I am getting close to the end now. The top of the hill is just in sight but . . .
I know there is a mountain sitting right behind. I need to know the on'yomi and kun'yomi readings. Which right now I don't. So here is my plan:

1. Finish the last 200 or so kanji I have still to learn.
2. Get all the kanji into box 5 or beyond.
3. Use kanji town/movie method to try to learn the on'yomi.
4. Ignore the kun'yomi as people seem to recommend that though I am not 100% sure why.

I have a few questions on all this and I'd appreciate some advice. It seems to me the movie method approach means you have to be able to see the kanji and from that remember the keyword and/or story. This in turn leads you to the movie and hence the on'yomi. This is still a bit of a problem for me. I am much stronger in going from key word to kanji. Any thoughts here?

When doing movie method do you put the key word into the movie or your entire story? I can easily put the keyword into a memorable scene in the movie but shoehorning my stupid stories in, well how on earth do you do that?

Is there anywhere a list of the RTK kanji sorted by on'yomi? I keep finding posts saying something like "here is the list" but then the link doesn't work.

Just how many different on yomi are there? I read somewhere there are 300. Blimey! I like films but I don't think I know 300 of them in enough detail for this to work. But I guess any other device can be used as a memory palace. Sit coms, novels or whatever. But I do need 300 separate films or whatever else I can use right?

What is the best thing to do when there are multiple on yomi? Ignore the less popular one? How do I know which is less popular?

Any help people can give me much appreciated. Apologies if all this has been done to death elsewhere and apologies also if I am posting in the wrong forum. Maybe RTK 2 is better - I decided to use this forum as I am still working through RTK 1 but the logic of this seems a bit off somehow! If people think I will get better responses in RTK2 I will repost this there.

No idea why you need it, but...
http://www.kanjinetworks.com/eng/kanji-d...ionary.cfm
http://homepage3.nifty.com/jgrammar/gram.../kanji.htm
(it's not Heisig)

What's kanjimovie?

buonaparte Wrote:What's kanjimovie?

http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com.au/

uisukii Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:What's kanjimovie?

http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com.au/

Thanks. People do have some weird ideas.

I used Japanese movies and learned how to recognize many kanji, but it was before I started to learn the language.
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_m...c346179176

The first kanji/words I was able to recognize (hundreds of them!) were in fact proper names (film directors, actresses, actors, writers, models, historical figures, towns, islands), movie titles, book titles, etc. And long before I even started to learn Japanese. It wasn’t possible for me to confuse黒澤 明Kurosawa Akira with 山田 洋次Yamada Youji, 宮澤 賢治Miyazawa Kenji with安部 公房Abe Koubou, 三船 敏郎Mifune Toshirou with仲代 達矢Nakadai Tatsuya, 車 寅次郎Kuruma Torajirou withリリー 松岡Ririi Matsuoka, 網走Abashiri with 函館Hakodate, or 広島 Hiroshima with 長崎 Nagasaki!

I've always been interested in good books and movies and have been in the nasty habit of checking the literal meaning of the original titles.

Thanks Buonaparte - and yes I did mean movie method - I have amended my post so as not to confuse people.

Rusty Wrote:4. Ignore the kun'yomi as people seem to recommend that though I am not 100% sure why.

Basically, kun readings don't have any value by themselves. I'll try to explain. On readings are recycled over and over again for different kanji compound words: a typical kanji has its on'yomi used in dozens of words. Kun readings on the other hand are usually connected to a single word or word family, and you're better off reversing the order: learn the word along with what kanji and okurigana (= the part of the word that's not covered by the kanji's kun reading, e.g. べる in 食べる) are used to write it, and optionally its variations in writing (there are quite a few). This makes sense when you consider the directions were opposite too in the 'creation' of the readings (please forgive me if the following isn't completely accurate): kun'yomi already 'existed' as (parts of) words in classical Japanese and were just assigned to certain kanji (words were used to create readings) while on'yomi readings were sounds derived from Chinese used in the construction of new vocabulary (readings were used to create words).

First of all, I sort of want to dissuade you from trying this method at all, because I used it and it was one of the things that led to me abandoning my first efforts to learn this language at all. Also, the guy who made it seems to have disappeared off the map, so that's not such a good sign..
I did complete it though, and made mneumonics for all of the on-yomi, but it took a REALLY long time, and I had a really blunt-force way of testing it where I tried to produce EVERY keyword associated with an on-yomi for each single card. Horribly slow. I eventually got discouraged when I realized how long I'd been working on the language and how little practical knowledge I had to show for it. That was more or less when I threw in the towel. But you should take this with a grain of salt because I had more problems than that back then-- the worst of which being inconsistent use of anki, and deletion of semi-mature cards to "free up more time". [/horror story]

But if you're still set on it, I think I know how it SHOULD be done. First, you need to complete it fast, like 1 month tops. The reason should be obvious. Completion means two things:
1. Writing the mneumonics (they can be movies or anything else really, just stories), such that each kanji keyword is included in some long (and I mean LONG-- some will include 60+ keywords) mneumonic associated with a movie setting/novel/anything.
2. Testing the mneumonics by going either keyword -> on-yomi or kanji ->on-yomi on an individual basis

So you'll need to associate the KEYWORD with the on-yomi mneumonic. The story you made for RTK1 need not have any place in the on-yomi mneumonic. I'm thinking also that you don't need to make new cards and could just do this at the same time as kanji reviews. That means you'd need to go keyword -> writing and onyomi for each RTK1 card.

Oh and I can hook you up with that excel file here. It's got some stories in it. I didn't make them but I left them there to show you the general concept.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2771...%2004.xlsx

Like every person who did RTK, I also thought about learning systematically the on-readings. After all, his method works well for the kanji, it's easy to mark progress and it breaks it out in manageable chunks before you get to the actual vocabulary.

But I urge you to reconsider!

The problem - and you actually found it yourself - is that there are many on-readings and it's not always obvious which is used for which words. It's very much similar to Greek and Latin roots in many European languages. Look at the words: "Aquarium, aquatic, aquaculture" and at "hydrophobic, hydrolysis, hydrodynamics, hydrogen". It's certainly not useless to learn hydro- and aqua- by themselves first, but there are thousands of those in Japanese and it's not always clear what they mean in isolation (water was a clear example, but it's not always so easy). Plus why is it "aquarium" and not "hydrium"? What would you answer to a learner of English asking you this question?

So in short: why not learn actual words right now?
After you've seen "長" in various words, you'll get that it is read チョウ, without specifically having to study it. I feel RTK2 (or any method to systematically learn on-readings) is probably not worth the investment - unlike RTK1 which actually makes learning vocabulary easier.

An other way to look at it is:
I prefer to go: "Ah, there's a pattern!" than "Oh, so many exceptions..." Plus in the meantime you're already learning vocab.

Anyway, just my two cents...

comeauch Wrote:So in short: why not learn actual words right now?

Because with RTK2, you do learn actual words... You don't learn the readings in isolation, I'm not sure where you got that idea from. Sure, they're organised by onyomi, but you study the readings through compounds, aka, words...

Thanks everyone for the replies and Haych for the link. Now I am having all sorts of second thoughts. Dang! Nothing simple under the sun - at least not if it is kanji related!!

I was in a similar situation to you a few months ago. I had wrapped up RTK1 and received RTK2 shortly thereafter. I flipped through it, read the intro and it didn't really "click" with me like RTK1 did.

I had, after all this kanji study, this overwhelming desire to learn something practical. So instead, I grabbed some old Genki books I had around for a while and started using them for grammar and vocab. Found a Genki vocab anki deck and started learning words with kanji at the same time, not really focusing on individual kanji and readings, but more so on whole words themselves.

~1500 or so words later I am familiar with kanji readings not because I have drilled them into my brain but because I know the words that contain them. Patterns start to emerge, I'm starting to make connections, and things are sinking in. Looking back at RTK2, it makes a little more sense with some vocab behind me.

So, and this is just me, after RTK I would start learning complete words. Don't worry about kunyomi/onyomi now. I don't think it makes things any simpler now, and with the same amount of effort, at the end you can know some actual words instead of bits and pieces.

muteki99 Wrote:I was in a similar situation to you a few months ago. I had wrapped up RTK1 and received RTK2 shortly thereafter. I flipped through it, read the intro and it didn't really "click" with me like RTK1 did.

I had, after all this kanji study, this overwhelming desire to learn something practical. So instead, I grabbed some old Genki books I had around for a while and started using them for grammar and vocab. Found a Genki vocab anki deck and started learning words with kanji at the same time, not really focusing on individual kanji and readings, but more so on whole words themselves.

~1500 or so words later I am familiar with kanji readings not because I have drilled them into my brain but because I know the words that contain them. Patterns start to emerge, I'm starting to make connections, and things are sinking in. Looking back at RTK2, it makes a little more sense with some vocab behind me.

So, and this is just me, after RTK I would start learning complete words. Don't worry about kunyomi/onyomi now. I don't think it makes things any simpler now, and with the same amount of effort, at the end you can know some actual words instead of bits and pieces.

Like I said, using RTK2, you do learn words... You study the readings through over 2000 words...

muteki99 Wrote:I had, after all this kanji study, this overwhelming desire to learn something practical. So instead, I grabbed some old Genki books I had around for a while and started using them for grammar and vocab. Found a Genki vocab anki deck and started learning words with kanji at the same time, not really focusing on individual kanji and readings, but more so on whole words themselves.

That is pretty much what I plan to do, but with a different book. With so many readings for so many Kanjis, I can't help but feel that it's better off learning from the context instead of out of context. RTK made me able to recognize Kanji, so my mind doesn't block anymore when I encounter a Kanji, but it's time to get into context and tackle real stuff. So far, only by playing Zelda games on NDS (which has furigana), I've learned quite a lot of words, and I'm still learning. This summer break, I'll start vocabulary, and hope to be able to tackle games without furigana (I have a big urge to try Chrono Trigger in Japanese).

So far, I can only feel like it's easier to recognize a word and apply its reading as a whole, than apply reading to individual Kanji. After all, if you don't know a word, you can't tell which readings are the right ones.