One thing I have discovered while studying RTK is my poor English vocabulary. Although I feel pretty much at home in English, I end up having to look up the keyword before moving on to the kanji. Usually those are words that become obvious in context, but aren't present in my active vocabulary. (To natives: Does Heisig use rather sophisticated speech, or do I just need to brush up on my English?)

Although improving your English is a neat side effect of going through the list, it arises one quesition for me: Should I learn a mapping from the written word of a kanji to a story, or rather associate the story with the word's (language independant) meaning?
Obviously stories based on puns and word plays won't work anymore.
Although word plays often work great, I feel like I'd be lost when trying to find a kanji for a certain concept without an English keyword for it.
Take rut for instance: "Begin with the car whose tires get caught in a rut and spin without going anywhere. Then go on to the baseball team who can’t win a game because it has fallen into a rut of losing."
You can probably imagine that "rut of losing" simply doesn't work in any language. Additionatly, I might not recall the word 'rut' when thinking of its concept - I'm completely dependant on the English word.

To those of you more experienced, especially in studying vocabuly rather than isolated kanji: Will this be a problem? My hope is that keywords aren't of such significance later on.

If you have any trouble with a keyword make up a related one by yourself. It'll stick better anyway.
Also, yes keywords don't mean much later on. There are many many kanji i can't tell you the keyword to if I see if I see it but I can tell you some jukugo it is used in without a prob. Just think of RTK as an introductory course in writing Kanji and recognizing how they are made up from different combinations of similar component. This iwll give you a powerful view on kanji and allow you to differentiate between then in a splitsecond, but it will take some months after completing RTK to really notice the effects for all the characters, I did it in 20 days but thereafter I had to solidify each kanji for the following months through reviews until I became pretty solid at it.

I also learned a few new words, lol... this Heisig character is pretty damn well educated. Almost to the point of coming off as a snob, I say. (lol) What I did when I learned a new word was look it up in a dictionary. Sometimes also googling the words so I had pictures to see what it really means ('plaid' for example).

about your question of Keywords, I think that many of the keywords are vague because they are not used in everyday speech (just like many of the kanji that you are learning!) For example, 'hegemony'. This word is very very hard to define. So yeah, there are lots of words that he uses that are rare and vague (because how can you really just use one keyword to define something? its hard with words like hegemony). I certainly think that you should learn the meaning of the word that he is using because if you learn the English incorrectly when you actually come to the Japanese word you will have an incorrect meaning! That happened to me with several words...I can't think of which off the top of my head, but just make sure you got the correct meaning!

bizarrojosh Wrote:I certainly think that you should learn the meaning of the word that he is using because if you learn the English incorrectly when you actually come to the Japanese word you will have an incorrect meaning!

Alright, I guess compared to the task of learning ~2000 kanji, those few new words in English shouldn't be that much of an obstacle anyways.

There's even things I've never heard of (like "brocade") so I guess I shoud be thankful for the additional education

I'd heard of brocade, but never of ... gah the one that means lie on the ground. See? I don't even know it now. Oh and the one that's made up of 'going' and 'correct'. Shows just how important the English keywords are. I know the kanji when I see the word but I probably won't know exactly what they mean until I actually learn words using those kanji.