yukamina Wrote:Why do RTK again? Just learn words and sentences that use the kanji.

That doesn't mean you can write them when the time comes. Heisig is something you do so you can focus 100% on recognition because you already know how to write the kanji. Stop doing that, and you end up in traditional learning-land where everyone can read the kanji but never write them.

If it was as easy as you want to make it seem, RtK would be useless; just learn words including kanji!

Tobberoth Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:Why do RTK again? Just learn words and sentences that use the kanji.

That doesn't mean you can write them when the time comes. Heisig is something you do so you can focus 100% on recognition because you already know how to write the kanji. Stop doing that, and you end up in traditional learning-land where everyone can read the kanji but never write them.

If it was as easy as you want to make it seem, RtK would be useless; just learn words including kanji!

Well, wouldn't it be more efficient to learn how to read and then write??? I've been thinking about that lately, and...it would make sense with the input hypothesis stuff.

igordesu Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:Why do RTK again? Just learn words and sentences that use the kanji.

That doesn't mean you can write them when the time comes. Heisig is something you do so you can focus 100% on recognition because you already know how to write the kanji. Stop doing that, and you end up in traditional learning-land where everyone can read the kanji but never write them.

If it was as easy as you want to make it seem, RtK would be useless; just learn words including kanji!

Well, wouldn't it be more efficient to learn how to read and then write??? I've been thinking about that lately, and...it would make sense with the input hypothesis stuff.

Nah, it's really hard to do it the other way around. If you learn Japanese the traditional way before finding RtK, you basically have to relearn all compounds you learned before to understand which kanji to use when writing it. The same isn't (as big of) a problem the other way around.

And really, didn't you learn to write latin characters way before learning how to read text? If you did such in your native language, it makes sense to do so in Japanese.

Tobberoth Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:Why do RTK again? Just learn words and sentences that use the kanji.

That doesn't mean you can write them when the time comes. Heisig is something you do so you can focus 100% on recognition because you already know how to write the kanji. Stop doing that, and you end up in traditional learning-land where everyone can read the kanji but never write them.

If it was as easy as you want to make it seem, RtK would be useless; just learn words including kanji!

Does that really apply to doing RTK a second time? If you've already done RTK, learning the words and sentences after should be enough to review the kanji. You can write things out by hand to re-enforce writing skills. You don't need to keep going back(if that was the key to remembering the kanji, it wouldn't be a very efficient method)

Pete171, you already decided what you wanted to do. Maybe you did not have to post a thread asking for support on something you want to do anyway. Trust me, every thread is going to give you many different opinions backed up with strong assertions.

If you don't want to review via RevTK anymore then don't. You're still doing Japanese. Ok, you'll forget the less used Kanji now and again, but that's the trade off. If that's reasonable and it keeps you going at Japanese studies then yes, stop your RTK reviews.

Don't expect us to say it's a good idea or one that's recommended. But most of us are self study with our own way of doing things. If it works for you it works for you. Not everyone is going to say it's good, but that's how message boards operate. Just tell us the results, and offer advice later on based on your experiences to another that may decide to do the same.

yukamina Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:Why do RTK again? Just learn words and sentences that use the kanji.

That doesn't mean you can write them when the time comes. Heisig is something you do so you can focus 100% on recognition because you already know how to write the kanji. Stop doing that, and you end up in traditional learning-land where everyone can read the kanji but never write them.

If it was as easy as you want to make it seem, RtK would be useless; just learn words including kanji!

Does that really apply to doing RTK a second time? If you've already done RTK, learning the words and sentences after should be enough to review the kanji. You can write things out by hand to re-enforce writing skills. You don't need to keep going back(if that was the key to remembering the kanji, it wouldn't be a very efficient method)

Why would anyone go back and do it a second time? That's the whole point! Don't stop, finish it once so you never have to do it again. Stop in the middle, when your cards are still expiring, and you'll eventually have to learn those kanji again... a waste of time. Like I said before, 7-10 successful reviews is all you need, then you'll never see that card again because you'll remember it until you die.

Tobberoth Wrote:

igordesu Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:That doesn't mean you can write them when the time comes. Heisig is something you do so you can focus 100% on recognition because you already know how to write the kanji. Stop doing that, and you end up in traditional learning-land where everyone can read the kanji but never write them.

If it was as easy as you want to make it seem, RtK would be useless; just learn words including kanji!

Well, wouldn't it be more efficient to learn how to read and then write??? I've been thinking about that lately, and...it would make sense with the input hypothesis stuff.

Nah, it's really hard to do it the other way around. If you learn Japanese the traditional way before finding RtK, you basically have to relearn all compounds you learned before to understand which kanji to use when writing it. The same isn't (as big of) a problem the other way around.

And really, didn't you learn to write latin characters way before learning how to read text? If you did such in your native language, it makes sense to do so in Japanese.

Well, that's assuming that the fact of having done RTK helps while reading, which...is sort of not true for me. I went all the way through RTK and and can write them in my reviews prompted by the english keyword, but I have no idea about the meaning of most kanji when I'm reading.

Basically, what we're essentially debating is whether the sentence method combined with tons of reading can teach you to read within a reasonable amount of time without RTK. I mean, heck, I even did RTK, and, even if I stop reviewing, the fact that I went through and systematically analyzed the logic behind all the kanji must count for something.

What I'm thinking is, perhaps, after I can read at a decent level, I'll do RTK with Japanese keywords. Then...I'll just starting writing out my sentence reviews everyday or something.

Tobberoth Wrote:Why would anyone go back and do it a second time? That's the whole point! Don't stop, finish it once so you never have to do it again. Stop in the middle, when your cards are still expiring, and you'll eventually have to learn those kanji again... a waste of time. Like I said before, 7-10 successful reviews is all you need, then you'll never see that card again because you'll remember it until you die.

I guess it wasn't clear. When I said "Why do RTK again?" I was relying to igordesu who said he'd do RKT again a year from now.

yukamina Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Why would anyone go back and do it a second time? That's the whole point! Don't stop, finish it once so you never have to do it again. Stop in the middle, when your cards are still expiring, and you'll eventually have to learn those kanji again... a waste of time. Like I said before, 7-10 successful reviews is all you need, then you'll never see that card again because you'll remember it until you die.

I guess it wasn't clear. When I said "Why do RTK again?" I was relying to igordesu who said he'd do RKT again a year from now.

Oh... well then I'm kinda agreeing with you I guess. I do think the act of doing RtK does wonders for recognition and production though, so I really think anyone who is serious about learning Japanese should not only complete it, they should review those kanji until they are done with it, simply because of the massive benefits. Doing it once (and quitting) then redoing it though... nah, too much work. At that point, I'd probably just say "deal with it". Add sentences, find kanji you suck at and create specific dictation training for those. Someone who has already done RtK should be good enough at creating stories and splitting up kanji to work with it on a kanji-by-kanji basis.

@tobberoth: I'm also not so sure I agree with your argument about learning to write the latin alphabet before learning to read. In English, at least, learning the meanings and pronunciations of words was a largely separate task because the words aren't spelled like their pronunciation. I remember our teacher in first grade holding up cards with words on them and telling us how to say them.

igordesu Wrote:@tobberoth: I'm also not so sure I agree with your argument about learning to write the latin alphabet before learning to read. In English, at least, learning the meanings and pronunciations of words was a largely separate task because the words aren't spelled like their pronunciation. I remember our teacher in first grade holding up cards with words on them and telling us how to say them.

Well, my comparision was flawed regardless because the difference is that you can hear much more easily in alphabetical languages what to use. It doesn't matter if you can't write kana when you learn how to read it. By hearing "kana", you know it should be か and な, even if you learn them later. The same isn't true with kanji. It's often impossible to hear which kanji to use, you have to rely on some form of memory. For people who learned recognition first, it's visual memory... how did that 熟語 look when I saw it last? It's not an easy or good thing to do. Much easier if you already knew the kanji when you learned it, so it was part of the internalization from the start.

that's part of the problem, though, isn't it? for lots of people (like myself), doing RTK doesn't help you "know" the kanji at all. You know how to write the lines in the correct manner based on the prompting of an english keyword. You don't "know" anything about how the kanji is related to actual Japanese. You know? I mean, for me at least, either way, I'd be relying on recognition first...

Pete171 Wrote:Honestly, I posted this thread in the hopes that some human advice or responses would surface and convince me that if I truly believed I had gained all I could from Heisig then I should quit immediately in favour of something more productive and fun. It seems, though, that the infallible SRS system has once again triumphed and I am to forever remain a slave to those three buttons: "No", "Yes", and "Easy".

Sarcasm aside, does anybody agree?

Wow sounds like you just want some "yes" men. Just do it then come back and report on how it goes in a year.

I pretty much stated outright that I was still only SRSing them due to my OCDish personality and that I was simply wondering if anybody had ever felt similarly since, yes, I had pretty much decided on wanting to abandon them myself, having felt they had served their purpose. Perhaps my second post was a little too dry for its own good but I am honestly outstanded by the almost mechanical responses from several people regarding SRSing.

As a side note though, I fail to see the offence caused by my posting of a thread asking for the experiences of others, even if I'm already sure of the course I want to take. It might sound ridiculous but I find it very hard to just ignore those orange stacks, knowing that they will be slowly piling up each and every new day.

Pete171 Wrote:I pretty much stated outright that I was still only SRSing them due to my OCDish personality and that I was simply wondering if anybody had ever felt similarly since, yes, I had pretty much decided on wanting to abandon them myself, having felt they had served their purpose. Perhaps my second post was a little too dry for its own good but I am honestly outstanded by the almost mechanical responses from several people regarding SRSing.

As a side note though, I fail to see the offence caused by my posting of a thread asking for the experiences of others, even if I'm already sure of the course I want to take. It might sound ridiculous but I find it very hard to just ignore those orange stacks, knowing that they will be slowly piling up each and every new day.

Well stated. I agree. I don't agree with abandoning it, I think you should swap to anki and put Japanese on mature cards.
Edit: or just go through it again starting now with Japanese, suspend everything and restart?

igordesu Wrote:that's part of the problem, though, isn't it? for lots of people (like myself), doing RTK doesn't help you "know" the kanji at all. You know how to write the lines in the correct manner based on the prompting of an english keyword. You don't "know" anything about how the kanji is related to actual Japanese. You know? I mean, for me at least, either way, I'd be relying on recognition first...

And that is a skill most Japanese learners don't have and one I'd like to retain after spending all of the effort to learn to do so in the first place. This is coming from someone that stopped reviewing RTK for the exact same reasons as the OP, started doing recognition sentences thinking I would simply retain this ability, and have since realized my folly and regretted it tremendously.

Being able to write a Kanji from memory requires an intimate knowledge of said Kanji that recognition alone can not give you.

I stopped doing the RTK deck soon after I began doing sentences regularly (I always write out new words, or things I'm feeling vague about). There's a period where you're only learning words with basic kanji for a while, but I passed that before my memory of RTK kanji noticeably faded. Plus, relearning kanji is very quick, so if I am ever fuzzy on something, I just restudy it briefly. Also, after doing RTK, I found it very easy to learn non-RTK kanji or RTK3 kanji I encountered in new words, without doing them separately as RTK cards.

Anyway, I personally found this better than having RTK reviews in addition to sentences, or getting confused by English keywords, or going through the trouble of replacing keywords, etc.

I think you can just do Recognition cards for sentences and start the JRTK (Japanese RTK) With Production cards. Then you won't forget how to write the kanji, and you'll have a nice replacement for this site.

(I also do recognition cards for sentences, but that's just personal taste... I do think that being able to write kanji from memory is only for the purpose of "show off", in these days we only use computers so we don't have to write.)

Hmm, that's interesting. Well, I think that, since I'll be doing nothing except reading until I go through RTK with Japanese keywords, I'll stop reviewing my normal rtk deck. I mean, if I don't do kanji reviews anymore, so what, I can't write them anymore? No big deal, I s'pose.

RtK's true value isn't that you are able to go keyword to kanji. Nor is it that you can recognize the meaning of the more complicated characters in the wild-- most people who finish RtK can't go kanji to keyword, even though Heisig may claim otherwise, and really, that doesn't even matter because the value in being able to distinguish individual kanji meanings (via keyword) only really helps for verbs, kanji that dominate their respective compound groups, and in a limited environment, like test taking where you're trying to guess the right meaning from a group of wrong meanings. The value of RtK is that it familiarizes the mind with a very effective way to learn future characters, to remember characters you already know, and also introduces you to a large group of standard characters which are quite useful.

For me, going through my RtK deck and completely changing the context I had been reviewing those cards for months on end (after all, if you completely change the question (ie go from English to Japanese keywords, why not just create 2000 new cards and delete the old ones? the time commitment, along with the inevitable confusion seems to be about the same or more damaging than just creating new cards) just didn't seem to be worth my time. I suspended my RtK cards and am now working through Kanji Odyssey, adding multiple compounds for each character that I do production on-- only now instead of going English to kanji, I'm doing Japanese kana to compound.

Does this mean that doing RtK in the first place was worthless? No. Because of RtK I have the skill to glide through KiC and kanji are no longer the huge, monumental stumbling block they were before I did it. However, that's not to say that reviewing RtK forever is a great idea either. At some point, it's inevitable that you're going to outgrow certain cards. I delete cards in my deck all the time-- some with intervals of a year+ because after a certain point, I just don't need to study things like "今、何時ですか" anymore. Like anything else in my life, the SRS is just a very accurate guideline. In the end, I'm not a slave to my tools. I make the final decision.

Mesqueeb Wrote:I do think that being able to write kanji from memory is only for the purpose of "show off", in these days we only use computers so we don't have to write.

Personally, from my experience. The easiest and most reliable way to ensure fast recognition and understand which compound is correct to type requires me to know how to write it by hand also. It simply improves my ability by knowing how to write it. I see it as much more beneficial than simply "showing off." Perhaps that is just how my brain works.

The reason I started RTK is because I struggled for many years with the Japanese language and finally gave up for 3 years. Recently, I concluded that my struggles were due to not understanding the language intuitively. It seemed like sounds that I had to memorize (I am terrible at memorization). The Heisig method in learning how to write the characters has, in a sense, made understanding reading and spoken Japanese significantly more intuitive to me.

Mesqueeb Wrote:I do think that being able to write kanji from memory is only for the purpose of "show off", in these days we only use computers so we don't have to write.)

kinesthetic memory is a very important element in kanji retention that can't be gained just by typing in "kan" or "shou" or whatever and then having complete kanjis bloom before your eyes.

FutureBlues Wrote:At some point, it's inevitable that you're going to outgrow certain cards. I delete cards in my deck all the time-- some with intervals of a year+ because after a certain point, I just don't need to study things like "今、何時ですか" anymore. Like anything else in my life, the SRS is just a very accurate guideline. In the end, I'm not a slave to my tools. I make the final decision.

Why? The card will pop up in a year+. When it does, it will take you 5 nanoseconds to push "Easy" and you won't see that card again in like 5-6 years. You're wasting a LOT more time deleting the card than simply keeping it in the deck. That's the point of SRS. It spaces things you don't need to review away so far that you won't see it again.

Personally, I never remove cards, I simply start pushing "easy" once I'm perfectly familiar with the items.

I aggree with Tobberoth on this one. Keep reviewing. You need to know this stuff and you need to know it well. Review time will eventually approach zero.
I got into the groove and powered through RTK1 in a few months. Then, like many others I think, I had no real plan for study and efficiency went down the drain. I wasted a lot of time researching different methods and switching between different things. I stopped reviewing rtk, believing it would be enough to just keep reading random books and manga. It eventually became clear to me however that kanji was still holding me back. So I've gone back to doing the reviews. This time though, I'm testing myself on onyomi(and creating onyomi mnemonics) while i review. I've also started on rtk3 to maintain the forward momentum.

I stopped around 2 months after finishing, and I do not recommend it. I forgot some primitives even existed, let alone how to write them. Thankfully, I now have all my cards in one deck called "Life.anki", so it looks like I'll be reviewing kanji forever now