It's hard to believe some people actually go around saying RTK is useless, when in fact the most daunting thing that discourages the vast majority of those interested in Japanese from studying it is actually kanji.

Excuse me for thinking the massive amount of new words that'll show up in native material that have nothing to do with my mother tongue or English is actually enough of a burden. Immersion is more enjoyable when you don't have to worry about the shape of a gazillion new kanji and learn the more unusual ones much faster? Who'd ever think that? Such a useless skill to develop!

I don't think it's a useless skill (quite the opposite), it's more that using RTK just for that seems like overkill, if you're not actually learning to write the characters from memory.

(2016-06-13, 2:01 am)pm215 Wrote: I don't think it's a useless skill (quite the opposite), it's more that using RTK just for that seems like overkill, if you're not actually learning to write the characters from memory.

It's not easy to determine how time-efficient RTK is compared to other approaches. But in the grand scheme of things, you'll take a LOT of time to learn Japanese no matter what. Whether it was overkill or not, I'm glad I don't have to waste time trying to make sense of most kanji I'll ever encounter.

My main goal was to do that in advance to make my life easier and immersion more fun - most people seem to ignore the latter, which is actually a big deal imo -, and at the end of the day I got what I wanted. Of course, the extra fun is a trade off because you're doing part of the hard work in advance, but I don't think it's a bad idea to get the boring stuff out of the way asap in order to reach a comfortable level where immersion is both viable and enjoyable. No matter how difficult a language is, the whole process only gets easier from there because it's a lot more fun.

You must remember that different communities are strongly biased towards or against different goals, so people who are about efficiency or learning as much as possible before they burn out will totally be down on methods like Heisig, since they add extra steps upfront to the process of getting better at japanese.

I really don't look at it any other way. It's different strokes for different folks. The important part is making sure that people who don't know what they're doing don't get dragged into something that's got caveats attached, and that's a job for time.

(2016-06-13, 2:45 am)wareya Wrote: You must remember that different communities are strongly biased towards or against different goals, so people who are about efficiency or learning as much as possible before they burn out will totally be down on methods like Heisig, since they add extra steps upfront to the process of getting better at japanese.

I really don't look at it any other way. It's different strokes for different folks. The important part is making sure that people who don't know what they're doing don't get dragged into something that's got caveats attached, and that's a job for time.

It's not particularly difficult to do RTK slowly alongside N5-N4 material though. The advantage of knowing tons of kanji only starts to kicks in once you get past N4 stuff imho. There's a lot to take in before you get there. Granted, that's not what's recommended in RTK, but the fact of the matter is you can do it and it works great.

Not that anybody has to do it or like it, but it's definitely possible to do it without getting burned out. But then again, some people hardly make an effort to learn the language. I don't think I could stand taking a full year to finish Genki 1 and 2, let alone just Genki 1 like some people do.

That's exactly the mentality I'm talking about. You're heavily biased in favor of kanji study. Not all other people are the same way. There are people that just literally don't accept the idea that there are enough benefits to RTK to justify the time expense.

There's not even necessarily a good reason for believing that, just like there's not necessarily a good reason for believing that RTK is vital. Personal reasons aren't that important when both paths clearly work. There's plenty of room for purely subjective decisions here.

On the flip side, you'll never have to justify using RTK to me. I'll just nod my head and go back to doing recognition for kanji to on'yomi rather than doing recall for keywords to writing.

No point doing RTK if you are only going to go to say a N4 level. If you are going to grind in 4K hours + into the project than it makes more sense to do RTK and do it up front.

Much like doing drills over and over is pointless if you are a recreational sport player, just go ahead and do it. If you plan on taking something seriously though, it would be useful to spend a lot of work on the fundamentals.

The only real difference is that with RTK, it kinda works on a system and an order which is not the same as the order in which you will encounter Kanji from other learning methods so in that particular case it is warranted to do them before than during. At the very least spent much more time on it than the other stuff.

Yeah it sucks, it's boring and it feels like you are just mucking about when you really just want to do whatever you want with the language. Again though, in the long run it is better to eat bitter in the short term.

If one looks at the JLPT wiki article, it seems that those who know Hanzi save a rather significant amount of time when learning Japanese. For N1 it is 1700–2600 hours for people who know Chinese vs 3000–4800 hours for those who don't.
I am not going to say that going through RTK will save you over 1000 hours, those people who know Chinese are also well versed in reading characters at speed in addition to knowing how to learn new characters. RTK only helps with the latter mostly. However I'd guess that putting the 200 hours up front would save more than 200 hours on the road to N1, maybe 50 or 100 hours but that's something. Heisig IIRC alludes to this in the introduction or somewhere, RTK gives part of the advantage that Chinese people have in learning Japanese.

I'd also find it a fresh hell to try to learn new characters in order of usefulness instead of via building blocks allowed for use of hint sentences and memory devices.
OTOH I'd also find it a fresh hell to come up with long stories for each character and to come up with detailed mental images for them, so I skipped that part of the method.
Unless they have cupcakes, or bacon I prefer avoiding fresh hells.

I don't think anyone says RTK is useless - it is obviously useful, because many people have used it and it worked. For them. Which is great.

That said, I could not recommend it, because I personally found it excruciating, gave up, and learnt Japanese anyway.

Dudeist Wrote:If you are going to grind in 4K hours + into the project than it makes more sense to do RTK and do it up front.

Dudeist Wrote:Yeah it sucks, it's boring and it feels like you are just mucking about when you really just want to do whatever you want with the language. Again though, in the long run it is better to eat bitter in the short term.

And claims like this really annoy me. Can you back that up with hard evidence? Almost everything argued on this topic is anecdotal or conjecture based on almost nothing. I think it's quite arrogant to ignore other people's experiences in this when your claims aren't based on anything solid. And even if you have had huge success by doing RTK and whatnot, you have a sample-size of one. It's meaningless.

Until someone does some real research on this, it would be nice if everyone refrained from making sweeping claims about the validity of one method or another. All you have there is opinion, so don't dish it out like it's a sure thing. Appealing to Heisig as an authority is silly too - AFAIK he knows exactly as much as we do on this topic.

[Zgarbas]

Well, this is a forum and no one really offers their credentials to begin with. All we have is anecdotes, many of them from people who are not proficient themselves, which lessens their legitimacy even more.
there are only a few methods to actually learning kanji
mixed-method approaches are the only ones that work.
it helps some people, others it doesn't
heisig is one of many options, though that doesn't make his method less valid
And so on. It would be methodologically impossible to see if it works, since 1. You need a mixed method approach to learn anything 2. Time investment and dedication matter more than method in either case, 3. It would require a longitudinal study that keeps track of at least 100 independent variables which could effect the result, and ain't nobody got time/funding for that (not would it matter since very few people read academic Jsl material before they start learning the language)

At best, all you can say about heisig is that it works for some, but not for others, and that among highly dedicated individuals it tends to show positive results. No reason to dismiss it as a method, no reason to say that it's a surefire technique. But there can be no talk about hard evidence in a question that is not testable, and no evidence of it having better long-term benefits either; just some people giving their opinion. If they make it sound authoritative it is merely people's manner of speaking, you can be certain that 90%+ of anything you read on a forum is subjective or even wrong.

What I find interesting how so many people say RTK saves people from burnout because it makes kanji easy, but from what I've seen on this forum (based on RTK) there are a LOT of people who make threads saying "this is my third attempt, last time I got to around 1000, hopefully I can actually make it this time". RTK doesn't save people from burning out, it makes people burnout. Compared to just learning vocabulary at least it's a lot more abstract which leads people to question why they're even bothering (and for good reason) which leads to doubt and they give up.

Also it's not just Heisig, the idea that you need to learn kanji individually at all to learn Japanese is a myth that needs to be broken. You only need to learn words, and whatever information you learn about the kanji from that is all you ever need in the first place.

I was a bored while doing RTK and I began to doubt it. So I decided to do some Tae Kim with accompanied vocabulary.

And I must say, there was a hell of a difference in learning vocabulary I knew kanji for and the rest. That pretty much convinced me that yes, doing RTK has its merits.

No, I don't have a study and everything in this post is from my experience only and your mileage may vary...

[Zgarbas]

Yeah, i dropped out of rtk early but whenever I remember how to write kanjis it's thanks to the stories I made 3 years ago. Then again, it's the only method I seriously kept to learning how to write so i have no other method to compare it to