Learning Japanese fast - Why not use frequency lists for 80% coverage?

Aijin Wrote:for kanji, it's hard for me to imagine learning only how to write the characters first, and then having to go back and learn all the readings, and then on top of that having to learn all the vocabulary that uses those various readings.
To me it makes more sense to do it at the same time, so that you can instantly use what you learn. If you only learn how to write a character and it's rough English meaning, it has no practical application until you learn the readings and words that use it.

James Heisig wrote:

"STUDYING THE KANJI

The big question is, of course, how to train one’s mind to read and write Japanese. There are those who simplify matters by deciding that there is no need for persons educated outside of the Japanese school system to bother learning how to write the language. If you can read, you will remember how to write a few hundred of the kanji along the way and you can leave the rest to computers to handle for you. Or so the argument goes. It has the full support of most Japanese who have never met a Western-educated individual who can write the kanji with the same fluency as they and have somehow decided that, without the benefit of an education in writing that begins at the pre-school level and goes all the way up to the last year of high school, there is no way they ever could. This is not only the case for ordinary readers of Japanese but also for the great masses of scholars of Japanese scholarship in the
West. The hiragana and katakana, and perhaps a third-grade level of writing—but more than that is unreasonable to expect.

If you accept the argument, you are solidly in the majority camp. You would also be as wrong as they are. To begin with, there is no reason you cannot learn to write the kanji as fluently as you read them, and in a fraction of the time it takes to do it through the Japanese school system. What it more, without the ability to write, you are forever crippled, or at least limited to walking with the crutch of an electronic dictionary or computer. Finally, by learning to write you have helped to internationalize the fullness of the Japanese language beyond the present-day limits.

All of this is common sense to the Korean and Chinese who come to Japan to learn the language. The reason Westerners tend to dismiss it is their fear of not being able to learn to write, or at least not without devoting long years to the task. As I said, this fear is unfounded.

The key to learning to write is to forget the way the Japanese learn and pay attention instead to the way the Chinese learn Japanese, and then adapt it to the West. Consider the following diagram.






The conclusion should be obvious: If you want to learn to read and write all the general-use kanji, you should study them separately.

Which one do you start with, the reading of the writing? You might be surprised, but the answer is—the writing. There are two reasons. First, by doing so you end up in basically the same position as the Chinese coming to the study of Japanese kanji: you
know what they mean and how to write them, but you still have to learn how to pronounce them. Second, the writing is a rational system that can be learned by principles, whereas the readings require a great deal of brute memory."

Aijin Wrote:I don't know if the analogy is fair. I'd compare the roman alphabet more to hiragana/katakana, which of course has to be learned before it can be used.

oregum Wrote:I think of RtK as a very complicated form of spelling. Imagine not knowing the alphabet of completely foreign language that has 3007 common words. Instead of trying to memorize each word as a picture (kanji), you break it up into letters (primitives). By knowing all the primitives you can build words. Like any language, the letters must be put in the correct order for the word (kanji) to make sense.