(2016-06-19, 9:30 pm)declan Wrote: Old thread, but still a valid question.Nice. That should work out well for you. One of the big problems with replicating Heisig's results is that most people can't dedicate 4-6 weeks purely to kanji study, real life tends to interfere. Doing RTK an hour a day is obviously not the same as doing it 8+ hours a day.
I'm about half-way through and I should finish in another 3 weeks or so. I'm unusual since I have some Japanese (from 20 years ago, mostly forgotten) and right now I have nothing else to do (no job, school) so I'm spending whatever's left from 24/7 after subtracting sleep, food and other things that distract from study.
I wanted to make a couple of main points with this post:
Quote:1. Continue with flashcard revisionCertainly. Continued reviews are important. For people going the slow road (1-2 hours a day) constant review during learning is important too, but for people like you who are lucky enough to be able to do RTK full time, there's merit to prioritizing new characters over reviews. (You get a lot of effective reviews from embedded elements and characters anyway without doing formal reviews).
I reckon that you should continue with the flashcards for at least 1 month after completing the book before you can say that you actually remember everything you've learned. It would probably be good to continue for longer, even if it is at less regular intervals (say weekly after that for a couple of months, then monthly after that)
Quote:2. Memory "Pathways"I don't really agree with this. It is important to maintain your memory of keywords and keep up your reviews in early learning, but as you build up real vocabulary that uses the characters, there's no need. You can transition your understanding of the character to the actual Japanese words that it is used to spell. If you're not regularly handwriting but want to maintain the ability to write, it may be worth formally transitioning your deck to Japanese keywords.
People talk about going kanji -> keyword instead of keyword -> kanji (what Heisig advises). I think that can work, but you have to be careful. For one thing, Heisig's keywords can be kind of arbitrary, so the temptation will be to forget the keywords after a period of using the kanji -> keyword method.
The way I see it, the brain will try to make it easier for itself to file everything away. If, while you're doing the keyword -> kanji study that Heisig recommends, you start doing other stuff like keyword -> kanji or learning kanji meanings (in compounds or individually), your brain will start to decide to dump the very thing that Heisig's method is there to teach you to remember (namely keyword -> kanji mappings). It's like if you see 勉強, your brain is going to just go "べんきょう: study" and short-circuit any activations of the part of memory that involved looking up "exertion" and "strong". After time, these memory circuits will atrophy for lack of use and at least some of the effort you've spent on RTK will end up being wasted.
So even though I haven't finished the book, I recommend making sure that when you transition to learning kanji in practice (whether it's kanji -> keyword or kanji in context in vocabulary) that you "complete the circuit", ie, do at least as much revision of the keyword -> kanji memories as you're doing for the other new stuff.
Once you have keyword -> kanji memories really solid, you can always modify them. Keywords can be arbitrary, but at least you can post mental post-it notes on them to give you pointers about how they actually are used, compounds they're used in or whatever. The great value of English keywords is that you can build up a web of associations (stories, etc.) even if you can speak very little Japanese.
Kanji->Keyword study is really a whole different thing, I think. Since it's pure recognition, there's no point in worrying about keywords at all with that method once you've got a few Japanese words learned for the character. As long as you keep reading in Japanese you won't lose your ability to recognize the character and you don't have the ability to write it anyway.
Quote:3. Transitioning to Japanese (translating the system)Maybe. I'm personally transitioning my deck (verrry slowly) from English keywords to Japanese keywords. As far as reading is concerned, it's really not that important to maintain a 'Japanified' version of Heisig in your memory... that's why I keep slowing down. I'm mostly reading, and when I write, it's mostly by typing into an IME. Handwriting characters is almost entirely for looking things up by handwriting recognition, for which being generally right about stroke order of the character you're looking at is enough. Maintaining what you learned is much more important if you want to be able to handwrite. I do want to be able to handwrite (even though I do so only rarely) which is really the primary reason for my keeping at my En->Jp transition of my deck. Atrophied characters do sometimes cause me trouble when I start mixing up characters that I never would have mistaken for each other when RTK was fresh in my mind, but that can be corrected with repetition or quick and dirty mnemnoics.
The main question, then, about the utility of Heisig's keyword -> kanji system is what happens after you get better at Japanese. Do you just let those memory pathways atrophy (treating them like a temporary crutch that you throw away once you're fit again) or do you try to incorporate them into your new Japanese way of thinking? I think that the latter is better.
Also of course, some amount of incorporation is inevitable anyway. The real question isn't 'do you incorporate them into your new Japanese way of thinking?' ... you -will- do that, it's inevitable. You can't just not think about the character and the associations you already have with it when learning words spelled with the character. The question is, 'do you proactively incorporate -almost all the details- into your new Japanese way of thinking?' and that's a much iffier question. I will say I think it becomes -much- harder to recover writing if you don't keep (if in changed forms) almost all of the details, but recognition really doesn't fall away as long as you keep reading material including the character. (Because of my slow approach, I have characters in both camps to compare in my own experience.)
In any case, good luck on your high-speed completion of RTK!