My university is offering several intensive language courses over the summer, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese among them. Now, it is my goal to learn both Chinese and Japanese, and, after a great deal of consideration, I decided to take the Mandarin course this summer. Ultimately, it came down to the fact that I have somewhat more interest in Japanese than Chinese culture (i.e. I watch a lot of anime ), so it will be somewhat easier to learn to read and understand Japanese outside of the classroom than Chinese would be. Maybe that's a flawed reasoning, but I can only take one class over the summer and I had to pick one of the two.

I'm unsure as to how I should procede with Remembering the Kanji given this. I've done 200 or so kanji, although I've been slacking off lately, both because of general busyness and because I was still deciding what language to take. I'm confidant that I could start back up again relatively quickly. What worries me most is that knowing the heisig readings, without knowing the Japanese readings, will just confuse me if I try to apply that knowledge to learning to read Chinese.

Obviously, it would be great if I could apply the RtK method to learning to read Chinese. The problem here is, I don't know exactly how much of an overlap there is between kanji and traditional characters. Can I generally assume that a heisig reading will work just about as well for a Chinese character as it will for the corresponding kanji, or will this simply not work? And even if it doesn't work, would it still be worthwhile to continue going through Remembering the Kanji while taking the Chinese class (at the rate I'm going I certaintly won't finish before this summer) for applying it to learning Japanese later on?

You might be interested to know that there are some Remembering the Hanzi books coming out. You can download previews here: here

From a (BROKEN LINK) discussion on another thread, the traditional is apparently pretty close to the Kanji book.

If it was me, I would choose one language (and it'd be the language I'm more interested in because I'd stick to it longer) and really concentrate on getting to at least an intermediate level of the language before I thought about trying another language.

However, if you still want to do it the way you plan, I wouldn't give up RtK just yet. I would keep at it. For the most part it'll be transferable somewhat to Chinese and you wont be wasting time doing nothing as you lead up to your summer course.

For myself, I find it somewhat difficult to do the RtK method while having to learn other Kanji in a course I'm doing. I put RtK on the back burner and learn about 50 a week. It's a nice easy pace so that I am still moving through them while having plenty of time to focus on my other studies. And at least this way I should be done by the end of the year (especially if I then put it into the main focus of my studies during semesters)

Anyway, that was my thoughts and ideas, I hope I've given you some food for thought!

I'm studying Mandarin too, and I'm finding that the strategy for learning hanzi is exactly the same for kanji. Make up an english reading for each kanji/hanzi. After you know the characters by this name, then you'll be able to link that character to the foreign language word (or reading). I'm enthusiastic about Mandarin because there is only one reading per character, and that reading is correlated to the meaning of the character. Also, in my reading about Mandarin, I came across the statistic that indicated that the college level speaker of Mandarin will only actively use between 3 and 4 thousand unique characters...perhaps not so far from the RTK 3 list?

AJATT has a "hanzi mnemonic" wiki, created as part of his Mandarin/Cantonese project. As I was scanning thru this, I realized that you really cannot tell that it's for Chinese, instead of Japanese. Well, some of the character forms are a bit different, written a bit different. It's almost like a different font...that sort of variation.

I am also learning Chinese. If you are now only at frame 200 of RtK, I would probably not suggest to finish the book. I have finished it and it is useful, but just not enough. In the first around 500 words I learned in Chinese (from a standard text-book) there were around 150 Hanzi, that were not included in RtK1. Also quiet a lot of adaptions and slight changes had to be made and you end up learning certain characters twice - which can be a little confusing. Even though the RtH trial intersects immensly with the first chapters of RtK I guess that will not be the case for the whole book.
As for the Heisig method; I still recommend it for learning Chinese Hanzi. The "Remembering the Hanzi" by Heisig trial pdf has been around for quiet some time now and the full book was rumored to be out already last summer so the lack of a release date makes it hard to decide wether to wait for it or not. Maybe I would learn the sample, and learn further characters by taking primitives from RtK or inventing meanings for them yourself.

I found the file, where I put the non RtK1 Hanzi. They correspond to the above mentioned 500 first words I learned. The character with "*" indicate that they are RtK characters but have somewhat been changed. I learn simplified characters in Chinese. To my impression so far the Kanji are somewhere in between traditional and simplified characters. (Meaning this list would not be (much) shorter, if you decided to learn traditional characters)
1 1 你
2 吗
3 2 很
4 呢
5 也
6 3 哥
7 们
8 4 这
9 爸
10 妈
11 5 车*
12 那
13 她
14 书
15 6 哪
16 谁
17 师*
18 汉
19 7 什么
20 图
21 8 喝
22 您
23 进*
24 欢
25 烟*
26 气
27 习*
28 10 儿
29 舍
30 11 还(1)
31 报
32 画*
33 12 认
34 识*
35 13 喂
36 啊
37 买
38 笔
39 对
40 14 姐
41 爱*
42 孩
43 给
44 写*
45 15 个
46 几
47 还(2)
48 览*
49 杂
50 16 条*
51 裙
52 两
53 张*
54 剧*
55 从
56 找
57 穿
58 衬
59 衫
60 17 后
61 跟
62 咖啡
63 18 吃
64 时
65 19 务
66 橘 (eigentlich Baum+packed)
67 啤
68 听
69 乐*
70 让*
71 20 辅
72 吧
73 导*
74 岁*
75 址
76 21 兴
77 轻*
78 姑
79 亮
80 开*
81 22 园*
82 厅
83 旁
84 椅
85 桌
86 总
87 厨
88 帮
89 餐
90 卧
91 澡
92 怎
93 样
94 23 复
95 团
96 观
97 厂
98 玩
99 发
100 24 农
101 炼
102 些
103 难
104 练
105 懂
106 25 游
107 备
108 腿
109 奶
110 矿
111 26 译
112 或
113 应
114 俩
115 竟
116 27 尝
117 茅
118 为
119 谊
120 葡
121 萄
122 筷
123 赞
124 28 赛
125 办
126 签
127 李
128 队
129 赢
130 踢
131 冰*
132 鞋*
133 29 飞*
134 愿*
135 步
136 离
137 站
138 紧*
139 过
140 30 东*
141 哭
142 热*

I think one important part of having finished RtK is that you just know you can do it. So there are a few thousands more characters you'll need to learn? No big deal. You know how to do that. Sure it's going to take some time but it's not that hard.

It's important to bear in mind that the Heisig keywords are not the "absolute" meanings for the characters. A few of them are actually quite arbitrary.

So knowing that, the Japanese version of RTK should only help, not hurt your Chinese studies and I recommend finishing the book before starting your Chinese course this summer.