Last month I created a post about my goal to learn all 2042 kanji in the book Remembering the Kanji. I set a goal of December 31 as my finish date. With only two months to finish, I had to learn about 35-40 Kanji a day in order to make the deadline. With only 12 days to go will I finish in time?
The simple answer is no. I currently sit at about 1300 kanji and will have learned about 1500-1600 by the end of December. Unfortunately, there were days I wasn’t able to study and that put me behind schedule. Am I disappointed? Definitely not. In fact, I think this is a great example of why setting big goals and falling short can be a lot better than setting small goals and achieving them.
Learning 35-40 Kanji a day is a huge task. Instead, let’s say that I had been more reasonable and tried to learn 5 or 10 kanji a day. Still a formidable project. Even if I had succeeded I would only have learned 300-600 kanji. Not to mention that 10 kanji a day would take 200 days, and 5 a day would take over a year. I would be much more likely to give up.
Being at 1300 kanji, and knowing that I am over halfway there is a great feeling. It gives me the motivation I need to keep going. I’m nearly 70% there. Had I done 10 a day I would only be about 25% of the way.
Set goals that you have to strive for and try your best to accomplish them. In the end, even if you don’t achieve them you will be much further along than if you had chosen a much easier goal.
Here are some things for you to try. Just fill in the blank with a number that seems too much and try to accomplish it.
Study ________ new Japanese words a day.
Watch _______ hours of Japanese TV/Movies a day.
Speak to a native Japanese speaker _________ hour every day.
Learn _________ new Japanese phrases every day for 10 days.
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medmal on August 12, 2013 at 4:07 am
How is it going? I was intrigued that you would start Heisig after such a long time in Japan and after acquiring so much language ability. I, too, lived in Japan for a long time (the eighties) and stalled out at 200 kanji then found Heisig and quickly shot up to 500. Then I really started to “pick up” words and read Japanese travel guides, ads, and reviews of sake, kabuki, sumo matches,etc. Things with a clear context where I was only interested in specific information. At that point Heisig became a boring time waster. I never did learn all the kanji and I doubt I could ever have passed JLPT 3. Thus I was interested in your attempt. It’s August of 2013 – can I assume you failed? Perhaps we could come up with something for people like us – people stuck in the middle, far from beginner but nowhere near advanced. BTW I now use Anki, but I think any flashcard system might be wrong for Heisig and kanji in general. Looking forward to hearing from you.
A Fellow Sufferer