Hi my name is Josh, I'm 20 years old, I live in Hawaii, and am at
around #425 (a solid 300?) for RTK1 with a month of poking at it.
I'd like to learn since I've always had an interest in the culture that has grown from living here for 10 years. But what pushed me to look (Then realizing it's possible) is my father mentioning I should get my masters or do something like learning Japanese to make myself more likely to find a job in Hawaii; which isn't easy. I have earned 75 credits of my Bachelors with myself, the internet, and a pile of books along with a lot of college tests (Minus math :/ which seems far harder then RTK1 or anything else)
I found RTK1 and am surprised on how great it is. I'm now addicted to it and learning as much as I can.


I have no experience with Japanese minus that I have been in the International Karate League for 4 years where I hear words and basic phrases (and occasional insults in Japanese from a 70 year old 10nth degree sensi) from mostly native speakers that are accompanied with English translations.

I know nothing other then the Kanji, which actually seem to make sense. (I'm trying to get Kana understood since I am starting to see where they apply) I've been trying as many do to make an interconnected network of meaning so that everything is added up on higher levels; so it's not strokes but Kanji. Although my stories aren't like RTK1 in complexity, and are more in the realm of associations with some plots that are simple stories.


My questions are many but I'll limit them
Firstly my hand writing has much to be desired.
I have always been somewhat visually impaired (not so good a decade ago, and now okay enough to drive) so I'm blaming that on my bad writing, although I could be wrong. Furthermore, everything I remember visually turns into mush that magically means something when I see the Kanji. That makes writing them out hard to do until they are Very familiar to me. (I was thinking perhaps I could just learn to write Kana?) I'm not sure why, but for some odd reason I do actually remember them well.

The other question is what should I do with RTK1?
I do the Anki 2 Deck of Kanji (20 new daily), I'm looking at Kana, I'm reading online to patch in some perspectives (Japanese All The Time, Japanese Level Up, and so forth), and finally I'm trying to plot my next moves.

I'm presuming I need to associate Kana with Kanji (which seems harder then learning Kanji) then go from there. I'm also guessing once I know the Kanji, and their sounds then I can make some sense out of phrases, then proceed with loading suck things into my Anki deck.
I'm assuming a closer and more immediate source of satisfaction would be reading a newspaper or being able to pick some meaning out of writing?

Personally, I'd hang up all your other Japanese study, and just focus on getting RTK1 done in the next 2 months. Then you will have a solid foundation for picking the rest of it up^^
Plus, I think it's better to use this site for RTK Kanji reviewing, and you can make use of public stories for your kanji when you get stuck!

I reference to the stories here a lot, but I'm usually not home, without internet, and have an Android tablet.
The only reason I've thought about Kana now is perhaps they'd grow well together, but I don't want a hindrance, and perhaps that could be one.

jm82792 Wrote:The only reason I've thought about Kana now is perhaps they'd grow well together, but I don't want a hindrance, and perhaps that could be one.

It's not necessarily going to be a hindrance, but kana is like the alphabet, and pretty easy to remember. I just wouldn't worry too much about getting it learnt right now, unless you really need it for class (or will do so in the near future).

Thankfully I don't have a language class, from what I'm reading they are a painful endurance at times......
Are there any things I should study with the Kanji that would be useful?
I'm going to try to ramp up on the Kanji and try to get more done, read online about a few things, but otherwise it seems I have a single mission

It wasn't stated, but don't major in Japanese.

jm82792 Wrote:Thankfully I don't have a language class, from what I'm reading they are a painful endurance at times......
Are there any things I should study with the Kanji that would be useful?
I'm going to try to ramp up on the Kanji and try to get more done, read online about a few things, but otherwise it seems I have a single mission

Honestly, I would go through the Kanji the Heisig way, without the readings. If you're focussed, and have the time, and do it right, I don't see why you can't get the 2200 kanji he'll teach you done in 2-3 months.

That's a big chunk of your learning out of the way right there, and as a bonus, kanji stop being scary :p

Then you can work on vocab, grammar, and the kanji readings at your own pace, by whatever method suits you best.

vix86 Wrote:It wasn't stated, but don't major in Japanese.

I won't go for it
I'm going for a business degree, I am into science and technology but Business was something I could test out of most of the degree with studying at home. I'm seeing that if I learn Japanese it's another asset.
For what I know I may never use my degree for a job, and knowing Japanese might be my ticket. That or maybe it won't but I'll definitely enjoy myself with knowing it anyways.

I recommend you to learn hiragana and katakana, if you haven't yet. They are simple enough that they shouldn't require too much focus, and at the same time you could start reading Japanese, even if it's only the sound and you don't understand yet the meaning.

You can also listen to music, which is both fun and works as immersion. I'd recommend you to install MiniLyrics, which recognizes the song you're playing, downloads it's lyric and displays it on screen, and Lyrics Master, for downloading lyrics when you can't find them with Minilyrics.

Good luck!

More realistically, RTK is a tiny aspect of your learning, but it can be like tying your shoes up a little tighter before going on a long hike, or something. It should give you a bit of a footing on the path, and might even provide added motivation (to be able to write 漢字 whereas others may be stuck writing かんじ?), or at least it can be used as an experience in continuous study and review, maybe as opposed to cramming for a test and let letting revision slide for a while.

Quote:That or maybe it won't but I'll definitely enjoy myself with knowing it anyways.

Sounds like something you can use for long term motivation. You're already living on an island many see as paradise, so you're already a few steps on the way, lol.

Thanks for all the input!
My brain sort of wreaks lyrics and turns them into things I can't remember, until I hear them then I remember them. Off the top of my head I can't remember a single lyric from one song, although then again I've never tried to remember lyrics when I listen to music.

I'll keep going on the Kanji, read a little bit of "Remembering the Kana", then go from there. Are there any good books or online resources that could help me get a structure of how and where to study once I'm done with these set of tasks? I feel a bit overwhelmed thinking about integrating what I'll know to actually understanding words and so forth. I tend to really over think things, but in the end what I'd like is a tangible thing (Book/guide) that would give me a sense (not a strict following of it) of what's up and what's down.

I do like going online and researching, but I can also see myself continually doing so to find the most intelligent/best/easiest course, which would bring me nowhere

Not sure if you know this, but Heisig also has a book out to help you learn the Kana. I used it to learn the Hiragana, and it made it so easy that it convinced me to do RtK.

Anyways, the reason why I'm bothering you with this dull little anecdote is because I didn't also do the Katakana. I did the Hiragana, practiced it and became pretty much able to read it comfortably. Then I did RtK, and then did the Katakana. Right after, I delved into sentence reviews, with lots of Katakana in them. And I found that it was a problem. I spent at least a month having trouble reading Katakana words, and just guessing what they are.

In hind sight, it would've been better to learn both Kana first, and then practice them while doing Rtk (possibly by reading simple Kana only stories, like the ones in the Yomu Yomu Bunko Level 0, or in children's stories), so that once I finished RtK I would have the skills to read them both comfortably, and be able to focus strictly on Kanji at that point.

P.S. While it's true that you can memorize both Kana in just a day or two (especially with Heisig's book), that doesn't mean that you can also use them that fast. It still takes weeks of practice to get to use them. (not sure if you ever learned to touch type, but learning to read/write the Kana or something like the Hebrew script is a lot like touch typing: you can only be good at it by practicing a little every day - there's no point in doing it 10 hours a day, it won't have the same effect as doing it half an hour for 20 days).

So you should learn the Kana well ahead of when you're planning to use it to learn Kanji words and sentences.

I have been reading Heisigs "Remembering the Kana" book for a little bit.I don't like having it on my tablet, so I'm due for buying a physical book, or maybe some sort of hacked Nook Simple Touch E Ink display with Android

(...and hopefully I can laugh at the proceeding text by the end of this year...)

I am definitely not going to try to learn it all in a day or two, or even a week. It seems things should be done incrementally so that they are properly connected together, and have meaning. I was looking at romanjii (?) for "sushi" (then again the kana for shi is like a hook that is fish guts related), karate, and then from my head all the random words for upper block, lower block, peaceful mind, and so forth that I mindlessly remember (that are slowly getting tagged with Kana). I am almost tempted to get them somewhat tied together just to get them initially remembered. Although I'm reading that can mess things up with pronunciation. So maybe just two words for each one in an Anki deck to get it sort of associated, then go to something else.

Oh yeah I have a little CNC machine that I've been torturing for a year or so and made a sign for a friend of mine who is my dentist, and a sensei. I asked a month or two ago on this elsewhere. I'll ask just to show off the sign, although for what I know it could be off, and it could be gulch tossing material.

Didn't use Remember the Kana, or anything like that. More brute force style with flash cards and writing them out, pronouncing them during writing, etc. Learning the pronunciation took a fair bit of trail and error with reading different study resources and contrasting with native media, so see what they meant, yet even after things made sense enough, reading a string of kana was still hell, as my brain simply forgot how to work. But after gaining a sense of grammar, with a bit of a vocab., I found reading (and pronunciation in my head) to make a whole lot more sense.

Tablets aren't really something I've had much experience with, but, if you had individual short sound clips of a native Japanese person pronouncing individual kana, would you be able to use it to put in the answer field/back side of the card while you're studying in Anki?

I've got a collection of these which I could easily email to you if you're interested. They were part of some $1 membership offer package from japanesepod101, so are at least accurate.

This site http://thejapanesepage.com/beginners/hiragana/a has a set of lessons (with audio) that include incremental word examples ... that is, if you go in kana-order, you can spell the examples with just the characters learned so far.

Tae kim has a chart that you can click on any kana and get both a male and female voice for the pronunciation:
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/hiragana

As long as you're roughly in the ball-park on pronunciation I wouldn't fret during kana-learning phase too much, but once you have the full set of kana down it would be a good idea to spend some time working on pronunciation along with vocabulary, earlier rather than later.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem that bad pronunciation habits early on can become ingrained, but you can't know how the words sound until you've attuned your ear to Japanese from a certain amount of listening... you'll probably just have to keep refining your pronunciation forever, or until you start being mistaken for a native on the phone, whichever comes first.

Oh, and the sign is cute, but nobody would put さん after their -own- name or their own title. It is how somebody else might refer to a dentist, though.

(Thanks for all the help, I greatly appreciate you guys putting up with me)

I do see the chicken and egg issue. Just tonight one of my Sensei(s?) was mentioning getting your black belt merely means you are ready to learn and go up 2nd, 3rd, and etc degree. (nobody in IKL makes a dime from their teaching so their isn't monetary interest in keeping students) If anything I did 4 years ago was filmed I'd be laughing at myself, and others would wonder what that idiot was doing. It is not easy to get to the point where learning is productive, where you already know enough to simply listen, and do what you are told (well to naturally learn) without freaking out that you can't do anything (and that sounds good and all, but in reality it's "here is what to do, now do it!" in my current case).

I think I can do whatever I want for custom flashcards with Anki.
The tablet blurb was me overthinking about what to find that will run android and have an "E Ink" screen. I have found a few decks with Kana along with their pronunciations, I think they were supposed to be native, but I could be wrong.

SomeCallMeChris, I'll be visiting those links since I really appreciate being able to build off of stuff. I can remember Kanji without associations but I "have" to go back to them since they don't truly make "sense". I should become more attenuated to what I hear, as I do notice the pronunciations are roughly comparable to some vowels(and many will say "that's obvious" ) and so forth, but definitely have a difference that I need to integrate in. I won't worry too much since as you said it's an continuous process until otherwise noted. Sometime, someday, I'll bother my a few of my teachers. But not for a rather long time.

Edit. It's a really nice resource. Around here we say "tako poki" when we refer to chopped raw octopus that's seasoned and eaten raw.
Now this is making sense, it's time to tie all the other random words i know to Kana.

I've been busy working weekends, and all that random stuff that consumes more time then you'd like.
But in spite of that I am at 510 or so for Kanji, and am recognizing 25 Hiragana. Recognition is the keyword, me writing it is nearly an impossibility at this time. I find this far more interesting then most things that I can do in my spare time

jm82792 Wrote:I've been busy working weekends, and all that random stuff that consumes more time then you'd like.
But in spite of that I am at 510 or so for Kanji, and am recognizing 25 Hiragana. Recognition is the keyword, me writing it is nearly an impossibility at this time. I find this far more interesting then most things that I can do in my spare time

Impossible to write kanji, or impossible to write hiragana?

I have not tried a lot but right now it's impossible for both, but I know Kana in general have to be written eventually.
It does seem that everything in my head turns into visual mush (unless I'm seeing it then I recognize it). For instance I took a drawing class that my friend (he did concept work for dreamworks) hosted; and he asked me after a few minutes if I could see the paper.
Although I can't draw worth anything; like almost everybody who is alive I can write legibly (not much past that!) therefore there is hope.
For now I'm hoping to get the Kanji and Hiragana "memorized".
Grammar, words, and so forth (I'm assuming) will be the next adventure.

If you're doing RTK then you should be writing the kanji from the keyword on each review. That's pretty much the whole point of RTK, it's a mnemonic method for learning how to write the characters, and it naturally follows that you should be able to recognize anything you can write (although actually 'reading' will involve learning pronunciations, of course.)

It's funny that vix posted something about not majoring in Japanese. My thoughts exactly
But I agree that having Japanese language ability will help you after you get your degree. It certainly helped me. In fact, my very first job after graduating from uni (economics degree) was related to Japanese and not related to my major

Regarding using RTK, I guess I am one of those who started their Japanese studies without the use of RTK or even SRS. I went to a Japanese school every weekend and studied kana and Kanji from handouts That's like the ancestor of the SRS

I do see your point Chris, I'll start passively writing them out when I SRS after I install the stroke order addon. I do have a story or worst case good association between primitives, but for what I know it could be a missing dimension of learning even with how bad my predispositions are.
I didn't write it off, but thought I'd be fine delaying it. But I've payed for that in the past on other things (passing through a bunch of college courses and now I'm cringing with my math course is a nice example). I recall thinking about studying for what I'm doing now about 4 years ago when I had time and thought having a year or two of college before most was good enough.
I recently realized to stay on this rock means I better make my resume better, and it seems that what I'm doing now is a nice mix of a hobby and a practical skill.