While there are still daily reviews to be done on RTK1, there will be no more adding new cards, and the shorter reviews will leave more time for new learning resources. A few posts on the Koohii forum discuss the next steps, along with many other blog posts. Read this one, it gives a good idea of the options available. After quick research, I set up for either Core2k 6k from Smart.

RvTk (Reviewing The Kanji, and sometimes Koohii) is an invaluable website where students can share their Kanji stories and mnemonics. Perfect for the lazy and less imaginative, as I am. But once you finish RTK1, you might be tempted to switch to a more comprehensive SRS tool, like Anki. Among others, it provides online and offline reviewing, mobile apps for reviewing on the road, and many options to fine tune the SRS.

2042 Kanjis. That was a ride, with many ups and downs. Journey to japanese fluency is far from over, but it seems a big step forward has been accomplished. A few stats: Average: ~20 new cards per day Total reviews: 19,184 total Consecutive days without review: 4 (which builds a horrible amount of review) The stories from RvTK users are memorable, including the brave Spiderman 糸, Mr T., Jackie Chan 辰.

1977 Kanjis. Burned out, week ends with no review left me with Mondays with 400+ reviews. Not a good situation to be in, yet somehow common. On the bright side, only 64 left before finishing it!

1885 Kanjis. Keeping the daily review seems much more important than adding cards, so I averaged only ~25 new cards/day. On the plus side, it’s almost done! Also, the podcast is really fun to listen at this level. Lots of new vocab, and cultural info.

1394 Kanjis. Still slow on the new cards per day. But being able to read the podcast’s transcripts is motivating, the Kanjis are somehow used in real conversation! 何時ですか？

In a previous post, I was praising Pimsleur Japanese as a good introduction to the language. I also noted that while 3 parts of ~30 lessons each are quite long, you are still left as a beginner japanese student. I’ve been looking for an audio “class” replacement for my daily commute, and am happy to report that I have found an excellent one. JapanesePod101.com is the website. I actually stumbled upon them a few months ago, but for some reason didn’t trust it.

1194 Kanjis. Definitely not where I wanted it, it’s currently stagnating at 20 new cards per day.

Learning a language is not easy. But it can be fun, spiced with games and comedy videos. Last week I found Google translate on iPhone/iPod touch (also on Android, but see below). You just enter a word or phrase in one language, and it spits out the translation in another. What’s cool is that the input text can either be typed, or spoken. And what’s even cooler is that japanese (and a few other languages) is on the “say it out loud” list.

I’ve learned the japanese numbers. 一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六… but, they don’t register into my head when I see actual numbers. I see 53, I think fifty-three. Not ごじゅうさん (go ju san). So while driving to work, I tried a little game, any numbers I saw, I’d try to think of their japanese saying. And boy, there are tons of numbers everywhere you look. A few days of that, and it seems there are some good effects, numbers pop in much easier.