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Most effective kanji deck - splikie - 2015-06-16
What do you think is the most effective way to review kanji?
My anki deck has kanji on the front and stories,examples on the back.
Yesterday I re-read RTK's introduction and it was written that you should always review starting from the keywords.
What do you think is the most effective method?
Most effective kanji deck - tokyostyle - 2015-06-16
splikie Wrote:What do you think is the most effective method?The one you can finish. Alternatively the one you can finish in the shortest amount of time so you can start studying Japanese itself.
Most effective kanji deck - scooter1 - 2015-06-16
I think the answer is different for everyone. It depends on your Japanese language goals and how much time you have. In a vacuum, studying both sides for RTK would be great, but it is time consuming.
Reviewing "kanji to keyword" is likely significantly faster than "keyword to kanji." But I am not sure if "kanji to keyword" will stick as well. And the RTK method is designed to facilitate the writing process. I just don't know if learning all those stories for recognition only is worth the effort. Other will surely have a view. Also, if you spend so many hours with RTK and finish unable to write, you may be disappointed; even after completing RTK following JH's recommendations, you will be unable to read or pronounce words!
Regardless of what JH says, after following his "keyword to kanji" method, my "kanji to keyword" skills are not all that great.
Vocabulary is a bit different, but can provide some value as an analogy. When I was studying vocabulary at language school, we needed to study a word's kanji writing, reading, and meaning in context (e.g. how it worked in a sentence, not just a direct one-to-one translation to English). That was painful at first, but I learned to memorize (vocabulary) very rapidly. I also felt the multidimensional approach was highly effective and sticky. Downside, is that I spent a lot of time memorizing the writing of words I may not write (but I still think that helps improve my reading).
Most effective kanji deck - geminimonk - 2015-06-16
I've thought that it's desirable to recall kanji while looking at English, but undesirable to recall English while looking at kanji. The goal is to have Japanese vocabulary come to mind when reading Japanese text, and teaching your mind to think 'English' when it should think 'Japanese' is counterproductive in the long run.
Most effective kanji deck - TurtleBear - 2015-06-16
Based on my experience, studying from kanji to keyword has worked very well. Back when I was going through RTK1, I would study 550 kanji from the index each day. This might sound time consuming, but it only takes about thirty to forty-five minutes. Of course, I also studied from keyword to kanji to practice my writing. The result was that I became a lot better at recognizing kanji than writing them, but my writing ability is still quite good. This works for me because I use Heisig's keywords to look up kanji whose readings I don't know when playing video games or reading visual novels.
These days, I mostly study from keyword to kanji, but if I start doing poorly on my reviews, I'll take a few days to study from the index again. When I do that, my review scores immediately get better.
Having done RTK2 and the Core 6K, whenever I encounter a kanji or compound I know how to read, I have no problem recalling the Japanese over Heisig's keywords. It's like the two are stored in separate parts of my brain.
In my opinion, learning by recognition isn't a bad thing. That being said, even though I don't have any need for writing kanji, I like having the ability. It also makes looking up new kanji by radicals a lot less time consuming.
Most effective kanji deck - bertoni - 2015-06-16
I would rate "kanji to Heisig keyword" skills as unimportant, which is why I never drilled them. Any Anki deck that covers RTK1 should be fine. Some people have stated that learning recognition only is faster, and that might be true, but I'd use Japanese words for that.
Most effective kanji deck - ariariari - 2015-06-16
I agree with what's been said before, which is basically that people do it differently, and have different goals.
I'll tell you my experience just because I made a change recently and my experience might be useful to you as a reference.
Many years ago I moved to Japan to do JET and didn't know any Japanese. During those years I never heard about Heisig or his method. I wrote out the kanji in a book when I learned them and very rarely wrote them by hand afterwards. I met with a teacher weekly to go thru a textbook and my progress was fine. Writing by hand was a minor part of the lessons. For example, I kept a journal in Japanese and my teacher corrected it. The journal was my idea. IIRC I had tons of errors, but very few of the errors related to mis-writing a kanji.
Now I live in the US. Last year for fun I took a Japanese class, and it was the first time I had tests where we had to write the kanji by hand. I used Heisig to help with that. First I used his book, then an anki deck, then "RTK Lite". It was time consuming, but by the end of the class I was doing fine on the exams. I didn't finish Heisig, but a large portion of my daily study time was spent writing kanji. At that time my deck was keyword -> kanji.
This year I decided to continue with Japanese lessons, but now I take lessons online with JOI. I also set a goal of taking (passing?) the N3 in December. I don't have to write kanji by hand for my class. I switched my deck to be kanji -> definition (scraped from jisho.org). This has been much better for me. To me is extremely useful to use Anki to quiz me on whether I know the definition of a kanji or not. And it doesn't take much time. I now view writing kanji by hand as a "nice to have" rather than a requirement.