Quote:What's fortunate is that readings are automatically learned with words. You can't (as in, it's impossible to) actually spend your time 'only learning words' and 'not learning readings,' because every time you learn a word you've learned a reading of the kanji. You'd have to be pretty dense to not understand, after learning the word 食事, that ショク is one of 食's readings. The point of learning this way is that it turns what's usually thought of as a two-step process into a single step.

That's certainly true, but there's also importance in being able to distinguish which reading is a 音読み and which a 訓読み. Only having a list of readings in your mind for a character, but not knowing into which category those readings fall, makes reading personal names, place names, and unknown words much, much more difficult.

Quote:Aijin, out of interest, has your question been answered as to why many of us learn Kanji via our native language first?

I think I understand the gist of it. I don't really have an opinion as to which method is more efficient, since I can't test the methods on myself. But if it didn't work then of course this forum wouldn't have so many members, so there's definitely rhyme and reason to this method but how it compares to the way I was taught, and also to how foreigners are taught in a university setting, that I can't really say. I don't have enough experience yet with all the different methods, but I hope to gain that experience in time.

Aijin Wrote:That's certainly true, but there's also importance in being able to distinguish which reading is a 音読み and which a 訓読み. Only having a list of readings in your mind for a character, but not knowing into which category those readings fall, makes reading personal names, place names, and unknown words much, much more difficult.

Easy

音読み = chinesey chinesey SHOU~~ CHOU~~ KOU~~ etc
訓読み = japanesey AMATERASU OOOOOOOOOOOOMIKAMI, MONOGATARi
burra burra burra

lol

(I'm just joking btw, but it gives me a fairenough indication most of the time)

I'll stick with "RTK will REALLY pay off after finishing it" guys here use to say
I already tried the difference while studying Tae Kim's.

I was going to say what Liosama said, yeah. You can almost always tell an onyomi from a kunyomi when you hear it the first time. Onyomi sound Chinese, Kunyomi sound Japanese. They're in very different styles. And even if you couldn't, it rapidly becomes apparent due to various other circumstances, such as, well, how they're used. I wrote ショク rather than しょく because I know it's an onyomi. I also know that オン and　イン of 音 are on, and おと and ね are kun. I know that クン of 訓 is, ironically, on.

I haven't studied this, beyond reading a wikipedia definition of what 音読み and 訓読み are when I first started, and looking up words in the dictionary

Of course, I'm not saying a study of readings isn't beneficial in some way. But I couldn't say that it's necessary, or that not studying it hampers you in any particular way. Of course, I've never practiced the alternative to an appreciable level...

I can say, however, that this way is incredibly stress-free. I did actually try to learn the traditional way in the very beginning, and I found it absolutely torturous and slow, through about 250 kanji, and I forgot everything constantly. Conversely, learning this way has been only fun, and I don't forget as much. This may be a result of my specific approaches to both styles, but I can only speak to what's true of my personal experiences.

I can give you some feedback on this method vs. the university method. I took 6 semesters of Japanese in university, and I'd say the total number of kanji I was comfortable with was around 300-400. That's after about 2 years' worth of time, because I fit the first two semesters in over a summer. Still, that's pretty pathetic.

I stopped studying Japanese for about 2 years, and pretty much forgot everything. (Well, almost everything, but I'd say the number of kanji I really knew was pitifully small.) I'd say my number of "known" kanji dropped to something around 100 or so.

I started over with RTK in Fall, 2007, then went on to study Kanji Odyssey (among other things), and while it's hard to put an exact number on the number of kanji I "know," my Anki deck says that it contains 1016 unique kanji, with an overall pass rate of 97.9%. And that's going from kana-> kanji and kanji-> kana for each card, with over 8000 cards total.

So in the same ~2 years, I've more than doubled the number of kanji I knew in comparison to what I had learned in college. Even if you toss out 20% of that 1016 for only having one reading being tested, that's still 800 kanji for which I know more than one reading. (Which I'd say is fair.) That's still at least twice as many as I learned in college.

Of course, this is only one data point. Some are faster, some are slower. I'm sure a lot of other people on the board can give similar stories.

The thing RTK did for me was make it easier to break down kanji and assimilate them. The keywords are important as placeholders for me. As I replace them with Japanese, the English fades. But trying to memorize everything all at once was just way too inefficient. Division of labor for the win.

Aijin>
I think one way you can verify the effectiveness of RTK is by comparing the kanji ability of your students who are and are not following RTK to supplement their studies. You're teaching japanese at a university right? No doubt at least some of your students will be doing RTK.

As for the debate about learning readings independant from words, I'll second that it becomes extremely easy to tell what is onyomi and what is kunyomi simply from the sound.
I mentioned this in another thread, but I think it's definately worth your time to learn the most commonly used onyomi (used in 95% of jukugo) for each kanji. Because of the mostly mono-syllabic nature of the onyomi readings, it's incredably easy to memorise them using mnemonics, and once you've done that, reading/using a dictionary/guessing word meanings when listening/etc becomes much easier. I really think you get a lot of bang for your buck by studying onyomi.

iirc Aijin is an undergrad student.

People seem to be against frequency lists in this thread... but isn't KO2001 exactly that? A frequency list (within sentences)?

I personally think that you should do RTK as a topic unto itself purely to learn the kanji, and then the compounds you haven't learnt, pick up from reading books, newspapers, plain experience and exposure. If you try to learn too many things at once while doing RTK, you'll get bogged down and never finish it. Not only that, there is no formalised method for learning all 'common' compounds, and therefore it would require far too much effort. I'm constantly learning kanji vocabulary from media sources, separate from RTK, which I think has been far more effective.

nadiatims Wrote:I mentioned this in another thread, but I think it's definately worth your time to learn the most commonly used onyomi (used in 95% of jukugo) for each kanji. Because of the mostly mono-syllabic nature of the onyomi readings, it's incredably easy to memorise them using mnemonics, and once you've done that, reading/using a dictionary/guessing word meanings when listening/etc becomes much easier. I really think you get a lot of bang for your buck by studying onyomi.

This sounds interesting to me, studying only the onyomi for each kanji after RTK.

Since it seems easier to focus on thing at a time, like RTK does, studying only the onyomi seems complementary to the SRS method. Going from keyword -> kanji, then kanji -> onyomi, then kanji -> kunyomi, etc, seems like a good approach.

There are only a few possible ways to learn vocab:

frequency list: fast, boring, need to lookup context yourself
alphabetical list: retarded
textbook or test based list: really an extension of frequency-based studying, but with goals
as-encountered in the wild: potentially time consuming, more fun(?)

Personally I've been doing a combination of the last two. I imported JLPT lists into anki (suspended) and then supplement it with stuff I encounter in life. As I study stuff from the list (or encounter it) I unsuspend it. Once I'm done with the jlpt1 list I'll probably do kanken lists

scuda Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:I mentioned this in another thread, but I think it's definately worth your time to learn the most commonly used onyomi (used in 95% of jukugo) for each kanji. Because of the mostly mono-syllabic nature of the onyomi readings, it's incredably easy to memorise them using mnemonics, and once you've done that, reading/using a dictionary/guessing word meanings when listening/etc becomes much easier. I really think you get a lot of bang for your buck by studying onyomi.

This sounds interesting to me, studying only the onyomi for each kanji after RTK.

Since it seems easier to focus on thing at a time, like RTK does, studying only the onyomi seems complementary to the SRS method. Going from keyword -> kanji, then kanji -> onyomi, then kanji -> kunyomi, etc, seems like a good approach.

I think it's better to learn words in context, that way you pick up readings, words & ability to comprehend at the same. To learn an on-yomi, you just need to learn a few words that use that reading.

For example, someone who uses the Movie Method will know 進 is read "shin" because they have some story for it about proceeding turkeys in their "shin" move. I know it, because I know a bunch of common words like 進歩(しんぽ), 進路(しんろ), 進学(しんがく), etc. which I think is more useful, and it's not hard to learn.

Thanks vosmiura, that's encouraging. But it would've taken longer to learn the onyomi wouldn't it? Segregating onyomi, ala RTK with its kanji, is surely faster than learning them in context?

Nii87 Wrote:Thanks vosmiura, that's encouraging. But it would've taken longer to learn the onyomi wouldn't it? Segregating onyomi, ala RTK with its kanji, is surely faster than learning them in context?

But faster doesn't necessarily mean better or more effective in this case. Knowing the on'yomi to a kanji you don't know any words using is more or less useless. While it has a chance of improving your ability to memorize vocabulary using the on'yomi you've learned, you're also spending time learning it which could be spent learning words, giving the same result. Say it takes 3 months to learn all the on'yomi. In those 3 months, you could complete KO2001, giving you the same knowledge and TONS of vocab, grammar and kun'yomi.

It feels quite logical that I wouldn't know the on'yomi for a kanji I don't know the use of.

If you learn the readings in isolation then sure you can cover all the common on-readings in a shorter time, but it's not an end in and of itself. You still have to learn vocab, and it's not clear to me how much you gain overall by separating readings from learning vocab and practicing reading.

If you do the Movie Method from the beginning and it doesn't take much longer than doing RTK, then why not. But if you've already done RTK then I think there's less value in learning readings in isolation.

I also think using mnemonics for All on-readings is sub-optimal. With readings there are some that are frequent and/or easy to remember and some that are rare or easy to mix up. No need to use mnemonics for everything IMO.

welldone101 Wrote:Just comments like this make me wonder if you stumbled across these forums by accident and became intrigued by the many avid and successful Japanese learners, without realizing most of them owed their success (and motivation) to this very concept.

Some of us who post here do not owe our success and motivation to the Heisig method. To be honest, if I could go back and do it again, I wouldn't do RTK. I spent three months on RTK when I could have been doing real Japanese. I think RTK is probably useful if you want to write a lot of Japanese by hand, but I don't care. I can READ the kanji so I know what the correct reading is when I use a computer or read a book.

I have a friend who started studying Japanese from the beginning in August of last year and will take JLPT 2 in a couple weeks. I told him about the Heisig method at the beginning and he decided to skip it and instead use the White Rabit Press cards. In addition to learning kanji, he learned 5 words that went with each kanji and related kanji.

I'm not saying the Heisig method is bad, it obviously works for some people, and I continue to frequent this site to see what new ideas people are coming up with (such as this post).

I almost went crazy doing Rtk2 because I swear there are at least 20 sous, kans, shous,tous and kous

captal Wrote:I have a friend who started studying Japanese from the beginning in August of last year and will take JLPT 2 in a couple weeks. I told him about the Heisig method at the beginning and he decided to skip it and instead use the White Rabit Press cards. In addition to learning kanji, he learned 5 words that went with each kanji and related kanji.

You make it sound like he got to learn 5 vocabulary words per kanji basically for free just by using those cards. I think that learning those words took some time just like they take the same time if you learn them after having finished RtK.

Now skipping the writing part and just learning to recognize only can save time, but I think that even if you don't plan to write a lot of Japanese by hand that's a serious weakness that can cause confusion between similar characters when the context doesn't make it clear which one is used.

I used the Tuttle flashcards before I tried Heisig, and that was slow and inefficient.

If he got to the point where he can pass JLPT2 in less than a year, it sure as hell wasn't a set of traditional (rtk) flashcards that got him there.

It sure was a lot more than that, but that's where he started instead of RTK- went through the lvl 3/4 and then moved on to the lvl 2- learning readings and vocab at the same time as kanji.

He is hardcore though- studies about 5 hours a day- I can't handle that much study.

I think the best way to go about learning, is to to break something down into parts, and then learn the most finite parts first to make the less finite parts easier. I think most of us would agree that in the case of Japanese the biggest set of information to absorb is the vocabulary (tens(hundreds?) of thousands of words) and idioms. First their basic meaning and then usage and nuances. So anything we can learn before hand to make that main task easier is definately worth your time. Learning onyomi via mnemonics is extremely easy and certainly takes less than the 3 months suggested by Tobberoth, if you've already completed RTK1, let alone doing meaning and onyomi simoultaneously (via movie method or such). Anyway if I could go back in time i'd probably learn things in the following order (which is basically ordered smallest data set to biggest data set):

syntax = simple
hiragana/katakana via mnemonics (like I learned at school)
kanji meaning/writing/recognition + onyomi (via RTK but incorperating a 'sound primitive' in my stories)
kunyomi (maybe...? haven't found an effective mnemonics method yet)
words (reading/listening)
idioms (reading/listening)
usage (reading/listening)

Interesting to note that schools typically start teaching the least finite thing first (usage) right off the bat, with sample dialogues taking place in airports/hotel lobbies etc.

Another note about learning onyomi:
I believe it ultimately makes learning new onyomi words easier, because there is less 'new' information to learn (meaning only), and there is more 'old' information for it to stick to. In other words, the existing kanji and onyomi pair in your brain is acting as a place holder to stick new words to.

captal Wrote:

welldone101 Wrote:Just comments like this make me wonder if you stumbled across these forums by accident and became intrigued by the many avid and successful Japanese learners, without realizing most of them owed their success (and motivation) to this very concept.

Some of us who post here do not owe our success and motivation to the Heisig method. To be honest, if I could go back and do it again, I wouldn't do RTK. I spent three months on RTK when I could have been doing real Japanese. I think RTK is probably useful if you want to write a lot of Japanese by hand, but I don't care. I can READ the kanji so I know what the correct reading is when I use a computer or read a book.

I have a friend who started studying Japanese from the beginning in August of last year and will take JLPT 2 in a couple weeks. I told him about the Heisig method at the beginning and he decided to skip it and instead use the White Rabit Press cards. In addition to learning kanji, he learned 5 words that went with each kanji and related kanji.

I'm not saying the Heisig method is bad, it obviously works for some people, and I continue to frequent this site to see what new ideas people are coming up with (such as this post).

Ah, I've seen people using those cards. Pretty nifty. I wish I had shiny laminated flash cards when I was learning English It's an interesting idea though, six words per kanji and by the time you reach 2,000 kanji you'll learn 12,000 words.

Hopefully I'll be able to try my hand at teaching soon so I can use my students as *ahem* lab rats so I can get more of an idea as to which methods are most effective.

captal Wrote:It sure was a lot more than that, but that's where he started instead of RTK- went through the lvl 3/4 and then moved on to the lvl 2- learning readings and vocab at the same time as kanji.

He is hardcore though- studies about 5 hours a day- I can't handle that much study.

Heh, in 5 hours a day I think both RTK1 + KO would take only 2-3 months.

I used the WRP flashcards too before RTK, but I found it boring and after a few hundred, I basically hit a block. The set of cards for JLPT2 is HUGE. Anki 1 - dead tree 0.

nadiatims Wrote:I think the best way to go about learning, is to to break something down into parts, and then learn the most finite parts first to make the less finite parts easier. I think most of us would agree that in the case of Japanese the biggest set of information to absorb is the vocabulary (tens(hundreds?) of thousands of words) and idioms. First their basic meaning and then usage and nuances. So anything we can learn before hand to make that main task easier is definately worth your time. Learning onyomi via mnemonics is extremely easy and certainly takes less than the 3 months suggested by Tobberoth, if you've already completed RTK1, let alone doing meaning and onyomi simoultaneously (via movie method or such). Anyway if I could go back in time i'd probably learn things in the following order (which is basically ordered smallest data set to biggest data set):

syntax = simple
hiragana/katakana via mnemonics (like I learned at school)
kanji meaning/writing/recognition + onyomi (via RTK but incorperating a 'sound primitive' in my stories)
kunyomi (maybe...? haven't found an effective mnemonics method yet)
words (reading/listening)
idioms (reading/listening)
usage (reading/listening)

Interesting to note that schools typically start teaching the least finite thing first (usage) right off the bat, with sample dialogues taking place in airports/hotel lobbies etc.

Another note about learning onyomi:
I believe it ultimately makes learning new onyomi words easier, because there is less 'new' information to learn (meaning only), and there is more 'old' information for it to stick to. In other words, the existing kanji and onyomi pair in your brain is acting as a place holder to stick new words to.

If you isolated things completely it seems like you would be delaying understanding of the language as long as possible, and that doesn't seem like the best way to acquire the language.

I agree in divide & conquer myself, but I think you have to choose the divisions appropriately so as not to divide & multiply.

I believe kanji writing is good to separate with RTK because kanji writing is not closely related to readings - no matter how many times i practice "さいこう" it doesn't help me to remember that "sai" is written with a "sun" over an "elongated ear + crotch" (最). I might learn to recognize the look of the kanji, but if I want to accurately remember all the parts of the kanji, they need their own study.

However if I learn 最高, 最低, 最大, 最近, 最後, 最古 etc. it does help to learn 最 = "さい", so you can learn the two together. Practicing words enforces the readings, and if you learn several words that use 最 then 最 = "さい" will be a part of you like white on rice without ever needing a mnemonic.

And why learn the idioms (i.e. the exceptions to normal usage) before normal usage?

Meh, I don't know the difference between 音読み and 訓読み when I'm reading, and I end up fine. My brain organizes everything for me. When I see a new compound, with familiar kanji, I tend to get it right most the time.