(2016-06-12, 11:36 pm)kameden Wrote: I think RTK is a useless method. A much more efficient method would be to just Anki vocabulary without learning kanji beforehand.
You do NOT need to memorize the radicals for every kanji, you do in fact only need to be able to recognize the shape in order to read / type. Writing on paper is the only time that radicals actually matter. Most Japanese people forget the radicals of the majority of kanji and just use recognition as well.
It's like in English you don't need remember the spelling of any given word, as long as you remember the word when you see it, except it's compounded by the fact that in English you do need to spell to type, but in Japanese you don't need radicals to type. There is little to no point in memorizing which radicals are used in which kanji. You just need to be able to read it when you see it. Everything else is a waste of time and something you will most likely just forget in the long run anyway.
Even if you wanted to be able to write, I still would NOT recommend learning to write 2000+ kanji before you learn anything else, that's a horrible method. Learn what's actually useful first. Do RTK after you can already read fluently if you really want to.
That's a fascinating theory.
However, in practice I found that before I did RTK, I was constantly confusing one character for another... I spent literally -years- drilling kanji and vocabulary without making any significant progress. Making real progress required that by some happenstance I drilled two similar-looking characters very close to each other in time so that I was forced to stop and really compare the shapes and try to come up with some kind of mnemonic to distinguish them.
Recognizing characters by their outline or shape is not really sufficient, because so many characters have a similar shape. You need to recognize characters by their -exact- set of strokes.
Some people are blessed with a strong visual memory and don't find it a problem ... remembering the 'shape' of the kanji and remembering the 'exact set of strokes' is the same for them. For some of us, however, it's extremely easy to confuse kanji that differ only by a single stroke in the left radical. The RTK system helps distinguish each character as a unique entity and build a recognition of how extremely important the difference of a single tiny dot can be. It also sets you up with a whole -set- of mnemonics for the character, instead of leaving you struggling to come up with mnemonics on the fly when you realize that you're constantly confusing similar characters.
I mean, hey, if you have the kind of memory that lets you just drill kanji vocab in anki and learn it correctly, more power to you, but not everybody has that kind of memory so instead of denigrating a whole learning system that has been really helpful to thousands of learners, perhaps you should realize that not everyone has your advantages.