Well, I'm just a beginner with some trivial doubts. Since I've heard of RTK 1 many times as being an efficient way of memorizing most of joyo kanji, as many people regarded it so much, I decided to trust in this method and just start it out earlier in this year. Now I've completed half of the lessons, I'm about to finish a very wide revision on it to then going on. But my point is: I recently have found a lot of topics criticizing Heisig's method and saying it's inefficient and does not give the abilities it promises and some of these appointments said Heisig's keywords have not to do with actual kanji meanings; I already knew that kanji have multiple meanings, but since I've seen people stating they are only "intros" to what the kanji really signify, it made me confused about the purpose of that book. So I have a couple of questions:

1. Are RTK keywords for each kanji their most widely used meaning, a synthesis of its various meanings or something?
2. Are these keywords meant to help in the understanding of Japanese words and consequently sentences?
3. If they are neither one thing nor another, what is their purpose?
4. Would Anti-Heisig skepticals recommend someone in half of the book to just give up?

Thank you very much for your attention.

1. Generally yes, as far as different languages, different scripts and different cultures allow. Still, there is only so much one word can express. A single kanji is often found in multiple compounds and it can happen that the most common compound doesn't have anything at all to do with the original meaning of the kanji. Also keep in mind that the meaning of a certain kanji or a primitive/radical just sucks for mnemonics because it's too abstract. For example a person 人 could be anyone, but for me and many others Mr. T will instantly evoke vivid images, making it easy to remember.

Maybe the question should be what do people ask for when they ask for "the actual meaning of a kanji"? What is the actual meaning of 日? Sun? Day? Which one is it? Can an English word even be considered the actual meaning? Or is it ひ? にち? した? か? う? に?

2. Sort of, but not really. English and Japanese don't have enough in common to be able to understand anything meaningful by finishing RTK. It's just a starting point for kanji learning.

3. To be able to easily tell kanji apart by breaking them down into smaller bits. The keywords act as placeholders to keep the corresponding primitives together, making the whole process of learning kanji simple and straightforward. In my opinion.

4. I like RTK, I wouldn't stop half way. I think I'll eventually do RTK 3 as well.

I wouldn't stop halfway either. Even if there was a better way, switching to something new halfway though is likely to take more time then any efficiency you're likely to find.

I'm aware of some of the complaints about RTK, but I've never seen anyone suggest a better method. If you were to switch, what would you switch to?

[Katsuo]

I agree with Helltrixz's post, but also want to add:

1. You can check this out yourself to some extent by looking at any of the bigger kanji–English dictionaries, i.e. Nelson, Halpern, Spahn & Hadamitsky. Choose a kanji and look down its list of words and compounds. Is there a theme running through them and does a single English word sum it up? Of course many authors have done this already. I once made a spreadsheet to easily compare Heisig's choices with some others.

4. I'd recommend finishing quickly as it's a useful tool. Some people enjoy going through the book, but others find it a slow, boring grind. If you're one of the latter then consider quitting.

EduardoVS Wrote:1. Are RTK keywords for each kanji their most widely used meaning, a synthesis of its various meanings or something?

Most times they represent the "main" meaning, or a secondary meaning.

Quote:2. Are these keywords meant to help in the understanding of Japanese words and consequently sentences?

Quote:3. If they are neither one thing nor another, what is their purpose?

The keywords have as I see mainly 2 purposes.

1.- To teach you a main meaning associated with the kanji.

2.- To work as a unique index, like a sort of unique address for each kanji. With a 1 to 1 relation between kanji and keywords, you can identify unequivocally each one.

Quote:4. Would Anti-Heisig skepticals recommend someone in half of the book to just give up?

If you have other method that is better than finishing what you already started, then sure, why not?

If you have that better method, please share it with everyone here.

If you don't have a different, better method, then just stick to RTK. That doesn't mean in anyway that you can't improve on it, of course. For example, you can add 1 or 2 Japanese words that use each kanji and keep them together with the keyword, and that way you'll be learning both the characters and vocabulary.

I see RTK as an essential training. You don't train for playing sports just by playing sports. You make drills for the independent movements or skills involved in the sport, and then apply those moves and skills in the field. Same goes with training your kanji skills with RTK and then applying them to your Japanese.

Choice of keyword isn't as simple as picking the most common meaning.

This kind of mnemonic support is often redundant for the common meaning, by virtue of its being common. It can be far more useful to have the keyword relate to a less common meaning for the kanji, as that's when it helps the most.

Heisig's choices are often good ones in this regard.

I'm not really Anti-Heisig, as I would say use whatever method works best for you, but I am someone who quit RTK about half way through because I felt it was useless.
The main challenges for me are remembering irregular readings, as well as the sheer amount of vocabulary required for dictionary-less comprehension. I still mix up uncommon kanji sometimes, but you know, even when you finish Heisig I doubt you'd have perfect recall of all the jouyou kanji. It takes like 5s to compare two similar characters and come up with a mnemonic, and once you start to read more and more, differentiating characters is the least of your worries.

PS: If you're curious about my "method" - just go through Core 10k. Use the kanji you've already learned as guide, and if there are radicals that pop up frequently, make up your own association for them. It's not like Heisig invented memory aids or was the first person to notice radicals. Plus, if you use ZKanji (free dictionary program for Windows) you can just click on a kanji and see its components.

If I might add to what Kuzunoha13 said, even if you've done RtK you can mistake a kanji for another, like in 自転車 and 自動車. Obviously there is no problem in telling apart 転 from 動, there is no need of RtK for this. But this doesn't prevent you from mixing the two words... expecially as 運転 is "driving", which has the same 転 as 自転車.

At the risk of getting a little abstract... Kanji, IMO, don't have any inherent meaning, outside of a few dozen very simple ones (木、中、etc.).
Kanji that aren't simple pictographs of a simple idea are just characters used in language. They spell words that have a meaning, and we say that they have a 'meaning' of every word they are used in. As such, it's silly to worry about the 'Real Meaning' of any kanji or to endorse or reject any method based on any idea of such fictional 'Real Meanings'.
RTK won't teach you the 'Real Meaning' of the kanji because there is no such thing. What it will do is give you a mental tag to attach to each of a couple thousand of the most common kanji, and the ability to write and recognize those kanji. Later learning words spelled with those units is really easy when they are already familiar to you, and quite hard if they are not already familiar to you.
We could debate forever whether putting the RTK effort in first actually saves effort in the long run (I think it does, but it's simply not provable.) However, being halfway through the process you've already put in much of the effort learning core kanji and primitives and the rest should flow relatively easily. I certainly agree that whatever the case may be for total effort for someone starting from scratch, if you're halfway through the RTK program it wouldn't make sense to waste those efforts and start over with some new system. To get to your goal, keep moving forward, don't backtrack and try every possible path to your goal or you'll be studying the basic kanji forever!

Another thing is that, even if they have a meaning, you don't want to stop at every compound and think about the meaning of every single kanji in it. You want to recognize the word directly. In my previous example:

自動車

when you are reading you don't want to stop and think "ok, then... SELF + MOVING + MACHINE... oh yeah, that's AUTOMOBILE"... you want to look at the word and read directly じどうしゃ and continue reading... and this compound is pretty obvious, but most of the time it is not...

So a general "meaning" could be useful the first time when you're learning the word, but after that, you want to recognize the word for what it is. The same is for kanji, it is very useful to give meanings to radicals but after the learning stage, when you look at a kanji (if it is one of those which can stand alone) like 飲む you want to read "のむ (to drink)" and not to recall the story from the components etc..

PS: in my own opinion RtK is VERY useful to gain confidenge in kanji and to learn to recognize and distinguish them.

EduardoVS Wrote:1. Are RTK keywords for each kanji their most widely used meaning, a synthesis of its various meanings or something?

Most Japanese words are made up of either a morpheme written with a Kanji and some pre or post-fixes written in hiragana, or more than one morpheme, where a Kanji stands for each morpheme. Single morpheme/Kanji words are relatively rare. That's what makes Japanese an agglutinative language.

That said, a morpheme does indeed have meaning, though not necessarily exactly in the same sense a word does. One problem with then concluding that "the Kanji have meaning", however, is that the same Kanji can be used to represent two or more morphemes. So the pedantic way to put it is that it's the morphemes which have meaning, and that each morpheme gets paired with a specific Kanji. But a Kanji can get paired with more than one morpheme.

Heisig strives to balance the need for unique and memorable keywords with choosing a keyword that's close to the meaning or the morpheme the Kanji is most often used to represent.

EduardoVS Wrote:2. Are these keywords meant to help in the understanding of Japanese words and consequently sentences?

They are meant to help learn Japanese vocabulary. They won't help you understand most Japanese words without further study, but they will help a lot with that study. Like I said above, words are agglutinated together from morphemes. The Kanji keywords are most of the time either an accurate translation or at least a very strong hint as to what those morphemes mean.

That's of course not always the case, but it is often enough that doing RtK (and continuing to review it even after you've finished it) is well worth it.

I'll also give an example, to illustrate my points:一生懸命 (いっ*しょう*けん*めい, isshoukenmei) , it's a word you see all the time in coming of age mangas/dramas/movies.

The dictionary entry is here: http://jisho.org/words?jap=isshokenmei&eng=&dict=edict
It basically means "trying with all your might". Let's look at the component Kanji:
一 = one
生 = life
Makes "一生" = whole life. It's a common word.
懸 = suspend
命 = fate
The two together make 懸命, literally means to risk one's life, related meanings are "eagerness/earnestness" (not an easy connection to make, but if you make it it's easy to remember)

I picked a difficult example on purpose. There are cases where the connection between the component Kanji and the meaning of a word is even more abstract than this, but not many. Usually, things are more obvious. This is fairly abstract, but even here, you can see how much easier knowing the keywords makes remembering what 一生懸命 stands for, and even how to write it.

P.S. I learned the word through watching TV, not by studying. But I've never seen it written before I came across it in Anki. And I remebered it right away (I checked the card, zero lapses). I seriously doubt that would've been the case if I didn't have the keywords for the component Kanji.