aldebrn Wrote:Having spent so much time on RTK1, I am well aware of what Heisig wrote in his introduction. Part of my point is, that his comparison to Chinese learners of Japanese is just wishful thinking. In my experience, for what it's worth, there is just no way that you will ever attain anything close to the same familiarity with the Kanji that a native Chinese person has using the Heisig method. (Unless, perhaps, you have some sort of photographic memory or simply have a wonderful aptitude for learning.) And chasing that dream can cost you so much time and effort, that what you call a "wheelbarrow" may eventually well turn out to have cost you as much as a big truck...Eminem2 Wrote:looking back on it now doing RTK1 the way Heisig recommends it (going key meaning --> Kanji) feels like a royal waste of time. A little like having bought a 16-ton truck that, as it turns out, you only get to use to carry some light grocery shopping you do now and then.Heisig mentioned in his introduction that Chinese can learn Japanese well with only a year or two of study, much less than Westerners because of their familiarity with the kanji, and that part of his goal is to get someone not familiar with Chinese characters to somewhere near the level that Chinese have. Because of that analogy, RTK has always seemed to be a wheelbarrow rather than a truck: it's the price I pay for wanting to learn Japanese and not being born in the Sinographic world
What's even worse, even if you manage to somehow master all of the RTK1 Kanji going Heisig key word --> Kanji, you will eventually find that in far too many cases you have been working with a key word that is effectively useless. Either because the key word is simply wrong, or because the Kanji in question is mostly used in combinations that add up to a meaning significantly different from the first word listed in a dictionary for the Kanji in isolation. (And quite often, Heisig simply appears to have picked the first English word listed in a Kanji dictionary without much consideration for how the Kanji is actually used in everyday Japanese. Which is not all that surprising, because Heisig didn't know that much Japanese when he first published RTK1.)
But hey, this thread is for people who have finished RTK1 to share their experiences with those who are considering starting with RTK1. If you choose to ignore those experiences, then that's your prerogative.