You think taking up this book is good for those of us who have already passed 2級?

Any general tips for intermediate learners on how to deal with the frustration of not learning new vocabulary and readings?


I apologize if this thread has been done to death before.

Thanks,
X

if you passed the jlpt 2, then you should know about 1,000 kanji. (not sure how many you know, you may know more).

considering there are 2,000 more very useful kanji if you did rtk1 and 3, I think it would be a great idea. should be a breeze getting through first 1,000. just use the most popular stories on this website when you get to the part of the book where he stops giving stories.

For me it was more productive to use the stories already up on the site. Btw, you people are freakin hilarious with some of the stories. the deer one had me almost break down laughing so hard i was crying lol.

You think I should concentrate on every kanji or just skip over the ones I know? Will that screw up the system?

just go through them like someone starting out for the first time. it won't be a huge time investment for the first 1,000.

i would do like 50 a day, and you will knock out what you know in about 3 weeks. then i would take it down to 30 a day. or if you feel its really easy bumb it up to 80 a day.

i recently finished RTK 1 and when doing my reviews, i tend to average at about 50 kanji every 10 minutes. assuming you do 50 a day, it should take you less than an hour a day for the first 3 weeks. just do it as a morning routine before work/school.

When I started I knew how to read and write about 600 or so Kanji. Still, the benefit I got from RTK is huge. My writing speed increased a lot and because I made stories even for Kanji I already learned (which I personally would advise you to do as well), I had no more problems keeping similar Kanji apart. You should be able to skip over those you already know, but I think there's enough benefits for you not to do so.

I started RTK after having passed JLPT2. (IME it's fairly easy to pass without actually really *knowing* a huge number of kanji, in the sense of being able to write them reliably. If you can read them in context that's mostly sufficient; the kanji part of the test isn't a huge proportion of the overall marks.)

On the other hand, when I got to the end (er, maybe a year ago now?) what I found was that I had good recall of keyword->kanji, but on the other hand this hasn't been much use in practice because I have basically no kanji->keyword memory, so when I'm reading I know that 得意 is とくい and I know what it means, but since I don't know what the kanji keywords are for 得 and 意, then I'm no further forward with remembering how to write it than I was before I started RTK...

So, I think RTK is worth doing, but on the other hand you need to make sure you can tie it in to the stuff you're actually trying to do, which is where I failed a bit.

Tobberoth was in this position IIRC. I think he advocated the use of Japanese keywords for those that had a grasp of the language already. With Japanese keywords, going kanji to keyword is a great recognition step to add in.

The question I'd ask is "are you picking up new kanji easily?"

If the answer is yes, it's too late, don't bother—you can do as well or better on your own. If the answer is still no, though, then I'd say it's probably still worthwhile.

~J