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+--- Thread: schultz's terrible kanji help page (/thread-647.html)
schultz's terrible kanji help page - wasurenaide - 2007-07-08
surprised no one has mentioned this yet. the guy who does the hilarious tokyo damage report blog has taken it upon himself to create a how to learn kanji guide. it's patterned after heisig, or something similar, or maybe the guy is smart and just came up with it all by himself. whatever. the point is not that you should consider switching, but that it's pretty funny. and god knows we could all use a laugh at kanji's expense. also, his method for having a separate onyomi story is potentially useful, though i have a hard enough time remembering just one story.
anyways, check it out:
http://www.hellodamage.com/kanjidicks/main.htm
schultz's terrible kanji help page - ファブリス - 2007-07-08
He's got a list of mnemonics for the ON yomi, something which was discussed in the "kanji chain" topics previously.
He adds a mnemonic for the readings into each kanji story, however the kanji are not grouped by reading. So this looks like something you could do with RTK1 without changing the RTK order. Remains to be seen how effective it is compared to doing the readings as a second step.
But, as much as I owe to the RTK method I have to admit that :
1- I have no doubts that you can learn the ON readings at the same time as RtK1, much like he does
2- it must be a lot more satisfying to learners to be able to read those damned kanji as they learn them
The main drawback I'm thinking of is the danger of getting distracted from the most important goal of attaining the 2000 kanji mark; if one starts reading kanji and compounds early on.
Then again, if someone smart would rewrite the RtK method and incoporate the reading mnemonics into the stories, and make that as a one-year course of Japanese, including vocabulary; and perhaps some basic grammar; then the vocab could only serve to re-inforce the kanji in memory and the length of time it takes or getting distracted would not matter. Basically, take some of the existing Japanese courses and add mnemonics. Wow. Revolution! Mnemonics! Oh my, mnemonics! Can we teach that?
Seeing as most RtK critic's argument revolves around not knowing the readings, ... point 2 will far outweigh the disadvantages.
Love the fact that he's added pictures as well to illustrate some of his "primitives" and keywords.