Some responses:
--Jimmyseal, thanks for providing a quote from the man himself. Dukelexon, thanks for expanding on my first argument about motor-memory reinforcement. Whether to neglect writing or not shouldn't even be a question to debate...
--Dukelexon, thank you also for expanding a lot more on the relative time argument. Huzzah! That should be a sticky. =D Students should learn some survival Japanese when they first arrive in Japan, or first start studying Japanese. But it is a lack of vision that would let anyone argue that Heisig is a "waste of time", imperfect a method as it is.
--I don't think anyone here is arguing that NOT doing RTK will keep you from becoming literate in Japanese, but a lot of people are taking it that way. People, including myself, are just impassioned that is one of the best steps to quickER and easiER fluency compared to other methods. No, Heisig's arbitrary choice of kanji does not ensure fluency. But the jouyou list of kanji exists for a reason: they cover the vast majority of commonly used kanji. Numerous studies of every major language show that comprehension explodes up to around 80% vocabulary level before leveling off. Even if you've seen this graph and explanation before it's a good reminder of how Japanese students perceive the English they study, and how we perceive Japanese. A key excerpt:
"Here is what a text looks like to someone who knows the most frequent 2000 words and no others. Words that are not on the 2000 list have been replaced by gaps:
If _____ planting rates are _____ with planting _____
satisfied in each _____ and the forests milled at
the earliest opportunity, the _____ wood supplies
could further increase to about 36 million _____ meters
_____ in the period 2001-2015. (Nation, 1990, p. 242.)
(Text A: 80% of words known)
Text A has 40 words, seven of which are unknown or (7/40 =) 16%. It seems clear that someone reading this text would get a some idea of the topic, but not exactly what was being said about the topic.
Here is the same text with 95% of its words known, or 5% unknown:
If current planting rates are maintained with planting
targets satisfied in each _____ and the forests milled
at the earliest opportunity, the available wood supplies
could further _____ to about 36 million cubic meters
annually in the period 2001-2015.
(Text B: 95% of words known)
In Text B, the main idea of the text is reasonably clear. And the concepts needed to fill the two remaining gaps are also clear, so that if these had been new words instead of gaps there is a good chance the words would have been understood through inference."
Of course knowing the meanings of a kanji as opposed to the meanings of the compounds they are in is a lower level of comprehension, but it is still drastically farther total comprehension than non-RTK methods can even come close to providing. I rely on it every day.
revenantkioku Wrote:If I can't remember the word but somehow I remember the kanji (trust me, it has happened!) I draw out the kanji on my palm in front of the person and nine times out of ten the conversation is able to go on smoothly!I do that ALL the time! Even for words I don't know, I'll draw kanji I know encompass the meaning and the Japanese person most often has an "Ahh!" moment. I have totally neglected recognizing that that bonus from RTK. :lol: I use it several times a week. Also, the Japanese person will often finish writing an actual word for me using my kanji in a correct compound, so I gain a new word, its pronunciation, and gather its meaning from actual conversation context.
--Jimmyseal, thanks for providing a quote from the man himself. Dukelexon, thanks for expanding on my first argument about motor-memory reinforcement. Whether to neglect writing or not shouldn't even be a question to debate...
--Dukelexon, thank you also for expanding a lot more on the relative time argument. Huzzah! That should be a sticky. =D Students should learn some survival Japanese when they first arrive in Japan, or first start studying Japanese. But it is a lack of vision that would let anyone argue that Heisig is a "waste of time", imperfect a method as it is.
--I don't think anyone here is arguing that NOT doing RTK will keep you from becoming literate in Japanese, but a lot of people are taking it that way. People, including myself, are just impassioned that is one of the best steps to quickER and easiER fluency compared to other methods. No, Heisig's arbitrary choice of kanji does not ensure fluency. But the jouyou list of kanji exists for a reason: they cover the vast majority of commonly used kanji. Numerous studies of every major language show that comprehension explodes up to around 80% vocabulary level before leveling off. Even if you've seen this graph and explanation before it's a good reminder of how Japanese students perceive the English they study, and how we perceive Japanese. A key excerpt:
"Here is what a text looks like to someone who knows the most frequent 2000 words and no others. Words that are not on the 2000 list have been replaced by gaps:
If _____ planting rates are _____ with planting _____
satisfied in each _____ and the forests milled at
the earliest opportunity, the _____ wood supplies
could further increase to about 36 million _____ meters
_____ in the period 2001-2015. (Nation, 1990, p. 242.)
(Text A: 80% of words known)
Text A has 40 words, seven of which are unknown or (7/40 =) 16%. It seems clear that someone reading this text would get a some idea of the topic, but not exactly what was being said about the topic.
Here is the same text with 95% of its words known, or 5% unknown:
If current planting rates are maintained with planting
targets satisfied in each _____ and the forests milled
at the earliest opportunity, the available wood supplies
could further _____ to about 36 million cubic meters
annually in the period 2001-2015.
(Text B: 95% of words known)
In Text B, the main idea of the text is reasonably clear. And the concepts needed to fill the two remaining gaps are also clear, so that if these had been new words instead of gaps there is a good chance the words would have been understood through inference."
Of course knowing the meanings of a kanji as opposed to the meanings of the compounds they are in is a lower level of comprehension, but it is still drastically farther total comprehension than non-RTK methods can even come close to providing. I rely on it every day.
Chadokoro_K Wrote:I looked up every single character in a dictionary to make certain of its meaning(s). This meant that it took me significantly more time to finish RTK but it was worth it for me because now when the keywords and English meanings pop into my head they are always more accurate (and feel less intrusive and disjointed) than after that first pass through RTK.I did this and save myself a lot of trouble. I started RTK a year ago almost exactly and finished a couple months later. This site wasn't as populated as it is now, and some stories revolved around an incorrect grasp of the meaning of a keyword. You'll see a lot of the older stories have a 'NOTE' tag or something to warn people that stories at the time were using the wrong definition. "DISCRIMINATE" comes to mind as an example. Most stories used it in a sense of racism rather than fine taste. Granted, some people use a more memorable story with a different meaning to lead them to the correct meaning. But it's an extra step, and I think many people simply didn't know the difference because they didn't look up the kanji while they were studying, something Heisig of course endorses.