(2016-06-06, 4:31 am)anotherjohn Wrote: People who use Heisig's method literally as described in the book seem to be a minority. I did review keyword -> kanji but stopped writing them out after the first ~100, and switched to kanji -> keyword near the end of RTK3, so didn't really "do Heisig" either.
Added: With approaching 3500 kanji in my reading deck the idea of learning to write them all in order to read them is patently absurd. Yet "write them in order to read them" is Heisig's method in a nutshell.
Yep. If you used this website or an Anki deck, you didn't really do "RTK" as written. Hell, Heisig was all about people coming up with their own stories past the ones he provided. Then came all the other changes a few years ago with abbreviated decks (either JLPT based or 2k1KO being the most popular), different keywords, different orders and different primitives. Quite a few problems with RTK the book that were fixed by the RevTK community. Problem is most critique of RTK the book are done by those unaware of the work of this community over the years.
Now, I recommend writing down Kanji and Vocabulary and even Grammar sentences for new learners on the idea it would be a good time to get in practice doing something Japanese people have done since childhood. However, now I realize that should be an option and not something hyped as being essential. If most Japanese don't really write much anymore why demand it of people learning Japanese when they're still good about reading/understanding it.