I am going through RTK using skritter. On about #300 after a week, it's going really well. So I also got RTK volumes 2 and 3, and Heisig's remembering the kana book.

The introductions to the books don't clarify when exactly the Kana should be learned. The introduction to RTK implies the kana should be learned later, while the introduction to remembering the kana implies that the book can be used before learning Kanji.

So which should I do first? I could take 3-4 hours to go through remembering the kana - but it might be better to wait until after RTK to do that. I'm not certain. I'm sure I'll have to do the kana before volume 2 of course.

I don't need Kana yet. I'm doing Pimsleur for spoken Japanese, which will take four months total. I should be finished RTK before then. Pimsleur suggests no writing, so I won't need kana until I finish that. (Though it might be better if I need to take notes on the audio Japanese to be able to write in kana instead of my best guess at the English sound)

I'd take the time to learn the kana now. That's a simple job, comparatively, and knowing the kana is useful.

Thanks. What will it let me do during my course of Pimsleur + RTK study? Neither method calls for learning written vocabulary. In fact they actively call for avoiding it.

I guess my only concern is that I'll have a character set to remember for three months that I won't be using.

Though as a counterpoint I'll be able to read out the pronunciations of the Kanji I see in Skritter. I won't be trying to memorize the pronunciations, but doing that could give me hiragana + katakana practice to get me ready to read faster once I finish Pimsleur + RTK.

I second bertoni's recommendation for learning the kana now. You'll definitely need them before you can read anything.

I'd like to suggest that pimsleur isn't the best learning tool. I suggest choosing something which has written material where you can read along and a vocabulary list to learn from. I did the first 2 levels of pimsleur and a few other audio only methods before realizing how deficient those methods were. You might want to check out the genki textbook series and /or core6k as both have audio as part of the program.

ok, thanks, I'll try the kana shortly.

I'll stick with Pimsleur. I've used it for three other languages and it produces miraculous results - I've been able to talk with native speakers immediately upon finishing. Note that the results don't really show until lessons 80-90 onwards though. I say that based on the progression of past courses in other languages.

(Pimsleur has a massive failure rate though – you need to do it EVERY day or the algorithm breaks)

graeme Wrote:The introductions to the books don't clarify when exactly the Kana should be learned. The introduction to RTK implies the kana should be learned later, while the introduction to remembering the kana implies that the book can be used before learning Kanji.

So what this says is that you should do RTK first then do Kana but you can do Kana first.

I would read this as you are better of doing RTK then Kana, but if you have some pressing need then do Kana first.

If you are not living in Japan and are only doing a course that discourages writing then you have no need to learn Kana and it can wait until after RTK which based on what you said is the suggested path.

If you are doing Genki or living in Japan or if Fat Tony has you tied in a chair and will kneecap you or worse force you to listen to Justin Beiber music if you don't know the Kana by tomorrow then finish of the Kana.

Learning Kana and not doing anything with it for a month or 2 isn't useless but you will just have to learn it again unless you keep reviewing it.

I am only at the 74th Kanji so I don't speak from experience but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night and it seems logical to me.

graeme Wrote:ok, thanks, I'll try the kana shortly.

I'll stick with Pimsleur. I've used it for three other languages and it produces miraculous results - I've been able to talk with native speakers immediately upon finishing. Note that the results don't really show until lessons 80-90 onwards though. I say that based on the progression of past courses in other languages.

(Pimsleur has a massive failure rate though – you need to do it EVERY day or the algorithm breaks)

I think a lot of people that visit this forum have done Pimsleur, every day and through multiple levels. Myself included. I personally found it very lacking and after I moved on I wished I had spent that time more effectively. It gives you some confidence in the language but that's the only benefit I found from doing it.

PS That confidence doesn't hold up long after you realize how small your vocab is after completing the course.

The 50-odd kana (x2) are much like the 20-odd letters we use in the west. There are about 100 new kana to learn, which people can do superficially in a few days. So learning the kana is one of the easiest tasks in Japanese.

As you may know, each kana generally maps to one sound, maybe even better than roman letters do in Spanish or in Italian. Wikipedia calls that concept "phonemic orthography." That makes learning the kana easy at first.

The kanji are a different beast altogether. They are exceedingly imaginative and visual, so the learning process is completely different. They also don't provide phonetic clues to newbies. After completing RTK, you will be able to pick up the general meaning of a lot of material just by matching kanji to your Heisig keywords; you can't do that at all with kana (or English letters).

For me the challenge was really drilling the kana to become as mentally agile with the kana I am with roman letters. You want to be able to glance at a chain of kana and have your brain "instantly" connect that chain to a word, just like you do with English or other Romance languages you have studied.

I think spending 15 minutes per day memorizing and hammering in the kana for an extended period of time would help you to accelerate your learning process. I didn't use Heisig's book on kana but I believe writing every day will help you hard-wire the kana into your brain. On the other hand, Heisig argues that writing kanji excessively is not a productive use of time (some writing practice will help improve penmanship and provide you more confidence in writing).

You can also try some games to help your kana. Two free games I found to be helpful for the iPhone were KanaSwirl (rpglanguage) and Japanese!! (SquarePoet).

Unlike romance languages, where you can probably pick up lots of interesting native materials and read into fluency, Japanese provides limited reading opportunities to beginners. You won't be afforded massive input of kana via reading early in your Japanese studies. That is why rote writing and games can be helpful to nailing down the kana early in the game.

Learning the kana first makes the most sense, especially since stroke order is the same and many of the shapes of the kana are seen in the kanji. Plus, I know that Heisig's system inentionally turns much of the traditional learning order on its head, but it seems bizarre to learn kanji before kana, like learning to spell before you know the letters.

Another reason to learn the kana first is that there are a good amount of kana words that you will know immediately, especially katakana words because the majority of them are english words with japanese pronunciation. I believe there are around 500 katakana words in core 6k and roughly 90% of them are english loan words, so learning those 50 some katakana characters will allow you to read close to 10% of the most popular words in Japanese. Also, learning hiragana will allow you to read most children's books because they should have full furigana.

not knowing enough kanji is a big enough hurdle when learning vocabulary, not even knowing the kana is insane. learn the kana, it'll take you a week at most, maybe two in extreme circumstances.

Learning kana allows you to do something in Japanese without too much time or effort: read!

I don't understand why anyone would not learn kana first. It's the baby steps to reading/writing/speaking. You can even pick up vocab this way! Not the kanji equivalent of them (if there is any) but at least you're learning. You can read anything Japanese...even with kanji if furigana is present. Sure it is more difficult and reading will be a grind, but at least with that you can look up those unknown words in a dictionary.

There are works where all media is entirely kana like the Pokemon games. It is geared towards children and knowing kana is enough to at least start playing the game. Also many children's books/stories are mostly just kana with very little kanji and the kanji usually contains furigana.

I hope this proves to motivate you to learn kana. Kana really is a gateway to native media

yogert909 Wrote:Another reason to learn the kana first is that there are a good amount of kana words that you will know immediately, especially katakana words because the majority of them are english words with japanese pronunciation. I believe there are around 500 katakana words in core 6k and roughly 90% of them are english loan words, so learning those 50 some katakana characters will allow you to read close to 10% of the most popular words in Japanese. Also, learning hiragana will allow you to read most children's books because they should have full furigana.

Starting to get off topic, but there are also going to be some words in kana that you just can't figure out for the life of you. Sometimes it's because they come from another language. Other times, it's just because the Japanese pronunciation takes it so far off from what you're used to...

Early on after I first learned the kana, I was trying to figure out what the heck a GU-LI-LU was supposed to be on a menu. Took me a while to get the word "grill" out of it.

Another morning I was out walking the dog, still a bit sleep-brained, and read a sign on the side of a building for a restaurant further up the road. The sign was advertising their popular menu items like the beef bowl, the yaki something or other, and the dry busuru. I claim not fully awake brain on this one in that it took me a minute to realize the dry busuru was a drive through. I'd been wondering if it was something like the "dry ramen" I've run across in a couple of restaurant menus.

But yeah, the more exposure you get to it, the better you get at figuring the odd ones out.

Slightly more on topic:
I used the Heisig book for the Kana. Took me about a week for both hiragana and katakana, and I really only studied while eating breakfast and reviews while eating dinner. His method for kana worked really well for me.

If you're not anywhere you'll see the kana and it's not going to come up in your studies (Pimsleur), then you can leave it for later and just pick it up quickly. If you have any chance at all of running into it while out and about, or while going over other material, then there's no point in not picking it up now.

graeme Wrote:The introductions to the books don't clarify when exactly the Kana should be learned. The introduction to RTK implies the kana should be learned later, while the introduction to remembering the kana implies that the book can be used before learning Kanji.

Think of RtK as a magic pill that makes learning Japanese 10% easier. (a pill that happens to be really hard to swallow...it's gonna take you about 2 months of hard work, in fact )

That's what RtK is, that's what Heisig meant it to be. He looked at Chinese students, recognized how much more comfortable they were learning Japanese than westerners, so he devised a method to try and give at least a fraction of that comfort level to westerners, by making them familiar with Chinese characters before they start learning Japanese.

If you had a pill that made learning Japanese more comfortable, when would you take it? When you started learning Japanese, or midway through?

RawrPk Wrote:Learning kana allows you to do something in Japanese without too much time or effort: read!

I don't understand why anyone would not learn kana first.

Heisig gives a very good reason for doing Remember the Kanji before everything else. I take it you haven't read his introduction to RtK?

And how exactly would someone who can't speak Japanese start reading it, just by learning the Kana?

No, actually, his reasoning doesn't automatically convince everyone.

Vempele Wrote:No, actually, his reasoning doesn't automatically convince everyone.

No reasoning ever does. What is your point?

I interpreted your "I take it you haven't read his introduction to RtK?" as a passive-aggressive attack on him. I missed his "I'm not sure why anyone would...", which could be taken as ignorance of any reasoning to the contrary, including Heisig's. I'm sorry.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Think of RtK as a magic pill that makes learning Japanese 10% easier. (a pill that happens to be really hard to swallow...it's gonna take you about 2 months of hard work, in fact )

That's a really good way to look at it. I didn't think learning kanji first or later would make that much of a difference, but learning kanji made a huge difference in learning vocabulary vs before. If anything I think 10% is too low - more like 20% easier.

If we are trying to build some consensus - I also vote for learning the kana first. I haven't seen Heisig's book for that, but it is such a small set of characters that you could probably use any available system. Mine involved 1 day of locking myself in my room and making paper front-and-back flashcards and some blank paper. Now you can just pitch them all into Anki and it becomes no work at all.

And for a point of view on the question of:

Stansfield123 Wrote:how exactly would someone who can't speak Japanese start reading it, just by learning the Kana?

After that one day, with very little other Japanese knowledge, I was able to read:
-McDonalds and Wendy's menus
-Train station signs (at that time the line I lived on had no Romanji, but they had Furigana probably for all the 6 year olds going to school by themselves)

So it actually reduced my reliance on others quite a lot.

Vempele Wrote:(Now that I read the posts again, it's starting to look plausible that your "I take it you haven't read <the introduction>" was in reference to his "I don't understand why anyone would..." rather than you passive-aggressively calling him an idiot.

That's correct. I was questioning his implication that there can't possibly be a reason to do RtK first. But whatever, you misunderstanding is not really what bothers me. I guess it was easy to misunderstand. That's not the issue.

My question is this: You're not a mod, right? So why do you feel the need to police a conversation between two adults you've never even met? Let's say I really did have no reason to ask the guy whether he read Heisig or not. Let's say I really was just passive aggressively calling him an idiot. What's it to you? Would you do this in real life? If two people you don't know were having a verbal disagreement at the office, would you feel compelled to jump in and lecture them on how to behave?

Why would you think it's OK to do it on the Internet? Let me, and the mods, worry about whether I'm following etiquette or not. Don't be like one of those old ladies who just feel compelled to give their opinion on everyone else's behavior. Unless you're a mod and I don't know about it, in which case good work and keep up the vigilance officer.

The downside to doing all of RTK first is that you have to commit to it. You can read five hours one day and ten minutes the next, but if you do five hours worth of RTK one day, you're going to have a ton of reviews for a few days after that.

Learn the kana. Do as much RTK a day as you can commit to in the medium-to-long term. If you have substantially more time on some (but not all) days, don't spend it all on RTK or you'll get in trouble; study grammar / read / listen / ... instead.

SellingTokyo Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:how exactly would someone who can't speak Japanese start reading it, just by learning the Kana?

After that one day, with very little other Japanese knowledge, I was able to read:
-McDonalds and Wendy's menus
-Train station signs (at that time the line I lived on had no Romanji, but they had Furigana probably for all the 6 year olds going to school by themselves)

So it actually reduced my reliance on others quite a lot.

If OP lives in Japan, then I take back everything I said. He should learn the Kana right away. But I have a strong feeling that he doesn't live in Japan.

Ok, I have one more reason to learn the kana first:

I liked some of the shared stories that used the kanas in them - "mutually" and "do" come to mind.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Would you do this in real life? If two people you don't know were having a verbal disagreement at the office, would you feel compelled to jump in and lecture them on how to behave?

I perceived your actions as the sort of trolling that makes me avoid these sorts of discussions in the first place; that's why I made a throwaway comment instead of a useful post.

If I acted online like I do in real life, I'd never have made an account in the first place (if guest posting were possible, I might occasionally answer questions in the "What's this word/phrase?" thread). My threshold for joining conversations is that much higher.