Hey, everyone. Nice place you have here. I just picked up the first volume of the Heisig trilogy. It looks great and it's shiny and beautiful, but I was a bit disappointed when he said pronunciation wouldn't be discussed in the book. I'd rather learn pronunciation alongside the Kanji. I listen to Japanese a lot more than I read Japanese, and when I get to the end of the book, I still won't be able to understand a bit more than I do right now. That doesn't sound like an effective method to me. Is it really such a bad idea to learn pronunciation with each kanji as well? I'm thinking of doing that as a little extracurricular work. It won't hurt me, will it?

Also, if you don't mind, could you point me in the direction of some websites I could use to hear and see pronunciations of kanji? (Preferrably NOT in romanji!) Thank you! I'd appreciate it.

I don't really want to argue, but yes, Heisig is possibly the most effective method for learning kanji. The lack of pronuncation is intentional. Rote memorization of pronunciation
is a complete waste of time. You'll never know which pronunciations or words are more common/useful until you encounter them by listening/reading.

The idea is that you'll be able to remember all 2042 general use kanji. Once you've finish RTK, you can start reading manga/books/etc and learn pronunication from actually reading.

For example, most manga either have furigana (pronunciation) over ALL the kanji OR they have pronunciation over NONE of the kanji. So if you've memorized all the kanji using RTK, it'll be a heck of a lot easier to pick up new words (and their pronuncations) when reading manga. You'll know what all the kanji mean and the pronunciation will be written right there next to the kanji. Most manga use the same words over and over and over and over (you get what I mean). So you'll remember the pronunciation just by repeatedly seeing the same words on many pages.

Most Japanese TV dramas and movies come with full Japanese subtitles (i.e. all the words the actors are saying). Also, there are news websites (for example http://www.fnn-news.com) that offer Japanese subtitles for their videos.

My suggestion is to learn RTK to memorize the kanji.
Over time, start reading and you'll learn the pronunciation over time.

Another benefit is that if you're talking to people and hear a word that you don't know, you can ask them to write it down (and instantly recognize the kanji). That happens to me all the time when speaking with japanese people.

It's not that it's such a bad idea, but the problem is that many kanjis have different "readings" (=pronunciation). For example the 日 in the word day (日), is pronounced ひ. But in 日常, it's pronounced にち. In 今日, the two kanjis aren't really read separately, they are read きょう together. Japanese words are often made up of two kanjis or more... or from a mixture of kanjis and hiragana characters.

What you could easily do though, is learning one/some word(s) for each kanji.

You might already know that there are two main kinds of reading (on and kun). "On" readings come from Chinese and are often used in compounds words... Those are the main focus of the second book RTK2, which many of us on koohii didn't really study as we did with RTK1. It's not that it's useless, but as I said, those readings/pronunciations vary and it seems simpler to actually learn them for every word.

For finding the pronunciation of a word, I recommend using jisho.org Simply type the word you want to know and it'll give you the pronunciation in hiragana. If you want to have a list of different possible pronunciations of one single kanji, type the kanji under "Find Kanji" and it will list them. For example, 日 gives you:

Japanese kun: -か、 ひ、 -び
Japanese on: ジツ、 ニチ
Japanese names: あ、 あき、 いる、 く、 くさ、 こう、 す、 たち、 に、 にっ、 につ、 へ

A lot of possible pronunciations! But this is probably one of the worst case.

HopeFails Wrote:Hey, everyone. Nice place you have here. I just picked up the first volume of the Heisig trilogy. It looks great and it's shiny and beautiful, but I was a bit disappointed when he said pronunciation wouldn't be discussed in the book. I'd rather learn pronunciation alongside the Kanji. I listen to Japanese a lot more than I read Japanese, and when I get to the end of the book, I still won't be able to understand a bit more than I do right now. That doesn't sound like an effective method to me. Is it really such a bad idea to learn pronunciation with each kanji as well? I'm thinking of doing that as a little extracurricular work. It won't hurt me, will it?

Also, if you don't mind, could you point me in the direction of some websites I could use to hear and see pronunciations of kanji? (Preferrably NOT in romanji!) Thank you! I'd appreciate it.

Kanji readings aren't particularly useful in isolation, and if you spend a lot of time drilling these things instead of learning Japanese, it will hurt your progress. Did you read the full introduction to the book? I can't remember what's in it, but I remember Heisig making a convincing argument.

Words are what you want to know, and if you already know kanji, it's much easier to learn them. There's plenty of other stuff to focus on - listening, pronunciation, grammar - until you finish the book. The vocab you learn as a beginner is so common that you'll probably end up learning how to read it anyway. There are literally millions of manga with furigana you can read and familiarise yourself with some kanji in context.

Knowing the readings of any amount of kanji isn't going to see you picking up a newspaper in the next 18-months unless you have a large vocab and grammar base, so you're really not going to gain anything. If you plan on taking a long time to finish the book, say more than 9-12 months, you might want to look for an alternative method though.

I agree that you could move a little faster by just having some Japanese, even if it's a single vocab word in front of you as you learn each kanji. I just don't think you should make it the focus of your studies while doing RtK. There isn't any point of learning all the readings for each kanji as you go along, it will certainly slow you down and it's not very fun.

You could use the Anki deck on Japanese Level Up found on this page. Only gripe with the deck here is all the removed kanji deemed as useless, I'd rather just have those cards suspended so I could deal with them if I really wanted to. (Granted, it's not too hard to fix if you know how to work a spreadsheet.)

If you don't really care about learning to write by hand you can just do rtk lite then learn the rest as you read. The important part is really just being able to distinguish kanji radicals and stroke orders; if you know this then you can at least look up kanji on jisho.org. I don't want to discount the book though, finishing it is definitely worthwhile.

There's always the option of adding sound indicators to your stories. It will give you at least one onyomi pronunciation for each kanji. This is how I've been working through kanji and it's been extremely helpful.

The bottom of this blog post also vouches for it:
http://burritolingus.wordpress.com/2010/...-rtk-deck/

I don't understand the thinking that it's useless to learn onyomi while doing RTK. I hear the argument that "oh but some Kanji have several different pronunciations and you'll never know which ones are most common" - but surely it would be beneficial to know at least one possible reading instead of no readings at all?

If you have the time and the inclination, learning the pronunciation early likely is fine, as long as it doesn't interfere with the RTK1 study. I don't think it matters much either way over the long haul.

I'd have to agree with javizy, but I have been wondering if rtk2 might be used in conjunction with rtk1. If you see that 門 and 問 can both be pronounced もん in their 音読み, why not add some of these to your mnemonics? It's possible and I think it's kind of the philosophy behind the website Kanji Damage. Nonetheless if you've ever studied a piece of music you'll understand that it is sometimes best to break things down while learning and stay focused on each piece one at a time. Have fun!