No point doing RTK if you are only going to go to say a N4 level. If you are going to grind in 4K hours + into the project than it makes more sense to do RTK and do it up front.
Much like doing drills over and over is pointless if you are a recreational sport player, just go ahead and do it. If you plan on taking something seriously though, it would be useful to spend a lot of work on the fundamentals.
The only real difference is that with RTK, it kinda works on a system and an order which is not the same as the order in which you will encounter Kanji from other learning methods so in that particular case it is warranted to do them before than during. At the very least spent much more time on it than the other stuff.
Yeah it sucks, it's boring and it feels like you are just mucking about when you really just want to do whatever you want with the language. Again though, in the long run it is better to eat bitter in the short term.
If one looks at the JLPT wiki article, it seems that those who know Hanzi save a rather significant amount of time when learning Japanese. For N1 it is 1700–2600 hours for people who know Chinese vs 3000–4800 hours for those who don't.
I am not going to say that going through RTK will save you over 1000 hours, those people who know Chinese are also well versed in reading characters at speed in addition to knowing how to learn new characters. RTK only helps with the latter mostly. However I'd guess that putting the 200 hours up front would save more than 200 hours on the road to N1, maybe 50 or 100 hours but that's something. Heisig IIRC alludes to this in the introduction or somewhere, RTK gives part of the advantage that Chinese people have in learning Japanese.
I'd also find it a fresh hell to try to learn new characters in order of usefulness instead of via building blocks allowed for use of hint sentences and memory devices.
OTOH I'd also find it a fresh hell to come up with long stories for each character and to come up with detailed mental images for them, so I skipped that part of the method.
Unless they have cupcakes, or bacon I prefer avoiding fresh hells.
Much like doing drills over and over is pointless if you are a recreational sport player, just go ahead and do it. If you plan on taking something seriously though, it would be useful to spend a lot of work on the fundamentals.
The only real difference is that with RTK, it kinda works on a system and an order which is not the same as the order in which you will encounter Kanji from other learning methods so in that particular case it is warranted to do them before than during. At the very least spent much more time on it than the other stuff.
Yeah it sucks, it's boring and it feels like you are just mucking about when you really just want to do whatever you want with the language. Again though, in the long run it is better to eat bitter in the short term.
If one looks at the JLPT wiki article, it seems that those who know Hanzi save a rather significant amount of time when learning Japanese. For N1 it is 1700–2600 hours for people who know Chinese vs 3000–4800 hours for those who don't.
I am not going to say that going through RTK will save you over 1000 hours, those people who know Chinese are also well versed in reading characters at speed in addition to knowing how to learn new characters. RTK only helps with the latter mostly. However I'd guess that putting the 200 hours up front would save more than 200 hours on the road to N1, maybe 50 or 100 hours but that's something. Heisig IIRC alludes to this in the introduction or somewhere, RTK gives part of the advantage that Chinese people have in learning Japanese.
I'd also find it a fresh hell to try to learn new characters in order of usefulness instead of via building blocks allowed for use of hint sentences and memory devices.
OTOH I'd also find it a fresh hell to come up with long stories for each character and to come up with detailed mental images for them, so I skipped that part of the method.
Unless they have cupcakes, or bacon I prefer avoiding fresh hells.