I found this whilst online: http://www.coscom.co.jp/ebook/pakipic/sample-cards.html

I think its perfect, just what I needed to build vocab and sentence comprehension. However that only distributes those cards through mail. You can't get them online even if you purchase (which is what I prefer.)

Are there alternatives (because this looks really helpful) or a different distributor?

It doesn't have any kanji on it. You can use other methods to learn vocab, sentence structure, and kanji readings at the same time.

What method is that?

I started really going at kanji 3 days ago. 220 kanji in, thanks to heisig. However my vocab sucks. I really need to improve my vocabulary. Please enlighten me.

P.S. the heisig method is good but its teaching me kanjis that i will likely never use. like 桐
Have any experianced members benefited from such rarely used kanjis? shouldnt we be learning the 500 basic kanjis the school kids learn first?

mastermx Wrote:What method is that?


I started really going at kanji 3 days ago. 220 kanji in, thanks to heisig. However my vocab sucks. I really need to improve my vocabulary. Please enlighten me.

P.S. the heisig method is good but its teaching me kanjis that i will likely never use. like 桐
Have any experianced members benefited from such rarely used kanjis? shouldnt we be learning the 500 basic kanjis the school kids learn first?

AJATT method? http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...tences-how

If it is a jouyou kanji, it will surely show up at some point, and you are going to want to know what it is, so you need to learn them. I would say only get picky once you have completed all the jouyou kanji; they are essential.

So are you saying the AJATT method will help me on vocab sentence and structure? I thought that needed atleast 1500 kanji to do. doesn't it?

That was my concern that there are still some really basic jouyou kanjis that still havent showed up in the heisig method. will they all show up early on? or do i have to wait to get to 1700 to see some of them?

Yes, it will teach you vocabulary and how to read Japanese. Khatz requires you learn the jouyou kanji first before you dive into sentences, but you can start now if you wanted to. AJATT teaches you how to read the kanji (by learning the words in context that use them), which is what RTK isnt going to do for you.

In my opinion, it would be easier to learn words after having gone through all the jouyou kanji, and then start on sentences, but it can still work if you wanted to start building your vocabulary now. As for common kanji and Heisig, his kanji order is based on his primitives he uses, so there are common and less common kanji all throughout the list in no real order of how common or obscure they are.

I had thought that heisig's method is the most reliable method to learn kanji.

What method would you recommend that teaches the jouyou kanji?

If you want to play it safe (not get into too much complicated vocabulary, but still learn grammar structure and very basic vocabulary), you can start getting example sentences from Tae Kims website, which teaches you basic Japanese grammar.

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/

Well, pretty much all of us here use or have used RTK, and most of us think it is very reliable, but everyone knows that RTK isnt going to help you learn the readings of the kanji (Heisig says that clearly in the first book though the second book teaches you readings; however, the ajatt mehtod is a much more fun way of learning the readings of the kanji). What RTK does is help you to remember the kanji, and if you apply the methods of AJATT, which involves learning them with the SRS, then you will learn how to write them from memory. So yes, RTK is reliable, but it is only the first step. After learning how to write kanji from memory, you will want to learn how to read them, which brings you to the sentence method, so RTK plus sentence mining is the main combo to becoming literate in Japanese.

Also, if you were thinking AJATT is unreliable because of the order that they are in, then that isnt the case at all. Heisigs order helps a lot since most kanji use the same primitives that make up other kanji, so if you learned a batch of kanji that all have the same primitives, you will likely remember that character better since you got a good deal of repetition in. I think the biggest hurdle for you is if you want to do all the jouyou kanji. If you do, it shouldnt matter what order you do them in since you will have learned them all anyway when you finish and will have to review them all as many times as it takes until you remember them as well.

So how far do i have to go through heisig till i can use AJATT?

I think it is a matter of preference. If you want to do more than learn kanji, you can start getting example sentences at Tae Kims website, but if you want to wait until you complete the jouyou kanji, then that is also an option. But by doing Tae Kim, it will help you with grammar while giving a little bit of basic vocabulary to start with.

If you wait it out and start sentences after learning all the jouyou kanji, you should recognize nearly every kanji you come in contact with. If you start sentences early, you will learn how to read the kanji through sentences, then learn their meaning and how to recall them whenever you get to them in RTK. Either way, you are learning them, so it is good.

Another thing. AJATT isnt just something that you have to wait for. You could be doing it now. AJATT is all japanese all the time, so even if you decide you want to do just kanji, you can still have Japanese audio playing in the background for listening practice, or even movies/tv shows/anime etc.. I would recommend reading a few blog posts that interest you over on the ajatt website so that you can get a better understanding of what process Khatzumoto did to learn Japanese.

Or, you can check these videos out, which is Khatz giving a rough explanation of how the process works. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=...uery=ajatt

mastermx Wrote:So how far do i have to go through heisig till i can use AJATT?

One part of AJATT is immersion - listening and watching to Japanese, even if you don't understand it. You can do that from the beginning.

Another part is "sentence mining". Most people (including the AJATT guy) seem to recommend finishing RTK1 before starting this, although others disagree.
If you want to get to the sentence mining quicker, a good option might be "RTK Lite", which means you learn the most useful 1000 Kanji first.
See this for more details:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3865

I've been trying to find a way to switch to "RTK lite” since this is the first time ive heard of it. Are there any guides? That link didnt explain much... so RTK lite basically only shows you the most important and most used kanjis? is it like an option or something? plz help

P.S. ive already read the ajatt posts numerous times thanks though

RTK is not organized by frequency or usefulness - so useful or common kanji do not in general appear near the front. Heisig intended that you go through the whole book before starting to learn vocabulary etc.

You can try RTK lite if you wish, but after it your vocabulary learning ability will be limited as you won't know the meaning of kanji not in RTK lite, and after a while you're gonna want to go back and do the complete RTK anyway, so I think it's best to suck it up and go through the whole RTK first.

@mastermx, the main RTK Lite thread is here. Read at your leisure.

@zodiac, just like you don't need to redo RTK I before starting RTK III, there's no need to start RTK I from zero again after doing RTK Lite. The way the script is set up, after completing the RTK Lite kanji, and provided you keep up your reviews, you can at any moment (or even right away) continue with the non-Lite kanji by simply adding new kanji.

I'm a little confused. I study kanji by looking at heisigs RTK and reading his mnemonics. If lite overtakes some kanji does that mean il have to go back and use @find on heisigs book to get his explanation on the kanji i missed?

Also whilst I am at 220 kanji. The idea of knowing 2000 kanji just seems so out of reach for me. How can i retain them all. I would have to constantly review them. nearly everyday. even after i have learned them... Is this what you guys do? or is it that after youve learned them they just stick with very little effort?

Furthermore the fact that i have to go through all of heisigs kanji's just to get at the most important ones seems difficult.

Im still gonna try for it. I'm gonna learn everything. But these just my thoughts at the moment. If any experianced RTK'ers have some info that might help me or anyone else reading this thread. feel free to share

mastermx Wrote:Also whilst I am at 220 kanji. The idea of knowing 2000 kanji just seems so out of reach for me. How can i retain them all. I would have to constantly review them. nearly everyday. even after i have learned them... Is this what you guys do? or is it that after youve learned them they just stick with very little effort?

Are you not using the SRS on this site, or any other? You only have to review a few every day.

I use the srs on this. I used to use Anki but I like it here more. but what I am asking is, will i always have to use this site to keep these kanji' in memory. I'm sure many adult native japanese dont need to review kanji when they are older. But im worried that if i dont, then i'l forget them.

mastermx Wrote:I use the srs on this. I used to use Anki but I like it here more. but what I am asking is, will i always have to use this site to keep these kanji' in memory. I'm sure many adult native japanese dont need to review kanji when they are older. But im worried that if i dont, then i'l forget them.

Adult Japanese forget kanji all the time... yet they are writing and reading them more or less every day.

If you want to know them perfectly, keep using the SRS. If you don't care, you can stop doing it eventually. Just make sure you keep using kanji all the time and it won't be all that much worse for you than it is to Japanese people.... but yeah, you need to be pretty amazing at Japanese to get the same high quality exposure everyday that Japanese natives get.

Yes, you are supposed to keep reviewing for a long time. Don't worry, if you use an SRS reviews will take care of themselves. If you keep reviewing periodically, repetitions will start decreasing naturally, because the more you review a kanji -and pass it-, the less you need to review it in the future.

Of course reading Japanese is an extremely useful way of reviewing kanji and vocabulary, but using this site's SRS will help you a lot anyway, so don't think of it as a waste of time, but rather as an investment.

About Japanese people "not" forgetting kanji:

1.- Their whole lives are in Japanese.

2.- Even though their whole lives are in Japanese, they do forget their kanji too. If you don't believe me, ask Prime Minister Aso Tarou san.

So your saying no one can say that they have learnt kanji. Because it would require constant review anyway? Your telling me it wont stick to long term memory unless its constantly reinforced by exposure.

I was hoping someone to say "One you've learnt it, its there"

Because if thats the case, then i might aswell just do the lite version knowing that most people forget all the other kanji's anyway except for the most used ones.

P.S. i looked into aso taro, this is what it says on wiki:

"The Japanese media noted in November 2008 that Aso often mispronounced or incorrectly read kanji words written in his speeches, even though many of the words are commonly used in Japanese.[45] Aso spoke of the speaking errors to reporters on November 12, 2008 saying, "Those were just reading errors, just mistakes."[46] Aso's tendency for malapropisms has led comparisons to George W. Bush, and the use of his name, "Taro" as a schoolyard taunt for unintelligent children.[47]
An anatomy professor from the University of Tokyo, Takeshi Yoro, speculated that Aso could possibly suffer from dyslexia.[48]"

You're missing the point. People don't 'forget' the ones less common than the most common 1000. The 'most common' characters that Japanese people get from everyday exposure number well over 3000, and you need to know these to read varied Japanese material easily. (And the kind of people who are like those of us around here in English [language-inclined, avid-readers] will know, because they need to, considerably more than that)

But this isn't going to happen for you. Not immediately. Japanese retain this degree of knowledge because they spend all day every day in Japanese, speaking in Japanese, thinking in Japanese, writing in Japanese, typing in Japanese, reading in Japanese. And they do all of these things quickly, in large quantities. What a particular Japanese person reads in a day is probably more than you can handle reading in a week. As a beginner, one would feel accomplished just reading a bit of Japanese as long as this post I'm writing right now, for the whole day. But as an English speaker, this is barely a drop in the bucket for what you'll be reading today. So, a Japanese person is going to see some 'relatively obscure' word as often as you're going to see 猫.

An SRS is essentially a way of circumventing this while you're still learning, or otherwise can't put in an appreciable amount of time compared to an actual Japanese person. It's a way of helping you remember things that you do need to know, even though you might not be seeing them often enough to easily remember them automatically right now. There are several Japanese words I've only seen once or twice, but Japanese know *very* well, and thousands more that I've never seen at all that (again) Japanese can read and write brilliantly. This isn't because the words and their kanji are rare, it's just because I don't read enough.

Just do RTK in its entirety, RTK lite will leave you missing a lot of Kanji over time and you will have to continually add to your deck as you see these "new" albeit less frequent Kanji.

I still do RTK reviews daily, though now it is fast and only comprsise 70-80 cards.

QuackingShoe Wrote:Japanese retain this degree of knowledge because they spend all day every day in Japanese, speaking in Japanese, thinking in Japanese, writing in Japanese, typing in Japanese, reading in Japanese. And they do all of these things quickly, in large quantities.

Great theory for a way to study japanese. Someone could become quite popular by starting a site using the above......

P.S. Sorry for the selective quoting in a vain attempt at humour

I'm bilingual. Even after a long period of say a couple of months of not speaking my mother tongue i can still read write and speak it well. Shouldn't this apply to all languages? I'm hoping that after I perfect this third language (japanese) I will probably be using it a lot and i mean ALOT, to read such things as (books, websites, and games). But supposing i were to leave it for a period of time. Are you saying that most of the kanjis i spent time memorizing would diminish from memory? Thats a scary thought. I hate dependency, i want to think that once I've committed something to memory it would stay there. But whats so different between kanji and all other forms of knowledge. Why would it just disappear if its in your long term memory.