Thora Wrote:yudantaiteki Wrote:Of course it can't stand alone, what I meant there is that I don't have a high opinion of RTK when a learner is left up to his own devices to figure out what to do after finishing it. I really think that in the next edition, Heisig should get someone else to write the introduction to say more about this -- given that he's asking you to do something very unusual and that has a short-term negative affect on your Japanese ability, I think he owes it to the learner to explain what this is going to do in the long term and where to go after finishing RTK 1. [...]
I suppose I don't see RTK as a separate system because we did it as a supplement during univ.
Heisig says in the intro to RTK 1 (italics are in the original):
"The reader will not have to finish more than a few lessons to realize that this
book was designed for self-learning. What may not be so apparent is that
using
it to supplement the study of kanji in the classroom or to review for examinations
has an adverse influence on the learning process. The more you try to combine
the study of the written kanji through the method outlined in these pages with
traditional study of the kanji, the less good this book will do you. I know of no
exceptions."
(Beyond that, even here it's often recommended to completely finish RTK 1 before doing anything else, except maybe learning kana.)
Quote:I think every beginner needs to figure out how they want to go about learning Japanese and RTK is just one resource for a specific purpose. It shouldn't be expected to spell out a comprehensive system any more than a book on Japanese grammar should.
I don't feel that reference works need to justify themselves, but RTK 1 asks you to associate Japanese characters with English keywords and explicitly *not* to learn readings along with them. Given this, I do believe that Heisig owes the reader some sort of advice on how to turn this skill into actual Japanese ability. Especially since he already makes pedagogical claims in his introductions -- don't combine this with traditional methods of learning kanji, don't study kanji->keyword, don't try to learn on and kun readings at the same time, don't try to just learn from context. As far as I can find, the only place in his introductions where he makes any sort of affirmative statement about what to do is in RTK 2, where he says that you can use "graded readers" in conjunction with the book after completing the first third or so.
The reason I say this is that before I discovered places like this forum, I had encountered several people in real life who were using RTK. All of them had the same misconceptions -- they had very little idea of what was involved in learning Japanese, but they had some vague idea that if they finished RTK 1 they would immediately be able to jump into reading Japanese and automatically learn vocab based on their knowledge of the English keywords. The book was publicly recommended at a panel during a JET conference I went to, and the person recommending the book said explicitly that if you learned the "meanings" from Heisig that was enough to start reading Japanese (he had not even finished half of RTK 1). So I'm not just making up this idea that people can be misled.
I think it's a lot to ask of a total beginner to make their own learning system. Of course in a place like this we have a lot of motivated people who are interested in learning methods and enjoy doing that, but someone who happens upon RTK 1 in a bookstore and picks it up isn't going to be able to do that. I think it's especially a lot to ask of a beginner to recognize that the RTK method can be good when used in a certain way, but at the same time to ignore very specific and strong statements the author of the book makes in the introduction. It's easy to see what to ignore when you have the collective experience of this forum, but not by yourself.
With a traditional textbook, it's clear what sort of progress you're making because the material appearing in those textbooks is actual Japanese (or at least something resembling it). It doesn't take a genius to figure out how reading a paragraph in Japanese is going to benefit your Japanese ability. I think it does take a good amount of insight to *correctly* discern how associating a shape with an English keyword is going to ultimately benefit your Japanese ability, and it would help people out a lot if such insight were in the book already.
Quote:btw, I'm curious what you consider "short term negative effects on Japanese?"
I don't think there can be any dispute that a person who completes RTK 1, compared to a person who has studied from a "traditional" textbook for the same amount of time, will have a significantly lower ability in actual, functional Japanese. Even RTK proponents admit this. The idea, however, is that it's OK if your short term ability lags behind traditional methods because in the long term, you will be better off.
Edited: 2010-02-20, 2:30 pm
More just general Japan stuff and alot of joke topics >.>
