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+--- Thread: Benefits of RTK. (/thread-5866.html)
Benefits of RTK. - Arckus - 2010-06-21
I'm only a couple of hundred into RTK but I'm still lost on the exact benefits of it. I know it teaches you how to write the kanji but from what I can tell it doesn't do much else, maybe it helps you recognize the difference between similar kanji? How harder would it be to learn a kanji if you didn't do it in RTK first? (I'm not counting learning how to write it here, just to read it.) If the main benefit of RTK is being able to write, then It's something I'd rather do down the line when I've already gotten decent in Japanese. I never write much in my native language as it is. So, people who have finished RTK, how did it help you? Will it be much harder for me to learn to read a kanji in a sentence if I skip RTK? Thanks.
Benefits of RTK. - caivano - 2010-06-21
I'm doing rtk now after nearly 2 years of Japanese study. I learnt about 500-600 kanji without rtk but got to a point where they were getting really difficult to remember correctly. Regarding reading and writing, writing helps a lot with reading, especially distinguishing between similar kanji.
Benefits of RTK. - thurd - 2010-06-21
Arckus Wrote:I'm only a couple of hundred into RTK but I'm still lost on the exact benefits of it. I know it teaches you how to write the kanji but from what I can tell it doesn't do much else, maybe it helps you recognize the difference between similar kanji? How harder would it be to learn a kanji if you didn't do it in RTK first? (I'm not counting learning how to write it here, just to read it.) If the main benefit of RTK is being able to write, then It's something I'd rather do down the line when I've already gotten decent in Japanese. I never write much in my native language as it is. So, people who have finished RTK, how did it help you? Will it be much harder for me to learn to read a kanji in a sentence if I skip RTK? Thanks.Japanese don't do RTK or SRS or any of this stuff we're trying here and they seem to do just fine with kanji. So it is possible to ditch it completely and just learn the language. However...
We are not Japanese, we are much older and we don't have the luxury of everyone going easy on us for about 15 years. We have to compensate for our lack of contact with kanji & language, so we're trying to synthesize almost 17-18 years of experience/knowledge into the smallest possible time frame. Its good to have a tool that can make it a bit easier.
Take it from me, I learned hiragana almost 10 years ago using my self-made SRS cards, putting easy/difficult into separate piles etc.. Since then I've had almost 7 year break from Japanese and despite that I remembered most of them without a problem.
Benefits of RTK. - Asriel - 2010-06-21
take 寺
now look at 時、特、侍、待、持、得
Do you know how they're different? You might now, but just wait until you see them in the wild.
RtK will remedy this.
Benefits of RTK. - Arckus - 2010-06-21
Good point Asriel. So, would it be a bad idea to start reading and SRSing Tae Kim grammar for example?
Benefits of RTK. - Asriel - 2010-06-21
We had a discussion about this not too long ago, in a thread pretty similar to this one.
I don't remember if we came to a conclusion or not (I'm going to say we stayed pretty divided...) but my opinion is to go for it. Your goal is to learn Japanese, and spending 100% effort on kanji isn't teaching it to you. You can always learn the kanji for words that you already know later.
Learn actual Japanese, but keep doing RtK at a decent rate (20 or so a day? It's really up to you)
Benefits of RTK. - ta12121 - 2010-06-21
Asriel Wrote:take 寺Definitely agree, I can point out all of them pretty easily do to RTK and immersion.
now look at 時、特、侍、待、持、得
Do you know how they're different? You might now, but just wait until you see them in the wild.
RtK will remedy this.
Benefits of RTK. - Arckus - 2010-06-21
Great! One more thing, I was just taking a look at the Tae Kim website and it's confusing. Should I be reading the complete guide or the grammar guide? They seem a lot different and the complete guide looks harder.
Benefits of RTK. - ta12121 - 2010-06-21
You know that doing RTK helps when you are doing monolingual look-ups. Another benefit right there.
Here is an example of my full monolingual sentence I just looked up yesterday.
疑惑の元力士、「恐喝ではない」と否定
[ぎ][わく]の(もと)力士[り き][し]、「[きょう][かつ]ではない」と[ひ][ てい]
疑惑>本当かどうか、不正[ふ][せい]があるのではないかなどと疑[うたが]いをもつこと。また、その気持ち。疑[うたが]い。「―の目で見る」「―を招[まね]く言動[げんどう]」「―が晴[は]れる」
元[力士]>相撲取[すもうと]り
恐喝>［名］(スル)相手の弱みなどにつけこみおどすこと。また、おどして金品[きんぴん]をゆすりとること。「収賄[しゅう][わい]をねたに―する」
否定>そうではないと打[う]ち消[け]すこと。また、非[ひ]として認めないこと。「うわさを―する」「暴力を―する」
Thanks to RTK I can understand this well. It's possible to learn japanese without RTK but RTK will help you later down the road
Benefits of RTK. - Groot - 2010-06-21
Yep, I agree with the other posters: RTK is worth doing. Yes, RTK teaches you to write characters, but it also teaches you to recognize them, and as a bonus usually gives you one useful meaning associated with a character. I tried learning kanji without RTK, and after a while my eyes would glaze over. RTK gives you a systematic way to read and write the kanji that, as a bonus, is fun. It's especially entertaining if you use it in conjunction with "Reviewing the Kanji", the link at the upper-right hand corner of this webpage.
Sooner or later you're going to have to learn to recognize the kanji. Why not do it in a systematic, relatively quick way? And learning to write kanji is important because stroke count and stroke order is relevant when using dictionaries. But even if you don't think you'd ever write a single word in Japanese, RTK is still indispensable for learning to recognize and (eventually) read them.
And sure, it's not a bad idea to do other stuff at the same time. I did textbooks, but I suppose Tae Kim would be OK.
Benefits of RTK. - Groot - 2010-06-21
Quote:Great! One more thing, I was just taking a look at the Tae Kim website and it's confusing. Should I be reading the complete guide or the grammar guide? They seem a lot different and the complete guide looks harder.Tae Kim's site is impressive, and I certainly admire him for putting so much work into something available for free. But for me, it wasn't the best beginning tool. I used the Genki textbooks and other textbooks to introduce myself to basic Japanese. TK's grammar section seems to presuppose some basic vocabulary, not to mention familiarity with kana. I preferred using a published volume that's been edited professionally. Something like Genki or Hosogawa also comes with audio to help introduce you to the sounds of the language. But such things aren't free.
I share your impression that sometimes TK is a bit confusing; I've run into minor English glitches there, and some of his locutions irk me. (My peeve: "This grammar", he likes to say about every new point he discusses. That may be acceptable English usage, but it's unusual, and he invariably uses it instead of more common phrases like "this construction" or "this idiom" or "this sentence structure".) Also, his deliberate policy of providing literal English translations is OK -- but I prefer the technique of the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, which provides not only a literal translation but also a more "natural" English translation. In general, I prefer the Dictionary of Grammar series, though I recognize that that isn't necessarily a great starting point either.
Benefits of RTK. - Seiska - 2010-06-22
Well I am only a starter in learning japanese, but I have tried both heisig and normal method. Based on my small ammount of experience I can somewhat guess what kinds of benefits Heisig method gives you in learning japanese.
Problems with normal method:
Japanese people already know a huge amount of vocabulary when they start learning writing and reading. Just like in any other language you can already understand the language but you can't read or write it until you learn how the languages writing system works.
Japanese can already write pretty much every word with hiragana and slowly start using kanji as they learn them. Now we do not have the same luxury as we need to learn all the words as well.
What heisig method does, is somewhat mimic the advantage the chinese people have in learning japanese. They don't really need to learn new kanji, but to learn how japanese people use the same kanjies.
Heisig builds up a giant spreadsheet in to your brain filled with all the kanjies and the spreadsheet even has these pointers that we call stories.
Now you only need to start adding data to that spreadsheet, and new kanjies are easy to learn thanks to the Heisig method.
In normal way you probably start learning words, grammar etc by writing and reading them in hiragana or romaji and using only few kanji if at all. They need to learn grammar, words, kanjies (writing and meaning) all at once. It is often also very time consuming and annoying to find a kanji trough kanji dictionary by with radicals and stroke number.
Now with Heisig method it depends on how you'll continue after RTK1. Many start learning trough context and use books like Genki. Genki uses only hiragana until the 3rd lesson or so.
The kanjies in the 3rd lesson are not 1st grade kanjies which japanese learn on first grade, they are common kanjies.
If you have done heisig you already know the kanjies and you can just start adding information in to your brains spreadsheet.
Every time you use a kanji it also further improves your image of that kanji, now if you have already learned the kanjies trough heisig no matter how hard text you read it will strenghten your image on those particular kanjies. So its basicly one big battleships game where every hit strengthens your memory on the kanjies. You can also easily find information about the kanjies trough online dictionaries with the help of keywords.
But the simplest way to tell people how heisig helps is to tell them what the sentence
"Divide and conquer" really means. Its far more easier to learn 1 or 2 things at once instead of 5. Not only will you get confused but you'll also forget things more easily.
With Heisig RTK1 completed you have already completed "writing of kanjies" and "naming/understanding the kanjies(keyword)". You can nearly fully focus on increasing your vocabulary, understanding on grammar. You have the tools you only need to learn how to use them.
Benefits of RTK. - falconzss - 2010-06-25
@Seiska
thanks for your well written post.
i restarted learning japanese after almost two years of inactivity and even after writing a lot due to exercises we were given in the beginners course i took back then at university, i forgot most of the kana/kanji i had learned. that's the reason i looked for a better method for learning and containing the kana/kanji so i tried Heisig's approach. even though i've only done RTKana up to this point i already can see the benefits of this. With only one time going through the book i can remember every kana, even those i had problems with in the past. i can break down kana i don't recognize instantly and recall the associated story to help me recall the sound.
i know this is about the benefits of RTK but since it uses the same method as RTK just applied to kana it shouldn't make a difference in this aspect.
Benefits of RTK. - Arckus - 2010-07-05
Hey guys, sorry for asking another question in this old thread but I've stumbled on something! I've been doing a bit of Tae Kim on the side because I find I get bored of RTK after doing 30 or so but I can still keep studying other Japanese stuff! Anyway, I've noticed that I'm not having that much difficulty learning to read kanji I haven't seen in RTK yet, obviously I can't write them but I can still recognize them decently. I'm gonna do some light SRSing of Tae Kim while going through RTK, I can always learn to write kanji I can read when I get to it in RTK! Can anyone foresee a problem with this?
Benefits of RTK. - yudantaiteki - 2010-07-05
Heisig claims it will cause problems but I've never seen any evidence that this is the case.
Responding to something earlier:
Quote:Japanese people already know a huge amount of vocabulary when they start learning writing and reading.Not only that, but they learn the kanji quite slowly in comparison to normal foreign learners -- they spend 4 years learning 640 kanji, and this is with constant exposure and seeing them in all their other learning materials for every other subject they study as well. (This is not to say that kids don't learn additional kanji as well on the side, but they "officially" don't have to.)
Benefits of RTK. - Arckus - 2010-07-05
yudantaiteki Wrote:Heisig claims it will cause problems but I've never seen any evidence that this is the case.The only thing that worries me is that while I can recognize and understand the kanji in an SRS, I might not when I see it randomly somewhere.
Responding to something earlier:
Quote:Japanese people already know a huge amount of vocabulary when they start learning writing and reading.Not only that, but they learn the kanji quite slowly in comparison to normal foreign learners -- they spend 4 years learning 640 kanji, and this is with constant exposure and seeing them in all their other learning materials for every other subject they study as well. (This is not to say that kids don't learn additional kanji as well on the side, but they "officially" don't have to.)
Benefits of RTK. - yudantaiteki - 2010-07-05
That's why I think it's a good idea to get away from RTK as soon as possible and get into Japanese -- for those people who can finish RTK in 3 months that's fine, but personally I don't think it's a good idea to spend a year or more on RTK before you even start anything else Japanese-related. RTK Lite is a neat idea.
Quote:now look at 時、特、侍、待、持、得It's worth noting that not using RTK does not automatically make these groups impossible to deal with. I never used RTK but I have no problems telling these apart; once you get enough Japanese to read them in context it rarely causes problems because the kanji show up in different contexts and different words.
Do you know how they're different? You might now, but just wait until you see them in the wild.
If you end up not using RTK, the most important thing to do is get as much context and as much reading as possible. Sometimes people focus way too much on the number of kanji they know, and if you're mostly trying to learn kanji as out-of-context shapes (without a supporting framework like RTK), then groups like the above do present real problems.
Benefits of RTK. - Arckus - 2010-07-05
yudantaiteki Wrote:That's why I think it's a good idea to get away from RTK as soon as possible and get into Japanese -- for those people who can finish RTK in 3 months that's fine, but personally I don't think it's a good idea to spend a year or more on RTK before you even start anything else Japanese-related. RTK Lite is a neat idea.If you didn't use RTK how did you learn kanji? Did you use the classic rote memorization or can't you write them at all? I'm not interested in learning to write them and I originally asked in this thread if I can manage without RTK but I'm still a little unsure about it all. Right now I'm unsure whether to completely skip RTK or do it at a slower rate with other stuff on the side.
Quote:now look at 時、特、侍、待、持、得It's worth noting that not using RTK does not automatically make these groups impossible to deal with. I never used RTK but I have no problems telling these apart; once you get enough Japanese to read them in context it rarely causes problems because the kanji show up in different contexts and different words.
Do you know how they're different? You might now, but just wait until you see them in the wild.
If you end up not using RTK, the most important thing to do is get as much context and as much reading as possible. Sometimes people focus way too much on the number of kanji they know, and if you're mostly trying to learn kanji as out-of-context shapes (without a supporting framework like RTK), then groups like the above do present real problems.
Benefits of RTK. - Asriel - 2010-07-05
My advice would be to learn Japanese with RtK on the side. You can learn to listen and speak without needing a single kanji, so watching shows and stuff could still be done.
You could then learn RtK on the side, at whatever pace you feel is good, 20/day? 10/day? whatever. I'd suggest it, because you become quite comfortable with all the characters, even the ones that look similar.
Just my 2c
edit: my basis for this is that I didn't start RtK until I had finished Genki 1/2 and IJ, as well as a bunch of native materials. I was "relatively decent" at Japanese before I started it, and I would have gotten bored out of my mind had I spent 3 full months just going through RtK
Benefits of RTK. - oregum - 2010-07-05
Arckus Wrote:I'm not interested in learning to write them and I originally asked in this thread if I can manage without RTK but I'm still a little unsure about it all. Right now I'm unsure whether to completely skip RTK or do it at a slower rate with other stuff on the side.I always try to explain RtK as a 2000 character alphabet to people. It may not teach you how to pronounce each character, it may not teach you the meaning of words, nor will it teach you grammar, but it will help you distinguish each character.
I'd say RtK lite is a minimum. You can complete it while doing Tae Kim, and finish both in 2-3 months.
Before I started RtK, I kept hitting a brick wall every time I ran into a kanji I didn't know. Which was pretty much all the time. I tried avoiding kanji before going to Japan, thinking kana was enough, but that was a big mistake. Kanji was everywhere, and couldn't read anything. Then I tried learning kanji using every method under the sun (except RtK) and failed. I'd learn a bunch of kanji, then the next week get them all confused as I learned new ones. Then, I'd have to go back and learn the old ones again. Then I'd forget the later group, have to relearn those, and so on.
I hated kanji at that point, stopped going to class, and got a bunch of C/Ds in all my classes.
The end.... lol. But that was me, and everyone is different.
Benefits of RTK. - Groot - 2010-07-05
I've had kinda the same experience as Oregum. I tried lots of ways to learn to recognize kanji before RtK, and none worked for me. Now I know the whole 2000-character "alphabet." But it was fun for me; if it's not fun for you, then yeah, maybe do it on the side while you study a text or Tae Kim or something else.
Benefits of RTK. - yudantaiteki - 2010-07-05
Arckus Wrote:If you didn't use RTK how did you learn kanji? Did you use the classic rote memorization or can't you write them at all? I'm not interested in learning to write them and I originally asked in this thread if I can manage without RTK but I'm still a little unsure about it all. Right now I'm unsure whether to completely skip RTK or do it at a slower rate with other stuff on the side.I pretty much did "classic" rote memorization -- I used Kanji in Context, which presents a lot of vocab words with example sentences to go along with each kanji, and I also tried to read things while I was doing that. I also used Basic Kanji Book 1 &2 and Intermediate Kanji Book 1&2. (This was after 2.5 years of formal class, though)
I can write kanji OK because I took some of the kanji kentei tests; for me handwriting kanji isn't that important of a skill so I'm more or less satisfied with my abiliy.
Benefits of RTK. - Arckus - 2010-07-05
Thanks people! I'm gonna go with my initial idea and do tae kim on the side so I don't get bored. I'm gonna be careful not to add too many sentences and burn out though.
Benefits of RTK. - Anna B - 2010-07-05
I'm really glad RTK wasn't the first thing I studied.
For me, it's both easier and more interesting to have some context for the kanji. I recognize, and know meanings and readings for, some RTK kanji that I've already picked up in my other studies, and I'm also exposed to kanji every day in 'real' contexts (outside of RTK), so I've got a nice little feedback loop going.
You may not need to write kanji IRL, but when you're learning nothing cements it in your brain like writing it.
I do wish I'd tried RTK a lot sooner, though. Nothing else I tried worked, and I feel that my lack of kanji has been detrimental to both learning the language and enjoying my time in Japan. I'm a reader and it's hell not to be able to read anything!
Benefits of RTK. - Arckus - 2010-07-05
Well, I may have gotten a bit cocky. After reviewing all the stuff I learnt from Tae Kim so far it's proving difficult to review sentences with kanji that I haven't seen in RTK yet. I may try changing the kanji I don't know to kana for now.