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+--- Thread: Does RtK teach you kanji? (/thread-10485.html)
Does RtK teach you kanji? - thefransw - 2013-02-07
I am very confused here. I am planning on buying rtk1 but I have read it does teach kanji and on the otherhand that it ONLY teaches stroke order. Help!
Does RtK teach you kanji? - Zgarbas - 2013-02-07
For the record, this is a pretty simplified way of putting things:
Kanjis are ideograms which have one or more meanings, and readings (2 types of readings, but depending on the kanji it can have from 1 to 20+ readings). There are about 2000 of them which are considered of common use in the Japanese language.
Remember the Kanji is strictly focused on remembering the ideogams themselves, along with an assorted keyword (usually consisting of one of its meanings, but some have abstract keywords for the sake of making the kanjis easier to remember), by splitting them up in primitives and using imaginative memory to store them in your brain rather than rote memorizing strokes.
The main purpose of RTK is to familiarize the non-Japanese learner with all 2000 common kanjis in the Japanese foreign language before they embark on journey of learning their assorted readings, variety in meaning, etc. It is mainly focused on learning how to write them while you're at it, though some do a variant of RTK which only involves recognition.
If you go black-and-white about it, RTK doesn't teach you anything about using Kanjis. However, it teaches you how to recognize them, separate them, write them, and understand them a bit better before. Kind of how you would learn each letter of the alphabet separately before reading words, only more time-consuming and intricate.
So, for example, you would learn a kanji such as 上 and know it as "up" without learning its multiple readings. A simple kanji which arguably would be just as well learned in a textbook. However, you will also learn complicated kanjis like 議 and they will seem easy, whereas textbook learners would have a hard time learning each individual line one-by-one.
So rather than offer you instant gratification, RTK helps your long-term study of the Japanese language by getting rid of an annoying and tiring task from the get-go.
Hope this helped ^^.
Does RtK teach you kanji? - yudantaiteki - 2013-02-07
Quote:whereas textbook learners would have a hard time learning each individual line one-by-one.As one of these "textbook learners" I just want to say that we don't learn each individual line one by one. Even though I had never heard of Heisig I learned to break down kanji into parts.
I'm not criticizing RTK here, but it seems like a lot of people think that if you don't use RTK, you just write the kanji over and over again in a notebook and have no idea what each "line" is, but we're not that dumb
Does RtK teach you kanji? - Zgarbas - 2013-02-07
^^ I am also pretty much a textbook learner, actually. Of course, given the high amount of textbook learners there will be a lot of variation between individuals, but I was trying to simplify things a bit. I apologise if it came out wrongly.
However, the premise of textbook kanji learning is rote memorizing the strokes, though of course at one point familiar radicals will stop being presented on a stroke-to-stroke basis. Even then, how much you rote memorize strokes and how much you use previous knowledge to help you out depends on the person.
(it doesn't help that textbooks sort kanjis in a pretty erratic manner due to frequency. 曜 was in the very first few lessons of my textbook whereas 白was in the second book, for a random example. )
Does RtK teach you kanji? - chamcham - 2013-02-07
The best thing is for you to download the sample chapters here:
http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2012/12/RK-1-6th-edition-sample.pdf
It'll take you through the first 12 lessons.
Then, you can decide if you want to buy the book.
Don't skip over the intro. It's really important.
In fact, don't skip over anything in the book.
Good luck.
Does RtK teach you kanji? - Stansfield123 - 2013-02-08
Yes, it does teach you Kanji. However, if you aren't sure about exactly how Japanese is written, you should go to Tae Kim's website http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/writing
and read the relevant parts (everything before Basic Grammar).
Heisig doesn't teach you the readings of the Kanji, or Japanese words, or anything like that. It only teaches you the characters, and one (usually the main) meaning of each characters.
However, this will be extremely beneficial in your further learning. It's well worth taking the time to learn the Kanji in this way first.
Does RtK teach you kanji? - TwoMoreCharacters - 2013-02-08
- Meaning(s)
- Appearance and stroke order
- Readings (pronunciation)
- Functions in words, some kanji mostly make up a word by themselves, some are only part of compound words (two or more characters making up one single word), some are both
What correctly constitutes as "knowing a kanji" is probably knowing all of the above, and in that sense RTK doesn't teach you Japanese. You won't know how to read Japanese when you're done with the book (although when you see words in context you'll have a good shot at guessing what they mean even if you've never seen them before, because you're familiar with the meanings).
What's arguably the hardest part though, is remembering the appearance of a kanji (which includes separating it from similar-looking ones) and associating that with what it means. RTK takes that hardest part, and lets you take it on in an easier and more systematic approach than brute forcing it all in. This is very motivating if you're at the start of learning Japanese and you find it daunting to think about how you're supposed to even deal with the 2000+ cryptic glyphs you're supposed to know.
Having the familiarity of the kanji that RTK gives you, the readings and compound applications are left for you to deal with later, in whatever way you want to continue your Japanese studies. Only now it's much easier--and you will always be learning the readings as you simply go along learning words.
Does RtK teach you kanji? - KanjiNoKami - 2013-02-09
The main drawback that is often pointed out is that it does not teach you kanji readings.
So strictly speaking it does not teach you kanji completely.
However, I did not find it too difficult to learn on-yomi directly while reading native sources.
There are people that try to learn on-yomi while studying kanji, but I think it is not necessarily.
Now I am able to infer the readings of most unknown words I come across and I have never done a systematic study of kanji readings. This is probably due to the fact that the very common ones are lesser than 1000 (a not too overwhelming number).
So in the end, Heisig teaches you only a subset of each kanji, but a very important one: the general meaning. You will have to fill up the missing parts of each kanji by reading, but as I said (at least for me) it was not too difficult (it takes at least a years of intensive reading though).