Just wanted to post yet another reason why RTK is so useful:
I've recently made a few Chinese friends at my school purely through knowing RTK and being able to competently read Japanese material.
I can speak one word of Mandarin (albeit badly), Nihao. Yet, knowing the 2042 Kanji, plus some various 100 or so from book 3, I found mutual ground with a few Chinese students in my classes at school, and through discussions on the English meaning of various Kanji, we've become friends. One of them was particularly impressed when I read the Heisig keywords that made up their name. So, although I know practically no Chinese, no simplified characters, but I know RTK, I've bridged a language gap (just a little bit) rarely crossed by western high school students.

I will learn Chinese using RTH (Trad. and simpl.) sometime next year, but not for now.

I know what you mean. I live in a country with a huge chinese population so theres kanji/hanzi commonly displayed in various places throughout the city. And it's cool being able to identify the characters!

mezbup Wrote:I know what you mean. I live in a country with a huge chinese population so theres kanji/hanzi commonly displayed in various places throughout the city. And it's cool being able to identify the characters!

Yeah, I was just saying that whereas I had nothing in common with Chinese people beforehand, I now have 2, 000 characters worth of something in common with them.

mezbup Wrote:I know what you mean. I live in a country with a huge chinese population so theres kanji/hanzi commonly displayed in various places throughout the city. And it's cool being able to identify the characters!

What country do you live in?

New Zealand

I think every country seems to have a huge Chinese population. I mean, even my crappy little hometown in the middle of Pennsylvania had a bunch of Chinese (although you'd be hard pressed to find them anywhere outside of a restaurant, where the hell did they all go?)

How did there get to be so many?

Well it's not surprising considering they do make up a massive chunk of the worlds population. It'd be well worth learning chinese... but im not going down that road just yet.

mezbup Wrote:New Zealand

Holly shit me too! I always see Chinese characters on queen street and read out signs to my friends now.

I do the same thing on Queen Street every week day too I'm only half way through, but it's awesome actually seeing them in real life.

That's great, it's really cool when you can make a contact with folk purely from a knowledge about their language. Unfortunately, when I was at school there wasn't a single asian student in my year... ach well...

Haha omg you guys are in Auckland! Hopefully im moving back there soon... im down in Napier atm and theres still kanji down here! I read a few on the name of the restaraunt out loud and then I look above it and in english it says what I just said. Ahahaha. I thought it was quite cool.