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Perhaps this has been discussed, but I'm curious what people think about RTK and slow learners.
If people do what Heisig did, sit down and power through 2,000 kanji in 2 months, it seems like a good way to do that. But what about people who want to learn the same number of kanji over 1 or 2 years while they concurrently study Japanese. Is RTK then still the best way to go?
The point of Heisig is ultimately not to connect an English keyword to a kanji, it's to remember the kanji as a unit. If you're learning the joyo kanji over 2 years, it seems you should at some point start focusing on the readings and uses of the kanji you've already learned through RTK without waiting to finish the system.
Anyway, just wondering if people have any thoughts on this topic. I've lived in Japan for a while and used RTK as part of my study, but I never sat down and powered through it. Then again, kanji reading is definitely the weakest part of my Japnanese.
I'm advising someone who has recently come to Japan about how to go about learning Japanese. He's definitely not someone who is going to sit down and go hardcore through RTK. I'm wondering whether it's really even worth it to recommend RTK to someone like that. He might be better focusing on a book that teaches the radicals and then trying to learn kanji as he encounters them.
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I was a "slow learner" for all my first year studying Japanese (both then and now I'm going to a course). I've had a copy of RTK1 since before starting the course, but I started following it seriously only in the last 2 months.
I think that going slowly through Heisig while you're studying Japanese from other means could not be worthy, but doing the first 100-200 frames and then stopping should take away the fear of kanji from most people. You could show your friend the free extract with the first pages of RTK1 and let him decide by himself... maybe he'll do like me and get back to RTK1 in a year or so to learn a lot of writings in a short time, maybe not... I don't think this is the most important thing.
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I don't think it's a great idea to spend more than a year on it, as it takes time away that should probably be spent elsewhere, but you can do that by doing a little less than 10 a day.
And as said above, you will also benefit a lot by just going through the first 200, merely to get you comfortable with how the shapes work and give you a general process for analyzing kanji better
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I'm not a slow learner but in the beginning I tried learning just radicals then kanji as I went, and it just doesn't work for some people. Because as pointed out by Heisig, 92 (or 214) radicals isn't enough. You need more building blocks. And what is great about RTK is it gives you that, in a very progressive (cumulative/i+1) order.
So yes, I think it's worth mentionning to your friend Bortrun. But like often in those cases, it's recommended to go through RTK lite (ie the 1000 most frequent RTK kanji) instead of the full RTK, because I'm not sure just 200 frames in are enough. Maybe 500 frames could be a more acceptable minimum.
Edited: 2014-02-24, 11:18 am
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There's RtK lite, and there's also RTK ultralite (650 Kanji). Either of those would be better in this case.
Also, RtK ultralite could be done very fast. A week at most, if he's willing to do 4-5 hours every day for that one week. It can be done much faster than a quarter of the time it would take to do the full RtK, actually.
There's less time for the reviews to pile up due to the 100 new cards/day. And the fewer the Kanji, the fewer the primitives to memorize. There's less room for confusion as well, so you don't need the stories to be too elaborate. It would definitely be easy even for someone who doesn't want to put too much effort into this.
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Right, I've seen Lite and Ultralite mentioned before. These are a list of essential kanji based on Heisig's numbering?
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Bortrun, I'm just curious, how are you using RTK as part of your study if you don't "power through it", and how is that working for you?
To answer your question, I don't think speed is necessary, but consistency definitely is. So if by "slow" you mean intermittent, I'd advise against it. But if you mean something like doing RTKLite, and only adding five new cards every two or three days, but never going more than a day or two without clearing your reviews, I'd say go for it. I suspect that could work without being a burden. I'd be interested to hear about it from someone who tried it.
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As Stansfield123 said, RTK Ultralite now is the first 555 kanji from KO2k1 taught in Heisig's order. If you can learn about 15 kanji an hour, that'll mean you need about 35 hours of dedicated study/review time to get through it. RTK Lite now refers to the 1110 kanji in the KO2k1 list taught in Heisig's order instead of JLPT 2 (which is now called N2 anyway).
The reason I chose that KO2k1 group is that vocabulary words sorted in the KO2k1 order become much, much more easier to learn. This is convenient when you want to sort something like the top 2000 words in the Japanese language. Groups of words based on common themes (dining room, hospital, taxi stand, airport, classroom, etc) are also easy to learn, however it's much easier to sort a list via kanji than to try to group words by common themes which requires enormous dedicated research time.
Plus, you're not forced to learn a new kanji to learn a word. At the minimum, just learn the kana for that word. This is useful for when a kanji is used for one word that appears very rarely. It sounds lazy, but I aim for maximum effect for the minimum of invested effort.
Edited: 2014-02-25, 8:38 pm
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If you are studying Japanese alongside why not just learn the kanji that come up in your studies instead? Seeing them naturally in your studies will help the memorization a lot.
The way I learned them was to just follow the grade school order with Anki. It worked pretty good for me (though it sounds like Hesig would have been faster.)
I think with Heisig though you would have to memorize a lot of kanji that you would rarely if ever see in your (elemenarty/not native material) readings
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I don't see the value in doing a Light or UltraLight version. If you lack knowledge of a certain Kanji, the whole sentence might not work out for you. Yea, you'll see familiar ones mixed in, but they'll lack context. Unlike words, you can not guess what they mean from the known parts around them, and the less you learn, the tougher it will get.
At half of the Kanji, it'll be incomprehensible chicken scratches all over again.
Since RTK really won't take so long, might as well do the full thing.
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Edited: 2015-05-16, 8:27 pm
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There are some people who are not going to buckle down and learn the whole system. So, a lite or ultralite system might be good for them. The friend I was talking about in the post isn't disciplined or determined enough to sit down and go through the Heisig system in a reasonable amount of time. But he might be able to get through a "Lite" version.
I agree that it's best to go through the whole system, but it's not something that everyone is going to do.
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You can be a slow learner by choice if Japanese is not
an emergency for you.
In brief, you have to adapt the system to your circumstances.
Heisig was already in Japan and under pressure to learn
Japanese ASAP when he invented his method. It is
doubtless that he would have modified it if his
circumstances were different.
If you have more time than Heisig, there is nothing
preventing you from learning more information per
kanji, and more importantly, more correct information.
For instance, I took about 9 months to go through
RTK (plus about half of RTK III), making sure to
learn the dominant on-reading(s) for each kanji, as well
as checking its etymology, which was a great help in
some cases, and useless in some other cases.
If you base the meaning of your primitives on etymology
- where the etymology is relevant, you have a better
chance of simplifying your stories down the road for kanji
that contain it, instead of using whatever random association
related to phalluses dreamed up by some 14-year old user.
I also learned the top two meanings of the kanji using
Halpern's dictionary, so I just ignored Heisig's keywords.
In general, I would advise you to do what you find is
best to do by using your own best judgment.
Good things take time to mature.
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But then, what you do is not RTK, it's more like KanjiDamage.com
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KanjiDamage? Ok, that's a new resource to check out. Seems like more and more are popping up all the time.
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KanjiDamage is kinda similar to RTK, only that its stories incorporate readings and mnemonics for those, and they show you some common words containing the Kanji.
I find it's a nice read, but I prefer Heisig to learn the Kanji. I might go back there after that tho, pick up a few readings, then continue with other stuff. I don't find it incredibly useful to actually learn the Kanji, but that's just me.
