Ive reached 600 kanji now. I feel so impatient. I wish i could go through all of them in day and retain them for ever. Im doing about 70 per day. I still however cant read a thing yet. Its disheartening. So i was thinking of starting on KO whilst working on RTK. But there are characters in KO2001 that i have yet to encounter.

Should i start KO2001 or should i just concentrate on the kanji for now? Would doing KO2001 now have a detrimental effect on my kanji studies? especially considering i will encountwer characters in context first rather than RTK.

Finish RTK1 first. Then do KO2001.

If you're really impatient, go ahead and start reading. I know you just said you can't read a thing yet, but you may find that you actually can pick up the meanings of things from the characters you know (just don't memorize them that way!).

Paradoxically, I found that very early on certain kinds of seinen manga were easiest to read—something along the lines of Gantz or Tsutomu Nihei's works (Blame!, Abara, etc.). If you're just getting started your vocabulary isn't big enough for furigana to be useful yet, and the dialogue is so incredibly terse that minimal grammar is needed.

Then you get to go back later once you've learned a bunch more and actually properly read the stuff you were just getting the sense of before.

But no, I wouldn't advise trying to do any real other formal study alongside RtK.

~J

It's a very natural reaction. I couldn't wait to finish, either. I wouldn't rush it, though. Instead, just spend a lot of time watching Japanese media. Read manga if you have it. Watch anime/dramas. Just listen and pick out the words you do know. This is the most important part of learning to understand and speak Japanese well.

70 kanji a day + K2001 might be a bit much. If you do start, I would say go slow with reading, and make sure you keep your focus on the kanji. You could also try just studying the kanji and some grammar.

Just keep your focus. I started reading early, and I lost interest in doing RTK. It took a lot longer than it should have to finish RTK because of that.

If you want to get good at Japanese, just keep doing it, an hour every day is far, far better than 7 hours one day a week. Find things that can keep your interest and try to read/watch them a lot. I like "The girl who lept through time" (時をかける少女, Toki o Kakeru Shōjo) it is one of the few things I can watch over again and still enjoy it. Some people are able to watch things over and over and not get sick of something- if you can do that- DO IT. The repetition will drill things into your head that won't easily leak out.

Sometimes I think that if I could give myself advice when I first started Japanese, the first thing I would say is "quit." Sometimes...

Get used to the feeling of impatience, I'm still impatient to be good at Japanese and I've been studying for over two years. If you can't handle the feeling, consider another language. That's pretty negative, but realize that if you can make it to the intermediate level, it is very rewarding. The ability to speak with people and read things in Japanese is a very good feeling. It's a tough road, but with persistence, anyone can do it.

captal: You have been studying for two years and still havent reached a certain level of fluency? How far are you into RTK? Have you tried the ajatt method. Apparently khatzumoto reached a good level of fluency after 18-months of study whilst also juggling a busy lifestyle.

My main concern isnt just with my impatience. I'm just naturally impatient... with everything. But after 600 kanji, RTK is getting a little boring. So I was thinking of doing some KO2001 to go with my RTK. It just just more fun. However according to the advice ive read here on the forum doing KO2001 might harm my study since i should finish RTK as soon as possible First. which should not exceed a couple of months if i continue at this speed. So im gonna do this first. I can see how RTK pays off especially when one encounters familiar kanji in KO2001.

I'm pretty confident any kind of studying will not hurt. Honestly, the only kind of studying I can think of that will hurt you is studying non-native material as if it was the gospel truth (such as some of those youtube personalities. I swear none of them actually know Japanese...).

Look, just as Khatz says, the bottom line is to have fun. I also had a problem with RtK. It is undeniably boring at times. However, once I started sentences as well as RtK, it became MUCH more manageable. I wouldn't do a lot of sentences, but just a couple per day to kind of get a feel for it. I was also taking Japanese classes at my university at the same time, because due to my self study I could get an A in them without any (extra) effort at all.

Now, here's the thing. Due to my classes mostly, I feel, I have not yet finished RtK after 2 years (a lot of stopping and restarting). I hope this time I am on my last restart, but who knows. I think I can do the whole thing this time, but I am still taking classes all the time and barely have time for anything since it is my senior year and, due to my study abroad in Japan, I have a lot to accomplish. However, at the same time I wouldn't take any of it back. Maybe I would have forced myself to do a little more self study, back when I was in the lower levels (I somehow convinced myself that classes were "doing a good job"), but I view it all as valuable learning experiences.

Bottom line is: if you want to do some KO2001, do it. The kanji at the beginning may not come up until later for some of them, but they are all so basic and common use anyway that it shouldn't be hard to brute force learn a couple of them. The last time I stopped RtK I was at 1750 so I can almost get through the whole first book on kanji I already know, which is what I do as well as try to complete RtK on the side.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:Look, just as Khatz says, the bottom line is to have fun.

That is precisely what I was thinking. English is not my first language. When i think back at how i learned it. It was because i played so many games and watched so many cartoons. It was only later when i got much more advanced that i could play really text heavy RPG's. And that boosted my english speaking abilities greatly. ok so i was seven years old, but that shouldnt make it any different now. In fact the process was at such an unconcious level, that i remember watching TV one day, and laughing at the jokes, when it suddenly struck me. The show i was watching. i understood all of what they were saying. This was the same show i had hated a couple of months ago. The same show that when i watched i had said to myself, "its all gibberish. i dont understand a thing ah well nothing else is on tv guess im stuck watching it."

Surely sentence mining and immersion in their media will propell you to a certain level of fluency. I started this two weeks back. And from what i have seen there are some people who move through RTK at such a slow pace that they become fixated with kanji and RTK, thus missing out on all the fun of sentence mining and media consumption.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:I'm pretty confident any kind of studying will not hurt.

In this case, I'm not so sure. At least for me, RtK really demanded momentum—when I lost that momentum, I reached a point where it was no longer worthwhile before I picked it up again. I don't think it's some huge crippling loss, but I think as much as you can get through while you do have momentum is probably good.

~J

woodwojr Wrote:

Ryuujin27 Wrote:I'm pretty confident any kind of studying will not hurt.

In this case, I'm not so sure. At least for me, RtK really demanded momentum—when I lost that momentum, I reached a point where it was no longer worthwhile before I picked it up again. I don't think it's some huge crippling loss, but I think as much as you can get through while you do have momentum is probably good.

~J

I agree, but the point I was trying to make was sometimes one needs to regain momentum, and it sounds like mastermx has the same line of though as I do, so I was telling him how I regained some momentum.

Also, I think I should make a point that I don't believe RtK will ever loose how valuable it is, even if you take a long time to complete it, or don't do it until after you have been studying Japanese for some time. The reason being is, even those people I meet who are far better at Japanese than I am, severely lack when it comes to writing and recognizing kanji. In my Japanese class now (I know, I know, why am I still taking them?), there are some students who can talk circles around me, yet when it comes to reading passages and understanding quickly, I beat them every single time, no exceptions. Also, when we study individual kanji meanings (which does help, actually), I am usually the only one who has a chance at answering (and I am usually correct).

I disagree; I at least have reached a point where I can pick up any kanji that I see vaguely regularly simply by making an effort to remember its shape and composition and writing it a couple of times, then adding it to the SRS workflow. It's about as easy as RtK, but also dodges problems like bad or poorly-differentiated keywords, allows me to easily learn characters that I actually see earlier rather than later, and doesn't require remotely as much momentum.

~J

To each his own, and while I agree that doing it that way is also easy (as I have done that multiple times), RtK still has it's merits. I like working with it just because it is a more structured method then going straight out into the world of kanji and trying to pick them apart by yourself.

woodwojr Wrote:I disagree; I at least have reached a point where I can pick up any kanji that I see vaguely regularly simply by making an effort to remember its shape and composition and writing it a couple of times, then adding it to the SRS workflow. It's about as easy as RtK, but also dodges problems like bad or poorly-differentiated keywords, allows me to easily learn characters that I actually see earlier rather than later, and doesn't require remotely as much momentum.

~J

Rote memorization plateaus much more quickly than Heisig.
It tends to work well for the first 500 kanji or so. But after that,
you'll start to encounter many kanji that use the same primitives
at which point RTK passes with flying colors and rote memorization
breaks down very easily.

For a good example, take a look at the RTK chapter with the 120+ kanji using the "thread" primitive.

Would indeed be a pain in the butt brute forcing those...

Plus you will be missing out on all the wonderfull adventures spiderman and venom will undertake

chamcham Wrote:Rote memorization plateaus much more quickly than Heisig.
It tends to work well for the first 500 kanji or so. But after that,
you'll start to encounter many kanji that use the same primitives
at which point RTK passes with flying colors and rote memorization
breaks down very easily.

For a good example, take a look at the RTK chapter with the 120+ kanji using the "thread" primitive.

You get a sense of how kanji work eventually, after which it's actually quite the opposite—primitive mixups are part of why I dropped RtK, because for example I could never remember if it was supposed to be an aerosol can or a clay pot in 結, but 結 is just the kanji in むすぶ so it's no work at all to remember.

~J

are you saying that in the long run mix up with primitives is normal? do you still do rtk?

Part of it depends on your specific story, and certain issues are probably accentuated by moving away from RtK—I had some issues for a little bit with 戻 because I'd been away from RtK long enough for the distinction between "large dog" (大) and "little dog" (犬) to fade away, but the story I had for it was still strong enough for me to have clear dog-related associations, so even though I'd write it correctly I'd catch myself and add the (incorrect) tic.

I do not, in general, still do RtK. I still mostly review using the RtK anki deck, but I'm in a process of replacing RtK cards with Japanese-prompt cards (described in this thread), and while I still use preexisting stories when recalling some kanji I don't use the RtK method to learn new kanji in general (though if I do have difficulty on one I'll sometimes check stories here—I haven't found one that I've wanted to use yet, but in principle it could happen).

I was, it should be noted, around frame 1600 or so when I stopped, and there was a substantial gap between when I stopped and when I started again with the non-RtK approach. I don't believe that abandoning RtK at the time I stopped would have been useful; although it started the process of developing the "sense of kanji" I mention above, that sense had to either be trained by the exposure in the interim or had to ripen over time.

~J

mastermx Wrote:captal: You have been studying for two years and still havent reached a certain level of fluency? How far are you into RTK? Have you tried the ajatt method. Apparently khatzumoto reached a good level of fluency after 18-months of study whilst also juggling a busy lifestyle.

Well, we have to define what fluency, or in this case, "certain level of fluency" means. To me, I am far from fluent. After two years of study- though I would count by hours if I knew because the first year was pretty casual and during my MBA, but the second year I've been in Japan- I have a certain level of fluency I guess. I can converse with people pretty easily about "normal" topics (ie, nothing too deep)- I never feel like the whole conversation is going over my head like I did when I arrived last year.

I did RTK (and I wish I hadn't), I've tried AJATT and I still do do a lot of things in Japanese, but I don't make my life fit around it. Japanese got a lot more enjoyable when I just going at my own pace and not worrying how much better people like Khatz are and people on here are. Maybe I'm just linguistically retarded, who knows My only point was, get used to feeling impatient, ESPECIALLY with Japanese. I've never been so frustrated with learning/studying anything, and I have an engineering degree and an mba, those were easier than getting to the level of Japanese I'm at now.

I shouldn't say my only point, because really, the most important thing I said was just keep going. Just keep going and don't worry about the end game, you'll get there one day. It may take me another 10 years before I feel fluent, or maybe 20, who knows, but I'll be there one day. That's more important to me than trying to force it into 18 months. Maybe that's why RTK wasn't that great for me- I fit it into 3 months and kept up reviews for another 3 months or so before I just got fed up with it. Ah well.

While in Japan my first time I was in the same situation as you, captal. I felt a false sense of being adequate in the language. It mainly stems from Japanese dumbing down their conversation with you in Japanese once they see how good you are.

It's sort of like how we would do with a foreigner learning English that is not so good. Before you get a handle on their ability, you are speaking super fast and using super complicated speech patterns. Once you realize the foreigner has no idea what you are talking about, you dumb down your speech when talking with them.

But you can reach fluency not making your life revolve around Japanese, it will just take longer. You still need to put in the hours, whether it takes you 1.5 years or 10 years to get to that point is up to how much you put into it. I am no expert on the subject as I have not reached fluency yet so don't take this as expert advice haha.

anyways for the OP, if you want something else to do while you are doing RTK1, do what I did and do smart.fm along with it. something like the core2000. i was able to get 70% finished with core2000 on smart.fm by the time i finished RTK1. once i finished and started sentences, i dropped everything i studied on smart.fm to focus on sentences from then on.

if you are having trouble with impatience now, it might get really hard for you when you get to the point where you are doing 20 sentences a day on top of RTK1 reviews and maybe even RTK3 like i am doing.

anyways good luck.

Captal plays (beach?) volleyball with Japanese friends. I'd subscribe to the Captal method! fun, stamina, team over ego, balanced, strategic, practical, humour without verbosity, genuine humility, no recycled self-help ooze ... and the knowhow to create a decent business plan. Where do I sign? or pledge...or vow...or invest...whatever. :-)

Yep, I play beach volleyball with a group here in Fukuoka. I had to work up the courage to ask some people my age to play with them, but since then I've played with them a lot, and we go out occasionally for drinks and such after tournaments, etc.

Like I said, I'm not pushing myself to do something that is not fun for me (aka 100% Japanese all the time, which obviously no one on this forum subscribes to 100% of the time ) and instead just trying to do things in Japanese everyday and things I enjoy. I may not always enjoy doing my Anki everyday (if I do it), but I do my best. Thora- email me and I'll tell you how to "invest" in my method

jacf29- one thing that really helped was moving into the city from the country. People speak standard Japanese to me instead of the crazy-ass dialect in the area I teach in. My volleyball teammates use some dialect but a lot of it is easier to understand than the country dialect. I can actually go out with my volleyball team and understand what's going on and contribute, it's nice.

nice you are on a beach vollyball team. if you can understand enough in a non dumbed down conversation by natives on a routine basis then i would say you are already fluent. or do you mean you can pick out certain words or phrases and make comments on them?

i can't speak for the others here, but i am very active on here just recently. its until october 15th when i finish my first 500 sentences from all about particles (on 220 now). doing 20 a day.

when i get to 500 sentences i am switching monolingual and going complete 100% immersion. the only non immersion thing for me right now is surfing the internet. even at work i have a hidden earpiece in my ear (bought online). hell i dont have to use it half the time as i work as delivery for dominos until i move to japan january. they dont care if i have headphones on at work lol.

anyways so everything else has been immersion for last 3 months. 24/7 japanese in my ear, japanese tv, japanese movies, etc. i follow the AJATT method, but not some of the things he suggests. like the chopsticks, sleep on floor bs. i have lived in japan before and most of the japanese i knew didnt use chopsticks for everything, just things that you are supposed to use them with. like the dude on the website says to use them with cake. i have never seen anyone eat cake with chopsticks in japan.

so as of october 15th, i will stop using all english websites. i already have a list of japanese equivalents to use. it will truly be 100% for me. i will check back in 1/2/3 etc years depending on how long it takes for me to become fully fluent.

jacf29 Wrote:so as of october 15th, i will stop using all english websites. i already have a list of japanese equivalents to use.

　Would you be so kind as to share those "equivalents" with us.