What's the point of keeping up reviewing RTK (or doing RTK at all), assuming I don't care for writing kanji?

I finished RTK, I kept reviewing for awhile, then I stopped and basically just forgot all of RTK because my RTK mnemonic images were getting mixed up with my actual vocab mnemonics.

I think the only thing RTK has helped me with is that the kanji don't all look the same and I'm not completely lost when I see them. But then again, this seems hardly useful - especially considering all the effort necessary for RTK.

And as far as the keywords go, they don't help at a because they are actually multiple "keywords" and kanji compounds make things even more complicated.

Btw, yes I've read the sticky, I'm still confused...

Oh yeah, after RTK, are we supposed to be able to know the "keyword" or general meaning(s) of every kanji when we see it? Should I make a kanji>keyword deck and focus on this, or should I just acquire them through vocab.

Because RTK gives you the ability to visually distinguish kanji like a native does (often times reading them on the computer more complex kanji can look nearly identical because they're so small), makes learning to read them (readings) significantly easier (Supermemo rule #1 "Do not learn if you do not understand"), and gives you the toolset to deal with kanji you encounter in the future inside or outside of RTK. Perhaps you might be questioning right now if you're time was wasted, but I believe it's similar to someone wearing a weighted training vest all week and eventually forgetting that it's on.

How far along with vocab did you get? Do you really think you didn't get any benefits from RTK? I could be totally wrong.

After RTK you should probably continue with vocab and grammar. Nukemarine has a great thread for this.

The keywords are temporary labels, or "training wheels".

The idea isn't to drill in the keywords as a necessary part of each character. The idea is that through the characters' radicals/primitives you end up being able to deduce a general idea of the meanings to keep their appearances separate and clear from each other, making you familiar with the characters.

As you learn Japanese you'll start associating more and more characters by their common readings and functions as words, rather than dictionary meanings or keywords. The keywords are supposed to fall away, it's ok to forget them one by one as their necessity goes away. You might have learned 員 as "employee", but after learning words like 社員, 部員, 全員, you'll have "イン" be the sound that immediately pops up in your mind as you see the character, and you'll understand that a closer meaning is actually something like "member" rather than specifically an employee.

Depending on how much work it is to save your deck from the growing pile of reviews, the choice of whether or not you wanna lay off should be yours. I don't suggest kanji→keyword though. Whatever's on the back of a card is the information we're supposed to work our brains to remember. I think putting keywords on the back is counter productive as the end goal isn't to have them solidly drilled into your mind - we're learning Japanese, not keywordese.

Honestly, the first post gives me doubts that he/she really read the book.
All of those questions are answered throughout the book.

Apparently quite a few people don't even use the book and go with just the study page for each frame on here.

I guess what you guys are saying makes sense. I never really tried to study before doing RTK so I don't understand what it'd be like. So I think I'm just underestimating what it's done for me.

@TwoMoreCharacters: That was why I was confused about doing RTK, because you come to understand the meanings like 員 eventually anyways. And doesn't doing kanji>keyword accomplish the same thing, faster? (Remember I'm not concerned about writing, just recognizing.) Lemme know if I'm understanding you incorrectly.

I read the book, I still had questions, so I came here for further clarification.

Quote:And doesn't doing kanji>keyword accomplish the same thing, faster? (Remember I'm not concerned about writing, just recognizing.)

The main reason for doing keyword>kanji is for having a placeholder word in a Language you are able to fluently comprehend (English, for example) in which you brain has been trained to connect with and recall the associated kanji. The book is aimed towards short-term memory in respect to the keywords, as the entire point of RtK is being able to study actual Japanese well, a bloody lot easier.

Eventually yes you do understand the meanings of kanji which were associated with English keywords, and those English keywords fall away and become disassociated. The kanji remains the same, however. Which is how the system of keyword>kanji works. I'll make it a little easier to understand, as my writing is often unintelligible.


The placeholder word acts as a scaffold for a building:

read>読

The reviews will correct and reinforce the image of the kanji in your mind. The keyword is there to help you create imaginative shortcuts so you are not relying on rote memory, etc. to recall the kanji shape.

After a while the kanji for the keyword "read" will become very will cemented in your brain. Then you begin studying actual Japanese...

and come across a more accurate translation for "read" as:

よむ＞読む

At this point you may begin to come across similar keywords and begin recalling kanji you've seen in the wild which are more accurate in respect the the keyword's meaning, and in your reviews, you may end up "failing"- not the kanji, but the keyword. When you make these "false-errors" you will still be able to produce a number of similar kanji until you eventually recall the kanji which matches with the keyword.

This is not a bad thing. Basically, you may be forgetting the transitory keywords but you are able to recall multiple similar meaning kanji in order to "match" the keyword. This very act means that you must have a pretty powerful mental association with kanji, and are able to produce them from memory.

This means "Mission ******* Success!"

From this point the transition of learning different readings for kanji stems, etc. becomes a game or getting used to certain word usage patterns, etc. which will eventually become intuitive, and all the while you won't have to "learn" the responding kanji at the same time. Which is a very common "mainstream" approach.


Now... doing Kanji>Keyword is more or less running counter to this long term approach and I personally do not see a great deal of value to is, and either does Heisig, who created the system.

If you still have questions, I suggest you re-read through those section of RtK which the author explains his reasons for not going Kanji>Keyword. Often it takes multiple reads of something, at spaced intervals, with a clear mind, to really soak in what is trying to be communicated.

The thing is, it's just Heisig's opinion. I doubt anyone had really proven the effectiveness of going keyword>kanji over kanji>keyword. But for that one'd need a good controlled blind experiment.

If you're less specific (which shouldn't affect the result) then there have been countless experiments proving that production is better for long term and strong memorization than recognition. That's become somewhat common sense in the language teaching industry. This really is just an extension of that, so I wouldn't call it just an opinion at all

Edit: Actually, I'm not gonna "do a nest0r" and post countless links to research papers... You all know how to use google if you want them :P

If we're less specific, I'd say that language teaching industry mostly has gone from translation as a primary tool to reading and recognition. Even on this forum nobody goes from English words/sentences to learn Japanese ones.

Production is good for active memory, but for reading passive memory is just well enough.

わかりました。

I not really arguing about production vs recognition but whatevs...

Another question: I don't remember any of my stories, and I don't need them - when I see new kanji, repetition makes me recognize it and I don't use my old stories. Is this normal??

Even Heisig himself writes that the stories are a temporary thing to help you get started differentiating kanji, and eventually you'll get rid of them. So in my opinion, yes, if you don't mess them up with the old ones. If you mess up, maybe it'd better to take a closer look.

I'm not done with the book yet, but I will say that the keywords do help in that they make it easier to learn the kanji themselves. In many ways, this is replicating what we did back in the day when we first learned to read. We KNOW most of the first words we encounter in print, there's no need to teach the 250 words for example that make up The Cat in the Hat. What happens is assigning vocabulary to arbitrary lines on paper. Unless encountering a new word, no one sounds out a word. We see them and recognize them (Just as you are doing now) without sounding them out or considering their individual meaning.

One thing that trips up my Japanese students when first learning to read English is a very limited vocabulary. I have to ask them to juggle a new (kind of) writing system that follows odd rules, a collection of sounds above and beyond what they know, and equate it to something in their native tongue, and do all of that while assigning meaning to a word. No wonder they struggle with just 26 letters.

What I have discovered with RTK is that I don't have to do the above, I just have to assign a word I already know and am familiar with to the bloody kanji. It's a nifty shortcut that will, hopefully when I finish vol1 and start on vol2 make getting the Japanese vocab and the multiple readings easier since I'm not worried about remembering stokes/translations/etc.

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:Apparently quite a few people don't even use the book and go with just the study page for each frame on here.

Could anyone speak further on this? I don't mind buying another book if it's necessary, having failed to make much progress in Kanji the "hard" way (basically trying to to through this book: http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Reading-Writ...0804833656). Stroke order is good but I can get that from the above book and from renshuu.org. Just curious about the value it provides versus simply using the tools on the site here.

With only this site you miss out on the components which aren't a Kanji, but still have their own "calling". Makes buildung and understanding stories easier. I'd recommend getting the book. AFAIK all revenue goes to charity, so it's for a good cause anyway. ; )

[Zgarbas]

I wish the entirety of the book was written with Heisig's comments, thinking for yourself be damned. He has such an encouraging way of explaining things for some reason.
Also, the book has the primitives. Without it you'll have to catch on to what primitive is which, and why, on your own.

Alright, thanks to both of you. I always feel like I'm learning more if real paper is involved anyway, even if that feeling is false. Bookcount++!

This is just the discussion that I was looking for. I started the book, but didn't take Heisig's advice to study Keyword -> Kanji. Or the advice to write them. Silly me, big mistake, apparently. But I wanted more information on "why not?".

Background: Essentially, I stumbled across an article about How To Start Heisig's Method For FREE. Free? That's my favorite price. And for something I was researching and considering, sounded almost perfect. The recommendation was to download the PDF of the partial book at
http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/publicatio...the-kanji/
-near the bottom is a "sample" of the book, which is basically the book up to page 118, about 300 kanji. This plus an Anki study deck gets you on your way.

However, I just figured that I wanted passive reading comprehension so, why bother writing them? I don't need to write them; that just isn't my goal right now, I just want to read them. I even REVERSED the Anki deck that I had so that I went Kanji -> Keyword...

A couple quotes from Heisig on this topic:
page 7, introduction, "the kanji are best reviewed by beginning with the key word" & "If pen and paper are inconvenient, one can always make do with the palm of the hand",

page 101, lesson 11, "[don't] try to shortcut the process by merely learning to recognize the characters" & "study only from key word to kanji; the reverse will take care of itself"

I'm sorry if this post rambles on... I don't have much more to add to the discussion. But I did want to "flag it" so to speak - in case other people are searching around for this topic just as I was. If anyone has any extra thoughts on this topic, I'd love to hear them. Meanwhile, I will post below just a few extra key words for future Searchers.

:wq!

_______
reading before writing, passive comprehension, keyword only, keyword to kanji, reading only,

Zgarbas Wrote:I wish the entirety of the book was written with Heisig's comments, thinking for yourself be damned. He has such an encouraging way of explaining things for some reason.

ya I had my moments when I really did too. I get why he didn't... He basically gave us all training wheels, helping us transition into creating mnemonic associations.

Its funny in retrospect the shock I felt at the end of the first section when the stories got really short... And then the terror at seeing there were no stories at all half-way in... but he was still there holding your hand occasionally when things got tough.

Well being that learning a language is about creating tens of thousands of mnemonic association later on, that was useful.

but ya there was a warm fuzzy feeling about the beginning of the book and his weird academic dad-like explanation of things.