Tobberoth Wrote:WAT? That's right, I almost NEVER use hiragana in everyday life, because like 90% of Japanese writing is Kanji anyway. People never forget what kanji a word consists of.

I wonder if you actually use Japanese in everyday life then. Here's a random sentence I grabbed from the Mainichi News article:

菅内閣の発足を受けて、市場ではバラマキ政策から財政再建路線への転換や、成長戦略への期待が高まっている。

As you can see it's 51 characters, less than half of which are kanji, 19 are hiragana, 4 are katakana, and 3 are punctuation marks.

bucko --
It's not hard to find a "kanji dense" sentence. I tried to find something from something more practical, like a message board. I ended up getting some sort of "denser" news article anyway:

Quote:芸能リポーター梨元勝氏（６５）が肺がんで、都内の病院に入院していることが６日、分かった。
１カ月前からせきが続き、検査を受けたところ右肺に影があると診断され、
肺の細胞を採取する精密検査の結果、肺がんと分かった。

　手術はせず、抗がん剤治療の予定で、入院期間は少なくとも１カ月となる予定だ。
ゴシップだけでなく、数多くの著名人の闘病も取材してきた梨元氏は、
「自分のこともきっちり伝えたい」と、自らのサイトで病状経過を報告する。

Forgive me if my counts are a little bit off, but
Kanji: 79
Kana: 112

How about handwritten? We've got a board at our cafeteria where you can write comments/questions, and they will respond. Often humorously. Here's the longest one I could find:

Quote:ピカチューはふしぎなアメ使って育てた方が強くなりますか？インドメタシンとヨクアタールは使ってみたのですがあまり変化がなくて困っています。野生のポケモンと戦わせると感染症とかの心配もあるのでできれば避けたいのですが。

Response:
ごめんなさい。
全く分かりません。
２チャンエルとかで聞いてみてはいかがでしょうか？

Kanji: 20
Kana: 120

My question to you is this: What do you consider "daily life"?
If text messages from friends, written notes, signs, menus, and schoolwork, not to mention novels and short stories, don't count as "every day life" because Newspapers aren't included? Then I guess no, I don't use Japanese in my "daily life"

I guess another reason is that kana pretty much reviews itself if you're reading anything at all, so if you were to learn the kana today and embark in your RTK pilgrimage, you'd have forgotten the kana by the time you're done (unless you review kana), while if you were to learn it today after learning the kanji, it'd be fresh in your memory and you could start doing sentences or whatever.

I'd have given up if somebody had told me I wouldn't know almost anything about Japanese after two or three months, though.

I'm pretty sure Tobberoth was being sarcastic.

Well, lots of different opinions! I think overall I'm convinced that it definitely wouldn't hurt to pause RTK (it's not like I'm very far into it anyway) and learn the Kana first. Since it doesn't take very long anyway, why not? That way when I watch japanese movies, or whatever else, I would stand a better chance of recognizing things, especially as I go deeper and deeper into RTK.

Well, I definitely don't think you should do RTK at a point where you don't even know how kanji fit into the Japanese writing system. At the very least you need to read some introduction to the writing system, and I think it would be a good idea to have at least some very basic knowledge of Japanese before doing RTK.

It's not strictly necessary to use RTK, but the questions you're asking about kanji are sort of like someone trying to memorize multiplication tables without knowing what the number symbols are for or what they represent.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Well, I definitely don't think you should do RTK at a point where you don't even know how kanji fit into the Japanese writing system. At the very least you need to read some introduction to the writing system, and I think it would be a good idea to have at least some very basic knowledge of Japanese before doing RTK.

I found a great introduction to kanji at the University of Chicago website. It is a 14 pages pdf file, and they also have a list of the 214 traditional radicals + Japanese and English names.

If you want to know more about kanji, I sincerely recommend you this introduction.

Asriel Wrote:It's not hard to find a "kanji dense" sentence. I tried to find something from something more practical, like a message board. I ended up getting some sort of "denser" news article anyway:

(snip)

Response:
ごめんなさい。
全く分かりません。
２チャンエルとかで聞いてみてはいかがでしょうか？
Kanji: 20
Kana: 120

My question to you is this: What do you consider "daily life"?
If text messages from friends, written notes, signs, menus, and schoolwork, not to mention novels and short stories, don't count as "every day life" because Newspapers aren't included? Then I guess no, I don't use Japanese in my "daily life"

Now I'm confused. You said a few posts up, "I almost NEVER use hiragana in everyday life, because like 90% of Japanese writing is Kanji anyway."

And you've just proven yourself wrong by all those character counts. Perhaps you meant to say you almost never use *kanji* in everyday life??

Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you didn't confuse the OP into thinking that kana were not as essential as kanji. Thanks for clarifying.

Oh sorry, yeah, I was being sarcastic. I interpreted Khatz as saying "LRN KANGYS, BCUZ HERGANA AIN'T GOT NO USE!" (which was an incorrect interpretation)
and was sarcastically saying, "DERRR, I AIN'T NEVER SEEN NO HIRAGANA IN REAL LIFE"

Then you posted with a sentence with a ton of kanji, which I interpreted as:
"Your sarcasm implies that you're not exposed to enough Japanese to see how much kanji dominates the writing system" (which was an incorrect interpretation)

So then I responded by saying
"I am exposed to quite a lot of Japanese, especially the handwritten type, where I've seen hiragana being used much, much more often"
in order to prove a point that you already agreed with.


Hmm, it seems recently I'm being misinterpreted a lot. Maybe I should write in a better manner, or add </sarcasm> when it's being used...

Hologen, I just want to reassure you a bit on how slowly you feel you're going. I also learned kanji very slowly at first (a non-RTK course though), but then once the patterns became familiar, my pace shot up drastically. The people who are going much faster than you from the start are generally the ones who have already learned some kanji the old-fashioned way before starting the book. Expanding on previous knowledge is much easier than starting from scratch like you are doing.

I agree with Yudantaiteki, who suggested you learn the basics of the writing system before continuing your study.

As for learning the kana, all they are is sounds. You will definitely recognize more characters, but they won't mean much to you until you gain Japanese vocabulary. You would essentially be learning how to pronounce pieces of stuff that means gibberish to you. I can assure you, as someone who learned kana first before everything, the novelty of this wears off very quickly:

"Ooo, that thing there says, 'Something ku something ka ri ma se n.'"
"What does that mean?"
"I have no idea."

I would definitely suggest learning kana either just before or concurrently with grammar/vocabulary. I doubt it matters whether you do this while learning kanji, or after learning kanji. My point is, kana without any vocab is useless.

I haven't actually started the kana yet. Waiting for my next day off to devote a good chunk of time to it and not feel rushed. I took a peak at Heisig's remember the Kana, read the introduction, was a bit baffled when he wrote that I would learn it in three hours, as I looked at the pages I thought "Yeah right." But hopefully it will be easier than it looks. Everything LOOKS difficult before you figure out how it works, and then you think "I can't believe I ever thought this looked difficult." So I guess I just gotta keep the right attitude and not defeat myself.

3 hours is a pretty common time for the kana, even without RTKana. I did it just by trying to write the whole set from memory, restarting from scratch every time I forgot one. No RTKana or mnemonics..

That is of course just to get them into your head, you're going to need review by actually using them in practice too. If you're note starting real Japanese learning until after RTK, then you should SRS them (both ways) though.

Asriel Wrote:Oh sorry, yeah, I was being sarcastic.

Lol, thought something was amiss!

Hologen Wrote:I haven't actually started the kana yet. Waiting for my next day off to devote a good chunk of time to it and not feel rushed. I took a peak at Heisig's remember the Kana, read the introduction, was a bit baffled when he wrote that I would learn it in three hours, as I looked at the pages I thought "Yeah right." But hopefully it will be easier than it looks. Everything LOOKS difficult before you figure out how it works, and then you think "I can't believe I ever thought this looked difficult." So I guess I just gotta keep the right attitude and not defeat myself.

Give the kana a week to sink in. Most people can learn them all in a few hours though. One suggestion from personal experience, learn hiragana first and leave katakana for a few weeks time. I did this and I've never had any problems getting the two sets confused (maybe something to do with them being locked in different memory parts of my brain...I dunno). However, people I've studied with before who learnt the two kanas simultaneously would often mix then unknowingly, especially for the very similar kana characters like か and カ, う and ウ etc.

I've never heard of someone mixing up katakana with hiragana. People often forget some katakana since it's not used nearly as often though.

Tobberoth Wrote:I agree with you there. It seems unlikely to me than someone who has no grasp of Japanese at all can really value RtK. And it would suck pretty hard to spend 3 months on RtK and then give up Japanese altogether after another month because it turns out they found it boring to learn the actual language.

Kanji is an integrated part of Japanese, so doing it first without having ANY contact with Japanese seems odd to me.

Are you kidding me? :O There are loads of people who do that, including myself, and it made me actually enjoy learning Japanese even more, because I got this hard stuff out of the way. The kanji was one of the reasons I was hesitant to start learning Japanese, because I'd have to learn those and they seemed impossibly difficult.

The only thing I learnt before Kanji was the Kana (by rote memorisation) and I knew about three Japanese words. I'd consider that 'no grasp of Japanese at all'. I did start Pimsleur somewhere through RTK but not until I was almost finished. I didn't do any other Japanese, except watch the occasional anime/drama (and listen to lots of Jmusic), but that was just because I enjoyed them, not to learn anything from them.

So; not so odd at all. I'm definitely not the only one doing it this way.

Aethnen Wrote:"Ooo, that thing there says, 'Something ku something ka ri ma se n.'"
"What does that mean?"
"I have no idea."

That made me laugh so much, because I used to do that all the time (still do sometimes). :lol: I do it with kanji now though; see which ones I can remember the keyword of and, of the ones I've already learnt the onyomi of, what their onyomi is.

Jarvik7 Wrote:I've never heard of someone mixing up katakana with hiragana. People often forget some katakana since it's not used nearly as often though.

I think by the time I've worked my way through RTK2, I'll never forget katakana again. Ever.

Koos83 Wrote:

Aethnen Wrote:"Ooo, that thing there says, 'Something ku something ka ri ma se n.'"
"What does that mean?"
"I have no idea."

That made me laugh so much, because I used to do that all the time (still do sometimes). :lol: I do it with kanji now though; see which ones I can remember the keyword of and, of the ones I've already learnt the onyomi of, what their onyomi is.

Ha, I know what you mean with the kanji thing. Sometimes I'll be trying to read something, and I'll come across a word that I can read, but I have no idea what it means, and it drives me crazy because I'm sure I must have learned it before because it seems so familiar. But then it turns out that it actually is new, and I was just used to seeing the kanji involved from other compounds.

So I was just wondering, if any of you guys come back to read this. Should I just immediately return to Kanji study after I feel that I have a good grasp of the kana? Or sort of tip toe around it and learn some other things first?

Also, would it be a good idea to do pimsleur along with the Kanji? Do any of you think it's a good or bad idea to study two different things simultaneously like that?

Jump right back into kanji, in fact do kanji and kana at the same time.

Do not let up on the kanji monster.

You must TAME the animal and train it to do your bidding.

The sooner the better

Hologen Wrote:So I was just wondering, if any of you guys come back to read this. Should I just immediately return to Kanji study after I feel that I have a good grasp of the kana? Or sort of tip toe around it and learn some other things first?

Also, would it be a good idea to do pimsleur along with the Kanji? Do any of you think it's a good or bad idea to study two different things simultaneously like that?

You'll be fine learning kana and kanji at the same time. The kana characters are actually derived from kanji and throughout your learnings you'll see similaraties, mostly within the elements of kanji.

Yes, you can do Pimsleur along with Kanji. That's what I did all those years ago. Get a good textbook also, such as Genki I and II. Remember different people have different methods and you'll develop a method after a while. I have developed a quazi-Heisig method over the years where I learn batches of kanji common in a certain subject. When I first started 6 or 7 years ago I did the first 600 kanji the Heisig way (I even remember when this site first came out), as well as using textbooks for grammar learning and Pimsleur for reinforcement. But I got a bit disillusioned with Heisig after a while because, as a beginner, I was learning all these kanji that I wouldn't come across until years later when my Japanese was more advanced. Now my vocabulary and understanding of grammar is quite advanced (enough to earn a living from as a translator) and my method involves learning the more technical kanji that only appear in certain types of subjects. I don't do it in Heisig's order at all, but I have a good enough grounding in it that I know all the various elements that can make up a single kanji.

I wonder when Heisig will release "Remembering the Hentaigana".

I might actually use that

Is there even a font with hentaigana in it? Everything I've seen in print is a splotchy blob.

Jarvik7 Wrote:I wonder when Heisig will release "Remembering the Hentaigana".

I might actually use that

Is there even a font with hentaigana in it? Everything I've seen in print is a splotchy blob.

I have no idea what that is and I'm actually afraid to search for that in google....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana

Answering my own question re:fonts

http://www10.plala.or.jp/koin/koinhentai...nhenminfex

bizarrojosh Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:I wonder when Heisig will release "Remembering the Hentaigana".

I might actually use that

Is there even a font with hentaigana in it? Everything I've seen in print is a splotchy blob.

I have no idea what that is and I'm actually afraid to search for that in google....

Don't worry, "hetai-gana" has nothing to do with what you're thinking. XD