Hi there,

I have studied Japanese both actively, with textbooks and classes and passively, through watching native media and speaking to Japanese friends for about 5 years or so now. I would describe my level as "conversational". I understand most things said, and have a general grasp of grammar (although not an academic one). I couldn't give you a JLPT equivalent of my level, because I simply haven't taken the tests.

My biggest problem, though, is reading and writing. I am pretty much illiterate - I can only read/write hiragana, katakana and basic kanji.

Can anybody recommend a quick path to learning kanji? I am well-aware of Heisig's RTK method, and have tried it using Anki - but I found it very laborious and have pretty well forgotten most of it. I am willing to try it again - but what about the next step?

The problem I have is that after I've done some of Heisig's RTK - they are still just meaningless symbols to me. With no use until I actually learn their readings or attach them to vocab I know. I have read that a good way of doing this for beginners is to learn them alongside the vocab. I can't really do that. I know most words already. It's boring and painful, and I can't bring myself to sit on the computer for hours on end trying to re-learn words I already know.

I've read about what I suspect are methods designed to do this quicker or more efficiently - something like the movie method or story method? Can somebody explain these? I am not sure how that works though - maybe I'm a little dense - but I tried looking up exactly what these were, and how to do them, and only got a vague idea and nothing concrete at all.

Are there any other ways to learn kun/on-yomi quickly? Can somebody recommend a way to do RTK that won't bore the hell out of me? Did the Japanese keywords project ever get finished, with an anki deck or list produced?

[I should also mention that I am a fifth-year law student with 3 part-time jobs, working on 2-3 volunteer projects at any one time - so any advice to get this done quickly/efficiently/while commuting would be appreciated]

Sorry for the long post!
Kurotoshiro3

This website here is the quickest way of learning kanji from what I've seen. There isn't really a shortcut so persevere and learn all of RTK 1 and maybe 3 as well. Learn to understand the radicals in kanji and learn what they really are. Once you start treating kanji as pictographs and ways of expressing ideas you'll find it easier to learn them without treating them as symbols.

If you're busy, even 30 minutes of study a day can help as long as you study smart and only take on as much kanji at once as you can fit into your routine.

If all you want to do is be able to read kanji, you could do RTK Lite/Ultralight and then just do Core6000 where all you test is Kanji -> Kana (since you already know the meaning?). However, this may not be the most interesting thing to do.

Your listening comprehension is pretty advanced.
This is what I would do:
Learn 214 classical bushu (radicals), they are building blocks of kanji.
Learn stroke order rules.
Take as many scripts with audio (and perhaps a translation into your language), just listen and look at the transcripts. Identify the components.
Go through as many texts with audio as possible, as quickly as possible.
Read what you understand aurally, check against the recording.
Type what you can read.
Write by hand what you can type.
You can find something for yourself here:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/

By the way, I didn’t like Heisig nor Anki at all.

You could probably just add a 'hint' field in the anki deck and add example words containing that kanji, but you type the reading represented by the kanji in kana. Not in the spirit of learning that word, but in the spirit of associating that kanji with that reading and that word. I will give an example since I can see how it might be difficult to see exactly what I mean.

If you're trying to learn 車 you would put　くるま on the front and if you want a word with on-reading i.e. 車輪 you would type しゃ輪. That's what I've been doing and it's been great for me, though I don't have the same background as you. But since you already 'know' the language, providing example vocab should only make it easier.

The biggest backside to this however is that in the above example compound, if you don't know 輪 then obviously the help gotten will be very limited. But the more characters you learn the more help you'll have from the example vocab. The good thing is that the keywords are at most a stepping stone, if even that, as you will look at the vocab instead of the keyword half the time.

If you like yo mamma jokes and dirty humor you could try http://kanjidamage.com/. You learn the jouyou kanji alonside their readings with goofy mnemonics.

Disclaimer, I've never used kanjidamage and I haven't heard much from it recently, but it might be worth checking out. At the very least, it might keep you interested longer than vanilla RTK.