ariariari Wrote:The problem that I'm hoping RTK can help with is that as I have more and more written correspondence with Japanese the amount of vocabulary they write to me - in kanji - is overwhelming. My textbooks make a point point of introducing, as you say, just a handful of kanji a lesson. But my colleagues and friends introduce a lot of new kanji and vocabulary to me seemingly with every email. That combination makes learning feel overwhelming.Yes, RTK1 can probably help you with that. Although given your goal, I'd recommend going from Kanji --> keyword even more strongly if recognition of Kanji that friends use in correspondence with you is what you're aiming for.
My hope is that RTK can make all the kanji I'll likely wind up using familiar to me now, so that learning new vocabulary doesn't feel so overwhelming. When it's all just a bunch of squiggles that you've seen for the first time, it's hard to keep it apart. In contrast, learning new katakana words is easy.
Even then, you will probably experience the same frustration that many other RTK1 veterans have felt: that Heisig's keywords are far too often not all that helpful, even though they are scientifically justifiable when consulting a dictionary. In my experience, if a Kanji has 2 or 3 meanings that each occur in almost equal frequency, then you can't get away with knowing just one of these meanings. So if RTK1 ever gets a thorough revision, Heisig (or whoever succeeds him) would probably do well to let go of the counterproductive "single keyword" approach.
Funny that it turns out that I was trying to give advice on learning Japanese to someone who is further along than me in their studies, BTW.
