Hi you fellow RTKers.
I come to you with a weird but sweet experience I've been having in the past few weeks. You see, that's when I started actively trying to learn Japanese. I've been watching subtitled anime and reading translated manga for a long time, so I kind of have a bit of a feel for the sound and "spirit" of the language (please pardon my metaphysical language use here). The thing is, the Kanji have always scared me off trying to learn, there are just so many!
You see, I have been diagnosed with an admittedly mild form of ADD, so learning things by rote isn't really the easiest thing for me to do. I have had 9 years of French classes at school, yet I can barely speak and read French at all. As for English, I have had about 6 years of it at school, but because I'd been watching so many movies and using it so often to read books and chat with people on the internet, it just came naturally to me.
But the problem with Japanese was that the Kanji didn't come naturally. I had to memorize every single one and even so I'd forget it very quickly, or I'd start confusing them with similar looking ones.
I'd been reading a lot about how to work things out and I found out about RTK. I promptly ignored it. Mnemonics, I thought. Funny idea, but it doesn't seem like something I could stick to. I'd forget the stories anyway, so why bother? I mean, I sometimes used mnemonics (or Eselsbrücken, as we'd call them in German, literally meaning donkey bridges... Yeah, so this doesn't add anything to the discussion, but it might exemplify how having ADD can play into this), but I never really did so deliberately.
So instead of getting RTK, I downloaded an Anki deck with common Kanji to start me off. I started memorizing them, their readings, and meanings - all at once.
Now's the point where I'm supposed to say "but it didn't work for me at all." Well, no, that's not actually true. I was having fun. I learned about a hundred and fifty Kanji that way in maybe two weeks of effort. It wasn't getting boring, and I was proud of myself, but I did keep confusing them and I couldn't write them at all, though I didn't mind much about not being able to write them. After all, I just wanted to read, and there's IME for typing.
Still, the process probably didn't teach me all of the readings (since it was someone else's beginner Kanji deck I'm assuming some readings were left out, though I could be wrong)
After a while, I picked up the first chapter of One Piece in Japanese and started reading. Or, well, I tried to and failed. I knew almost none of the Kanji, and while I understood some things with the furigana (thanks to the subtitled anime I watched) I was looking up Kanji all the time. I just didn't feel as if I was making any headway.
I looked online for other ways to accelerate my learning, as the Anki reviews were getting increasingly bigger and I was starting to see diminishing returns because I did so much at once (I think for most people 150 Kanji in two weeks would be a big accomplishment. Not that it wasn't for me, but it didn't *feel* like one, and if that happens to me I easily give up, especially with the mentioned diminishing returns). I happened upon RTK again.
Why not? I thought. I'll give it a shot. It can't hurt.
I'm now about 2 and a half weeks in and I stand at about 1180 Kanji. The stories stick (Anki says 75% retention, and the ones I don't remember I almost always immediately recall my stories for. The ones I didn't remember on one day I easily remember on the next one), and whenever I see the primitives of the next Kanji I'm learning, my mind immediately connects them into a small story - almost always better suited to my memory than the ones Heisig supplies. Since my mind flickers around between so many things all the time, the stories don't end up to be similar at all, even though I think think them up in 1 or 2 minutes, tops.
I couldn't work on one of those stories for 5 or more minutes (like Mr. Heisig suggests) even if I tried. I'd get bored. As things go on, the Anki reviews of now 250 a day don't seem overwhelming. They take me maybe an hour a day, while with the Anki deck of elementary Kanji I had before, I was working at least 2 or 3 hours just to get through them all and remember each one at least once.
This is the first time I feel like my ADD is an asset to my learning. My brain's need to keep itself entertained actually delivers the stories that work best for me into my lap, without me needing to think a lot about them. It's still work, but it's not frustrating, and it feels amazing to progress this quickly. Once I have all the Kanji symbols neatly stowed away in my brain, I think I'll be ready to learn Japanese in the same way I once learned English, and it's all thanks to RTK.
So, yeah, I don't know why I wrote this (had to get it off my chest because I always get so excited about the things I do I guess?) And now that I look at it, the title doesn't seem to quite fit what I wrote, seeing as it is a question that I'm actually answering in my post, at least for myself. Still, what do you guys think? (If you stuck with me through this jumbled mess of disconnected thought processes at all, that is)
I come to you with a weird but sweet experience I've been having in the past few weeks. You see, that's when I started actively trying to learn Japanese. I've been watching subtitled anime and reading translated manga for a long time, so I kind of have a bit of a feel for the sound and "spirit" of the language (please pardon my metaphysical language use here). The thing is, the Kanji have always scared me off trying to learn, there are just so many!
You see, I have been diagnosed with an admittedly mild form of ADD, so learning things by rote isn't really the easiest thing for me to do. I have had 9 years of French classes at school, yet I can barely speak and read French at all. As for English, I have had about 6 years of it at school, but because I'd been watching so many movies and using it so often to read books and chat with people on the internet, it just came naturally to me.
But the problem with Japanese was that the Kanji didn't come naturally. I had to memorize every single one and even so I'd forget it very quickly, or I'd start confusing them with similar looking ones.
I'd been reading a lot about how to work things out and I found out about RTK. I promptly ignored it. Mnemonics, I thought. Funny idea, but it doesn't seem like something I could stick to. I'd forget the stories anyway, so why bother? I mean, I sometimes used mnemonics (or Eselsbrücken, as we'd call them in German, literally meaning donkey bridges... Yeah, so this doesn't add anything to the discussion, but it might exemplify how having ADD can play into this), but I never really did so deliberately.
So instead of getting RTK, I downloaded an Anki deck with common Kanji to start me off. I started memorizing them, their readings, and meanings - all at once.
Now's the point where I'm supposed to say "but it didn't work for me at all." Well, no, that's not actually true. I was having fun. I learned about a hundred and fifty Kanji that way in maybe two weeks of effort. It wasn't getting boring, and I was proud of myself, but I did keep confusing them and I couldn't write them at all, though I didn't mind much about not being able to write them. After all, I just wanted to read, and there's IME for typing.
Still, the process probably didn't teach me all of the readings (since it was someone else's beginner Kanji deck I'm assuming some readings were left out, though I could be wrong)
After a while, I picked up the first chapter of One Piece in Japanese and started reading. Or, well, I tried to and failed. I knew almost none of the Kanji, and while I understood some things with the furigana (thanks to the subtitled anime I watched) I was looking up Kanji all the time. I just didn't feel as if I was making any headway.
I looked online for other ways to accelerate my learning, as the Anki reviews were getting increasingly bigger and I was starting to see diminishing returns because I did so much at once (I think for most people 150 Kanji in two weeks would be a big accomplishment. Not that it wasn't for me, but it didn't *feel* like one, and if that happens to me I easily give up, especially with the mentioned diminishing returns). I happened upon RTK again.
Why not? I thought. I'll give it a shot. It can't hurt.
I'm now about 2 and a half weeks in and I stand at about 1180 Kanji. The stories stick (Anki says 75% retention, and the ones I don't remember I almost always immediately recall my stories for. The ones I didn't remember on one day I easily remember on the next one), and whenever I see the primitives of the next Kanji I'm learning, my mind immediately connects them into a small story - almost always better suited to my memory than the ones Heisig supplies. Since my mind flickers around between so many things all the time, the stories don't end up to be similar at all, even though I think think them up in 1 or 2 minutes, tops.
I couldn't work on one of those stories for 5 or more minutes (like Mr. Heisig suggests) even if I tried. I'd get bored. As things go on, the Anki reviews of now 250 a day don't seem overwhelming. They take me maybe an hour a day, while with the Anki deck of elementary Kanji I had before, I was working at least 2 or 3 hours just to get through them all and remember each one at least once.
This is the first time I feel like my ADD is an asset to my learning. My brain's need to keep itself entertained actually delivers the stories that work best for me into my lap, without me needing to think a lot about them. It's still work, but it's not frustrating, and it feels amazing to progress this quickly. Once I have all the Kanji symbols neatly stowed away in my brain, I think I'll be ready to learn Japanese in the same way I once learned English, and it's all thanks to RTK.
So, yeah, I don't know why I wrote this (had to get it off my chest because I always get so excited about the things I do I guess?) And now that I look at it, the title doesn't seem to quite fit what I wrote, seeing as it is a question that I'm actually answering in my post, at least for myself. Still, what do you guys think? (If you stuck with me through this jumbled mess of disconnected thought processes at all, that is)
Edited: 2012-10-26, 3:59 am
Luckily, I finished RTK a while ago, so now the marriage is safe... until I start on RTK 3.
