[s0apgun]

I believe there are some pre-made decks available through Anki that have words just in kana that you could use to practice reading.

Gainax had a line of Japanese typing games. Eva, Mahoromatic, and Gunbuster typing games to be exact. It was actually these games that I leveled up my kana recognition with.

If you want another cute mini game to play, Tsunami channel had a silly game you could play too.

I know this website was basically set up to go with RTK but I really don't get why everyone is so obsessed with 'finishing RTK'. I 'finished' RTK about 2 years ago and it did absolutely nothing for me. I memorised a large quantity of random stories that took ages to think of and were all pretty stupid, and I have NEVER and I mean NEVER thought of them again since.

IMO RTK is a nice exercise to do to get you familiar with the kanji, but it doesn't actually teach you Japanese, so for me switching to kana seems like an awesome decision and I would not discourage this at all. Afterall, if you want to learn to actually READ the kanji then you're going to need the kana for when you look them up in the dictionary.

As for how to 'retain' the kana, again just my opinion, but the best way is to read them in the 'real world' as much as possible. I used a beginners textbook that had sentences of kana with romanisation below and just worked my way through like that.

I know I'm going to get flamed for saying RTK is largely a time waster, but that's my view. I'd say abandon RTK forever, sell the book on ebay and use the money to buy a textbook with kana + romanji sentences.

P.S. Just a pet hate of mine, but saying that RTK is 'learning kanji' is a bit of a joke. You're not learning the kanji, you're becoming familiar with their radicals and attaching them to completely random stories, all of which are probably in your native language.

I think if people really stopped about thought about what they are doing when they 'do RTK' they would realise they are not really 'learning' the kanji.

Let the flame war commence.

jankensan Wrote:P.S. Just a pet hate of mine, but saying that RTK is 'learning kanji' is a bit of a joke. You're not learning the kanji, you're becoming familiar with their radicals and attaching them to completely random stories, all of which are probably in your native language.

I think if people really stopped about thought about what they are doing when they 'do RTK' they would realise they are not really 'learning' the kanji.

Let the flame war commence.

When people do RTK they know exactly what they're getting from it. They probably know they still can't read the Kanji. When someone says 'learning' in a post mentioning RTK you can interpret precisely what they mean. I think you're just splitting hairs here. Nonetheless I won't say much more because you're anticipating a flame war on a forum for Japanese learning.

I do respect your opinion of RTK as it gets a lot of talk for a book encompassing a very simple idea. That being said it helps you break apart the Kanji and takes a bit of the scariness out of what is otherwise a bunch of random lines. That in itself, regardless of if you teach yourself or via RTK, is important to me personally.

My feeling as someone who did RTK late in the Japanese learning process is that people who do RTK up front and then think it's 'worthless' don't realize how hard it is to associate words with characters and recognize them accurately when coming to them cold, and don't realize how useful it is to have learned to differentiate the characters and associate them with a usually useful concept.

There are of course other learning methods, say, learning the radicals and using some -other- mnemonic system of your own invention; or, not using mnemonics at all and writing each new word hundreds of times until it gets hammered in. Or drilling in an SRS until recognition sets in, at the cost of being completely unable to write.

All of these -also- take time and effort, at -least- as much IMO as RTK.

I think you should only abandon RTK if you find it terribly unpleasant to study or have an abysmal success rate. In other words, if it's killing your motivation by making you miserable then don't do it, and if it's not working then don't do it. Otherwise, I think it's very worthwhile.

jankensan Wrote:P.S. Just a pet hate of mine, but saying that RTK is 'learning kanji' is a bit of a joke. You're not learning the kanji, you're becoming familiar with their radicals and attaching them to completely random stories, all of which are probably in your native language.

I think if people really stopped about thought about what they are doing when they 'do RTK' they would realise they are not really 'learning' the kanji.

Let the flame war commence.

I think you have this vision of others having unrealistic expectations for RTK, or not understanding that RTK is not really learning Japanese or kanji. But, everyone already knows what you're saying. It's true that people who do RTK as their first step to Japanese don't really understand what they're doing (i.e., they don't understand how kanji are really used in Japanese, and the extent to which RTK will help them). But later they all realize how far RTK has gotten them, and that it wasn't so far at all. I already had a lot of Japanese under my belt when I did it, so I understood exactly what I was doing from the beginning.

You realized the limitations of RTK and now think that it's not worth it. I realized the limitations of RTK and still think that it was worth it for me (I had studied Japanese for two and a half years before I did it, and hit a plateau where I didn't seem to be going anywhere. I feel RTK got me over that wall pretty spectacularly). And I think it's a great way for a lot of people who have similar study tendencies to me. It's not necessarily the fastest way, or the best way, to learn Japanese, and it's not for everyone.

In a way, of course, RTK is learning the kanji. There are a lot of different aspects to learning a kanji--having the kanji in your memory as a concept, being able to write it, knowing the on and kun readings, being able to recognize vocabulary that use it, being able to write vocabulary that use it, etc. RTK basically teaches you the first two--having it in your memory as a concept and being able to write it. Without actually knowing any vocabulary kanji are useless, and RTK doesn't touch on that, but that doesn't mean that RTK does nothing. RTK is simply going through and learning those two things about all the kanji in the book, only to later do the rest of the learning. So, you can say, doing RTK is learning the kanji; it's just learning only two aspects of many, and leaves out the part that actually makes you be able to read and write Japanese--vocabulary.

Possible benefits: reading acquisition (kanji familiarity)
Cons: Potentially slow, boring, discouraging (all possible benefits null)

If rtk were easy I honestly think it would be worth it and would speed up the learning process...

Aspiring Wrote:Possible benefits: reading acquisition[...]

Wrong. The acquisition is of writing and meanings.

There is no "reading acquisition" in RTK - what you probably mean is "recognition acquisition", which is a byproduct of the first two skills.

Actually, I think people do have unrealistic expectations of RTK. The proof of this is that they recommend people 'Do RTK' BEFORE they learn kana. If you're going to build a building, you don't start with the roof. You start with the bricks, and kana are the bricks of Japanese. That's why they teach kids kana before kanji at school.

I was discussing this with a friend who also likes to study Japanese, and we agreed that's where my issue lies. Why would you want to learn something in a way that is so glaringly back to front.

So when someone posts to say "I'm tired of RTK, I want to learn kana" and a load of people reply to say "You must finish RTK first" its very frustrating. Not only does telling people to return to RTK not satisfy their itch to learn (which is hugely important when it comes to language) it is massively demotivating for them.

It's like saying "Hey, here is a world of actual language which is fun and challenging, but you must grind through this book (which you have already said you are bored of) before you may be admitted"

Inny Jan Wrote:

Aspiring Wrote:Possible benefits: reading acquisition (kanji writing and meaning)

Wrong. The acquisition is of writing and meanings.

There is no "reading acquisition" in RTK - what you probably mean is "recognition acquisition", which is a byproduct of the first two skills.

In linguistics, recognition acquisition doesn't exist. What you probably mean is "voice recognition acquisition". I do understand what you're trying to say, though.

*adds quote to return to topic of discussion*

jankensan Wrote:[...]If you're going to build a building, you don't start with the roof. You start with the bricks, [...]

jankensan Wrote:IMO RTK is a nice exercise to do to get you familiar with the kanji, but it doesn't actually teach you Japanese, so for me switching to kana seems like an awesome decision and I would not discourage this at all. Afterall, if you want to learn to actually READ the kanji then you're going to need the kana for when you look them up in the dictionary.

This isn't just your opinion, this is common sense for anyone who has read and understood, and remembers the key things of the introduction to the book.

jankensan Wrote:Actually, I think people do have unrealistic expectations of RTK. The proof of this is that they recommend people 'Do RTK' BEFORE they learn kana. If you're going to build a building, you don't start with the roof. You start with the bricks, and kana are the bricks of Japanese. That's why they teach kids kana before kanji at school.

I was discussing this with a friend who also likes to study Japanese, and we agreed that's where my issue lies. Why would you want to learn something in a way that is so glaringly back to front.

So when someone posts to say "I'm tired of RTK, I want to learn kana" and a load of people reply to say "You must finish RTK first" its very frustrating. Not only does telling people to return to RTK not satisfy their itch to learn (which is hugely important when it comes to language) it is massively demotivating for them.

There was only one person in this thread who suggested to get RTK out of the way first, and his reasons weren't of unrealistic expectations. The fact that you (and I, and maybe most,) wouldn't enjoy plowing through all of RTK before doing anything to learn Japanese for real, isn't any sort of proof of a flaw in the method. Yes, kana is important, but we don't learn like Japanese children, it's not like it's an obvious fact that kana must be put into place in our brains before everything else.

jankensan Wrote:It's like saying "Hey, here is a world of actual language which is fun and challenging, but you must grind through this book (which you have already said you are bored of) before you may be admitted"

I don't see how you can't take part of things Japanese while doing RTK and suppressing the comparatively miniscule period of kana learning. There's still audio and video. I also don't think I've seen anyone telling others what they must do as if they had some kind of authority, I think this forum is very open minded in comparison to other communities.

Anyway, my only suggestion to the topic, even if the thread starter has his answer, is to just review an anki deck of the kana on the side.

jankensan Wrote:Actually, I think people do have unrealistic expectations of RTK. The proof of this is that they recommend people 'Do RTK' BEFORE they learn kana. If you're going to build a building, you don't start with the roof. You start with the bricks, and kana are the bricks of Japanese. That's why they teach kids kana before kanji at school.

This is a non-sequitur. The order that people recommend learning the writting system is irrelavant to how effective RTK is for learning kanji.

Presumably, the reason people recommend doing it first is because of the intro to RTK, which (if I remember correctly) says that you should hold off other reading and writing study until you're finished doing RTK. I think Heisig wrote this because he thought people would get bogged down if they tried to learn other things like the readings while doing RTK. However, not everyone agrees that it should be done first, nor that you shoud not start learning vocab/readings while doing RTK, nor that you can't do other Japanese study while doing RTK. I certainly don't believe that. I think there were a bunch of blogs that recommended doing RTK before kana (AJATT maybe?), and that's how that idea became popular.

Again, it's unrelated to how effective or ineffective RTK is. Also, the building blocks of Japanese are sounds, not kana. Kanji represent words or sounds, which can be delineated in kana, which represent sounds, which represent meaning. (Not that the brain never makes the path directly from a written form or other type of symbol to meaning--it does sometimes.) People learn spoken language first, and spoken language is the most fundamental form of language.

Not to sound like a dick, but this line of discussion may be better suited to a new thread specifically about RTK in the current context of this discussion. The legitimacy of and/or beneficially of RTK at certain stages in learning over others, is kind of a large enough deviation from the thread topic to warrant it's own thread, isn't it?

The reason for going through RTK first is because it's a complex mnemonic system that largely depends on associations with keywords in your native language. If you start learning all the complexities of the multiple words that a kanji can stand for or be part of, and all the possible translations of each of those multiple words, then you can quickly muddy the simple keyword->kanji association. Viewing the learning as a mental machine, it's more efficient to do RtK first and avoid exposure to at least real use of kanji (there's no reason audio or phonetic writing should interfere.)

It's nothing to do with over-expectation or how much of the language the system teaches, it's to do with not clouding mnemonic associations.

Of course, it's not -that- simple because emotional motivation factors are involved. Many people don't feel that they're learning 'actual' Japanese and that saps their motivation and makes pure RTK first -not- optimal because they aren't learning as much as if they were motivated. I always recommend going ahead and studying Japanese vocab and grammar, without kanji as much as is possible, while doing RtK exactly to keep motivation up. People with very disciplined minds should certainly go ahead and do just RtK first and ignore everything else until they complete it. (I don't have any such discipline myself, though, but some people do.)

In any case, the kana aren't the 'bricks' of anything. They're a phonetic representation of a language, no more and no less. The natural spoken language is audio, not writing, and the natural written language involves both kana and kanji.

Since I did this, I can never forget かな (kana) even if I tried. Essentially, I wrote both syllabary tables out ローマ字 (romaji) -> かな; かな -> ローマ字. It's tiresome and boring, but since it worked for me, I can't knock it. I'm putting it up here in case anyone is still struggling, and looking for some practice method to improve.

One a piece of scratch paper;
0) Initially, you do lines to first to establish stroke order. Do each かな 100 times, or until you can easily write かな without stumbling or having to think about it. You want to make it fluid and accurate remembering stroke endings. Repeat this process for each かな.

1a) write out the ひらがな (hiragana) table in ローマ字 leaving enough space to write the corresponding ひらがな, pronouncing each as you go.

1b) write out the ひらがな corresponding to the ローマ字, pronouncing each as you go.

2a) flip over your piece of scratch paper and do the opposite, writing the ひらがな first leaving enough room for the ローマ字 last, pronouncing each as you go.

2b) write out the ローマ字 corresponding to the ひらがな, pronouncing each as you go.

3) Repeat this process at least 3 times per かな table (6 pages worth)

4) Once you have done this part, do the same thing, but leave out the ローマ字 when writing the ひらがな, and leave out the ひらがな when writing out the ローマ字, pronouncing each as you go.

If you can't recall one or some of the かな, that's okay. Skip the ones you can't remember cause you're working on those next.

5) For the かな you can't remember or stumble over, write out the entire line for each かな, ie. If you couldn't remember ひ (hi)、ね (ne)、む (mu)、and と (to), write out the entire line 3 times.
ie,
はひふへほ、はひふへほ、はひふへほ (ha hi fu he ho, ha hi fu he ho, ha hi fu he ho)
なにぬねの、なにぬねの、なにぬねの (na ni nu ne no, na ni nu ne no, na ni nu ne no)
まみむめも、まみむめも、まみむめも (ma mi mu me mo, ma mi mu me mo, ma mi mu me mo)
たちつてと、たちつてと、たちつてと (ta chi tsu te to, ta chi tsu te to, ta chi tsu te to)

NOTE: Be sure to do one line three times per page so you don't confuse your mental image of the table, or cover the previous lines with another piece of scratch paper so you aren't looking at them. This is important.

6) repeat step 4. For any you still can't remember or stumble over, repeat step 5.

7) repeat entire process for カタカナ (katakana).

8) Once you are able to complete each table for 21 days without missing or mis-writing one かな to form it as a habit, you're ready to start writing out vocabulary in かな. After this, かな retention is a piece of cake.
If you find yourself stumbling over かな, simply repeat steps 1-6.

9) If you find yourself wanting to improve your penmanship, repeat step 0 (zero).

10) Make a set schedule to do this once per day, and stick to it no matter how much you want to play video games or watch tv or any other distraction so you don't have to feel like your fingers are going to fall off.

11) Whenever you find yourself not busy, jot down a かな table or two. If we could do this all day long, we should, but we're not learning only Japanese in our busy lives.

The purpose of this is to gain a mental retention for each table forwards and backwards.

After six months of dedicated practice, it's now a part of my long-term memory. I can even think in かな rather than ローマ字. If at any point you find yourself still stumbling over some かな, feel the need to repeat 1-6 for ひらがな and/or カタカナ if you have not started vocabulary practices.　Starting vocabulary practices after lines and syllabary table repetition is basically "putting what you've learned to work for you". This is vital because it is yet another form of repetition to promote fluency and immersion which is the entire purpose for learning any language; to use it.

If you're feeling creative, you might find newer ways to practice ひらがな and カタカナ, and this is important too. Novelizing (do the same thing in a new way) the way you practice forms a stronger neural pathway by creating more neural connections per novelized repetitive practice method improving retention and recall ability of any skill.

I'm not going to say, "this is the only way," or, "this is the way it should be done." Instead, this is just one way of many that might be included to improve your かな retention and recall skills.

"If you don't use it, you'll lose it."

Here's a sample of mine;

Easy. Song lyrics with rikaichan. Plus you'll learn to read kanji too

You didn't learn so you can drill it flashcards and what it right ? The whole point learning it is so you can read something In japanese that you want to read. Once you read enough you'll stop blanking out on them when you try to write the kana. Drilling is NOT necessary u les you're under some to e limit

Just realized this thread is really old so the op either did not retain them or retained themt