Any reenforcement will indeed help to cement a kanji into long term memory. I'm not saying that there are huge dangers or anything of the kind if you overexpose; you will learn fine either way you do things so long as you don't overwhelm yourself.

My only point is that limiting exposure early on has been scientifically shown to increase learning speeds to an optimal level. Its not a silly way to learn at all but neither is yours. If reading sentences early on is what you strongly enjoy, then you should probably do that since it will best motivate you toward your goal.

erlog Wrote:It would be silly and defeat the purpose to not try to apply your Heisig knowledge outside of Heisig.

Yup. I really don't buy into this whole "less is more" philosophy. Take everything psychologists say with a grain of salt. Nobody knows how the mind works. There's just no way I can accept the claim that by doing something often, I will end up compromising the effects of my studies.

Why would you take a string of multiple-decade scientific experiments with a grain of salt? Just because the premise seems non-intuitive doesnt make it false.

The_Dude Wrote:

erlog Wrote:It would be silly and defeat the purpose to not try to apply your Heisig knowledge outside of Heisig.

Yup. I really don't buy into this whole "less is more" philosophy. Take everything psychologists say with a grain of salt. Nobody knows how the mind works. There's just no way I can accept the claim that by doing something often, I will end up compromising the effects of my studies.

You know what? I like to take medicine with a grain of salt, too. I mean, they really don't know how the brain works either, right? So I guess I don't buy into using something like antibiotics to cure infections.

I say take them with a grain of salt because to me, they mean nothing. The individual needs to decide for himself how he best learns. Just because it's taken scientists decades to perfect their *theory* doesn't make it true.

Edit: And that remark rolls right on by me, because I take medicine with a grain of salt as well. In the end, everyone wants their pretty penny. So they will push their research and their products right on to the people, who *need* them.

What about learning some grammar by reading some grammar texts? This will give you a familiarity and fundamental base which will be useful in sentence mining later. Tae Kim's guide to grammar is a good, free online one. Just read through that, do some exercises or something, or just buy a book like Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar. Learning sentences is more of the same if you are doing RTK, it's probably worthwhile trying to do something different if you want to stay focused. So just read lightly, easily, don't stress too much about it as you'll see grammar structures again and again.

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/

Or you could learn the hiragana and katakana. Or just start listening to some dramas and anime.

"Anyone who claims that the brain is a total mystery should be slapped upside the head with the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. All one thousand ninety-six pages of it."

Anyway, I think what you can do is take sentences with only the kanji you've seen so far. Tanuki does this, more or less (sometimes it has more advanced kanji in the earlier sentences, but you don't have to learn it yet if you don't want to). KO is also progressive but the order is different.

You'll only see heisig power after finishing. If you starting mining sentences too early you wont enjoy the power of already knowing all the kanji, and your sentences will be halfwitted.
After finishisg RTK you can put whatever kanji heavy sentence that you'll manage.

The_Dude Wrote:

erlog Wrote:It would be silly and defeat the purpose to not try to apply your Heisig knowledge outside of Heisig.

Yup. I really don't buy into this whole "less is more" philosophy. Take everything psychologists say with a grain of salt. Nobody knows how the mind works. There's just no way I can accept the claim that by doing something often, I will end up compromising the effects of my studies.

I more so think the idea is "don't get ahead of yourself".
If you have the time to do Heisig's method for 100 kanji per day AND your reviews, consider yourself very, very lucky. I would continue to listen to Japanese. Turn on the music, shows, etc, but I would focus on completing Heisig especially if you have a lot of free time.

If you MUST, MUST learn Japanese while learning Kanji, stick to audio variants like Pimsleur or the Kana section of Rosetta Stone v3. Do not try to mine sentences that have Kanji cause you're gonna hit ALOT of frustration cause more and more kanji pop up that you just don't know yet.

That, coupled with RTK, means you have a GREAT base to begin sentence mining anything. Now, if you held off then starting off with UBJG after RTK works pretty good too.

Also, don't forget you should be watching lots of Japanese shows, news, anime, movies and listening to radios, podcasts and music.

To be honest, what little you learn during the time you're doing RTK is not going to be much. The divided effort makes RTK a little longer to complete.

PS: I did try sentence mining about 1000 characters into RTK. I did run into problems and promptly stopped until I finished up my Red stack.

Hmm. Why do people hurry so much with learning *everything* at once? You'll still be busy learning Japanese years from now. Chill! Take it easy and concentrate on RtK for now, I'm sure it will pay you back later and you'll have ALL the time in the world to mine sentences.

Cheers!

Ramchip Wrote:Anyone who claims that the brain is a total mystery should be slapped upside the head with the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. All one thousand ninety-six pages of it.

Well, The Lord of the Rings has 1216 pages. It must be completely true and scientifically indisputable as well, right?

Never! Zerg-rush!

FlyingFin Wrote:Why do people hurry so much with learning *everything* at once? You'll still be busy learning Japanese years from now. Chill! Take it easy and concentrate on RtK for now, I'm sure it will pay you back later and you'll have ALL the time in the world to mine sentences.

Not rushing is good advice. It's better to learn slowly and surely than to rush and forget half of it.

Having said that, I think it helps to put your kanji knowledge into practice. I don't know all the RTK kanji yet, but I still try to read Japanese, just for enjoyment. When I collect sample sentences, if it contains a kanji I don't know yet, I might look it up to see if I can learn it. If it contains a heap of them, then I skip it and go to the next one at my level.

So my advice is to not fret, accept the limitations of your current knowledge, and take your time.

But I think rushing is a better advice. Get RTK done and stick to review it. Later kanjis reinforce the earlier ones. And you wont forget. The SRS will come back to hunt you down if you do that.

Of course everybody knows the earth *is* flat.
Copernic was just a liar.

I'd say: complete your journey through the book and take conclusions after.

lol@phauna. hopefully I'll finish RTK1 before starcraft 2 comes out

So having heard all this mutually contradictory advice...

I'd say try it all out and stick with what works best for you!

Raichu Wrote:So having heard all this mutually contradictory advice...

I'd say try it all out and stick with what works best for you!

An unfortunate side-effect of life...these contradictions. Ne?

I'm in no position to tell a person what's best in the long run, seeing as I've only gotten halfway through Heisig's first book.

One thing I have been doing, though is learning to read Japanese names that have the character I've learned already. I can read a bit of the one's like 武内　高橋　沢田　谷口　白鳥　竹田　小河　宮田　井上　森下　小村　永井　and many more involving these kanji and many others.

After first I was using this website, http://www.manythings.org/kanji/

But then the familiar got to easy and the unfamiliar ones got to hard so I though it best to try to anki them. I found a deck with japanese names, suspended them all, then unspended the ones with familiar characters.

Don't know how much it helps in the long run. But it's pretty interesting to actually read the names on the news casters.

I am amazed at how much Japanese I didn't know I already knew, now.

Question.

Let's say that I want to follow this route and start to throw in a few sentences now, making sure to only choose ones with Kanji that I am already able to recognize. How do I go about this?

The idea I have is that I take a sentence. Input it into my SRS with the sentence on the question side. Then what goes on the answer side? Is it the kana and the english keywords? Is it only kana? Where does my understanding of the Japanese words come from? Do you let Anki generate the readings and then look up each word in a Japanese-English dictionary and then write out their english meanings?

I guess I'm just confused how sentence mining starts when you don't know any of the Japanese language yet other how to write the Kanji.

Go ahead and start mining sentences if you want, just be ready, it will be much harder than after you've finished RtK. And do not waste RtK time mining sentences. RtK you can do at full speed, you can't effectively do sentences at full speed until you've mastered the kanji used in them.

wonderflex Wrote:The idea I have is that I take a sentence. Input it into my SRS with the sentence on the question side. Then what goes on the answer side? Is it the kana and the english keywords? Is it only kana? Where does my understanding of the Japanese words come from? Do you let Anki generate the readings and then look up each word in a Japanese-English dictionary and then write out their english meanings?

Just find a sentence in a textbook where the sentence is explained. You can't mine from something you don't understand anyway. Using a Japanese-English dictionary is fine, but that will only help if there's one or two words you don't understand, you can't use a dictionary to understand a whole sentence.

Go and do it. Just don't forget to do your RTK reviews.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Go and do it. Just don't forget to do your RTK reviews.

So, as a whole I think I'm going to end up continuing with RTK as normal, and possibly cut to RTK Lite tomorrow. Either way, I seem to find that I can't keep more than 30 new Kanji in my head at once without the short term forgetting them.

So if there is any time left in the night and I've gone over all my new Kanji, finished all my reviews, and what not, I'm going to start working on reading. If it ends up being a distraction I'll cut it out and continue to just study RTK and watch anime with the remaining time.

Side question: Should I be reading aloud?

kittycate44 Wrote:I think people (no offence) are sometimes a bit obsessed and "rabid" about the RTK way. I can't understand why you'd isolate the kanji and learn it in seperate chunks as opposed to learning everything together where more connections are made.

I have also said numerous times that learning ALL the kanji with 1 keyword is one of the most stupid ideas i have ever heard of. Once you've seen a kanji in at least 20 or 30 words then you get a feel for what it actually can stand for. Which makes it much easier to create a story for it.

Because learning kanji first makes learning new words much easier, and you learn them the correct way from the very beginning, which kanji to use, instead of learning them in kana and having no idea how the words are actually written.

If you know all the kanji, learning Japanese is a breeze. It isn't if you don't.

wonderflex Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:Go and do it. Just don't forget to do your RTK reviews.

Side question: Should I be reading aloud?

No, not until you're better at Japanese pronunciation and Japanese pitch. Reading out loud when your Japanese isn't good might give you a habit of using the incorrect pitch or pronunciation.

Try shadowing instead. Read a text you have audio for, then read it out loud together with the audio. That way, you'll get the benefit of reading, without the danger of sounding odd and thinking it's correct.