James Bond Wrote:How does one even study from this book? Do you all write down the kanji as well as just looking at it?
I missed this part.
You can read the introduction, as it may or may not be good (I don't recall).
At first you'll think it's really weird, like you're not learning anything.
He gives you the certain 'primitives,' which all combine to make one kanji, to which he assigns a keyword. Your part, is to get to the point where you read the keyword, recall the "story," which should, in turn, give you all the "parts" (primitives) in the story, hopefully in order, which will in turn, lead you to remember how the kanji was formed, and thus, how to write it.
胆, "Gallbladder," kanji 31, is a good example, I believe.
The parts that make it up are 月, and 旦.
旦, is made up of 日, day (sun), and 一, one (ground, floor, horizon).
With 旦, Nightbreak, you could read it and your story could be "When the SUN rises above the HORIZON, you know that it is NIGHTBREAK"
Then, getting back to 胆、you have 月 and 旦. In many contexts in Heisig's stories, 月 is also used to be a 'flesh' or 'meat' or something along those lines.
So GALLBLADDER: The piece of FLESH (part of the body) that leaks fluid at NIGHTBREAK.
Note: To make your journey learning Kanji better/faster, I suggest looking into the "Movie Method." Basically, you assign movies to each of the readings of the kanji, and add it as another primitive to the story you make up, so you can learn to read the kanji much faster
The stories I have given are weak, and I just thought of them off the top of my head -- don't use them. I would highly suggest reading through the stories people have submitted on this site, perhaps modifying them to suit your needs.
Once you think you know them well enough to remember them the next day, put them into an SRS (I like the one on this site, it's all set up
) and don't think about them until when they come up tomorrow.
This is the counter intuitive part at the beginning. You will want to study them so you don't forget. Don't. The SRS makes sure it goes into your long-term memory, so spending your time studying things that you already know will not get you anywhere.
The next day, do your daily SRS reviews, if you forgot some -- be honest, hit "not remembered" and re-study them that day. It's no big deal. Once that's out of the way, you continue on with learning some more kanji the way you did the day before.
It will be fun at times, blazing through kanji and coming up with stories. It will be terrible some times (usually around number 1400-1800 ish? You just want to be done, but there's still a lot to go...)
But once you're done with it, and if you kept up with the community here, you'll most likely have developed a trust in the SRS system, as well as wonderful new ideas on how to continue your Japanese study.
That's the wonderful thing about RtK. Not only does it give you a wonderful system of demystifying Kanji, but it leads people to this site -- full of excellent motivated people, who willingly and freely discuss their methods of learning Japanese.
---now that you've been sucked in, you can't leave---
