Hi all

Great resource here.

I've been learning Japanese for around a year. I'm maybe slightly post JLPT4 level. I know how to read and write maybe 100 kanji, recognise a few more and enjoy learning. I finished 'GENKI I' and am about to start II. I get a lot practice speaking and listening as have a patient bi-lingual girlfriend and japanese friends.

I bought the book because I think it will fit into the way I study. I already use this kind of method internally - see a kanji and memorise it's meaning (often forgetting it's reading). Looking forward to getting going.

What's the best way for to approach it? Dedicate 1 hour a night? More? I plan to look through the RTK website to work out how to use their system, but any tips for someone starting are much appreciated.

The best piece of advice I think you can get is simply this: Keep working on it.

Whether you're reviewing or doing new kanji, just keep trucking on.

If you do 1 hour a night for simply 7 hours a week, it will probably take a long time to finish the book. Look at your life and schedule and try to make a deadline for you that seems realistic. Unless you're very gifted, 50+ kanji a day takes many hours. I think a lot of people move at a pace of 10-25. This is a fair pace and can be done with little over an hour if you're not distracted.

Just start it, get a feel for it. Reflect how you are doing after the first 50 or 100 kanji. If you find you screwed up something or didn't make your stories well enough, don't be afraid to start back again. If you really want to finish it, you just have to keep working on it. Find the best way you learn (it will take awhile for this to surface) and try to work with that.

It just depends on how much time you have to give to it. Some people with lots of time can get through the book in 1 month but only by spending lots of hours each day.

When you try to learn too much in one day, it can be hard to remember. Also if you study really fast, you then have to do quite a lot of reviews per day to retain the knowledge. So, you should try to find what is your own ideal number of kanji to study each day by starting with for example 50 and see how it goes from there.

For me, in the early kanji I studied quickly like 250 in a weekend, then dropped to about 40 a day, but by around 800 I dropped to doing only about 20~21 per day, because that was comfortable for me to do, spending about 1 hour each day, it takes about 3 months to finish. (I just finished recently, very happy with my results)

So some tips.

- Read all parts of the book like the introduction and notes at the start of chapters. Follow the advice in the book.
- Try to make the stories in the book work for you. This is good exercise for you to get used to learning even the hardest kanji, and practice 'borrowing' stories. If you get good at this you will save lots of time compared to writing all your own stories. I have probably used 80%+ borrowed stories and that maybe saved 100+ hours I would have spend writing my own stories. The shared stories here have gotten really good lately IMO.
- After the stories in the book stop, use the study area on this website.
- Use this website or Anki for reviews, every day.
- Don't spend lots of time to compare RTK keywords or stories to etymology or dictionaries... it's really not very important, will take up more time than it's worth, and may cause you doubts about RTK that you don't need to have.
- Use the progress chart on this site, and rather than looking at how many kanji are left to do in the book, focus on finishing the chapter you are on. It is more encouraging to focus on that. For me if a lesson had ~40 kanji I would pace myself to study it in 2 days, but if it was ~30 then I would push to try to do it one. It helps to decide when to stop and when to continue each day.

I suggest starting slower and ramping up the pace as you go. You hear stories about learning 8 billion kanji in a day, but it's more important to figure out how the stories work, and how you yourself work. Ease through the first 500 (the ones he gives stories for) and by then you should be able to make your own stories with confidence so you don't backtrack, and you can pick up the pace as your confidence grows.

Your 1 hour/night is a good idea-- it depends on how much time you can give. But whatever you do, do it regularly. It's a huge task, but the most efficient way I've found to do it. Maintain your pace and you'll be done before you know it.

I have a personal goal of 24 per day (that's 2 sheets of the great PDF flashcards here), but I think more important than any particular pace is that you keep momentum. Try to do some studying every single day, even if it's just reviewing the kanji you already know.

Thanks so much for your replies!

I think it'd be sensible for me to not overstretch myself or be unrealistic with time constraints, so 1 hour a night is probably good. I'm not in a mad rush to finish it in x amount of time, so I'll see how it goes. I'm sure I'll be back on here regularly

My own experience is that studying at night is more prone to missed days than studying first thing in the morning.

-- Daniel

Terhorst Wrote:My own experience is that studying at night is more prone to missed days than studying first thing in the morning.

-- Daniel

Definitely, I can't remember the amount of times I'd start studying at night and be like 'I don't really feel up to it tonight' and quit.

Just started and really enjoying it. The reviewing feature on this website is really superb. I got a 79% score on my first go ( although this includes the obvious kanji

What is the best way to learn? So far, I just read the description etc, and write the kanji. Should I also note down the meaning, primitive meaning, do repeats of the writing?

Thanks again!

"Best" is subjective, you'll find in the end what works best for you.

The only guidelines I can recommend is that you don't write the kanji until you've created your story first. And when writing the kanji, recall the story as well to help re-enforce the connection between the two.

I think Heisig mentions this in the Introduction.

Terhorst Wrote:My own experience is that studying at night is more prone to missed days than studying first thing in the morning.

-- Daniel

Hehe... actually I did all my study at night. But I guess I just got used to that because that's the only time I had peace & quiet to do it.

If you do study first thing in the morning your brain can be more fresh for learning, but if study last thing at night, your brain works to memorize in your sleep. 6 and 2 threes. I have 98% of the 2042 kanji at between 3 and 6 correct reviews in a row, so I'm pretty happy.

mr_goosey Wrote:Just started and really enjoying it. The reviewing feature on this website is really superb. I got a 79% score on my first go ( although this includes the obvious kanji

What is the best way to learn? So far, I just read the description etc, and write the kanji. Should I also note down the meaning, primitive meaning, do repeats of the writing?

Thanks again!

It takes practice to find and get used to a method that works for yourself, but to outline my method (after I got used to it), I'd do the following.

- if the kanji has some completely new primitive, trace the primitives in my hand until I get used to writing them.
- read the stories looking for a good one. In the first 500 I just used Heisig's stories for almost everything. After that I searched the stories on the Study section here. If I found a good one I used it, but if I didn't, or if I could think of a better story before I finished reading shared stories then I'd use my own. Obviously, it takes practice to learn how to choose the right kind of stories.
- then after picking a story I'd go through it in my head... trying to visualize as much of the story as I could, for 1 to 2 minutes. (Heisig says 3 minutes. Better to start with longer, then work down as you get more used to it).
- while processing the story in this way, I'd usually also trace the kanji in my palm a few times.

I never ever wrote the kanji on paper while learning it. Only when reviewing sometimes I would write it down, or write on my TabletPC, but mostly just tracing in my palm (because its faster).

Writing out the kanji is useful for improving your writing style... but in my experience it doesn't take very much unless you want to have very beautiful looking characters. After I finished the book, I picked up a Sumi brush and wrote out a few hundred kanji and was delighted how well they turned out.

I have a big notebook of graphing paper (a square of four squares is enough room to write the kanji and keyword, in my handwriting) and this is my method:

-Go through the stories on the site for the next 50 or so kanji I want to learn, and write them in my book
-Open my notebook to the back. Read story, write character in pencil with keyword underneath, memorize story. Continue on for next however many characters I want to do
-Go to the beginning of my new section and go over the character in pen while concentrating on the keyword.

When I test myself on the site I grab a scratch paper and open to the front of my notebook. I write kanji on my scratch paper. When I get one wrong, I input it in the notebook, again with the keyword. If I don't remember the story then I look it up in my book. If I'm having problems remembering the stroke order, then I'll write it a few times on my scratch paper.

I do believe in muscle memory, and for me practicing the writing of the kanji does help. It's not unusual for me to be torn between a few different arrangements of primitives but I'll know which one FEELS right (I'm sure that subconciously I know which one feels right to look at, but I think the muscle memory helps as well).

This makes it really easy for me to review kanjis I'm having problems with by flipping to the front of my notebook, or reviewing recently learned kanji by flipping to the back. I also put the date of every set of "wrong" kanji which helps me see patterns. I know which ones I confuse with each other (plan and plot are hard for me for some reason) and the ones that pop up over and over again obviously need some more time spent on them.

But, everyone has their own method and their own reasons for it. If I had constant access to my computer, I probably wouldn't notebook so much, but because I don't (I share with three other people) I like to be able to have tools on paper (I don't do paper flashcards though, whew, never again!)