I'm new here.

Yarrr.

.........

(Big post! :O)

So I've been wandering down that path to learning Japanese lately (past few months I suppose) and being that I have neither Japanese classes (that I likely wouldn't be interested in anyway) or learn-ed speakers on hand, I've been bouncing here and there trying to figure out a good learning/teaching method for myself. The goal of course, is full Japanization of the mind. Reading, writing, listening, speaking, thinking, at speeds a well-educated native (of Japaneseness) would enjoy. I've gathered up some books and websites of freely offered learning (a Google search of living costs in Japan landed me here) to facilitate my learning, as well as music, TV shows, and that Keyhole TV thing. I'm fairly confident I possess a large enough pile of stuff that if crammed into my head would equate to some level of proficiency, at least enough that I could figure out what I'd need to learn next.

I saw a link to that Khatzumoto fellow's blog thing here that I spent a few days reading, so for reference, his style of thinking aligns very well with mine for the most part. Immersion, enjoyment, and positivity interspersed with bits of formal(ish) study and looking things up seems a good way to go for me. I can't deny that Genki has been helpful in parts, but the grammar lesson sections when I have no point of reference yet are brutal to read, much less remember. "This can be this, except when it's this, this, or that, but sometimes that is okay depending on context"-type lessons make me cry when taking it all in for the first time.

But anyway, my main point of concern for the moment is learning this kanji stuff. I checked out Remembering The Kana, but I found the story things annoying and entirely unhelpful to me. Just seeing Hiragana a lot in Genki made me remember them well enough once the romaji (romanji?) was eliminated from the sample sentences. Katakana as well to a lesser extent, but I'm still fuzzy on most of them since I don't see as much of it. Despite that, I went on to Remembering The Kanji because quite honestly, it's the only kanji learning-ish book I've found so far. But I've run into the same problems as the previous book. This imaginative memory thing with the stories and the imagery either simply does not work for me or I'm doing it so wrong that it appears that way. The one thing I do like it about it is the way the kanji are all ordered, so similar shapes get written a lot to help with my memory, but they're still varied so I don't get bored with it.

My brain works very simply. Remembering an image of cows eating grass while cowboys kiss the floor with their mouths is very much unnecessary clutter to me and besides which, it's all in English and I don't want that. (Kanji) = (Japanese meaning) is all I want. If it's a kanji for "cow", I want either the Japanese word for "cow" in my head or an image of a Japanese cow. If I need to write "cow", I just want the kanji to appear in my head, not a cow being horribly mangled and contorted into a vague kanji-fied representation. "Simple is best" works for me. Even if it's as contradictory as doing boring, repetitive things as opposed to roundabouts and loop de loops. One Heisig primitive I saw last night was "kazoo". That means nothing to me. Boxes and lines arranged in such a way actually do for some weird reason, once I've seen it/written it enough at least.

But because I still like his ordering of the kanji, I've been plowing through the book not really knowing what I'm supposed to be accomplishing, except that merely writing the same kanji components (whatever you call them) over and over in different kanji combos is at least helping (my hand at least) remember stroke order, how to end up with each part, and so on. Except uh, since I'm only writing each kanji once and moving on, I don't really remember what anything is called or what goes with what. Slanty slash roof, plus slash slash, plus down line, then slanty slash and two down strokes is "metal" when combined with, um... I do know that if I saw a kanji a second time, I could reproduce it in the proper order, so that's something! Right...?

1. Write all kanji
2. Look at a lot of kanji
3. ???????
4. Knowledge!

One last thing, I haven't been able to find any information on the kanji system itself. All my feeble Googlings have yielded are the same "kanji is a system of writing that comes of the Chinese writing system. Here are kanji, they mean these English words." Why are different kanji characters associated with their assigned meanings? Why do so many have three stroke empty boxes in them? There's patterns in the characters obviously, but I have no idea how to find out what they mean. I don't even know what kind of book I have to look for to find out. Straight memorization is all well and neat, but I'm interested in knowing somewhat more about them if it seems I can learn new ones easier.

Also also, how do people read kanji written in tiny fonts? The closing credits of one show the other night just had a little white smudgey blob with a vague shape and a couple of points sticking out. Would those vague markers and the surrounding context have been enough for a fluent person to recognize it?

So... Yeah. Hi.

Please comment on my blown fuse brain I guess?

For the tiny fonts things,after a while you'll be able to get it all. You will notice when reading people's handwriting it's similar, it's like a big blog of messy ink in one. But you need to get used to it before you can read people's handwriting. Same applies to to vague fonts of the kanji(seems like a mess all together) but after a while you'll be able to figure out what the kanji is.

For katakana I recommend an anki deck(so you can either see the character, or the other way around, hear the sound and write the character-this trains it from memory but what you can do is keep reading it and hearing it, eventually you'll get it all) and read sites that contain katakana in text.

Personally I just rote-memorized hiragana and katakana over the course of 2 weeks while procrastinating instead of doing my exams last year :O. Its probably not worth putting any great effort into learning them though, since you only really get good at reading/writing them after using them for a few months.

I know what you mean about wanting to learn the words in Japanese instead of English, but it is much easier (when you don't know the Japanese words that use that Kanji of course) to use English keywords and then link them to the Japanese word. When you start actually learning Japanese words though you won't even bother with the keywords any more. Like whenever I see single I instantly think どくしん、or thing I think こと etc... Soon as you pick up the words that use those Kanji, you will begin to think in the Japanese instead of the English and can change the keywords accordingly.

About small fonts, I really struggle with them in DS games . Most of the time you can make it out from context/other kanji etc.. But with some that are on their own and are the key part of the sentence I get royally screwed and have no way of knowing the sentence meaning!

Basically just stick with RTK, even though it may be boring and you may want to learn some real Japanese instead, you will struggle massively with reading Kanji and will impede your literacy if you don't do it! I still haven't finished RTK and regret not completing it when I got to ~1650. Whilst I recognise a fair amount of Kanji in my sentence deck there are a good 100 or so that I have never studied in RTK and tend to struggle with when trying to write out the words from memory.

If you didn't like RTK for kana, you'll probably not like it for kanji, either. It's -work-.

Instead, maybe you should look at something like ReadTheKanji.com . Since you learned kana from Genki while learning the rest, you could do the same to learn kanji while learning vocabulary. It even provides sample sentences.

I didn't do RTK, but I did something similar for about 1300 kanji before I quit. I learned about 1000 of them very well. It has been a tremendous help for accelerating my learning and boosting my confidence. Even though it's a lot of work, you really should consider at least doing 'RTK lite'. (You can find info on this forum.)

Maybe the point gets clearer as I learn more Japanese, but for the moment, learning individual kanji before words seems really weird. I keep thinking of it as like trying to learn English by writing down half of words. "Hmm, the first part is 'fore', so it could be foreclose, foreshadow, foresight, or maybe even forget, forlorn or forge!" Why is the kanji called "spine" used in so many words involving bathtubs?

I'm only about a quarter of the way through RTK 1, but all I'm really remembering are stroke orders from writing them all down and the author's apparent smugness over the obvious flawlessness of his method is kinda bugging me.

Is there a point in learning the meanings of individual kanji first thing at my very beginner stage of learning? It seems like it would be easier learning words, then looking up the kanji they're composed of to see why they're written that way. I have no idea what's going on.

BoccKob Wrote:Is there a point in learning the meanings of individual kanji first thing at my very beginner stage of learning? It seems like it would be easier learning words, then looking up the kanji they're composed of to see why they're written that way. I have no idea what's going on.

I don't know. It's really hard.
Is it better to:
1) Add:
一 -> いち -> one (the number)
一つ -> ひとつ -> one (thing)
一人 -> ひとり -> one person
一月一日 -> いちがつついたち -> January 1st
to your deck
or 2) Add:
one -> 一 -> ONE down, 2041 to go
to your deck
or 3) Add:
一人で行きました -> I went alone.
or some combination of them, or even all of them? Or something else entirely?

Anything you add will be of benefit to you. I think you would do well to keep that in mind.

Random contradictory advice: (You will find contradictory advice in various places, but never in the same post like this!)
Person A: For immersion, find some music you like, get it, and listen to it often. If you need help, then do a search on this forum.
Person A1: For video, stick with subtitles for now, because no subtitles is boring and you'll never do boring for very long.

Person A2: For video, watch it with no subtitles because ???. (Khatz recommends doing this but I can't defend it)

Person B: Stick with RTK only for now. You don't want to be distracted doing two things at the same time, like learning vocab and kanji writings simultaneously. Note: Heisig is of this school of thought in his foreword to the RTK1 book.

Person C: Divide your study time between RTK and something else, because straight RTK is (at least a little) boring and you won't do boring.

Person C1: For the something else, I recommend Japanese the Manga Way, because it is a textbook designed for self-study.

Person C2: I recommend the Tae Kim grammar articles because they are free.

Person C3: I recommend [some other textbook]. I don't like this advice because these are designed for classroom use and will be of limited benefit to you.

Heisig expects you to have learned something before picking up his book, even though he himself started with his own method. In the lesson 1 foreward, he states that "you have probably learned these somewhere before picking up this book."

One of our illustrious forum members by the name of Nukemarine has done the following progression, I think:
1) Did Heisig
2) Said "That's not very important" and created RTK Lite, which is a revision of RTK 1 excluding the ~1000 rarest kanji in the book.
You can catch up on his current thinking here:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5110

Quote:Is there a point in learning the meanings of individual kanji first thing at my very beginner stage of learning?

Yes.

Less smart-ass response: By making the kanji one of the earliest aspects of your study you accomplish a couple of things. First, you get over the most intimidating aspect of Japanese study. As you've mentioned, the way your currently progressing through the book your learning a lot about stroke order and very little else. By attaching an English keyword to each kanji, it creates enough "kan-text" to give the kanji a hook in your mind. As you create more of these hooks, it becomes like the little hook-n-loop devices on velcro products, and it becomes easier and easier for Japanese to stick. Now, when you start learning vocabulary, the kanji you've just learned are already present in your mind, just waiting for the "loop" part of the velcro, ie. the word/japanese meanings, to come along. Vocabulary becomes much easier to learn AND because you know the kanji as you learn the word, much easier to reinforce through reading immersion.

Now, I'm not a fan of creating really complex stories and spending time trying to "visualize" them and all that stuff. But, using simple one sentence stories that tie the keyword and all the components making up the kanji in a neat, logical bundle are really helpful. They are what allows you to remember how to write/read the thing. Then, over a short period of time, they actually fade away and the keyword itself is really all you need. Then, when you start studying vocabulary, even the english keyword fades. It's like a ladder you pull up after you when you get done climbing up.
You don't have to imagine a cow in the shape of the kanji (and shouldn't, that's missing the point), just remember that 牛 means cow so when you get to another kanji that has 牛 as a component in it (like 告), the word "cow" in your sentence-story reminds you to write that part.

Also, I wouldn't say heisig is smug, exactly, he just observes that he has come up with a method which can teach non-japanese the kanji more quickly than anything anyone else has come up with so far. And, he's right.

I suggest you read the Wikipedia entry on Kanji: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji
It will give you an idea of what you're up against and perhaps give you an idea of why learning to recognize an utterly unfamiliar symbol (the kanji) by connecting it to a familiar concept (the keyword) is a pretty good idea.

Since a given kanji may have several possible pronunciations and/or "meanings" it really needs to be learned in context; your studies, whatever they are, will be your context. RTK gives you a head start on learning in context. You'll recognize the kanji and have a clue to its meaning--much better than confronting a meaningless symbol.

You don't have to be a slave to Heisig's stories. All mine are very short (one sentence) and they either have a vivid visual image or are jokey or absurd. But his idea of using mnemonics, and his organization by so-called primitives are effective tools, and SRS is a system that works. It's up to you to figure out to make them work for you.

If your having problems with RTK, I'd highly recommend RTK Lite. It goes by much faster. I think it's most important to learn all the basic primitives that make up a Kanji, that way when you find a kanji you don't know, you can break it up based on it's primitives.

I wouldn't worry too much about the entomology and patterns of why the kanji are shaped the way they are. With how kanji has evolved, quite a few things are archaic or just have plain been lost. It's a little like worrying about why the letters in the roman alphabet are shaped the way they are.

I also find the most important thing about RTK is the basic logical order of everything. There is a post somewhere on these forums about someone who just brute forced all the kanji into his head without stores but in the Heisig order. So if stories aren't working for you, you could try something else while using the same order.

The one other thing you could try is Japanese keywords instead of English ones, but I have any experience with it to comment on.

Using RTK's keywords and ordering are what I've been doing so far, while ignoring the stories. I've just been wondering if doing it this way will mess me up later somehow.

I tried to make my own Anki deck with Japanese keywords instead, but in cases where the dictionary would show multiple ways to write a word, I wasn't sure which to use, so I'm stuck with English for now. As per the thread title, I'm trying to figure out the most streamlined and quickish way to absorb kanji as possible, without leaving out any vital parts and it's been tricky finding more than "this is kanji! *List*" on websites.

Like are the keywords "official" things? Do they have equivalent names they use in Japan?

Most of the keywords are good aproximations of the japanese usage for the kanji, some are more arbitrary. Dunno if anyone has made a list of which is which. But, that really misses the point of RTK. The point is learning to break each kanji up into the component parts that make it up so that you can quickly recognize each of the 2000+ Joyo Kanji, making it much, much easier to learn vocabulary and readings later. The keywords simply provide a hook for your mind.

Have you looked at this, btw:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...ment-37226

You can find more about "Lazy Kanji" on that same site, and there's a thread about it here somewhere. Maybe this method would suit you better. It takes Heisig's ordering, primitives, and the basic idea of stories and simplifies the process in certain ways. I have been experimenting with it and found it works well for me. Although it does take slightly longer to solidify each kanji in my head, the actual process is far less "painful". Others disagree vehemently.

I will say this: a huge percentage of non-japanese who become literate did so by working through RTK in some way, shape or form. Most of them doing it exactly how he instructs.

Um, if you want Japanese keywords, there is a stickied thread in the RTK1 forum. No point in making them yourself.