!

It would have been a lot harder without kanji.koohii.com for stories when I couldn't think of good ones myself and Anki for making efficient learning just a matter of sitting down every night and clicking the buttons. Also thanks to the inspiring and entertaining Khatzumoto-san at All Japanese All the Time for documenting that it can be done and that it's a worthwhile step along the road to Japanese proficiency.

Now to try get in another few characters before Seán - asleep on the couch beside me - wakes up!

2 comments:

Nelnik said...

Well done Wargle, that's impressive progress. Keep up the good work.

Fergal Daly said...

It went kind of pear-shaped after that, due to a clerical error (!) I had no laptop for a few days last week and had to restore some backups which really builds a backlog in the SRS. Recovered now but got very little progress - there's always something cropping up.