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And then the moon!

I don't know about you guys, but I find significantly harder to remember new vocabulary if I don't have the real concept of the kanji well developed.

This is sometimes disturbed by the weak Heisig keywords. Sometimes the kanji has a meaning that is very different from the keyword.

So, training from kanji to keyword from the start might be a bad thing. I'm happy on doing it only now that I'm capable to figure out the real meaning of the kanji by myself (with the help of dicts and context, of course).

The moon sounds like a better destination than JLPT1. Do they speak Japanese there?

mattyjaddy Wrote:The moon sounds like a better destination than JLPT1. Do they speak Japanese there?

It's not called moonspeak for nothing.

zazen666 Wrote:Please dont tell me how you think its a waste of time (unless you have tired it and it was).

I did this a little by accident in the beginning...and I can see why it's better keyword-to-kanji.

Because you can recognize a kanji by it's general shape, and think you "know" it. But you don't really remember exactly how it looks when you're not looking at it. And if there are similar kanji, you may get them confused with each other.

However, if you start with the keyword and can correctly recall your story and write the kanji, stroke for stroke, you can correctly recognize it also, and not get it confused with a similar kanji.

I agree. I would not suggest for anyone to go kanji to keyword from the start. That is the mistake of most japanse language programs in college.

I am only trying it now after having finished RTK one year ago. I want to see if I can speed up my reconization.

I have been doing a few weeks now. It doesnt seem to be hurt yet, although my avearge about of due cards has increased. But, it doesnt really take long to go kanji to keyword. Much less time then reading a sentence.

I do it. Actually, Heisig does not recommend it, in the beginning.

I use flash cards now. The ones on Polarcloud.com. This way, I feel I could learn the last 1000 in a month. My goal is to finish by the end of December with RTK1.

I learn 25 kanji by reading the book visualizing them in my head.
I use the group of flashcards by looking at the kanji first and try to identify the keyword.
I check the ones I missed.
I do it again.
I do it again this time going from keyword to kanji and I write it out.
I do another set of 25.
I repeat the same steps.

I only go keyword to kanji when I am writing it out.

Doing it this way has help me accelerate the learning process.

I hope this helps someone out there. IMHO, flashcards are a must after you get past 500.

-Wisher

I never consider a kanji "learned" until I can reliably go from keyword to kanji, and most of my practice is keyword to kanji.

Nevertheless, I have been doing kanji-to-keyword reviews once a week. I have the very nice (and expensive! but I got them as a gift) printed Kanji Study Cards, and I make a giant pile of them and try to go through as fast as I possibly can, kanji-to-keyword -- the point being to drill purely for speed of recognition. RTK is great for turning kanji from a jumble of strokes to a smaller jumble of parts, but I want to get the kanji in my head as distinct meaning-associated (or meaning-carrying) glyphs.

Tobberoth's point about doing this in the context of actual Japanese vocabulary words is a good one, but I have a dual purpose here: I want to improve my Japanese (I had 3 years at the university level a while back), but I am also preparing for learning Chinese (of which I have no experience at all); I'm betting that having the characters as distinct glyphs associated to English keywords will help a lot when when I tackle Simplified Hanzi.