I started using RTK just over a week ago after having studied Japanese for little over/around a year. I already had a vocabulary of roughly 1500 words, and maybe 200 kanji. In one week i've gone through RTK and nailed the first 580 with 90% retention rate on the reviews. Consequently, my vocabulary learning seems much easier now too because I have new kanji to peg my words on to, and I'm even getting more efficient with the actual readings of the kanji compounds, due to exposure of the kanji in other compounds. Whats my point?
Having started RTK late into my studies, the results I am getting are absolutely fantastic for me; all the vocabulary, kanji readings, compounds etc are suddenly coming together because now i have keywords etc to peg them to.
I bring this up because I see soooo many people slating RTK saying that it doesn't teach you japanese at all, and that you won't learn the readings til book 2 etc. But the truth is, just after one week of spending 3 hours a day doing RTK at my stage, and I feel like i've learn a years worth of material- it's really helped to bring everything I did already know together! I'm really gonna finish this system!

Is it the same for anyone else?
I guess it is really hard when your first encounter with Kanji is RTK, without having seen any of the kanji "in the wild" as it were.

I think it's handy and motivating if you're building on prior knowledge like that, realizing how easy, even easier, it is once you're using a clever method like RTK + an SRS system to integrate kanji. I remember how motivated I was and how everything began falling together once I started learning sentences and those contextualized kanji suddenly resonated with visual meaning and sound, the previously accessible yet murky kana around it forming this enhancing background to the 'landscape'. Ah, waxing a bit poetic there, sorry. ;p

This is, re: RTK Lite + iKO2001 + Japanese the Manga Way, et cetera, why I'm always working out how one can do RTK as much in conjunction with the rest of the language as possible without obstructing the 'assembly line' approach or affective learning, since I think the best aspect of that modularization is finding the most complementary strategies to unify it all around one's language goals.

Yeah, this is kinda similar to my situation (I studied Japanese for 2 yrs in college and then took a 4 yr break - oog). Doing RTK gave me a much better understanding of how all the words I knew were formed. I'm going through KO2001 now (not too far due to work getting in the way), and I'll sometimes run into words I had already learned but never really knew how to write. Now it all seems easy - knowing the "meanings" of the KTK kanji makes memorizing vocab so much easier. I couldn't see myself ever remembering how to write words like 望遠鏡 and 熱帯雨林 when I was learning Japanese the traditional way, but now it's a snap!

Doing RTK was definitely the single most useful thing I've done towards learning Japanese. I can't imagine a skill level where you'd still be looking for learning resources and RTK wouldn't be useful

OTOH I wound up with a handy skill of being able to go from english keyword to writing the kanji -- but almost completely unlinked to any of my other Japanese ability. I really should try to fix that some time ^_^; (probably more practice of anything that involved production would help there.)

I studied Japanese for about 6 months before starting RTK, had a paltry vocabulary and was torn between whether or not I should spend more time on RTK or on mastering the spoken language. I chose additional language study at the time, but after another 9 months, got frustrated that the written language was still so opaque, so I took a break from serious language study and focused on RTK, which is where have been for about 2 months and expect to finish by the end of this month.

For the most part, yes, I do see the advantage of knowing Japanese because many of Heisig's keywords translate to the point that I often learn the kun reading of the kanji on the spot, simply on account of prior knowledge of the vocabulary word in Japanese. However, there are a number of keywords that frustratingly do not reflect the traditional English glosses, like the kanji he gives for "return," which is not かえる. Similarly, when trying to come up with a way to keep the two apart, I found on accident that the kanji for "punish" and "penalty" presented in the book are actually mixed up from their traditional English glosses (actually 罰 = punishment, and 刑 = penalty). Often now, I look up kanji I'm learning in a kanji dictionary before committing to a mnemonic so I can be sure that I'm not mis-interpreting the kun reading or committing on a keyword that is too far from the kun reading's meaning. In this respect, I just wish he could have asterisked the kanji that match their traditional English glosses, so it could be that much easier to know the ones that don't match.

Either that, or just not pretend that the Japanese language doesn't exist when talking about certain of the kanji. For instance, I guess that "Esq." works for 様 （the さま honorific）, but "old boy" for 君 threw me to the other side of the moon. He could have just said that 君 was きみ and explain how that pronoun is used, which is basically what he's doing for this term "old boy," a word just as unfamiliar to my American-English lexicon as the Japanese pronoun the kanji actually refers to.

@jajaaan Have you checked out wrightak's Japanese Keyword system? It's on the forum somewhere. I'd like to see that mixed with KO2001 (as well as RTK Lite's KO2001 list) as a nice start to adding new systems to the existing RTK structure.

[Katsuo]

jajaaan Wrote:I just wish he could have asterisked the kanji that match their traditional English glosses, so it could be that much easier to know the ones that don't match.

That's why I made this spreadsheet. The idea is that as you go through each kanji in RTK, glance at the choice of names given by other sources (especially Kenkyusha) and if there is a discrepancy consider investigating further.