A few days into RTK I find that I can recall the kanji well enough from the stories but there are lots of details that I keep on missing. It's unclear to me how important they are. Can some people who have completed the course advise me on this?

For example, for "chant" the mouth on the left is smushed. But when I drew it this morning I made all the mouths the same size. For "stomach" the left part of the lower radical is straight even though when it appears by itself it is curved. I can never seem to remember which cards have the left part straight and which have it curved. Are these details important?

Basically, I need to make a decision about whether to fail the cards when I review them in Anki based on whether I get these sorts of details correct. If I fail them then I'll presumably eventually get these details right. But it will take me longer to get thru all joyo kanji, which is my goal. Because I'm self-studying I don't have someone to tell me which of these strategies I should adopt. Can people who finished the course and continued to get an advanced level of Japanese give me advice?

Thanks.

You should be relatively strict about this. In time you will learn more about how kanji generally work and it will seem obvious that mouth on the left side of 唱 is narrower. The danger of not having your proportions right is that it can look like two separate kanji (i.e. a miswritten 口冒).

yudantaiteki Wrote:You should be relatively strict about this. In time you will learn more about how kanji generally work and it will seem obvious that mouth on the left side of 唱 is narrower. The danger of not having your proportions right is that it can look like two separate kanji (i.e. a miswritten 口冒).

Thank you!

[Katsuo]

For the left side of moon the general "rule" is as follows:

1. If moon isn't under another element it is curved: 月明肌盟
2a. If moon is under another element it is usually straight, e.g. 有宵梢滑
2b. Exception to 2a: When it shares the element above with others, it is curved 崩筋藤覇
2c. Exception to 2b: Unless the element it shares with is 刂 "sword" 癒揃煎

Katsuo Wrote:For the left side of moon the general "rule" is as follows:

1. If moon isn't under another element it is curved: 月明肌盟
2a. If moon is under another element it is usually straight, e.g. 有宵梢滑
2b. Exception to 2a: When it shares the element above with others, it is curved 崩筋藤覇
2c. Exception to 2b: Unless the element it shares with is 刂 "sword" 癒揃煎

sheesh, that's a lot of rules. And that's just one radical. I guess if you want to "get it right" then RTK is just the start - it gets you in the door. I mean, the mnemonics are great and so far at least I'm learning and retaining more than any other method I've tried. But there are still lots of details that it doesn't cover.

I also have to see how much I still retain after a few months.

Getting the strokes of something like 月 right is more for beautiful writing. You don't really have to get those perfect right away. Just pay attention to them, maybe trace / write the kanji when you get it wrong, and you will get used to them on your RTK journey.

Likely, before you started RTK you barely realized there were such rules in Kanji writing in the first place.

Many primitives appear again and again in kanji, so you likely will not have trouble remembering how to write them assuming you recall your stories. More typical things are mixing if a primitive was on the left or right, top or bottom.

Unless you want to learn japanese calligraphy, you really shoudn't bother yourself with such details as difference between 唱 and 口昌. You won't mistake them in their printed form. For me the lower part of 胃 and 月 (or the top-left part of 然) are exactly the same and I don't distinguish between them.

But always check:
1. order of strokes
2. number of strokes
3. relative position of primitives (even if you draw them usually out of proportion as I do)
so for example:
1. the left part of 特 is not the same as 牛
2. the top part of 各, the right part od 攻 and 又 are all distinct
3. make sure that the top part of 薄 (flowers) clearly covers both "water" and "specialist" (just write it extra big)

it's important for some input methods

It's not just for "calligraphy," you need to know that for basic handwriting of any kind.

To reiterate what I said earlier, this is not something you will need to be paying constant attention to for a long time. By the time you learn a few hundred kanji, possibly sooner, you'll have a feel for how to write kanji and won't have to be fretting over the small details nearly as much.

Do not fail Kanji over minor details. Do not worry about your handwriting at all. Don't worry about stroke order beyond the very basics, don't worry about how primitives look in different positions, none of that. As long as you can tell which primitive goes roughly where, and you can tell apart the few primitives that are similar looking (there are only a few, and Heisig always points them out from the start, so don't worry about missing them) that's plenty.

The goal here is to learn to read the Kanji, not to write them in a pretty way. You're so far away from a point where you can write Japanese that it would be ridiculous to worry about getting that right.

The writing is there mainly to help your memory, not to turn you into a handwriting specialist. For now, you should write as much as you can, but over time (after 5-600 Kanji) you should begin to write less and less altogether, in favor of speeding up the reviews.

P.S. If your goal, for some odd reason, is to learn to write Japanese correctly above all else, ignore this advice. Not getting into correct habits, as far as handwriting goes, early on, would no doubt make it harder to learn to do it correctly later. But I suspect your goal is to learn to use Japanese in a practical way (understanding, speaking, reading, typing, and only as a final priority writing it on paper), not to impress people with your flawless handwriting.