Hi everyone

I recently started RTK, (~200 Kanji so far :|) and I wanted a little advice on how to balance 3 languages.

Here's the problem. I can speak and understand Cantonese (it's a chinese dialect) very well, but I'm pretty much illiterate. (400~ words/sentences)

I can also somewhat speak Mandarin if I alter the tones and a few words here and there, but I usually end up sounding like an idiot .

So my question is.. since I intend to learn all three.. well technically 2 languages, which one should I start with in terms of "characters?" Kanji? Or the traditional Hanzi?

I asked my parents about some keywords/meanings that I learned from RTK, and some of the Kanji that I showed them were quite off from the Hanzi that they wrote. But they were "kinda the same." Like an average between Simplified and Trad. o_O.

In other words, If I started with RTK and finished it, would I potentially be able to understand what a chinese/canto newspaper reads? And vice-versa. (Began with RTH --> read Japanese?)

I understand that this is just Kanji/Hanzi identification and not necessarily the definitions but in the long run would I save time by learning Kanji first, then learning Traditional Hanzi?

I just want to save some time because Kanji has SOME simplified Chinese Hanzi along with some traditional Chinese Hanzi, along with purely Japanese Kanji.

Thanks!

Personally, I would just focus on one language at a time.
But, in the end, it just depends on what it is you want to do.

I don't think it makes sense to use RTK as a way to prepare for Chinese.
Some of the definitions may be different in Chinese and Japanese or maybe
Chinese uses one variation and Japanese uses another.

I'd just go straight for RTH instead. Also, I think your knowledge of Chinese
will make things much easier for you.

I'm confused. Are you planning to learn Japanese? You didn't say you are in your post. If not, then RTK won't offer you any benefits over RTH.

calmthedarkness Wrote:In other words, If I started with RTK and finished it, would I potentially be able to understand what a chinese/canto newspaper reads?

No, because there's a lot more to reading than just meanings of characters. RTK + your knowledge of spoken Cantonese would provide you with a very good basis to learn to read Cantonese fairly quickly. Reading standard Chinese would be harder because you have to learn Mandarin vocab and grammar as well.

Quote:I understand that this is just Kanji/Hanzi identification and not necessarily the definitions but in the long run would I save time by learning Kanji first, then learning Traditional Hanzi?!

Start with what you want to learn.

Oh sorry guys, yup, I do want to learn Japanese as well as Chinese/Canto.

Blah, I guess what everyone says holds some merit , I think I'll just put the other two on hold and just stick with Japanese first then.

I just thought that if the characters between the 2 languages were similar enough then learning RTH first would allow me to bypass the whole.. or a good chunk, of the RTK book. Sorta like killing two birds with one stone? ^^

Anywho, thanks!

There's no sense in doing RTK and RTH. There's enough overlap that doing one after the other would be tedious and unproductive.

Assuming they actually release RTH part 2 at some point, probably your best bet is to do RTH Traditional, as it has more characters and surely most of the characters worth knowing from the RTK series.

I've had this dilemma somewhat. I intend to learn Mandarin after I have done Japanese, so I wasn't sure whether to do RTH or RTK, or even do what Khatzumoto did and go through all ~4000 characters on Zhongwen.com in a Heisig-esque mnemonic fashion.

In the end I've decided to do RTK, because Japanese is what I want to do *now*, and it doesn't make much sense to me to learn all the traditional hanzi and then have to learn loads of the Japanese Kanji simplifications before I can actually make sense of Japanese (not to mention I'll either forget those unsimplified characters through disuse, or have lots of extra unnecessary SRS work).Also RTH isn't fully completed yet, and I wanted to get started now. Especially when the likelihood is that I might just end up doing Mandarin with Simplified Characters - rather than Cantonese or Mandarin with Traditional like Taiwan - then the whole effort would have been a waste.

I found this blog helpful, which discusses this dilemma exactly for people wanting to do both: http://chinesequest.blogspot.com/2009/10...-list.html Particularly this:
"I decided to start with Remembering the Kanji, rather than either the simplified or traditional versions of Remembering the Hanzi, for a number of reasons.

1. There’s a lot more material available out there for RTK, as it has existed for about thirty years, as opposed to like two years for RTH.
2. I already have a copy of RTK, and I didn’t want to invest more in something I wasn’t sure would work at all in the first place.
...
5. The first volume of Remembering the Hanzi only goes up to 1500 characters which, for Chinese, is pretty lame."

Whatever you do - Chinese and Japanese are written differently so whichever way you choose to learn it - Traditional -> Kanji -> Simplified, Kanji -> Simplified, Kanji -> Traditional -> Simplified - you're going to have to learn the extra characters some time. So it would make most sense to learn the characters of the language you intend on studying first. If you do traditional first you'll need to learn Kanji simplifications for words like 学 instead of 學 and vice-versa.

My advice:

Go through RtK1. Once you're done with it, don't go through any of the other books. When you start learning Chinese and come upon Hanzi you don't know, just use the same tactics you learned in the book to learn the hanzi by yourself. That way you can learn just the stuff you need. Reason why it's good to go with RtK instead of RtH is because it contains more sinograms, and you get a weak mix between traditional and simplified (it's really just traditional with minor changes to a few of the sinograms). Learning simplified is really quite easy once you have a decent grasp of traditional, so doing RtK is IMO the book which gives the most "bang for your buck" if you want to learn both Japanese and Chinese.

Thanks for linking my blog, Tefhel. I ended up not finishing RTK because I've decided to save Japanese until later, but that's because I'm studying Chinese (modern and classical), French, and Latin, along with other stuff. I just couldn't balance them all, so I had to make a choice.

However, I'd say go for RTK first in your situation. There aren't a whole lot of characters that are different between Japanese kanji and traditional hanzi. Something like 300. After that you need only learn a few hundred more from RTH and you'll be pretty well set for both languages. Of course, you may eventually need more for Chinese but you can learn those as you come across them.