RTK or remembering the kana first?

RTK or remembering the kana first? - Printable Version

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RTK or remembering the kana first? - yogert909 - 2015-09-10

Stansfield123 Wrote:My question is this: You're not a mod, right? So why do you feel the need to police a conversation between two adults you've never even met? Let's say I really did have no reason to ask the guy whether he read Heisig or not. Let's say I really was just passive aggressively calling him an idiot. What's it to you? Would you do this in real life? If two people you don't know were having a verbal disagreement at the office, would you feel compelled to jump in and lecture them on how to behave?

Why would you think it's OK to do it on the Internet? Let me, and the mods, worry about whether I'm following etiquette or not. Don't be like one of those old ladies who just feel compelled to give their opinion on everyone else's behavior. Unless you're a mod and I don't know about it, in which case good work and keep up the vigilance officer.

We are all having a conversation here. Your analogy about two people arguing on the side of a street is not a good analogy. If a group of people are having a conversation (virtual or actual) and one person comes off aggressively towards others in the conversation, it's normal that people complain to the person. And I find it odd that you find it odd.

I'd like you to know that I think some your ideas you post on here are very good ones and I really appreciate them personally. However, you come across as such a self appointed authority on pretty much any topic you care to comment on, disrespecting others' opinions, that It makes it hard to respect the message when the messenger is being such a jerk. In other words, you are polluting a respectful conversation with arrogance and derailing an otherwise productive conversation.

This is just my opinion and I'm not a mod, but I think your comments would be taken a lot more seriously if you didn't take yourself so seriously.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - graeme - 2015-09-10

Guys, you're arguing over the wrong thing. I was asking whether I should do the KANA using Heisig's method now, or later, since Heisig wasn't clear on this point. I'm already doing Kanji now, up to about 350 in RTK.

For the other who asked, I'm not in Japan, so I have no practical use for kana yet.

One comment mentioned reading fluency for kana. That's an argument for learning them now. Skritter displays the hiragana and katakana for each kanji I'm learning. So if I knew those I'd get a bit of passive practice at the same time I was learning kanji.

Would that be a good reason for learning kana now, even though I won't be otherwise using them until I finish RTK? I don't plan on reading or studying vocab, I'm going to stick to Heisig's method.

One other consideration is that my pronunciation will improve with three more months of pimsleur. I may develop a more native like pronunciation of kana if I wait till then. That might be the deciding factor.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - SellingTokyo - 2015-09-10

I think the bottom line is that it such a tiny little step in your overall Japanese learning journey, and it probably doesn't matter at all. A bigger problem is wasting too much time overthinking your study methods or wasting time on message boards about studying during your study time. On this I am speaking from experience!

Regarding Skritter showing kana (I guess probably Onyomi and Kunyomi) Heisig says not to study this. You might get little rewards when you can link a keyword to a word you learned in Pimsleur, but the general consensus as far as I understand is to ignore this until you have completed RTK1 as per Heisig's instructions.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - yogert909 - 2015-09-10

If you are studying pimsleur now, there is no practical reason to study kana to support pimsleur, but then again no reason to study kanji for pimsleur either. However, once you start learning to read, you will need both kanji and kana. Actually, there is plenty to read with only kana if you don't mind children's books or graded readers, so there is one argument in favor of learning kana before or parallel to rtk. Also, once you start studying written vocabulary, you will need kana as japanese words use a mixture of kana and kanji(or sometimes just kana). And then there's learning the readings of words with kanji in them. A good way of learning vocabulary readings is to put the word with furigana on the back of a flash card, so knowing kana will help you there. You will also get plenty of kana practice from vocabulary flashcards with furigana on the back.

So all that coupled with the fact that there' only a small number of kana and they are comparatively easy to learn, it makes sense to learn kana before or parallel to kanji. But of course, it's not going o ruin your brain or anything making it hard to learn later, so I wouldn't worry too much about it really. It's just kana are nice to know and not too time consuming to learn.

Regarding reading the yomi while you are doing rtk, it's probably best to not spend time on this with now and learn yomi from actual words, or study RTK2 first.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - graeme - 2015-09-10

Of course, it's not a big deal in the long run. Still, knowing or not knowing kana would change the three months.

I think I'll avoid them, so as to get better pronunciation later. So I'll just be blind to skritter' readings for now Smile

Re: the other comment about pimsleur, it's true there's no need for kanji yet, but doing this is a good way to be ready to start learning to read much faster once pimsleur is done. The timeline for pimsleur and for RTK is similar, though I may finish RTK1 first. If so I'll move on to kana or RTK 3

RTK or remembering the kana first? - yogert909 - 2015-09-10

graeme Wrote:Re: the other comment about pimsleur, it's true there's no need for kanji yet, but doing this is a good way to be ready to start learning to read much faster once pimsleur is done. The timeline for pimsleur and for RTK is similar, though I may finish RTK1 first. If so I'll move on to kana or RTK 3

Sure. I totally agree doing RTK in parallel makes sense. I'm sorry if it seemed otherwise.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - anotherjohn - 2015-09-10

I learned kana only after finishing (sprinting) RTK, but found it took a while to get decent at reading them, so I guess starting them sooner and doing some regular reading practice alongside RTK might have been more efficient overall.

Could have just started core6k at a gentle pace & put furigana on the front of all the cards & used them purely for kana reading practice without bothering about meaning etc, though I was far to obsessive about things at the time to tolerate any 'not bothering'.

I used to misread quite few of them, e.g. mixing up はほ, まも, あお, さち(ffs) etc, so getting immediate feedback from the core6k audio was very helpful in the beginning.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - yogert909 - 2015-09-10

anotherjohn Wrote:I learned kana only after finishing (sprinting) RTK, but found it took a while to get decent at reading them, so I guess starting them sooner and doing some regular reading practice alongside RTK might have been more efficient overall.

Could have just started core6k at a gentle pace & put furigana on the front of all the cards & used them purely for kana reading practice without bothering about meaning etc, though I was far to obsessive about things at the time to tolerate any 'not bothering'.

I used to misread quite few of them, e.g. mixing up はほ, まも, あお, さち(ffs) etc, so getting immediate feedback from the core6k audio was very helpful in the beginning.

That's a good point about taking some time to really get to know the kana. I had a similar experience where it took months before I could be confident I wasn't mixing them up like you said. However, putting furigana on the front probably isn't the best of ideas, as you just end up reading the furigana and not paying much attention to the kanji. At least that's what happened to me.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - RawrPk - 2015-09-10

Stansfield123 Wrote:
RawrPk Wrote:Learning kana allows you to do something in Japanese without too much time or effort: read!

I don't understand why anyone would not learn kana first.
Heisig gives a very good reason for doing Remember the Kanji before everything else. I take it you haven't read his introduction to RtK?

And how exactly would someone who can't speak Japanese start reading it, just by learning the Kana?

As an owner of the book, yes I have read the intro. I even read it before buying it because I wanted to know what the system was about and I just jump into the deep end of something without knowing what I'm going into.

Seeing as kana is the phonetics of the language, yes I can say kana is damn useful for reading and basic speech/phrases. Maybe I'm a bit traditional since I was in the middle of my first Japanese course when I discovered RTK, and at this point already knew kana.

I've personally never finished RTK (got to about 200 in my last attempt; plan to finish it this time around) and learned most of my kanji rote (which I hate -_-) in classes but does that mean I can't read/write/speak? I'm not fluent but I'm not completely helpless either. Kana is what made this possible for me.

Oh last bit, my current RTK deck has Japanese keywords which of course contains kana. So there is another current and relevant reason for me to be thankful I have kana knowledge under my belt.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - Stansfield123 - 2015-09-11

yogert909 Wrote:We are all having a conversation here. Your analogy about two people arguing on the side of a street is not a good analogy. If a group of people are having a conversation (virtual or actual) and one person comes off aggressively towards others in the conversation, it's normal that people complain to the person. And I find it odd that you find it odd.

I'd like you to know that I think some your ideas you post on here are very good ones and I really appreciate them personally. However, you come across as such a self appointed authority on pretty much any topic you care to comment on, disrespecting others' opinions, that It makes it hard to respect the message when the messenger is being such a jerk. In other words, you are polluting a respectful conversation with arrogance and derailing an otherwise productive conversation.

This is just my opinion and I'm not a mod, but I think your comments would be taken a lot more seriously if you didn't take yourself so seriously.

You really believe that acting like a "self appointed authority" is wrong, don't you? Of course I'm a "self appointed authority". In fact I'm my only "self appointed authority". My judgement is the only thing that informs what I believe and say. No one else's.

You should try that sometimes. You should try having enough confidence in the value of your own judgement to not be wishy washy about everything you say. You should consider the possibility that prefacing everything you say with "I could be wrong, I'm not really sure what I'm talking about" isn't some kind of virtue.

yogert909 Wrote:In other words, you are polluting a respectful conversation with arrogance

You just said that my posts have good ideas. So how am I arrogant? An arrogant person isn't right. An arrogant person pretends to know things, when they have no clue what they're talking about.

Your problem isn't with my supposed arrogance. Your problem is that I don't subscribe to the subjectivist, consensus driven epistemology that drives you. That's not arrogance on my part, that's just a fundamental philosophical disagreement that you failed to consider and instead just dismissed as a character flaw. That supposed "character flaw" is one of the things I'm most proud of.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - Stansfield123 - 2015-09-11

RawrPk Wrote:As an owner of the book, yes I have read the intro. I even read it before buying it because I wanted to know what the system was about and I just jump into the deep end of something without knowing what I'm going into.

Seeing as kana is the phonetics of the language, yes I can say kana is damn useful for reading and basic speech/phrases. Maybe I'm a bit traditional since I was in the middle of my first Japanese course when I discovered RTK, and at this point already knew kana.

I've personally never finished RTK (got to about 200 in my last attempt; plan to finish it this time around) and learned most of my kanji rote (which I hate -_-) in classes but does that mean I can't read/write/speak? I'm not fluent but I'm not completely helpless either. Kana is what made this possible for me.

Oh last bit, my current RTK deck has Japanese keywords which of course contains kana. So there is another current and relevant reason for me to be thankful I have kana knowledge under my belt.

I never meant to suggest that the Heisig method is the only valid way to learn Japanese. Far from it. And yet, that is the position you seem to be arguing against.

You learned the Kana, and then you learned basic Japanese, and they you learned some Kanji through a more traditional method. All I have to say to that is "Excellent! Well done!". You won't hear a single word of criticism out of me, for doing that.

What I will criticize is the advice you gave the OP to interrupt his RtK studies, or cut down on them, and start doing something else in parallel while he's also learning RtK. Makes no sense. RtK is most useful when done up front, before you start studying Japanese. You don't HAVE TO do RtK, but if you're gonna do it, then that's the best time to do it. And it's best done in a single chunk of sustained effort. Dragging it out for months is counter-productive and kills motivation.

RTK or remembering the kana first? - s0apgun - 2015-09-11

OP's question has been answered. Thread closed.