I've only finished RTK about a week ago. I gave it a couple days to let my reviews calm down a bit (down from 300/day to 150/day, thankfully) before diving into Core6k. I had already completed Core2k concurrently with RTK1.

After just two days of running Core6k in standard order (e.g., no optimization--I'm a sucker for punishment, I guess) I'm already seeing a massive benefit. I did the bulk of Core2k without RTK1 based on visual recognition alone. It worked, I could/can read 99% of what's in the deck that way, but when seeing new vocab it was always a dual-sided struggle: memorize the kanji, then memorize the reading. This was twice as hard for compounds, given that they contained twice the kanji.

Now I'm only 200 cards into Core6k but due to the lack of optimization I've already seen 70-80 new words. I keep a separate list for separate review on Quizlet and after my quick pre-review this morning the difference between Core2k and 6k is night and day. Core6k is much harder, it's throwing 2-3 unknown words at me per sentence, often obscure business terms, and my retention is better than it was before.

Then of course there was last night when we went out to a 焼き鳥 place for dinner and I got smacked with an all-hand written menu with no pictures. If you didn't know, 90% of menus in Japan have tons of nice colorful pictures and you don't even really need Japanese to order. Without pictures I normally leave everything to the girlfriend, but not this time. Even without knowing half the readings I was able to discern the general meaning of tons of what was on the menu. Further, I couldn't even dream of recognizing hand-written kanji before RTK1. Now they're much, much easier to spot (although some will certainly leave you wondering).

I put off RTK1 for a long time based on a lot of bad reviews (doesn't actually teach you a word of Japanese, etc etc), but I'm starting to see that the time investment was well worth it as a jumping off point to more advanced study. And just understanding the very, very Japanese world around me in general.

In total (including daily reviews for several months after finishing), I invested about 250 hours into RtK. I do think it was worth it, but not by a huge margin.

I'm not even done with Heisig and I do see the effects. I can get the gist of a lot of stuff, but this might not be an obvious thing when you're not in a country where Kanji are being used.

I'm here on a student visa and enrolled in a Japanese language school. I'm not really there to learn Japanese, as I'm already beyond that level (and as a matter of fact, I already did and passed their graduation test), but I did make a lot of observations. I'm not sure this will derail the thread, but it may help the point you're making.

More than half of the people here are Chinese or Taiwanese. They already have what you will have after finishing RTK1 and maybe 3, they can make out the meaning of stuff without being able to "read the Japanese". What this means is, that at a school where all the people from non kanji countries like me have to either be pretty good at Japanese, or they won't get a lot of what's being taught here, because the teachers don't speak English. So when someone like them asks for a nuance or a meaning or something like that, the teachers try to explain it, in Japanese, and many of them just stopped asking because they won't get the answer anyways.
When a Chinese/Taiwanese asks, the teacher just writes a Kanji or two, maybe makes a short comment and you can see the face of the guy lighten up.

I was in the beginner class, because when I came, I couldn't even write Hiragana (I could read them, but writing them is a whole different skill, and opens up your competence to read hand written stuff), so I learned them there. That took a week, then I got transferred to a class on a slightly higher level, where they were busy doing Minna no Nihongo 1, with the prospect to start Kanji a week or so along the road. This was the place I wanted to be, because I thought that I might be able to learn Kanji at school.

Unfortunately, the method to teach Kanji was the teacher writing it at the blackboard, along with the on/kun yomi, followed by a few words that use the kanji. Sounds not too bad, huh? But when you can't write anything at all yet and have to concentrate to get the stroke length right on stuff like 三 or 川, because all those years you did your self-studies, Kanji were your arch enemy, this just didn't cut it. Not enough practice, and then, we never got to use them in writing either, because we didn't really write a lot.

I finally gave up on that approach after maybe 100 or 200 Kanji, because they taught 4 a day at first, but 8 a day soon after and then the pace got up even more. While we spent a whole morning with grammar out of Minna no Nihongo, Kanji rarely took longer than 10 minutes, and they were not being taught in a systematical order, they were taught by JLPT grades, because this school, like so many in Japan, is designed to pass tests, and especially to teach Chinese/Taiwanese people the language on a passive level, just so they can pass a test to then proceed to get into a university or whatever.

Yea, call me naive if you want. I won't mind ^^

The point I'm trying to make is, I was far better at Japanese than all of the other students (and I then proceeded to 上級A, the class for those soon to graduate and take the N1, so I can compare myself to the "best they have") when it came to just talking or listening comprehension, and I did some interpreting for the staff when a student had a problem.

And I wouldn't even consider me being good at speaking! I can say whatever I want, but I sound primitive often and sometimes the words are inside but won't get out! But what they had there was a bunch of people absorbing to understand, without any ambition to produce anything.

But when it came to anything that involved Kanji without Furigana, I was at a total loss. And so were the other students not from a Kanji country. Some drilled stuff on their own and failed. Some had some prior knowledge of Kanji, but not enough. Some tried to keep up and couldn't. None of them had any real self-learning experience, and terms like ANKI or Rikaisama or whatever was like alien language to them. Go figure.

So, when I came here, I was a guy trained to understand and speak, with a considerate amount of stuff learned by doing things such as Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, Japanesepod and tons of audio, with some vague knowledge of some Kanji as a guy who socializes a lot and has Japanese friends on Facebook to chat with (aided by Rikaisama), then I learned to utilize the Kana by hand here (which would come handy when I got a job at the gas station and had to write reports after work), but Kanji gave me trouble, and apart from obvious stuff such as 出口, all my "reading" here was guesswork. I could somehow get the 駐車場 or 立入禁止 and of course the one sign you see ALL over the place in whole Japan, 止まれ, but that was about the extent of what I could do.

Now, I started Heisig a month ago, after I refrained from using it because I too had the feeling that "learning Kanji with English meanings was a bad idea", but I finally thought I'd give it a try. And the reason I did that was my experience at school.

All the other students, with one exception, a girl from India, were from China/Taiwan. In the 上級 classes we would not do any grammar or some such stuff anymore. Teachers would throw columns of compound Kanji at us, often with similar meanings, think of something like 停止、停滞、停頓、停留、停戦、停車 and the Chinese guys never had a problem with those. The teacher just explained each of them with a simple sentence, they nodded and that's it. I on the other hand was busy like a one legged man on an ass kicking competition, scribbling furigana above everything while looking up the stuff on my smartphone while listening to the teacher while suppressing my wish to throw a hand grenade.

When I encountered Heisig again and read his introduction, it dawned on me that the ONLY real advantage they had over me was knowing the meaning of Kanji in their mother tongue, plus the skill to write them. I was so much better at everything else that they had no choice than to stuff me into the highest class they had, just to make me busy, and just this Kanji knowledge alone enabled them to keep up at the rapid pace they had in that class.

My goal was to gain the same skill, to be able to do what they do: They hear something and when they don't get it, a Kanji will clarify it for them. They accumulate vocabulary at a very fast pace, and they can make out nuances in meaning when I have to ask for an explanation, which often paralyzes Japanesen natives, as they often don't know how to explain such things. Being used to Chinese character writers, they're used to write the Kanji!

Now, with only half the book under my belt, I can say that I make a lot of progress too, just by being here. What only applied to my listening comprehension and speaking skills, learning by performing, because there's no choice but to perform for me here, as a non English teacher and with no expat bubble to keep me warm and fuzzy, finally translates to literacy as well.

I am not trying to learn vocab via ANKI. I plan to just read a ton of stuff with either Furigana (lots of stuff at the library for middle or high school kids come with at least partial Furigana), because right now, I pick up so much from having stuff being read out loud by co-workers, my girlfriend etc., or by noticing funny stuff, such as 達 is not only the skill in たつじん but also the pluralizer for people, such as おれたち.

It really opened my eyes just what kind of advantage we're talking here when it comes to people with Kanji skills in a non-Japanese language, such as Chinese people. They hear a string of Kanji read out once or read the furigana, and chances are the word is theirs. They already know the Kanji, so they only have to grow connections for the readings and some minor meaning differences in Japanese. A Chinese with good Japanese grammar understanding might be able to absorb the language by just reading manga or furigana or using Rikaisama, or maybe doing ANKI vocab decks.

I should have known earlier, when they only got Katakana words after they drilled them hard and got them wrong even after 100 repetitions, while for me, they were freebies. Heard/read them once and they were mine.

That's what Heisig does to people who learn his way and then get to study on, and I can totally relate to your adventure with your GF in the restaurant

I hope I didn't bore you all to death. Thought you might find it interesting to read what I think we have here, and which doors it could open, and for what reason.

That's a really good point about foreign learners of Japanese from kanji-using countries. I've had a couple Chinese friends in Japan and the way they describe their language acquisition blows my mind: "Well I took some classes in high school and then I moved to Japan and became fluent in about a year..." I was here a year and a half before I started studying. I've been balls-to-the-wall studying for the last 8 months. I'm about on par with the 5 and 6 year olds that I teach. Which is pretty amazing, by the way, if you consider the amount of stuff little kids can express. But it still sure as hell isn't a lazy walk in the park toward fluency.

I don't think we're even approaching the innate advantage that a lifetime of conceptualizing kanji comes with, but RTK certainly helps to close the gap. If I were living in any other (non-kanji) country I'd have passively absorbed a ridiculous amount of words by now. Even being in a country a couple months with no intention whatsoever of studying can give you hundreds of words. When you're surrounded by sensible input the benefits are amazing. RTK doesn't go all the way in giving you that sensibility, but I've definitely seen marked improvement in passive retention.

andikaze Wrote:More than half of the people here are Chinese or Taiwanese. They already have what you will have after finishing RTK1 and maybe 3, they can make out the meaning of stuff without being able to "read the Japanese".

Quote:When I encountered Heisig again and read his introduction, it dawned on me that the ONLY real advantage they had over me was knowing the meaning of Kanji in their mother tongue, plus the skill to write them.

No, RTK1 & 3 is not comparable to the knowledge of characters a Chinese person has. The Chinese person doesn't gain advantage because of individual characters meaning, they gain advantage because often there are similar onyomi which makes them easy to remember, but more importantly than that so many compounds come directly from Chinese that they already know already what the word means. It can be close to instant memorization for them, they just need to remember the small difference in pronunciation and they have it. Like teaching an English speaking person the word "Problema" in Spanish. Not hard to remember because of the similarity.

I'm not disputing RTK can be helpful, but claiming it puts you anywhere a Chinese persons level is wrong at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

NightSky Wrote:I'm not disputing RTK can be helpful, but claiming it puts you anywhere a Chinese persons level is wrong at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

I think it greatly depends on what part of "Chinese person level" you're focusing on: they surely are greatly advantaged by the existence of chinese-originated kanji compounds and by the sheer fact that 3 months going through RTK cannot compare to a life using the hanzi.

Still, it does a lot to address one of the most important problems people coming from an alphabetic writing have compared to chinese people: after RTK, kanji don't look anymore like a bunch of unintelligible scribbles. If that is the biggest difficulty one is experiencing, and you're doing great with learning compounds and everything else, RTK is probably giving you the thing Chinese had and you were missing more badly.

Not having to write some hundred times each new Kanji every afternoon (which is what OP's Chinese classmates did when they were little, and what they don't need to do anymore now) surely puts you a lot closer to using your study-time distribution to that of the Chinese classmates.

What you also gain from Heisig is similar to the "onyomi-similarities" Chinese people have.

So I know the word for "bill", which is かいけい, which I did remember down the road when I was still in my avoiding the heck out of Kanji phase. Having been a learner of the language for 3 years, my brain is already familiar with the "same sound - same meaning in some cases" concept, but with some blanks (which is which? why, how?).

Now you learned the Kanji, and you can connect a lot of かい with 会, because words such as 飲み会、送別会、会議 are very frequent and, living here, you get to hear and use the words in context often enough to cement that in. You see some vocab item with 会 and think of かい, you hear かい and imagine the kanji, and in the end, your brain plays connect-the-dots. Then you get to know that 「かいけい is 飲み会's かい and 計算's 計」 and again, it clicks. Not only is the sound sequence かいけい now more stable and the kanji help reinforcing it, but also the kanji themselves are now part of the image. They're one more connection to what the word is being "made of" in your brain.

Talking about brains, studies have shown that, when you read something, certain areas in your brain get active, which is the case for everyone. The written word and the sound sequence make up different parts of the same thing and you use this to cross-reference. In the case of Chinese speakers (or rather, speakers of a language that normally uses Kanji in its written form), this also applies to cases when they hear a word. The same areas light up, because the Kanji are part of their memory of the word.

When you learn a the language and the network is already there, it's not that important whether you connect the sound to the Kanji or the Kanji to the word. There's two different memories that grow a physical connection in your brain.

And now the Heisig thing comes into play, because we are not native speakers, but adult learners. We don't have to learn what "rather" or "democracy" or "logic" means. We connect the second language meaning words to these concepts, the sounds to that, the characters to the same memory and we have a pack of information that represents the sound.
We do this to some degree in language using the roman letters, too, that's why mitsake looks the same as mistake at first glance.
But Kanji are more compact and faster to read, given the same kind of training. They're not meant to be parsed, and we usually don't parse words in our native tongue either. We can, however, do it with roman letters, and reading a Kanji and then breaking it down into radicals which correspond to letters (or keywords) is basically the same thing.

What Heisig also does is, it trains us in making up weird imaginary strings of thoughts or "stories" on the fly. When I see a Kanji that contains "car", "heaven" and "earth" and means "great banana", I spontaneously create a story like that like "not even a great banana can comfort me when i have to clean my car after driving a pile of dirt to heaven on the backseat" (which is such a string of bullshit that normally, your brain would reject it), we are used to auto-accept such information. This also makes it easier to accept that "meet" and "calculate" lead to "bill".

Hence, the same training that enables you to internalize characters by connecting the primitives, enables you to connect familiar characters with familiar sounds. When you see 公 50 times in different words over 2 days, and you know it reads こう, because you read it with Furigana, it sticks, and the combination of both then leads to faster vocab acquisition.

This is an abstract concept and I'm not sure I got my point across. There are people who can explain stuff much better than me. But I hope it's easy to get where I'm coming from, as this not only describes my thoughts on this, but also my experience, and this is what the OP was talking about as well in the original post, only with "guessing the meaning of stuff", which represents one half of the whole thing.

And this basically puts us in the same shoes a Chinese is in. We have the memory hooks, we have the clues, but we lack a piece of the puzzle. Whether it be the Japanese reading or the finer points of why "these two Kanji mean that thing" is not important when you just have to make ONE connection to make it stick.

Now try to compare that to someone trying to learn the language by ear. It's nothing like learning Spanish or French, which is full of cognates very similar sound sequence, which relates to: the same character / a similar sound sequence for Japanese.

It's also not coincidence that Japanese people pick up Chinese faster that English speakers, even tho Chinese grammar is vastly different from Japanese and has more in common with English. Grammar is a narrow subject and can be learned definitely, while vocab is a much bigger set of data and takes much, much longer to acquire.

And yea, I picked up English by reading, as a German.
This works exactly as well in Japanese without Kanji knowledge as playing radio would work for a deaf person.

Not sure why you are giving a Heisig sales pitch, everybody on this forum already knows what it is and how it works.

Then again I suppose even going by the topic title this thread is another "Why Heisig is great" thread, there isn't much new to explore here =/

And that's fine, I'm not very interested in another Heisig debate. I just debate the point that 3 months of RTK puts you anywhere close to that of a Chinese person. You are still thinking in terms of single characters and not in terms of words, which is another huge benefit a Chinese person has over an RTK person. A Chinese person can immediately understand 生活 as "shenghuo" and as "life / lifestyle", or remember 性格 immediately, or another other thousands of words that totally overlap. An RTK disciple can not.

This helped me learn Mandarin much quicker than most other westerners did, because I could often recall the characters exactly but not the word. But I'd remember the reading once I see the character, so then I'd be able to recall the word faster. Bit of a roundabout way to get there, but it would work, and that is the same advantage a Chinese person has learning Japanese.

Kanji are a barrier to learning either language for sure, and a bigger barrier for some people more than others. I'm not posting to dispute how good or not good RTK is, I'm only disputing the notion that someone spending 3 months on RTK gets them anywhere near the same familiarity as a Chinese person. Its not even comparable, even after RTK they are probably 5%-10% of the way there, if that.

It doesn't make sense to discuss to what degree a westerner who did Heisig compares to a Chinese person in the first place, because, besides Kanji and compounds, other factors come into play, but in the end, all that doesn't matter much, because Kanji are the key to a specific skill, and that's vocab acquisition, which in itself won't make you a Japanese speaker.

The OP posted about how he could get the gist of stuff by reading with mostly the skills he got out of Heisig's book and a bit of vocab learning, whereas I discussed how being familiar with Kanji enables you to learn words faster. Neither a Chinese, nor someone who learned with this book will be able to read Japanese in Japanese, and some compounds would be surprising for Chinese people, too, like 来日, which doesn't read as "getting to Japan", but looks more like "tomorrow" for a Chinese, and probably a RTK student, too. Luckily for both groups, such words are more of an exception, and studying more of the language makes it clear.

We're not actually talking about different things here, you just misread my posting as "a sales pitch", when it actually states that both groups have distinct advantages for learning over someone who tries to tackle the language in other ways.

Just wanted to pop by and say that this is not just another fanboi thread. I see a lot of people doing RTK without any Japanese whatsoever. I see a lot of people finish RTK and feel they've actually advanced in the language. This is a mistake. Half the characters are so loaded with meaning and nuance that claiming to know a kanji because of a single keyword--in English--is like claiming to have read a book after finishing the introduction.

(That isn't to say that knowing an English keyword is useless. Tons of simple nouns and verbs are super easy to learn because they do actually correspond with the keywords. But compounds? Yeah, forget about it.)

No, RTK is a tool, and nothing but a tool. It's a really damned expensive tool, it costs you a lot of precious study time, and like many specialist tools, far too many buyers pick it up, put it away in their garage, and forget about it completely before moving onto the next hobby. Too many people feel that the obtainment of the tool itself is the biggest accomplishment. Getting the tool is one thing, using it effectively is something else. It's that second part that I'm interested in: I want to see what people actually did with RTK.

I got to an intermediate level without it, I know it's quite possible to never touch RTK or write a kanji and get to fluency. But I do think RTK is a great tool. What have you built with it?

For me it's been loose familiarity with characters (both in shape and meaning) which has had several benefits:

1) Memory hooks for new vocab (by far the biggest benefit for me)
2) New mnemonics for vocab
3) More effective character recognition (by leaps and bounds)
4) More effective pattern recognition (no more "I swear I've seen this in another word.. but where..?)
5) Ability to read handwritten kanji
6) Ability to correct my student's writing order and produce rare kanji they don't know (priceless)

This is not a lifetime familiarity with kanji a la Chinese learners, but it's still my first power tool in what was a box of kid's plastic hammers. That's a lie. Anki was my first power tool. I have two. Okay also Core. So three.

I am a fluent speaker. I'm working in a Japanese company with Japanese colleagues and when I have to say something, it's in Japanese. I got there without Kanji whatsoever, by ear and studying vocab with audio and Kana.

However, I think that from this level on, further progress can only be effectively made through reading, which requires Kanji knowledge on my own. Using Rikaisama has its uses, but it has also drawbacks for me, as it makes me lazy and seeing new words with it doesn't have the same impact as learning them via Kanji.

What I can do now is guess a lot of stuff, and I'm only halfway through. Must be fun to read stuff for middle/high school kids with Furigana over increasingly difficult words.