At the moment I'm learning for the N5 with Genki I and I'm doing the last 300 vocabulary so that I will have something about 1.200 (I should now everything next month). I learn to pronounce each vocabulary and I think I'll take a little break of it, cause I maybe learn like 12-20 vocabs a day. I'm pretty sure I could do 3 time more of it with just recognition.
I just learned to pronounce (produce), so I could say something (although I can say pretty much)
Now I want to focus on my passive vocabulary, so I can read something and then go back to pronunciation.


But how should I start learning vocabulary with recogniation, for example じてんしゃ　自転車.
There are 3 Kanji I don't now.. So should start learning the reading/meaning of each Kanji and then start learning ? But thinking of learning 2.000 Kanji with kun-yomi and English meaning is pretty much. Or should I just pick up like 10 vocabulary from my list and learn all the different Kanji they contain?
Any suggestions? I don't want to do RTK 1 because I'm not that interested in writing Kanji at the moment.

Toshokan12 Wrote:At the moment I'm learning for the N5 with Genki I and I'm doing the last 300 vocabulary so that I will have something about 1.200 (I should now everything next month). I learn to pronounce each vocabulary and I think I'll take a little break of it, cause I maybe learn like 12-20 vocabs a day. I'm pretty sure I could do 3 time more of it with just recognition.
I just learned to pronounce (produce), so I could say something (although I can say pretty much)
Now I want to focus on my passive vocabulary, so I can read something and then go back to pronunciation.


But how should I start learning vocabulary with recogniation, for example じてんしゃ　自転車.
There are 3 Kanji I don't now.. So should start learning the reading/meaning of each Kanji and then start learning ? But thinking of learning 2.000 Kanji with on-yomi and English meaning is pretty much. Or should I just pick up like 10 vocabulary from my list and learn all the different Kanji they contain?
Any suggestions? I don't want to do RTK 1 because I'm not that interested in writing Kanji at the moment.

Welcome to the forum. I see this is your first post; if you are not aware of anki yet you should definitely check it out ---> it's an excellent tool for reviewing things you learn in japanese.

You should seriously consider doing RTK whether it be RTK lite or doing the whole thing. The writing aspect of it just helps cement kanji in your head just when learning them. You could even write them on your hand with your finger (much quicker than pen and paper). Even if you go at a pace of 10 a day, you could those 10 in 20 minutes and the reviews each day would be insignificant.

I did RTK the whole way through and I don't think it was a waste of time. However in hindsight doing RTK lite would have been much more practical. Doing RTK will be a giant shortcut in your studies. However if you're dead set on skipping RTK I would setup flashcards like this:

Front
自転車

Back:
じてんしゃ

bicycle

You may realize how tough it's going to be to learn kanji in this manner though. You will spend considerable more time learning anything involving kanji. It's probably in your best interest to at least give heisig a try. Either way good luck to you! I hope I helped you out a little bit.

[EDIT]: Don't worry about the reading for each kanji. Learn the whole word as one; later in your studies you will begin to see patterns and you will be able to guess the readings of unknown words.

ryanjmack Wrote:Don't worry about the reading for each kanji. Learn the whole word as one; later in your studies you will begin to see patterns and you will be able to guess the readings of unknown words.

If I were only allowed to give one hint for learning Japanese. It would probably be this one. Runner up would be just to keep moving forward, the idea of improvement will appear on its own.

If you're not going to do RTK1, I think you should memorize the english nicknames of the 214 radicals. It's really hard to differentiate kanji when you don't have a good way to describe their parts. RTK would give you a more complete way to describe their parts, but the radicals go a long way towards it.

I would -never- learn kanji by themselves. Kanji don't have a meaning in themselves. They are used in words that have meanings, almost always in more than one word, almost always with wildly different meanings -- but almost always with a common theme in those meanings. Anyway, memorizing facts about a character doesn't let you read a word. You need to learn a word to read a word.

A good way to get a handle on a character, however, is to find a word that uses just the one character and perhaps okurigana, and has a kun reading, and learn that word.
In the case of 自転車
みずから、ころがる、 and くるま.
This does a good job of hanging a name on the character as well as building basic vocabulary.

Of course, not all characters have such a word, or sometimes they have such a word but it's no longer in use. If you're lucky there's an on-reading word with just that character and maybe some okurigana. (There's lots of on-reading + じる verbs, for example.)
Sometimes, of course, there'll be nothing that can be done to break it down usefully - there are characters that are used in only one or two commonly occuring compounds, so it's either just roll with it and learn a word with multiple unknown kanji or start picking up obscure and archaic words just to learn kanji.

Thanks for your tips.
Learning the radicals sounds good, but how should I learn the words if I don't know what they mean? When I learn 自転車 as how it stands there without knowing anything? I think it would be pretty hard, cause I would just remember some random picture's with no context in different combinations. That's why I wanted to learn first a few kun-yomi readings and then go on to the Kanji, with context information. (I also think that this would help with the pronunciation)
I'm sure that this would be pretty good after doing RtK, because then you can guess what the word could mean.


How did you done it after finishing RKT 1? When you wanted to learn 自転車 what did you do?

It would be nice if you could say how you managed that.

EDIT:
I think that Ill just do the 6k list on iKnow and hope that it works well, after I finished the remaining words.

How many words should I aim for a day?

Toshokan12 Wrote:When I learn 自転車 as how it stands there without knowing anything?

Read my post again please, and look up the three words I suggested you learn before you learn 自転車 and the method I'm suggesting should be clear.

Quote:How did you done it after finishing RKT 1? When you wanted to learn 自転車 what did you do?

If you've done RTK1 then you look at 自転車 and see 'self', 'revolve', 'car' (I think. The original keywords are a little fuzzy as I'm turning them all over to Japanese keywords now, and also, I changed both of the rotate & revolve keywords anyway because they were annoyingly easy to mix up.) You also aren't looking at random lines if you've done RTK1, each character is familiar to you, you know how and way every stroke is there (well, not the -real- history, but a story that places every stroke), and you have a name for the character, which is to say the keyword.

With three familiar characters with a reasonable connection between their keywords and the vocabulary word, it's easy to add the meaning 'bicycle' and the pronunciation 'じてんしゃ’ to that particular combination.

(Of course, the keyword is just a name for the character; it doesn't always connect to the meaning of the word you're learning, although the keywords are all -a- meaning of -a- word that the character is used in. Sometimes a pretty obscure one though.)

I'm still a beginner and I'm only about half way through RTK, but a model is emerging. It seems to me, reading Kanji is a lot like reading those sentences that have pictures instead of words. Like the t-shirts with: "I" (picture of a heart) "NY".

That is, if you know the approximate meaning of individual kanji(RTK) and you know the word(vocabulary) you can put the two together relatively easily. Over time, as you see the same words over and over you will just read the word in it's entirety without having to puzzle out the kanji.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here.

Quote:How many words should I aim for a day?

In my opinion focusing on how many per day means nothing. It depends how long you study every day. I only have time to study 1 hour per day but others spend 4-6 hours every day.

That's why I think per hour is a better metric. I can manage 7 new cards for every hour of studying but I'm a little slow. I think most people would fit in the range of 5-10 cards per hour. So depending on how many hours of study time you have per day, try adding 7 for every hour. You will get a feel for it pretty quickly. Just make sure that you have time to finish your reviews every day. (You could probably add a few more if you don't have very many reviews.)