So some of you might know me from the Kanken thread and other discussions over the years. I've been studying a long time, and recently was focusing on Kanji Kentei. I'm now around KanKen 2級 level, and want to continue further.

I mentioned to some people that I had customized my RTK deck to better fit more advanced learners by making keywords more specific and adding example vocabulary. They wanted to look at it, and told me I should probably share it with the community.

In my opinion, standard RTK really isn't tenable past the first 1000 kanji or so. There's too many kanji with similar meanings, and in the case of RTK3 there are too many kanji with identical meanings that differ only by their 音 reading or very specific usage cases. This deck gives enough context for each kanji such that they can be more easily differentiated from the other ones that exist in common usage.

This should result in far fewer leeches.

Since I created it initially for myself over the course of a few years, it's kind of inconsistent in terms of formatting and vocab choice. I would like to make it a lot better, and so I thought I'd create this thread so I could take feedback on it.

I've added it as an Anki shared deck here:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/554088453

Quote:This includes RTK1, RTK3, the missing Jyouyou kanji, and also the remaining ~125 kanji to bring the deck into compliance Kanji Kentei 準1級.

I have replaced the kanji in the example vocabulary with katakana or hiragana where appropriate. Hiragana usually denotes a kun reading while katakana usually denotes the on reading. Verbs however use both katakana and hiragana in order to denote okurigana.

Background Info:

Over the past 3+ years I have worked my way up from Kanji Kentei 10級 all the way up to 2級 level. Using that expertise, I have customized this Remembering the Kanij deck with useful vocabulary and clarifications to keywords. This is the deck I used to introduce myself to new kanji, and maintain my ability to write them over the long term.

Because this deck was created primarily for myself over the course of many years, there are some formatting issues and strange things lurking in it. I update this deck all the time, and hope to fix those issues.

Great contribution erlog! I did the same thing to my RTK1+3 deck and found it to be really helpful.

Are those extra 125 Kanji tagged? Getting the groundwork set for 準１級 sounds like a nice boost.

The deck is split into 3 parts. RTK1, RTK3, a deck labeled "∞" that includes the extra kanji to bring you up to KanKen 準1級 level after finishing RTK3. There's also a few random ones I think it's nice to be able to write like 蜘蛛 and 蝙蝠.

Quote:Hiragana usually denotes a kun reading while katakana usually denotes the on reading. Verbs however use both katakana and hiragana in order to denote okurigana.

This is confusing me. So sometimes it uses katakana even though it's a kun, and hiragana even though it's an on? And what you do you mean verbs use both hiragana and katakana to denote okurigana?

NinKenDo Wrote:And what you do you mean verbs use both hiragana and katakana to denote okurigana?

I can only assume it means something like タべる and クジける (or the reverse).

I would further assume it's the only exception.

Yeah, JimmySeal has it correct. The part that gets replaced with a kanji is in katakana. This is kind of hard to read, and so I'm going to spend some time on this deck converting the markup on it to Kanken format using parentheses. So that タべる card would become "(タ) べる"

I will also make everything consistent so there's no surprises lurking in the deck. I feel really bad that it's a deck I really want to share with people, but it still has these really subtle things wrong with it in terms of formatting.

A dumb question: is it the case that none of the RTK1 notes have an entry in the onyomi field? I scanned through a few dozen and all of them had nothing in this field. Thanks!

I updated the deck to fix the issue with on-yomi. I think whatever base deck I started from had that field messed up. That field is still missing for some of the RTK infinity cards, but that information is usually contained in the J-Keyword field for those cards anyway.

I should be able to update those as well here in the near the future.

Once again, I feel really bad that this thing is not properly finished, and the comments here about issues definitely help motivate me to fix them. It's tough to motivate when you're not sure if people are using the deck, but if people are going to be using it then I start to feel bad and get motivated.

Thanks for the questions and input about this.

Okay, I updated the deck again to add parentheses to make okurigana clearer, and also fix the formatting so that it complies with the dictionary notation of on-yomi in katakana and kun-yomi in hiragana. This process is a bit time consuming, though, and so at the moment only the first 1000 cards have been changed. I thought it best to release what I had finished over the past 2 days instead of making people wait 2 weeks for a full update.

This should fix most of the confusing formatting issues that people have mentioned here.

Let me know if I have introduced any typos through this process.

I finished updating all of the RTK1 cards to fix typos, fix Japanese example words, and make the cards conform to the new clearer card format.

RTK3 cards might go faster because there's fewer example words to chase down.

This process of updating the cards was done by hand. So let me know if you find any mistakes or typos so that I can correct them in the next update.

Great work!

I'm only starting RTK and I'm already bitten by heisig's similar keywords. I've studied japanese for a few years, so having japanese words to relate to when trying to remember a kanji should help.

The problem is that I'm using a slightly costumized version of this deck, and would like to continue to. Is there any automatic way of merging the two decks? Or should I simply add the J-Keyword field and manually copy the info for each card as I learn it? It is not too much work, but it's kinda repetitive.

Ok, I got it to work. First I created the new fields in the target deck. Then exported your deck and the target deck. Using Libre Office's Calc, I pasted your keywords and J-keywords over the target deck, saved and then imported it back updating the deck on anki.

I haven't looked too deeply, but I noticed a few things:
- your J-keyword for 砂 is the kanji itself. Probably an IME slip.
- For 江 you have the J-keyword: え、（コウ）戸. Don't you mean えど on the second one?

erlog Wrote:I'm amazing

Hi erlog, thanks for sharing this deck with us!
I was wondering what do the (fancy fancy fancy) parentheticals next to some cards mean?

ReneSac Wrote:I haven't looked too deeply, but I noticed a few things:
- your J-keyword for 砂 is the kanji itself. Probably an IME slip.
- For 江 you have the J-keyword: え、（コウ）戸. Don't you mean えど on the second one?

Glad you got it to work. The first one is indeed an IME slip-up. The second one isn't a mistake since that reading exists as a valid on-yomi in words like 入江. However, the point is well taken that I should probably be using the word that users are mostly to know it from which is probably 江戸時代. So I've changed it to （え）戸時代.

These are exactly the kind of sanity and typo checks I've been looking for from users. So don't hesitate to post about more of them if you find them. I mostly just used the first word that popped into my head for each of the kanji, and then in editing later I've added more so that I'm giving an example word for all the common readings.

The on-yomi readings are a big help for a lot of the cards, especially, since there's a lot of kanji that carry roughly the same meaning but are differentiated only by on-yomi. 脂 and 肪 is a good example of this. They're the same meaning and kun-yomi in a lot of cases, but they have different on-yomi. So by providing the on-yomi words on the card front users should be able to reduce the number of collisions they have quite a lot as their general Japanese ability gets better.

yorkiisan Wrote:

erlog Wrote:I'm amazing

Hi erlog, thanks for sharing this deck with us!
I was wondering what do the (fancy fancy fancy) parentheticals next to some cards mean?

(fancy fancy fancy) and all other (fancy) versions of cards denote that the kanji is pretty much exactly the same as an already existing kanji in the deck, but that this is the non-simplified version(fancy version). 竜 and 龍 are probably the best example of this, but as you get into RTK3 you start to run into a lot more.

So instead of trying to pretend that they somehow have a different meaning or flavor like Heisig kind of does by trying to add a unique keyword, I just directly tell the user that it's prompting for the non-simplified version. The number of times "fancy" appears correlates roughly to how complicated the kanji in question is. So (fancy fancy fancy) means it's probably a pretty complicated kanji.

Rank beginner question: what's the J-Keyword? Is it a prompt useful for advanced students to disambiguate English keywords, like JALUP's RTK Mod deck (http://japaneselevelup.com/japanese-leve...anki-deck/)?

Well, it's a week out of date, but let me try to answer your question. A J-Keyword is like an English keyword in that it attempts to render the "meaning" of the kanji into one word. So, while I've never used them myself, an example for "食" might be "shoku" or "ta.beru" both of which have to do with food and eating, which is basically what that kanji is used for in Japanese.

Personally, I don't see the point of having J-keywords, since the whole point of RTK is to split up the various tasks you need to learn kanji (writing, reading, meaning) into manageable chunks, but some people find it helpful. I think mostly those people sort of feel like somehow by putting the readings on hold, they are somehow missing out, or lagging behind everyone else, but really, language study isn't a race, and I think that for a lot of language learners, they can benefit by focussing on one thing at a time, instead of trying to conquer everything at once.

erlog Wrote:So some of you might know me from the Kanken thread and other discussions over the years. I've been studying a long time, and recently was focusing on Kanji Kentei. I'm now around KanKen 2級 level, and want to continue further.

Quote:This includes RTK1, RTK3, the missing Jyouyou kanji, and also the remaining ~125 kanji to bring the deck into compliance Kanji Kentei 準1級.

I have replaced the kanji in the example vocabulary with katakana or hiragana where appropriate. Hiragana usually denotes a kun reading while katakana usually denotes the on reading. Verbs however use both katakana and hiragana in order to denote okurigana.

Background Info:

Over the past 3+ years I have worked my way up from Kanji Kentei 10級 all the way up to 2級 level. Using that expertise, I have customized this Remembering the Kanij deck with useful vocabulary and clarifications to keywords. This is the deck I used to introduce myself to new kanji, and maintain my ability to write them over the long term.

Because this deck was created primarily for myself over the course of many years, there are some formatting issues and strange things lurking in it. I update this deck all the time, and hope to fix those issues.

Sounds fantastic. I'm about to get into the KanKen also having found myself plateauing in terms of Japanese ability AND losing my writing ability rapidly. I will definitely give this a look.

yorkiisan Wrote:

erlog Wrote:I'm amazing

Hi erlog, thanks for sharing this deck with us!
I was wondering what do the (fancy fancy fancy) parentheticals next to some cards mean?

Also... who is this imposter? lol yorkiisan

ktcgx Wrote:Personally, I don't see the point of having J-keywords, since the whole point of RTK is to split up the various tasks you need to learn kanji (writing, reading, meaning) into manageable chunks, but some people find it helpful. I think mostly those people sort of feel like somehow by putting the readings on hold, they are somehow missing out, or lagging behind everyone else, but really, language study isn't a race, and I think that for a lot of language learners, they can benefit by focussing on one thing at a time, instead of trying to conquer everything at once.

I think, like erlog said, the English keyword thing Heisig is based on breaks down when you get into the multi-thousands that 準1級 involves. At the risk of making the cards TOO easy, my own solution has been to keep the heisig keyword, but put a utilized Japanese word (in kana) below that. It keeps you from failing cards that you actually know perfectly well, but mistook for a different character with a synonymous English keyword.

Sauzer Wrote:I think, like erlog said, the English keyword thing Heisig is based on breaks down when you get into the multi-thousands that 準1級 involves. At the risk of making the cards TOO easy, my own solution has been to keep the heisig keyword, but put a utilized Japanese word (in kana) below that. It keeps you from failing cards that you actually know perfectly well, but mistook for a different character with a synonymous English keyword.

Another issue is that RtK is designed for those with no prior Japanese knowledge, in which case the English keywords are a godsend, but once you become proficient, the English keyword can be a crux instead of the initial useful piece of scaffolding. In other words, you may know the kanji better as the ぎょう in そつぎょう rather than as "business/profession."

In this case I would recommend removing ALL English keywords.

yorkii Wrote:

Sauzer Wrote:I think, like erlog said, the English keyword thing Heisig is based on breaks down when you get into the multi-thousands that 準1級 involves. At the risk of making the cards TOO easy, my own solution has been to keep the heisig keyword, but put a utilized Japanese word (in kana) below that. It keeps you from failing cards that you actually know perfectly well, but mistook for a different character with a synonymous English keyword.

Another issue is that RtK is designed for those with no prior Japanese knowledge, in which case the English keywords are a godsend, but once you become proficient, the English keyword can be a crux instead of the initial useful piece of scaffolding. In other words, you may know the kanji better as the ぎょう in そつぎょう rather than as "business/profession."

In this case I would recommend removing ALL English keywords.

I think as you continue your Japanese study, the reliance on English falls away naturally, and without you realising it. So it's not an issue for me.

I think you meant 'crutch' and not 'crux'. 'Crux' means something like 'the heart of something'. A crutch is something you lean on for support.

Yep, I meant crutch. Thanks for that

That's just the point though, coming to do RtK reviews that are in English is NOT natural after a certain point. Hence the need for an improved method.

Not that I'm anywhere near there but I have seen JALUP's Anki deck for RTK modified with Japanese keywords for precisely the stage you're talking about, when you've reached an advanced stage with the language http://japaneselevelup.com/japanese-leve...anki-deck/ . Even at my stage (1200 in) I heavily annotate the English keyword with English and Japanese because naked keywords are too vague.

yorkii Wrote:Yep, I meant crutch. Thanks for that

It was probably autocorrect's fault

yorkii Wrote:That's just the point though, coming to do RtK reviews that are in English is NOT natural after a certain point. Hence the need for an improved method.

I think that that point hits in different places for each person. And I think it's better to wait til you've finished RTK 1 completely. Because then, if you start adding Japanese readings, you've stopped doing 'Heisig' because his whole thesis is that splitting up the tasks is faster and better for your memory. Once you have that solid foundation/relationship with the kanji and aren't 'scared' of them any more, then you can go back and start doing readings and vocab.

Obviously, people find it easier to study in different ways and go at different paces, and that's fine and great. But sometimes it's also good to think about the underlying reasons why a method is done a certain way.