Hi guys,

I've been reviewing the kanji for a few months now (around 800 kanji now, so I'm not in a huge hurry). I've reviewed almost daily so far and made steady progress, but there is one thing that bothers me.

I happened to install a java-applet on my phone (not iPhone, basic Nokia), with which I can review the kanji and keywords whenever I have a small moment of extra time. I only review the other way around (Kanji->Keyword) and while it is a great way to recall the kanji, I'm wondering is this actually working against the idea of SRS, since I'm basically reviewing some kanji more often than the website was planning.

It just feels a bit like I was cheating when the website asks about some old kanji I reviewed just some time ago on my phone. Then again, I suppose just reading Japanese text where I encounter familiar kanji might in that regard also be considered "cheating", right? :)

So in other words, is constant reading from Kanji to keyword okay (or even desirable) during the process of learning the other way around using the SRS-method? How have you long-term users seen this? I guess hardly anyone follows the SRS-method by the book.

Harmful. 2 reasons:

If you are short-circuiting your SRS, you're killing your effort.

Your time would be better spent reviewing vocabulary or full sentences rather than individual kanji.

The only time I'd consider it is after you study some new kanji. It wouldn't hurt to study bidirectionally then, but I don't know how much it would HELP.

Spiralwood Wrote:I happened to install a java-applet on my phone (not iPhone, basic Nokia), with which I can review the kanji and keywords whenever I have a small moment of extra time...

What's the applet called? Link?? Sounds really useful!

I think this is working against the premise that Heisig presents. He states rather clearly that you should only learn in one direction. I think the point of the single direction memory prompt is due to the fact that the keyword memory prompt isn't as important. The fact that you know how to write the Kanji and break it down is.

You should learn like this. Keyword -> Kanji and later Kanji <-> Reading. Once you learn the reading, is where bi-directional will be very useful.

If you wanna go bi-directional, you might want to just skip to using Japanese keywords.

Search for "Kanji Keyword" in topic subject only reveals about 10 or more threads on this subject.

Not saying you're beating a dead horse, just saying there's a fresh corpse elsewhere on the forums that hasn't turned into a patch of grass yet.

Thanks for all the replies. Hmm, I guess I'll delete the application for now then and carry some small grammar book with me as a replacement.

aphasiac Wrote:What's the applet called? Link?? Sounds really useful!

Here is the link, although as many pointed out it isn't that useful with RtK at least: getjar.com/mobile/27080/kanji-training/

Daichi Wrote:Not saying you're beating a dead horse, just saying there's a fresh corpse elsewhere on the forums that hasn't turned into a patch of grass yet.

Quite true that, my bad.

Spiralwood Wrote:It just feels a bit like I was cheating when the website asks about some old kanji I reviewed just some time ago on my phone. Then again, I suppose just reading Japanese text where I encounter familiar kanji might in that regard also be considered "cheating", right?

wccrawford Wrote:Harmful. 2 reasons:

If you are short-circuiting your SRS, you're killing your effort.

Your time would be better spent reviewing vocabulary or full sentences rather than individual kanji.

K so here's what I don't get... Spiralwool has a valid concern, thinks about it and makes a post. In doing so raises a pretty solid point that going out of you're way to review kanji to keyword is akin to kanji coming up in the wild. No, kanji you see in the wild were not due for review (shock horror)... What on earth would that matter at all though?

Don't get me wrong because I understand counter arguments for this because I have them myself but they just don't seem to sway me in the direction of thinking this is a bad idea.

wccrawford posts and says "harmful - shortcircuiting srs" right but what about everything that comes up in the wild outside of Anki or this site that isn't due for review? What is that doing to your "srs's plan"??

My main beef is this really and it's that everyone qoutes Heisig and takes his word as Gospel saying "Heisig said DON'T DO IT" (in caps) when what I remember him saying is this:

"Third, the kanji are best reviewed by beginning with the key word, progressing
to the respective story, and then writing the character itself. Once one
has been able to perform these steps, reversing the order follows as a matter of
course. More will be said about this later in the book."

I also remember feeling a little let down (to an extent) later on when it turned out not to be true for me. I don't think I'm alone here. He's saying here "if you can do it one way, you can do it the other no problem" I don't wanna use the word "bullshit" here but his statement here just doesn't always hold true. Taking it as gospel isn't a great idea.

I know, I know, I knowwww that you don't want to "drill" the keywords and have them with you for life but it's not gonna do you much harm to know them pretty well TBH.

What harm will it do you to know the keyword? What harm will it do you to forget the keyword?

Believe it or not the answers depend on where you're at with your Japanese. When you can read fluently or even OK, you're not sitting there thinking of damn keywords you're just reading like you normally do. There's no harm if you know a keyword and it's useful if you want to stop and actively think about it for a specific purpose. The harm comes in forgetting a keyword when you want to break down a word by keywords to remember how to write it and you've bloody well forgotten. Happens all the time. Annoying as hell.

Other end of the spectrum, lets say you can fluently write anything you want in Japanese and have been doing so for years. Good... it will do you 0 harm to forget them now. What harm will it do you to know them still (if you actively think about them)? I can't see any harm...

So it's beyond me why everyone says Khatz this Khatz that but don't take his word as Gospel. Then everyone turns round and does a total 180 when it comes to Heisig without even stopping to think about whether the statement they're holding as Gospel is true; sometimes, all the time or not at all.

I wouldn't call "sometimes" something I'd base my study plan on or give advice by.

Not harmful, but useless.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Not harmful, but useless.

Explain.

I've done it. Not worth the time.

1st put your energy to finishing RTK. Getting hung up on that is probably the wrost thing you can do.

In your free time, either review with anki or do something, anything else with Japanese.

(Or best yet, carry around a copy of RTK and make up new stories!).

mezbup Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:Not harmful, but useless.

Explain.

The goal of RTK is to remember the kanji. If you are able to recall it one way, chances are you have the kanji into memory for good (until it's deleted when you stop using it anyway). This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but the goal of RTK is to teach you to recognize the kanji, and not to know their meanings. In fact, many of all kanji you learn will rarely or never be used with the direct meaning you learn in RTK.

You are most likely studying these kanji in order to be able to use them in reading and writing regular Japanese words. When you are learning a compound in Japanese, you will want to focus on remembering on the kanji structure and not the RTK keywords that compose it. As long as your brain has the kanji image somewhere, it will be able to link it to a word without having to go through any time-consuming mnemonic process. The brain is great at building/strengthening connections between existing memories, but not so good at creating new ones as you have probably noticed by now.

In proper Japanese, your RTK keywords are completely useless. Reading comprehension depends on linking a compound to a kanji. Hence, there is no benefit at all to be able to link kanji to a keyword. In fact, this may be more harmful than helpful in the long run if you build very strong connections between English words and kanji, since they will often override weaker memories of Japanese words before they sink in well enough.

For example, if you think of a very familiar compound, say 日本語. There was no need for keywords wasn't it? Your brain doesn't recall day-book-word, but it instantly associates the apparently complex compound with the right reading and meaning. The reason for this is that our brains have learned to optimize word recognition by attempting to match it's shape, rather than character-by-character.
If you read in any language you know well, such as your native language, you almost never have to read an entire word character-by-character. Instead, your brain instantly recognizes the general shape of known words and it pieces the rest together on the fly. That's why it's so hard to read wodrs wehn you rplace or drop some of the caratcers.

Disclaimer: This is just my opinion. I don't have academic background in neuroscience.

edit: I wasn't trying to make a wall of text. How the hell did this get so long?

unauthorized Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:Not harmful, but useless.

Explain.

The goal of RTK is to remember the kanji. If you are able to recall it one way, chances are you have the kanji into memory for good (until it's deleted when you stop using it anyway). This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but the goal of RTK is to teach you to recognize the kanji, and not to know their meanings. In fact, many of all kanji you learn will rarely or never be used with the direct meaning you learn in RTK.

You are most likely studying these kanji in order to be able to use them in reading and writing regular Japanese words. When you are learning a compound in Japanese, you will want to focus on remembering on the kanji structure and not the RTK keywords that compose it. As long as your brain has the kanji image somewhere, it will be able to link it to a word without having to go through any time-consuming mnemonic process. The brain is great at building/strengthening connections between existing memories, but not so good at creating new ones as you have probably noticed by now.

In proper Japanese, your RTK keywords are completely useless. Reading comprehension depends on linking a compound to a kanji. Hence, there is no benefit at all to be able to link kanji to a keyword. In fact, this may be more harmful than helpful in the long run if you build very strong connections between English words and kanji, since they will often override weaker memories of Japanese words before they sink in well enough.

For example, if you think of a very familiar compound, say 日本語. There was no need for keywords wasn't it? Your brain doesn't recall day-book-word, but it instantly associates the apparently complex compound with the right reading and meaning. The reason for this is that our brains have learned to optimize word recognition by attempting to match it's shape, rather than character-by-character.
If you read in any language you know well, such as your native language, you almost never have to read an entire word character-by-character. Instead, your brain instantly recognizes the general shape of known words and it pieces the rest together on the fly. That's why it's so hard to read wodrs wehn you rplace or drop some of the caratcers.

Disclaimer: This is just my opinion. I don't have academic background in neuroscience.

edit: I wasn't trying to make a wall of text. How the hell did this get so long?

I know all of that. All of it.

"This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but the goal of RTK is to teach you to recognize the kanji, and not to know their meanings"

"The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple
method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in
such a way as to make them both easy to remember." ~RTK

Heisig disagrees with you.

Read plenty of Japanese and you'll figure out that a lot of meanings are fairly accurate and make sense when you put them together to form words and then there's words that are seemingly random or idiomatic.

Thing is right... even if you've done RTK and learned to read to fluency I'll bet you bottom dollar you couldn't write everything you heard from memory. Infact you have to do lots of reading to help build that skill but the main thing is to actually write whole words out and lots of them. It's the Japanese get lots of practice at all throughout school but we don't have as much opportunity for that thus building this skill takes concentrated effort. Stuff I know how to write from memory without thinking about it doesn't require keywords at all... stuff I want to be able to write from memory, keywords can be useful as training wheels.

zazen666 Wrote:I've done it. Not worth the time.

1st put your energy to finishing RTK. Getting hung up on that is probably the wrost thing you can do.

In your free time, either review with anki or do something, anything else with Japanese.

(Or best yet, carry around a copy of RTK and make up new stories!).

Did you do it for the whole deck? Just curious. Definitely value an opinion that comes from experience. Thanks.

Every person's experience is a bit different. I go from kanji --> keyword. Sacrilege, I know. Burn me. Fact of the matter for me is that seeing the kanji and knowing the keyword gives me something to hang my hat on. The story just pops into mind immediately when I see the kanji elements, and I have no trouble recalling the keyword. In fact, I have no trouble writing the kanji later, either. Vocabulary becomes easy to remember. As I learn more vocabulary, the specific kanji gains more nuance and the keyword begins to fade. Instead of seeing the kanji and going "oh, that's "x" keyword, I start placing it into where it's used with other vocabulary. But the keyword served it's original purpose, which was to burn the kanji into memory in the first place.

I know what Heisig recommends, I gave it a good faith effort, and found a method that works better for me. Simple as that. My knowledge grows and expands daily.

The point of this is different strokes for different folks. Take Heisig's advice for what it is (a method that works for him) and try it out, and if it's not working, try it a different way. It's not a sacrament to be observed.

hobofat Wrote:Every person's experience is a bit different. I go from kanji --> keyword. Sacrilege, I know. Burn me. Fact of the matter for me is that seeing the kanji and knowing the keyword gives me something to hang my hat on. The story just pops into mind immediately when I see the kanji elements, and I have no trouble recalling the keyword. In fact, I have no trouble writing the kanji later, either. Vocabulary becomes easy to remember. As I learn more vocabulary, the specific kanji gains more nuance and the keyword begins to fade. Instead of seeing the kanji and going "oh, that's "x" keyword, I start placing it into where it's used with other vocabulary. But the keyword served it's original purpose, which was to burn the kanji into memory in the first place.

I know what Heisig recommends, I gave it a good faith effort, and found a method that works better for me. Simple as that. My knowledge grows and expands daily.

The point of this is different strokes for different folks. Take Heisig's advice for what it is (a method that works for him) and try it out, and if it's not working, try it a different way. It's not a sacrament to be observed.

Yep. switched the whole deck and reviewed for about 3-4 months. Again, not worth it.

Since I posted it in other threads I'll post it here too:

It's worth it.

Granted, I set up my RTK deck on Anki to give more detailed facts about the kanji. I then imported my RevTK spacing. I then got the reverse flashcards to match that same spacing (that was the difficult part). I also set the matching card spacing to 0.25 instead of 0.10 for personal preference.

On that, I still review more Kanji to Concept which is easier cause I have more details on what the Kanji can mean (Onyomi and Kunyomi words, more English descriptions).

Trying to go straight Kanji to Keyword will not be worth it and maybe detrimental (well, demotivating) cause you'll fail more since you're not picking the exact word that's needed to pass that kanji, which isn't the point anyway in all this.

Always review Keyword to Kanji.
Add in Kanji to Concept if you feel the need.

If you feel the need, go a step further and substitute Japanese keywords over time. This turns your Kanji review (production and recognition) into vocabulary reviews.

Hell, who knows, maybe in the future RevTK will offer a way so that Kanji that makes it to stack 5 or 6 offer the option for you to utilize the Japanese (or Chinese) keyword if kanji making up that keyword are both in the 5th stack or higher. Sort of a "Hey, you know this well enough in English, why not make it a bit more applicable now", which also begins Japanese Keyword (pronunciation) to Kanji and Japanese Kanji keyword to Japanese Keyword pronunciation.

@mezbup - I think part of the reason is that Heisig doesn't really prescribe as much as Khatz. Anyway you're right about that.

It's just such a waste to do kanji-keyword. Even if it's training wheels, you won't need them soon. It's like you're learning to ride the bike, so you go to the store and buy training wheels but then the next day find out you don't need them anymore. You're glad to ride the darn thing but you sure wish you had that $20 back that you wasted on the training wheels.

Our time and energy and brain cycles are priceless.

mezbup Wrote:...
"This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but the goal of RTK is to teach you to recognize the kanji, and not to know their meanings"

"The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple
method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in
such a way as to make them both easy to remember." ~RTK

Heisig disagrees with you.

Read plenty of Japanese and you'll figure out that a lot of meanings are fairly accurate and make sense when you put them together to form words and then there's words that are seemingly random or idiomatic.
...

I suppose that didn't come out as intended. I'm not saying that the keywords are random or unrelated. In fact I remember reading around here somewhere that all keywords use either the meaning of a kanji or one of it's common usages.
The idea I was trying to convey is that Japanese has far more not-so-obvious compounds than it has straight forward kanji/kanji+okugana. The language has far more words than it has kanji.
EDICT alone lists 140k individual words. If we assume that only half of them are written in kanji (which is a gross understatement) we are still left with 70k words and 12k kanji. That's 5,8 to 1 ratio.

I think when you're in the process of doing RTK w/ SRS, that is, when you're initially trying to learn individual kanji and mature them in your memory, you want to avoid encounters with the kanji unless they're 'recontextualized' in a way that prevents disrupting the spacing effect, and instead allows reinforcement of what you learned. You want to minimize interference, in other words, while recruiting other associations to strengthen the memories that don't, as they aren't the focus, need to be strategically spaced out, and instead are supplementing what you are strategically focusing on. That's my working theory, at any rate, developed in part from readings such as these: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid38977 (Bonus link: http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/ks.htm#Redundancy)

It might seem that kanji-->keyword is 'recognition' but it's actually more like 'active recall of the keyword', and unfortunately you're strengthening, concretizing the keyword when, as it's a loose translation of possible meanings of kanji as they're used in certain words, it really ought to be ephemeral just as the story is meant to be a transient bridge, the keyword is something like a crutch that you discard later but can also use if needed. I also like the metaphor of 'dissolving stitches' when we talk of stuff like training wheels and crutches, hehe. Less insulting. ;p

If you're having trouble going both ways after doing RTK, I'd say for the most part you probably could have done RTK better, but I tend to think most people 'breeze' through RTK (especially towards the end, just trying to get the cards out of the 'new' stack) and sell themselves short. But inevitably the process does put those placeholders in the mind, and rather than continuing to obsess over individual kanji and trying to go both ways, better I think to just move on to sentences and solidify them there in conjunction with readings and suchlike.

Especially since 'going both ways' post-RTK really, in my view, means having internalized the kanji's strokes and spatial aspects to the point that you can instantly recognize it as this unique character that you channel into resonating with particular sounds and meanings as they're used in words within various contexts of sentences and semantic situations.

Daichi Wrote:I think this is working against the premise that Heisig presents. He states rather clearly that you should only learn in one direction.

He does, but then at other places he seems to indicate that you are supposed to be learning the keywords (or "meanings" as he calls them elsewhere, such as in book 2) as well. He thinks that you will learn them automatically if you do keyword->kanji, but he never really talks about what you should do if you are having trouble with them.

This really gets to one of the main problems with Heisig's book -- he's not very good at explaining the real purpose of RTK or how it relates to an overall program of Japanese study. He tells you what RTK 1 is going to teach you how to do (and what it won't teach), but he doesn't clearly explain why it's important or what you're going to do next. Sites like this have filled in that gap, but I think it's a reason why this question keeps coming up.

Op: Japanesetraining.blogspot.com hosts a nifty little app that lets you review either way by heisig keywords and chapter by chapter.

My 2c, extra reps ruining your srs isn't too big an issue unless you're always on top of your reps which I never am. As for reversing, you're using precious time learning something that you don't need to know but will learn indirectly for free as you go along. I guess it depends how valuable your time is. For me, i'd rather be doing more reps, more stories or moving on to sentences rather than learning something which in the short-medium term won't let. me do anything but say hey, I know that kanji, it means this arbitrary English word...

Some keywords are very useful in the long run, while others are completely useless beyond the scope of the book. I don't think kanji to keyword is necessarily harmful, but nor do I think it is particularly useful. There are far better ways to spend your study time.

chamois Wrote:My 2c, extra reps ruining your srs isn't too big an issue unless you're always on top of your reps which I never am.

My $0.02 is "staying on top" is more important than what you review or how. If you're not "on top" for even one day, stop adding, set a daily time goal, and suspend or delete failed cards. Continue doing this minimum until SRS isn't a burden. SRS prioritizes your review time. Without review, it's about as useful as a bicycle to a fish.

Encountering items (kanji, vocab, etc) in the wild isn't harmful. Worst case is:

1) You sees something every day after you first meet it. You grade easy (like you should), so SRS schedules it ahead.

2) You suddenly change your habits. You don't see the item either in SRS or in the wild.

3) When it next comes up for review, you fail it. Oh noes.

No big deal. Using multiple review systems is counterproductive, but don't let "spacing effect" scare you away from, you know, actually using the language you want to use.

Quote:For me, i'd rather be doing more reps, more stories or moving on to sentences...

Totally agree. Dead horse, but don't review 漢字 -> keyword. If you're curious what the keyword is, just look it up and move on; save your memory for sentences.