ryuudou Wrote:No you can't. Not anymore than someone teaching herself the Spanish alphabet can claim she's learning English. Only someone who knows neither Chinese or Japanese would say this. A lot of the kanji that are common in Japan aren't common in China, and vice versa. There are also Chinese exclusive characters within the standard sets, and Japanese exclusive characters in general use as well.Why does it seem like every time I talk to you, it's you nitpicking something into something else and me saying 'that's not the point'...
And in this case, you're still wrong.
If I know how to recognize the character 'p', it doesn't matter if it's English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, or whatever, I can recognize the shape of the letter 'p'. If I don't know the sound it correlates to in any of those languages, or know it in the context of the word and ideas 'phase' or 'perro', then I haven't actually learned any English or Spanish or anything else; I've learned a character. My point when I mentioned Chinese was that you know as much Chinese as Japanese by studying kanji; that is, none.
Characters are just scribbles and shapes that a group of people decided have a meaning, a sound, or are a distinguishing component in a cluster that has the previous two attributes. The only thing you learn by studying these scribbles by themselves is that certain scribbles have the attribute of 'character', which is used to make up 'writing'; there is no inherent language attribute to a scribble (now 'character'), so until you learn those attributes, you haven't learned any language.
If I taught a class full of children how to write the characters 日, 月, 木, and 火, and didn't tell them that these were characters used in a foreign language, would I have taught them Japanese? What if I told them that they were characters, but not from which language? What if I told them they were used in an East Asian language? No, because they are meaningless without a language they represent.
Even if I told them that I was teaching them characters that are used in Japanese, it still wouldn't be teaching them Japanese. There is no magical transformation from squiggle to language when you say something comes from writing; it's only when you put that squiggle into context and assign it a meaning or sound (in the context of language) that it becomes language study.
Spoken words are the same, but you don't really see them isolated in this way (there's no point in it like there is for kanji study); however, one could imagine teaching the same group of children (people, really; don't know why they're children) some sound pattern that's actually a phrase from another language and have them recite it, it still wouldn't be teaching them language, because they don't know what they're saying.
This is why it isn't Japanese study to do RTK (in isolation): there is no Japanese in RTK study, just scribbles. Even adding RTK2 doesn't really make it Japanese (it's more Japanese than before though, because you can name the scribbles), because there's no meaning or context between the scribbles, sounds, and Japanese language.
Edited: 2016-02-21, 9:03 am