Horray! I finished RTKI
Now I?ve been puzzling over the RTKII introduction and Chapter I for a number of hours and still haven?t the foggiest notion of what I?m supposed to be learning. I thought that RTKII would be teaching me a methodology for remembering the On and Kun readings of the 2042 Kanji whose English meaning I learned in RTKI, but maybe not. I?ll use frame 45 in RTKII as an example. What am I learning here. Am I learning that 美　is pronounced as ミ　? Or that 美 is the parent Kanji of ミ? Surely I can?t be trying to learn how to write that squiggly signal primitive. Am I supposed to learn the exemplary compound? But I never learned the pronunciation of the first of the two Kanji in the compound. Should I learn that, also? Seems like I have to Know Japanese to learn Japanese. I don?t mind muddling through for a number of days in the hopes that the process will begin to make sense but I don?t know what is the important part of frame 45 and what are just exemplary asides. I?ve read the RTKII posts but they?re all over my head. I just don?t know what I should be learning. I could sure use some direction.

I've found that RTK2 is a great way to learn to "guess" the readings of many kanji. This can be pretty useful although it is quite limited. For playing kanji games on my GBA it has helped out quite a bit,,, but it's not very practical when you still can't understand the message of the text. It seems that RTK2 is more of a "companion" to reading comprehension and should not be used exclusively to achieve this goal. Your best bet is to work on learning Japanese (sentences,etc..) then use RTK2 as a reference for further study. I had a similar post on RTK2 a while back and was given the same (good) advice (thanks).

RTK2 is basically pure memorization. RTK2 provides very little to help you along the way, unlike RTK1. What it does provide is:

1. one compound for each reading
It's better to learn a word (and its meaning) than to attach meaningless readings to kanji. In theory once you've memorized all the compounds in the book, you will have been introduced to all the on readings of all the kanji in RTK1. This is not that useful since when you encounter one of these kanji in a different word, you don't always remember the one word you memorized highlighting that reading. (And the given word is not always the most common or useful one containing the kanji.)

2. readings are grouped (by chapter) around different themes.
This may be the greatest strength of the book, but it's still not much. The first chapter is rather poor for this. The best is the "pure" primitives one. There you find all the kanji with 中 (沖 忠 仲) as an element and they all share the reading チュウ. Other chapters are organized around different themes, e.g. kanji with a unique readings. The first chapter is interesting for the kana derivations but I think it's a bad start to the book as often the given reading is not even the most common one for the kanji.

RTK2 provides no method to learn kun readings. The idea being, I presume, that kun readings are more basic and are learned word by word as you learn the language, whereas on readings are more "academic".

Going by your example, you memorize ミ as a reading for 美. Actually you should memorize the compound, except that the first chapter has poor sample compounds since often they are rare readings. What is it even in this case...? The fact that ミ is derived from 美 is no more than interesting trivia.

In a later chapter the more common reading ビ is introduced with a sample compound such as maybe 美術. That is actually a useful word so in that case so you memorize びじゅつ = art = 美術 = beauty / art (that last part thanks to RTK1). In theory this will help you remember that 美 = ビ in other words. However, as you noticed, you must also remember 術 = ジュツ even though that one probably only shows up later in the book!

All in all, it is a very limited method which amounts to no more than learning at least one word containing a given reading of each kanji. It only comes together when you learn more words, but it does provide words to start with. It's really debatable if learning words by themselves (outside of context) is useful. But then again, I've always liked flipping through the dictionary and reading definitions...

Read chapter 11 first, which will teach you the review steps. Then skip to chapter 2. You can always come back to chapter 1 later.

In RTK2, you review kanji + compound to sound. Whether you rate yourself successful if you only remember the kanji sound and not the whole word or the meaning, is up to you. You're also free to replace the compounds with ones you're more familiar with. Yes, it's better to know some vocabulary before starting RTK2, as a few chapters deal with basic and more advanced vocabulary, a lot of which you are supposed to have met before.

美 as ミ is actually extremely common in first names, especially for girls. At least 3 girls in my family all have that character (A beautiful mind, eh?). Or what about 美鶴 (みつる), a boy's first name and one of the main characters in Brave Story? The example compound in the book is 新美 (にいみ), a family name apparently. Not that I've heard of, but 新潟 (にいがた) is a pretty famous prefecture, so the whole reading isn't that difficult to memorize.

I just skipped chapter 1...

Then I entered the word examples into an SRS. I already knew basic Japanese, so learning less common words wasn't a problem, really. You can still use mnemonics to learn the meaning of kanji compounds, but I think the only trick for learning the on-readings is the phonetic grouping. Kun-readings... there's no trick, just use sentences examples.
I think once you start learning to read kanji, it's good to use an actual course. Learning to read the more common kanji first is more useful, especially if you don't know much/any Japanese yet.

woelpad Wrote:美 as ミ is actually extremely common in first names, especially for girls. At least 3 girls in my family all have that character (A beautiful mind, eh?). Or what about 美鶴 (みつる), a boy's first name and one of the main characters in Brave Story? The example compound in the book is 新美 (にいみ), a family name apparently. Not that I've heard of, but 新潟 (にいがた) is a pretty famous prefecture, so the whole reading isn't that difficult to memorize.

Thanks, that's good to know. I looked in the dictionary and didn't find any common words but I wasn't thinking of proper names at all. Such are the limitations of not having direct practical exposure to the language.

For the past week I've been working through RTK2 "by the book" and am finding it to be very helpful continuation of RTK1.

Per the instructions, I'm just going from compound to reading and meaning, using an Anki deck with the following fields: compound, meaning, reading, frame#, sample sentence (if necessary). Adding about 25 per day.

What I like about it:
- recognition reviews are faster
- installed PC application more portable for travel, etc.
- continues Heisig philosophy of learning one thing at a time
- helps recall of RTK1 kanji
- easy to put a photo (e.g. japanese teapot) from the web into the Anki deck for visual reinforcement
- gives imaginative memory a chance to recuperate
- makes dictionary usage an order of magnitude faster (critical for reading books off-line) by not having to lookup by kanji/radical
- although I do drill for reading + meaning, this is not a vocabulary builder per se, except as a side effect of learning pronunciation.


I had been thinking I'd spend some more time cementing RTK1 but am discovering that it's better to just plow ahead. This is not my first attempt at the summit, I've seen many of these characters before in readings, and have a solid grounding in grammar (Jorden/Noda JSL books 1-3). With less prior exposure I would probably have a different perspective.

Checked out Trinity but don't see compelling value relative to an customizable SRS with online backup (like Anki). The value of RevTK is in the user-generated content, and other than crowdsourcing data entry of sentences from elsewhere, where's the benefit post-RTK1?

Following Heisig's advice ("remember not to clog your memory with useless information - for example, which signal primitives share the same pronunciation") I'm not interested in kanji chaining, kanji towns, et. al., which Trinity seems designed to support. AJATT 10000 sentences? eh.. I'll read a book instead.

Not to say those approaches don't or couldn't work for some or even many people. But Heisig got me this far, and so I'll stick with his method for the next round.

I just ordered RTK 2 yesterday from Amazon. I got the free shipping version, which will hopefully give me time to finish the rest of RTK 1 (I'm on 1647). I'm excited for it to come. I'm also excited to have something to use Trinity with other than my own imagination.

Hopefully, for the final release, Trinity will have RTK 2 compatibility out of the box--meaning that I can just plug in the frame number I'm at, and all the preceding words will flood in.

It would be nice if it had all the fields that ivantolearnkanji mentioned above: compound, meaning, reading, frame #, and maybe even pre-written sample sentences to choose from.

Even if not though, I'm excited for the next step in my Heisig Japanese learning.

I'm going through with RTK2 and I'm not sure if it is just me or it is supposed to be this way... I've gone through 100 frames so far. Should I just be memorizing the 1) Kanji in a compound and the chinese reading of the signal primitive... or should I also be memorizing the entire compound pronunciation?

Memorzing the first two things is easy enough for me... but it is really hard for me to memorize the whole pronunciation outside of just brute repetition.

Then just do 1). Don't sweat on the first chapters. As in Part 1, those should be the easiest ones to do. Later on you'll encounter the readings for the other characters (if it's all on-yomi, which it is in 99% of the cases apart from chapter 1) which will make it possible to read the whole compound. Lots of compounds appear more than once, sometimes even for the same character (a duplicated effort that could be sifted out), so there's no real need to fail your old cards expressly after encountering a different character in order to see them more often. Unless it makes you feel better.