Hi, I've been going through RTK 1 for about a month now, and am at about Frame 700. I also happen to be an issei who came to the U.S. from Japan at age 4.

In terms of Japanese speaking ability, I consider myself passable. I grew up speaking the language, and as I grew up, my parents regularly sent me video tapes of my favorite shows, and perhaps my vocabulary, which although remaining poor, continued to improve modestly over the years beyond a 4 year old level.

Unfortunately, reading and writing is obviously a problem. I can read and even write most Hiragana with some effort. Katakana, I'm not too comfortable with. As for Kanji, with RTK, I figure I'm on my way!

One problem I've had with RTK so far is that I wish that it had the readings alongside each Kanji. Having looked up much of the Kanji as I went, I find that I already know most of the Japanese words represented by each frame, so I'd prefer to just use the Japanese word as my keyword, and I sometimes do. After all, what the heck is a "decameron"? The name of Kirk Cameron's French immigrant ancestor?

Any other native Japanese speakers out there using RTK?

So you already speak fluent Japanese natively and are doing RTK in English?

At least change the keywords into Japanese.

What button do I press on my copy of RTK to convert the keywords into Japanese?

I suppose it's all relative, but I'm not precisely fluent - at least not when compared with a "normal" native Japanese speaker.

I have some facepalm vocabulary moments. For example, I was once talking to my sister about this and that, and she mentioned per "pasokon", and I was like, what's a pasokon (personal computer)?? I have no idea why that word had slipped through the cracks of my mind up until that point.

I also have some strange pronounciation habits derived from having spoken English for so long. I find myself calling convenience stores "conveni" instead of the correct "conbini", and I call Seattle "siatoru" instead of "shiatoru", for example, which people have told me just sounds odd.

There is a [url=]Greasemonkey[/url] script called Substitute keywords which you can use to change the keywords to, for example, Japanese words. If you use this site then you can use it.

If you use Greasemonkey, then you can use another Firefox extension called Greasefire, which shows you when Greasemonkey scripts are available for the site you're currently browsing.

I think there's a spreadsheet somewhere with Japanese "keywords" for all the kanji in RTK. It must have been mentioned more than once in the forum.

[Katsuo]

Some threads and a website on the topic of Japanese keywords:

Long thread
Shorter thread
Website (Wrightak)

Thanks guys, I think that may help alleviate some of the confusion I've been experiencing while going through RTK. One early example was with 向, "over yonder", which I didn't look up at first, and just casually filed in my head as the "asoko" over yonder instead of the "mukou" over yonder. I later had to mentally undo the keyword when I discovered my mistake.

I'm not sure at what frame it was, but I simply switched over to Anki. It's a bit more work, but I enjoy the freedom to use images and any keyword I want.

This spreadsheet might also help Kanken +Heisig Spreadsheet

Has a lot of useful addendum for the Kanken kanji

Thanks! Once I downloaded the spreadsheet into Excel and sorted it by the Heisig number, I find that I can compose a mental story in Japanese using the kun-yomi column as I go, and it saves me the step of looking up each kanji.

My native language is Finnish and I have learned English normally from school and of course from using the language

(luckily I have played videogames from age of 6 or so, playing games like Final fantasy and Mmorpg conquer online plus participating to online discussion boards have done wonders to my ability to understand and write English.)

But to the point as Heisig keywords are often words that I can only hear rarely in some British shows and rather obscure it helps me a lot to have a Finnish word next to the english word. I however think both the Finnish and English keyword are important for me. Finnish one helps me understand if I happen to forget what the English word means.

I would suggest you to customize the anki deck to contain the reading you know, this might actually work as a extra pointer and improve your memory if you happen to forget the story. I would not recommend using only Japanese keywords tough, you probably posses 2 native languages as you have probably learned English trough hearing as well.
Might help you with synonyms and cover you up and give your brain some extra pointers. Besides the way you describe your situation tells me that your English skills far exceed your Japanese skills.

Anki is handy as the decks seem to be pretty easily shareable and customizable and my language is not even close to the "most spoken language in the world" (only 5,000,000 speakers)
which makes it pretty unlikely for any Finnish version heisig book to just pop out in near future.

http://tangorin.com/ - seems like good place to check the readings so that "over yonder 向 " doesn't happen again. But you probably already have a method to check the kanji.

but do what feels best.