1,200 characters in 90 days — how many a day, really?
"1,200 characters in 90 days" sounds like a plan. You divide 1,200 by 90, get 13.3, round it to 14, and assume that is your number.
It isn't. Two things change the arithmetic, and both of them are the parts nobody puts in the plan.
First: rest days
A plan with no rest days breaks the first time you get a cold. So build them in — one day off a week is the usual compromise.
90 days at six study days a week gives you 77 study days, not 90.
1,200 ÷ 77 = 15.6
So the real number is 16 new characters per study day.
Second: reviews, which are most of the work
New characters are only half of your evening. Every character comes back for review — five times, at the standard setting, spread over roughly a day, three days, a week, two weeks, a month.
On day 3 you write 16 new characters and review around 32. On day 30 you write 16 new characters and review something like 60.
The number of new characters never changes. The review count climbs, and then levels off somewhere around week five or six.
This is why people quit on day 20. Not laziness. They judged the plan during week one, when it was light, and were not ready for week five, when it wasn't.
What a day actually costs
Rough per-character numbers:
- new character — watch the strokes, write it, check it: about 45 seconds
- review — look, recall, move on: about 15 seconds
| Plan | Study days | New per day | Total per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 days | 51 | 24 | ~41 min |
| 90 days | 77 | 16 | ~27 min |
| 120 days | 103 | 12 | ~20 min |
| 180 days | 154 | 8 | ~14 min |
The totals assume reviews reach about four times the new-character count, which is what a five-repetition schedule settles at.
Choose the plan that survives a bad day
The question is not which plan finishes fastest. It is which plan still works on the day you slept badly and have twenty minutes.
If that answer is 180 days, take 180 days. Finishing in 180 days is enormously better than quitting on day 25 of a 60-day plan.
What 90 days actually gets you
A realistic 90-day plan gives you:
- 16 new characters a study day, six days a week
- about 27 minutes a day, and by the last month most of that is review
- all 1,200 characters written at least once, most of them five times
That is enough to be able to write them. It is not enough to write them fluently — fluency takes another few months of lighter upkeep.
Which is fine. Being able to write a character, slowly, is the thing the exam asks for.
The number to remember
Sixteen.
Not 14, not 13.3. Sixteen new characters on each of 77 study days, plus the reviews that come with them.
Want to practise this on the 1,200 characters you actually have to write?
Make a plan — start nowNo sign-up. No personal information collected.