Good day fellow mortals,

I am going to learn Japanese and decided to begin with learning the Kanji. I decided to start when I finished school which is 31 June. I'm going to learn the Kanji full-time during the holiday. My goal is to finish it in 4 weeks. The book says it is possible when working full-time, which I am. If I finish it on time I will have some free time when I am in Hungary.

Please wish me luck,

-Kruzer132

I think the book's author claims to have done it in a bit over a month by studying 10 hours a day 7 days a week. Most people won't be able to stay motivated for that, in fact I think most people will study an hour or two each day and still quit it. Some come back to it later, some don't.

I did 20 kanji a day and even then it was a horrible task. Of course you could try that 10 hours a day routine, but there's a very high chance you will burn out and start hating language study. Also, I don't really think doubling your work hours for the duration of your holiday will feel like a good idea after you have to go back to school..

I've been thinking of that. I'll see how my motivation changes, and try to change the pace if I think my motivation won't hold it.

I have kind of a déjá vu. Last year I was motivated to go to a higher level of education. All the grades were fine exept that I didn't learn Latin at all. And everyone warned me that it was to difficult to do in 6 weeks (that's my summer holiday). Worst of all, I didn't start learning untill the last 2 weeks. In the end of the holiday I just finished the last chapter. I was anxious because I thought I would fail the test that let me go to that level. But thank god, I didn't fail. But this year I'm planning to start right off. Because this is a bit more difficult that Latin.

But still, I'll see how my motivation will be, and change the pace if necessary. And thanks for letting me know your thoughts about my goal.

Bear in mind that learning kanji the heisig way has almost nothing to do with learning japanese.
What you learn is to associate an english keyword to a way of drawing a picture, that's about it.

It just happen to be really usefull later on when you want to read japanese :-)

My advise is: spend your holiday free time by learning actual japanese (kana first, then grammar and vocabulary), as much as you can without reaching overdose.

At the same time, start the rtk thingy, but keep a long term goal for it, and do only a _few_ kanji each day (5, or 10). So, yeah, it will take 2 years may be to stick, but anyway, even if you swallow the whole stuff in 30 days, you ll still have to review, and foregt things several time before it stick for real.

I've been preparing for a month, looking up different ways of learning Japanese, learning Hiragana and Katakana, and learning about Japanese manners and culture. I made the sentence I make with every language I start to learn: 私は鶏の王です。Wich means: I am the king of the chicken (=my favorite animal). I've heard of people who first learn speaking, people who first learn Kanji, and people who do all at the same time. I decided that I am a person who prefers to learn hard and know all the Kanji instead of looking it up every time. And I like calligraphy, so maybe this also is a factor of my choice.

I think if you seriously plan on learning 2,200 characters is 4 weeks then it would be a good idea to have a rough idea of what you are going to do afterwards in order to keep the momentum going. This should probably include lots of writing practice. 4 weeks is a very short period of time, long enough to learn a skill for sure but not long enough to guarantee the skill will stay with you. If writing is important to you - which it probably is considering you are doing RTK - it would be a shame to spend 10 hours a day on all those stories only to forget half of the characters.

I'd like to know more about how Heisig actually went about managing his time, I don't think he goes into enough detail in the book. Although this was maybe a conscious decision to avoid having thousands of Japanese students try and fail to mimic his success. Still, he must have learned 60-80 characters a day. Even with computers and SRS this is a lot.

Good luck anyway. I got a few hundred characters into the book before getting frustrated about spending so much time not learning Japanese. Learning to speak was a better route for me, I hardly write in English, let alone Japanese. If your determination is real, I'm sure you will fare much better.

A sure thing is that I'm going to keep reviewing the Kanji I know with anki. I'm planning to use Genki after the first book of RtK. If I finish RtK1 on time I'll be in a place where there will be some native Japanese speakers and I could ask them what to do next.

He was probably skillfull in storymaking that fitted in his mind and was passionate about learning the Kanji.

And thanks for the encouragement!

Kruzer132 Wrote:If I finish RtK1 on time I'll be in a place where there will be some native Japanese speakers and I could ask them what to do next.

They won't be able to help you. The people in this forum have much better experience helping you in the direction you need to take on Japanese as a foreign language. Native Japanese speakers without any experience teaching Japanese as a foreign language won't have a clue what you should do.

The Japanese themselves fall into this trap when they hire inexperienced native English speakers as teachers. And then are confused when the students make no progress. Speaking a language and teaching it are two very different things. You can learn to teach it, but those who have learned the same language as a second language are in a better position to help, especially at the start. Listen to the great advice you will get here.

(But do practice speaking Japanese with the native speakers. *That* they can do. Or, if the native speakers you will meet are experienced in teaching as well, then by all means ask away)

Good luck with your studies though. Great motivation is hard to keep but if you do, you'll go far.

Jawful Wrote:Good luck with your studies though. Great motivation is hard to keep but if you do, you'll go far.

Thanks for the tip and the encouragement.

I have an idea, but I don't know if it is useful or not, so I would like to hear the opinion of everyone who wants to help me:

I will use anki to review my knowledge of Kanji. I have a lot of time to spare this weekend. Is it a good idea to read all the Kanji keywords and meaning once and instert them in Anki. If I do this then my brain won't learn them, but it will get kind of accustomed with the Kanji, and some people say that sleep helps a lot with remembering things. This is a technique I used to use to remember the text for my presentations in Elementary school... And I still use it now for Latin and Greek words. But is it handy? Or is it a complete waste of time and could I better download the decks from the internet?

Kanji are too complicated, your mind won't get accustomed to them without some kind of mnemonic device. There's no gain in going through them before you start with the 'real thing'. Think about these random characters for example:　鬱病離陸様機額顎鍔嶽微

Also, creating 2200 flash cards with 2200 characters you cant write, read or recognize is probably not something you can do in one weekend. One card per minute and it will take the whole weekend (assuming you work 24 hours a day without sleep).

I haven't seen the premade decks so I don't know if they are good or not.

Okay, Thanks.

One thing to consider is that there are two ways to go about RTK. The author suggests looking at the keyword and writing the kanji. But if writing isn't as immediate of a goal to you as reading, many people do the opposite - looking at the kanji and recalling the keyword. The good thing about the second way is that it goes much quicker and it's easier to do on your mobile device while you are out and about.

If you think about doing the 2nd way, keyword to kanji, consider writing each kanji once or twice just to help remembering it's form.

Kruzer132 Wrote:A sure thing is that I'm going to keep reviewing the Kanji I know with anki. I'm planning to use Genki after the first book of RtK. If I finish RtK1 on time I'll be in a place where there will be some native Japanese speakers and I could ask them what to do next.

The way you say it, it sounds like you have a limited time opportunity to have face to face interactions with Japanese? If this is the case then personally I would consider switching RTK for Genki. You can practice the material from your textbook with native speakers, you can't really practice RTK with them.

Jawful is absolutely correct that Japanese, or people of any nationality really, tend not to have a clue how one should go about learning their language. However I have seen positive results essentially drilling textbook patterns/vocab with native speakers.

Taking the chance to become very comfortable with the basics of Japanese is something that may be worth thinking about. But again if you are a keen writer then I can understand the desire to get RTK out of the way as soon as possible.

Awnser for yogert909's reply:

I'm trying to do both reading as writing. My goal is to speak, write and read Japanese in three years. Because if my planning goes right, then I'll be an exchange student for a year in Japan. So... I'll do both ways.

Awnser for JKS87's reply:

I can't get motivation for learning long lists of things during school. So that's why I want to use RtK now I have a long holiday. I'll meet Japanese people during one week during my holiday, It's during some kind of congress of another language. You probabily don't know that language, it is named: Esperanto. A lot of Esperanto speakers are Japanese. The congress takes place every year. And after RtK I would like to learn/practise basic sentences with the Japanese there. Most of them don't know how to teach, but some of them there do. They are interested in language learning/teaching, because if they weren't, they wouldn't learn Esperanto.

And maybe I'll learn some with Genki there while speaking to them.

Ah that's fair enough. It's probably true that you need to be in a certain frame of mind for going through textbook drills. I used Pimsleur lessons which despite being quite slow to progress, are actually fairly stressful. There's no I would have been able to do one lesson a day had I not actually wanted to.

In fact, I considered learning Esperanto last year but came to the conclusion that I would only be doing it because it has a reputation for being easy. I'm never going to use Esperanto since I have no interest in the social side of that language, so it wasn't really worth the time investment for me, no matter how small. I didn't know a lot of Japanese people speak it though, that's interesting to me since Esperanto is quite often accused of being to Eurocentric. Good to know.

My parents are both Esperanto teachers, they said to me that a lot of the Esperanto speakers are Japanese. I think it probably is because of the easy pronociation of Esperanto.

Kruzer, I finished RTK1 in less than two months while studying full time. You don't have to listen to anyone telling you it's not possible or you'll burn out. I've been studying Japanese every day for about eight months since then, and I haven't felt like quitting yet.

Granted, I had taken two years of Japanese in college, so I already had the basics behind me. But those basics can be learned in a much shorter time than I took.

That's good. I've heard learning Esperanto helps learning other languages due to it's perfectly regular grammatical structure. There's actually research confirming this but I'm too lazy to look them up, and you may already know it anyway.

Thanks TurtleBear! I appreciate the encouragdement.

And I'm not that good in Esperanto, I never learnt rules. I kind of learnt it when I was 4 or something while listening to my parents talking in Esperanto. But I almost never speak it myself, and only asked my parents about the pronunciation of some characters. But I guess it still helped me with my Latin.

Now I'm thinking of it, it has kind of the same words as latin, the difference is that latin has a lot of long lists of rules and exeptions, while Esperanto has one suffix for every case. And that makes learning to use cases very easy. So I think I understand what you mean.

And again, thanks everyone!

I think I saw a TED talk about it a while back, maybe it was Benny the Irish polyglot or someone else suggesting that all schools teach Esperanto before moving onto French, German, etc. basically to learn about learning languages, and as a confidence building exercise. I haven't looked for any evidence but I'm sure it works to some degree. The problem I suppose is finding the initial motivation to learn a language that for most people has no social or economic value whatsoever. But for people who are genuinely interested in constructed languages then for sure I think it would help with subsequent languages.

It surely is impossible to learn all the Kanji without motivation. Anyway, I don't know how late it is in your timezone but it is pretty late in mine, and I didn't sleep enough this week because of this testweek. so goodnight.

I did it in a little under six weeks, with Anki, studying 4-5 hours a day. I could've done it in four weeks, if I wanted to, by studying another hour or two each day. But I chose to follow the author's recommendation: to do it in six weeks, because if you take the six weeks, more of it will be committed to long term memory, and a burnout is less likely.

Obviously, you'll be fine doing it in four, too. In fact, since you already set that goal for yourself, you should just stick to it. Just make sure to keep reviewing after you finish.

There are also some people who did it in two weeks, working 10-12 hours a day, and then promptly stopped reviewing their Anki deck (because they burned out). I assume they forgot most of what they learned, in a month. So don't do that.

Thanks for the warning.

I would recommend splitting it into three ~25 character chunks spread throughout the day. Also close your eyes and make sure you really visualize the story.

My school ended a little earlier than I thought. I am beginning now.