I'm having a bit of an issue with actually finishing the RTK book. I have been a bit slow, though consistent in doing RTK. I've reviewed and added new kanji nearly every day but at a very, very slow pace (at first I did 20 new per day then reduced to 10 for a while, and now I'm doing about 16 each day). The review also takes quite a while.

I see people do the whole book in mere week, using a fraction of the total time I've spent on RTK, and I still miss things when doing reviews. I've been doing RTK since November and am only on frame 1206. Any suggestions?

How many reviews do you do in a day, and how long does it usually take you?

Honestly, you may not realize it, but what you have done since November ensures a better long term retention than people who did the book in a few weeks. The average time to complete RTK mentioned by Heisig is two months, but I assure you most people take longer.

As long as you are not bored with RTK and keep (or start) studying real Japanese on the side, you should really just go your pace, you're probably already starting to see returns by now. Just be patient. Good luck.

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:How many reviews do you do in a day, and how long does it usually take you?

I'm doing around 80 reviews per day. However much Anki decides is how much I do. Also, I usually actually write the kanji when I review them.

EratiK Wrote:Honestly, you may not realize it, but what you have done since November ensures a better long term retention than people who did the book in a few weeks. The average time to complete RTK mentioned by Heisig is two months, but I assure you most people take longer.

As long as you are not bored with RTK and keep (or start) studying real Japanese on the side, you should really just go your pace, you're probably already starting to see returns by now. Just be patient. Good luck.

Thank you, I'm glad to hear that I'm not doing something terribly wrong, though I'm a bit concerned that the average is two months. At the rate I'm going I'll finish in about a total of 9 months. One problem I have, though, is that I have trouble coming up with stories. A majority of my stories come from Koohii, but I feel like that is impeding my memory.

Don't worry about that. It was the same thing for me, and I just stopped adding new Kanji by the time I hit 1600 or so (only doing the reps) and started to read. I still didn't add anything new. Time is not important, unless you know you'll die soon and wanna race.

andikaze Wrote:Don't worry about that. It was the same thing for me, and I just stopped adding new Kanji by the time I hit 1600 or so (only doing the reps) and started to read. I still didn't add anything new. Time is not important, unless you know you'll die soon and wanna race.

You started to read? How do you do that without knowing any vocab, readings, or grammar?
---
Also, I have a bit of a slow method for adding new Kanji. I think of a story, look and see if Koohii has a better one, copy and modify it, copy it to Anki, and then finally move on:
http://i.imgur.com/fGH3oZ9.png

I know vocab and grammar already. It takes time to get to a point where you can read stuff aimed at native speakers, but you'll get there.

If you only do RTK and NO Japanese at all, I think you're wasting time, because you can only hammer so many in your head every day, and how do you spend the rest of the time you'd have for learning? 20 a day is a very healthy pace.

Actually, you could do readers, or, heck, just read stuff on the internet on websites, with something like Rikaisama. I learned Japanese mostly with audio when I began, so yea, I could understand a lot already. You won't read your way to fluency anyways. You won't ANKI your way to fluency. Only audio may or may not work, but with Kanji alone, you won't get anywhere. Read some Tae Kim. Listen to some JPOD. Do some flashcards. Watch some Anime. Chat a bit with natives, for example on Twitter or Facebook.

In this case, it's not only that many ways lead to Rome, it's that you'll go faster the more of those roads you use simultaneously (which wouldn't work in the physical world ofc, that's why this analogy sucks).

Bottom line: Using ONE resource is not enough, but RTK doesn't claim to teach Japanese - it claims to teach "how to not forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters"

And yea, my ANKI cards look like this:

andikaze Wrote:I know vocab and grammar already. It takes time to get to a point where you can read stuff aimed at native speakers, but you'll get there.

If you only do RTK and NO Japanese at all, I think you're wasting time, because you can only hammer so many in your head every day, and how do you spend the rest of the time you'd have for learning? 20 a day is a very healthy pace.

Actually, you could do readers, or, heck, just read stuff on the internet on websites, with something like Rikaisama. I learned Japanese mostly with audio when I began, so yea, I could understand a lot already. You won't read your way to fluency anyways. You won't ANKI your way to fluency. Only audio may or may not work, but with Kanji alone, you won't get anywhere. Read some Tae Kim. Listen to some JPOD. Do some flashcards. Watch some Anime. Chat a bit with natives, for example on Twitter or Facebook.

In this case, it's not only that many ways lead to Rome, it's that you'll go faster the more of those roads you use simultaneously (which wouldn't work in the physical world ofc, that's why this analogy sucks).

Bottom line: Using ONE resource is not enough, but RTK doesn't claim to teach Japanese - it claims to teach "how to not forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters"

Thank you for that advice. I really appreciate it. Recently, I bought Genki I (second edition) and would like to start with it, though I realized (after buying it) that the intro. in RTK says it shouldn't be used with other learning material. However, before starting RTK I read some Tae Kim and really liked it, especially since it gets to the point (though the practice material is a bit lacking).

I write out all my reviews too.

Quite honestly there isn't any reason why you can't learn some basic japanese while you do RTK despite heisig's contentions.

Don't worry about how long it's taking you, just about how much you're enjoying learning

I think Heisig means "Kanji learning material", as in books with other order of Kanji etc. It doesn't harm to learn the language tho. Even if you get words like 食べる from the very beginning, while the Kanji 食 comes after 2/3 or so of the book, it's totally all right, because learning the language and learning Kanji are two different things

You'll be able to recognize 食 from having seen it so often anyways when you arrive at that part of the book, and Heisig will then teach you what parts it consists of, so you'll no longer confuse it with Kanji like 飲 or 良, and that's it. Really nothing to worry about

Heisig is only a step on the ladder anyways, because knowing that 寝 is "lay down", but it's being used mostly as "sleep", like in 寝不足 (lay down, negative, leg, but the word itself means "sleep deprivation" and reads ね|ぶ|そく), means you'll still have to learn the Kanji at least one more time (actually more than once), for actual vocab, for various readings and so on.

But that, too, isn't really something to be intimidated by. You'll eventually get there, step by step. Heisig is a great first step for that

I didn't only learn basic Japanese before Kanji, I spoke fluently before I started with Heisig. So it's not that one has to go one route or the other, but looking back, I could have saved a lot of time if I had done Heisig at that time, while doing audio stuff. One more way to travel, right, speeds it up quite a bit. You can "zoom in" on the Japanese when reading, way better than by "acquiring stuff while listening", but listening is a great way to learn other aspects of the language and necessary when you don't only want to get good at reading.

andikaze Wrote:I didn't only learn basic Japanese before Kanji, I spoke fluently before I started with Heisig. So it's not that one has to go one route or the other, but looking back, I could have saved a lot of time if I had done Heisig at that time, while doing audio stuff. One more way to travel, right, speeds it up quite a bit. You can "zoom in" on the Japanese when reading, way better than by "acquiring stuff while listening", but listening is a great way to learn other aspects of the language and necessary when you don't only want to get good at reading.

Oh, I see. So it was probably a different experience for you. Actually, I haven't done much except RTK. I would keep encountering Kanji in grammar studies, so I just decided to learn that first.

Also, what exactly did you listen to? Audio books?

It all depends on your goals. If you're going to Japan any time soon, then you'd better learn as fast and as much as possible. If you're learning out of the sheer enjoyment of learning, then, as long as you're enjoying yourself, you're already reaching your goal.

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:Thank you, I'm glad to hear that I'm not doing something terribly wrong, though I'm a bit concerned that the average is two months.

Don't feel intimidated by that. Take into account that such short time may be the "average" among a group of outliers.

Probably most people learn kanji in an awfully slow, unsteady and unreliable way. I'd dare to say that it's much more common after some point for people to forget faster than they learn new kanji, than to work as fast and efficiently as the great learners we have here.

In other words, even at this pace you consider so "slow", you'll still be learning in less than a year more characters than an awful lot of people manage to learn through several years, if ever.

It's even better if you are including actual Japanese words in your study, as you are doing.

If possible, it would be ideal for your study if you make clear what part of the reading corresponds to the kanji itself, and what corresponds to okurigana (the hiragana that accompanies the kanji).

For example, in the card you showed, the actual word is written 冷える, where the 冷 reads "ひえ". You could write the reading as furigana, or "ひえ . る", "ヒエる" or any way that makes clear the okurigana usage.

I do RTK while going through Genki (with my japanese classes as this is the textbook we use) and it's perfectly fine. Even learning the Genki kanji on top of the heisig kanji isnt really a burden, especially since Heisig has taught me how to recognize the different shapes. To be fair, part of why it works is because the class moves a bit slow, and so I'm not reviewing several chapters of jumbled Genki chapter per week, but even then doing something like Genki alongside RTK isnt too much of a hassle (and, in the end, it will probably do more for your motivation as you will actually be doing Japanese instead of memorizing funny shapes).

When I did come across kanji that I hadn't come across yet, I'd see if it's an rtk kanji, and skip ahead to examine the pieces quickly, to get to know it a bit better, and if it wasn't an rtk kanji, i just tried to apply the skills I have learnt, though early on in japanese textbooks it doesn't happen much.

I've done it in six weeks (on my second try), and then reviewed for a couple of months. Then stopped reviewing. If I restarted the whole thing, I'm sure I'd have a bunch of Kanji that I'd have to re-learn.

With Anki, you're not really learning everything, no matter how fast or slowly you go about it. And you don't need to. You don't need to know everything perfectly, to move forward.

I would suggest you speed things up, through whatever means you can (more cards added per day, quicker pace reviewing, suspending difficult cards, etc.). You need to get to actual Japanese. That's what you're trying to learn, not Rtk, in the end.

andikaze Wrote:I didn't only learn basic Japanese before Kanji, I spoke fluently before I started with Heisig. So it's not that one has to go one route or the other, but looking back, I could have saved a lot of time if I had done Heisig at that time, while doing audio stuff. One more way to travel, right, speeds it up quite a bit. You can "zoom in" on the Japanese when reading, way better than by "acquiring stuff while listening", but listening is a great way to learn other aspects of the language and necessary when you don't only want to get good at reading.

You spoke fluently before RTK? What methods did you use to achieve that?

I started with Pimsleur and Michel Thomas, then did JapanesePOD, looked up grammar on sites like "Timwerx", chatted via first Twitter, then Facebook. I also watched a lot of anime and dorama, with and without subtitles. Then, after 2,5 years of studying (or rather: enjoying) Japanese, I moved to Japan. I also have a Japanese girlfriend, which in itself won't teach me anything, and I wouldn't need the chatting with her for practice, because I'm working in a 100% Japanese environment, but I thought I'd mention her anyways, because she was a big part of the reason for learning the language.

I did 1600 of the 2200 RTK 6th Kanji lately and started to read Visual Novels now. The rest of RTK is on ice currently, because I can't be arsed to learn anything new from it after being done with my daily repetitions.

andikaze Wrote:I did 1600 of the 2200 RTK 6th Kanji lately and started to read Visual Novels now. The rest of RTK is on ice currently, because I can't be arsed to learn anything new from it after being done with my daily repetitions.

If you can force yourself to do the final 600 of RTK it's definitely worth it. When I was several hundred kanji from the end of RTK I was constantly coming across kanji in my graded readers that I hadn't seen before. It was annoying. After finishing RTK so far I haven't come across a kanji in my readers I'm not familiar with.

Remember too Heisig didn't present the kanji in order of importance so some of the most important kanji are in the final batch.

Yea, I heard that already, some important primitives such as 門 are yet to come. I know I should force myself through the rest It's just so boring ^^

andikaze Wrote:Yea, I heard that already, some important primitives such as 門 are yet to come. I know I should force myself through the rest It's just so boring ^^

Couldn't agree more. I am at 1800 and it really is a pain to finish the book. I always think "I'll take a brake" and then vocab in my core deck pop up with a kanji I haven't covered yet. So irritating.

riogray Wrote:

andikaze Wrote:Yea, I heard that already, some important primitives such as 門 are yet to come. I know I should force myself through the rest It's just so boring ^^

Couldn't agree more. I am at 1800 and it really is a pain to finish the book. I always think "I'll take a brake" and then vocab in my core deck pop up with a kanji I haven't covered yet. So irritating.

If Heisig really is such a pain for you, then you should just stop it. Any important kanji you missed will pop up sooner or later as you progress through your learning anyway. RTK is a useful crutch, but not one worth burning out over. It's a great way to get passed the kanji roadblock if you can stomach it, but it's far from being essential.

Linval Wrote:If Heisig really is such a pain for you, then you should just stop it. Any important kanji you missed will pop up sooner or later as you progress through your learning anyway. RTK is a useful crutch, but not one worth burning out over. It's a great way to get passed the kanji roadblock if you can stomach it, but it's far from being essential.

Probably true, but I am so close to finishing it and I don't want to stop now. I think it's unlikely that I'll burn out with just under 400 Kanji left. That's a week hard work or maybe three, if you have other things to do. And it does feel rewarding to finally know that kanji I never recognized in 分野, even though I have to fail the vocab and relearn it with kanji.

andikaze Wrote:And yea, my ANKI cards look like this:

http://s14.directupload.net/images/140424/gq9iadxy.jpg

Is that among the shared decks? If not, you should share it. It would help a lot of people.