I've read 'success' stories of people finishing RTK vol. 1... but with that I have a couple of questions.

1- Of those who have completed RTK vol. 1, how many of you can actually follow the meanings of the things you read based on the key words from the book?

2- Of those who have completed RTK vol. 1, has there actually been anyone that has completed RTK vol. 2 as well? And if so, know it well enough to be able to read a book/newspaper/etc.?

3- Is there a successful way to get through RTK vol. 1 while also learning the on and kun readings without completely screwing up the study flow? Any success stories with this?

I guess I just hear of people raving about the Heisig method, and I myself blew through ~400 or so awhile back before I got burned out and stopped due to life events... but I guess I just don't really hear of any success stories of people that have gone through the process of RTK vol 1-2 or 3 that have actually been able to sit down and read a book or newspaper. So I'm wondering if that even exists. I'm wondering if I should just maybe scrap the Heisig method and just stuck with beating myself through reading a novel or newspaper on a daily basis to pick up things here and there.

Thoughts, stories, suggestions?

You know a lot of times, people just need to hear that other people have done it successfully. Like learning a language to native-level,kanji,reading,etc.
I've been doing RTK for more than 1 year now(Finished in 3 months). It's around 1 year and 5 months now and my reps are less than 20 per day now.
What does this mean? I can recall the kanji from the story pretty easily, sure there are still hard ones even but thanks to learning Japanese through context, all the kanji started sticking to my head very well.

I started to notice I can recognize the kanji/write them easily.I could easily understsand kanji meanings and actually make sense of some unknown vocab just by knowing meanings(common sense really). So what's the benefit? You can the ability to write kanji,recognize it and get past the fear of kanji. Thanks to RTK(I did both volumes, 1 and 3) I don't have problems recognizing all the major kanji at random now and thanks to the srs it will stay in my memory for the long-term.

Although learning to read novels,newspapers is a different battle but RTK is a setting stone.

ldshakes Wrote:1- Of those who have completed RTK vol. 1, how many of you can actually follow the meanings of the things you read based on the key words from the book?

This is only a (very early) intermediate step in the process of learning how to read so it doesn't really make sense to ask about that in the context of a question about success stories.

ldshakes Wrote:2- Of those who have completed RTK vol. 1, has there actually been anyone that has completed RTK vol. 2 as well? And if so, know it well enough to be able to read a book/newspaper/etc.?

I'm sure there are many people here who have gone through RtK 2 after the first one, but these two volumes don't prepare you to be able to read a book or newspaper, they prepare you to be able to start learning how to read a book or newspaper.

You're not going to be able to read a newspaper after finishing RtK. If you're going through novels and newpapers, you should already know how similar kanji can be, how rarely some of them come up, and how one keyword cannot tell you what a word means. That's true no matter what your study method is. I'm not sure there are any "success stories" of kanji learning in the magic bullet sense that you're looking for.

RtK helps you remember the kanji, not read them. It's in the title, but people don't seem to get that?

1. I did RtK. I just passed N1. There's still a ton of words I don't know, and kanji I can't read.

2. RtK 2 doesn't seem as effective as just going through materials and learning them along the way, although...

3. You could try adding a reading as a primitive to your stories. You assign a keyword (that sounds kind of like the reading) to each of the (common) readings, and just have 1 or 2 more primitives in your stories. I haven't done it, but I've heard of it, and I think its probably a good idea (check out the movie method).

That said, I can read relatively comfortably, and that's definitely been helped out by going through RtK. But there's still a ton of words I don't know -- which is definitely not the fault of RtK.

edit: I should say that the vast majority of my study has been non-RtK stuff. I didn't start reading books comfortably simply after finishing RtK, there's been a ton of other stuff. RtK just got my foot in the kanji door.

@Asriel
I agree, RTK is definitely just getting your foot into kanji.
It took me a while to gain the ability to read Japanese with ease(news,novels,etc). Took about 1 year+. Even now there are still words I don't know but thanks to doing vocab via my vocab deck it's been going up.

But there will always be vocab one doesn't know, even in our native languages.

hmm, what has rtk1 done for me...

after going through the whole book, i only kept it in anki for a month after all 2042. i was just really tired of it.

what i did learn was the ability to identify kanji, identify the parts of kanji, and be able to put it together. looking up kanji in the dictionary is a cinch now. i know stroke orders and radicals. it also goes in a very sensible order. being able to identify radicals and elements of kanji makes it so much easier to remember too; i'm taking a japanese class as a refresher and there's a lot of people that are so lost and it's hard for them to remember because they view each character as its own.

i also learned how to use anki, and learned better self-study habits. i think it was instrumental in teaching me how to self-study.

what i did NOT learn was anything relevant to comprehension or understanding. about 3/4 of the way through RTK1 i visited japan. it *slightly* helped, since i'd see something like 石炭 and think "oh, rock charcoal! i bet it's yakiniku!" but really the practicality of keyword to comprehension was not there.

i can say though, that without RTK1 i'm sure that doing KO2001 as I am right now would be very difficult.

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as for the idea of going through newspapers and novels, you should do that if you find it fun or have the time. at the moment, i split my time between focused intense study (slowly reading and defining every word and understanding all essential grammar, SRS study and inputting new cards) and through casual relaxed study (reading, trying to figure things out through context, but not stopping to look things up). depending on my mood, one might get more attention, because i would consider it more fun or more useful at the time.

Hey ldshakes.
Yes, single kanji are like an alphabet, but you're screwed if you don't know the meaning of actual words (compounds). Like our writing system really (remember the words you didn't know when you were a kid?). I did RTK1 in 3 months, and I can "read" texts (meaning I decipher the kanji, they're not senseless squiggles anymore), but I cannot read because I don't know most of the words (I'm a beginner). Learning vocab is a separate task, but as time goes by, I really see how RTK allowed me to learn vocab easily and efficiently (I remember the rote-hell pre-RTK).

Agreeing with what others are saying RTK shouldn't be viewed as the answer to all your Japanese illiteracy problems. It is more of a tool to help on your way to becoming literate. The method teaches you how to pick up new Kanji and can help you remember how to write them so that you can see the differences between two very similar Kanji. Even just being ABOUT half way through RTK i can open a book an infer some meanings I then look up the readings and it sticks very well because I have a clearer picture in my head of the meaning.

You really get what you get out of it. IF you want to become literate you eventually have to learn how to write all these Kanji. Whether you learn how to write, or how to write and the meaning at the same time, you'll get there. Just which way is faster for you?

More than anything, I find that RTK is getting 'used' to kanji. They are arguably the biggest road block to literacy, which isn't exactly helped by the lack of systematic learning approaches. RTK isn't the only "systematic" approach, but as a beginner, it's very accessible. Especially so if you aren't used to self-studying, since you don't really have to plot your own path from scratch.

kainzero Wrote:i also learned how to use anki, and learned better self-study habits. i think it was instrumental in teaching me how to self-study.

In retrospect, this was the biggest one for me.

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:You really get what you get out of it. IF you want to become literate you eventually have to learn how to write all these Kanji. Whether you learn how to write, or how to write and the meaning at the same time, you'll get there. Just which way is faster for you?

You don't have to learn how to write to be able to read. Granted, I'd recommend you do because muscle memory is a powerful asset, but still.

I guess I should have also explained that I can speak and understand Japanese at an intermediate level more or less.

So if getting an understanding of reading material (books, news, etc.) is what I want... Perhaps RTK isn't the process I should be using?

I think you have a misunderstanding of what RtK is.

I didn't start RtK until I was in the 2nd semester of my 3rd year Japanese class...which was about a year and a half after I started studying.

When you look at a kanji like 飛行機, or 自動販売機, or maybe even 卒業, is it slightly intimidating? These are common words, so maybe you already know them, but seeing 5 randomly scrawled out characters in a row is generally daunting for most people.

Does "oneself" "move" "marketing" "sell" "mechanism" make you automatically think "oh that must be read じどうはんばいき and means 'vending machine'!"?
Absolutely not.

But what it does do is let you recognize at an instant that you're already familiar with those kanji, and you'll be able to see that they are the same in different contexts. Otherwise, you might think that 業 and 僕 are the same. And let's not get into the 寺 series, 侍、待、時、特, mixed with 得 for good measure. You become 'familiar' with them. Someone said that you get 'used' to the kanji -- and that's the point.

You're at an intermediate level in spoken Japanese, so you probably knew the word ひこうき、but that doesn't mean that RtK is going to automatically put the characters 飛行機 in your mind as ひこうき->airplane. That's what you've gotta do on your own. That's how you read books and newspapers.

Asriel, that actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
I guess as much as I'd like to be able to recognize kanji by meaning (such as in RTK), I think moreso I'd like to be able to understand in more of a "in Japanese" manner such as in reading. Which may only come about by pushing myself through a book or newspaper until I gain an understanding through familiarity by constantly emerging myself in reading.... Not sure if that makes sense or not.

That's the point in the long term. Let's face it, memory is associative and trying to learn more than two thousand seemingly random squiggles through osmosis isn't very efficient. RTK is a divide-and-conquer approach which associates said squiggles to already familiar concepts by providing keywords, and then using these as building blocks.

The end result is basically that vocab gets easier to learn, since you can more easily attach different concepts and readings to something that you actually recognize. It makes the 'immersion' part more efficient, if you will, since you won't really have to worry about unknown kanji.

Since you already know some Japanese, however, I can understand it'd feel strange to use English keywords. Try going kana->kanji with compounds, kun- or on-readings instead. I find it's easier to remember if you're familiar with the language.

Also, you can also check wrightak's Japanese keywords project, an alternative that might interest you.
http://sites.google.com/site/wrightak2/afterrtk1

However, you might try something other than RtK like Kanji in Context. RtK isn't a magic bullet "one fits all" book, and you're free to try something else if RtK doesn't seem that appealing to you.

OK, while I agree with a lot of what has been said here, I really want to stand up for RTK2 and say that using it in combination with Heisig's flash cards was far and away the biggest single factor in my being able to read at a relatively high level today. Phew! Just had to get that out.

I understand why people don't jump up and down shouting about the glorious wonders within book 2; but still, I loved that book. So much so that I gave it away to help someone else, knowing that I had had absorbed every page and would never need to go back to it. I was right. It's not often that I'm completely stumped by a general use character. I still run into problems, but I can happily read a novel without needing to reach for a dictionary to check a reading.

Learning to read Japanese is a painful process, but it can be done and RTK2 can help you on your way. You just need persistence and single-mindedness to get to where you want to be.

This isn't a success story, it's more of a "maybe you can avoid the pitfalls I ran into" story...

I went through RTK starting at a highish intermediate level, and I found it was pretty much wasted (or at least very inefficiently used) time. I think that a naive approach to RTK gets you what Astendra characterises as "getting 'used' to kanji" and kainzero describes as "the ability to identify kanji, identify the parts of kanji, and be able to put it together". If you're a beginner, that's all new and important stuff to know. If you're intermediate and haven't been totally ignoring the written language you probably already have most of that. I think at the intermediate level getting the best out of RTK probably requires (a) tying it into what you already know [eg Japanese keywords] and (b) having a plan for actually using the results, ie progressing from RTK keyword->kanji to the actual useful skill of vocab->written form. I think I'd also recommend using one of the "RTK lite" half-size subsets, because I think that is likely to get you most of the benefit for less effort.

If you only care about being able to read, not about writing, then I suspect that just ploughing through a lot of vocab (ie training recognising things in their usual written forms) plus doing a lot of reading will give you more benefit than going through RTK.

pm215 Wrote:If you only care about being able to read, not about writing, then I suspect that just ploughing through a lot of vocab (ie training recognising things in their usual written forms) plus doing a lot of reading will give you more benefit than going through RTK.

Very likely. It's hard for us to tell which level he's at, though.

GreenAirth Wrote:OK, while I agree with a lot of what has been said here, I really want to stand up for RTK2 and say that using it in combination with Heisig's flash cards was far and away the biggest single factor in my being able to read at a relatively high level today. Phew! Just had to get that out.

I understand why people don't jump up and down shouting about the glorious wonders within book 2; but still, I loved that book. So much so that I gave it away to help someone else, knowing that I had had absorbed every page and would never need to go back to it. I was right. It's not often that I'm completely stumped by a general use character. I still run into problems, but I can happily read a novel without needing to reach for a dictionary to check a reading.

Learning to read Japanese is a painful process, but it can be done and RTK2 can help you on your way. You just need persistence and single-mindedness to get to where you want to be.

It does take a while to gain the ability or read flawless due to so much readings. But I've already gotten to that 90%+ mark now. So it's just a matter of vocab+more reading to master it completely.

astendra Wrote:Very likely. It's hard for us to tell which level he's at, though.

yeah, plus people tend to say they're intermediate no matter what level they are.

i'd say anyone from JLPT N4 - N1 classifies themselves as intermediate. just like how everyone views themselves in the socioeconomic middle class.

i used RTK from the beginner level, as in, i only took 1 semester of japanese class before taking it. i was aware of radicals, but i wanted to learn all the stroke orders and radicals at once.

when i think about kanji, i think about what you have to do to learn it.
stroke order, general meaning, different readings depending on what it's attached to. writing it out. writing it out from memory as opposed to reading it. remembering the actual word that a compound means. what radicals form it.

the way i viewed RTK, it gets all the stroke orders and radicals out of the way first. there's still a lot to learn.

is it the best way to learn, as opposed to learning each kanji's details one by one? i don't know. as i've already learned through RTK, i can't go and unlearn RTK and learn through, say, kanjidamage or movie method. i can't forget RTK and then just go through genki or some other textbook.

and unlike most people, i stopped RTK very quickly after getting to the last character. i felt that the stroke order and radical learning was the most important part. i can see how knowing the keyword would help (especially trying to write in from memory), but i chose not to go that route.

ldshakes Wrote:Asriel, that actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
I guess as much as I'd like to be able to recognize kanji by meaning (such as in RTK), I think moreso I'd like to be able to understand in more of a "in Japanese" manner such as in reading. Which may only come about by pushing myself through a book or newspaper until I gain an understanding through familiarity by constantly emerging myself in reading.... Not sure if that makes sense or not.

RTK doesn't let you recognize kanji by meaning. The loose keyword associations in RTK are merely meant to be used as cues for stories—however you want to think of the stories (some think of them as visual mnemonics, for me they were more like abstract conceptual scaffolding for piecing the radicals together in my mind in a specific way per kanji). These cues and stories are for writing/recognizing kanji, not for yomi or definitions.

Both of these fade away as you complete RTK, so that when you're reading Japanese, you simply instantly see each kanji as a unique icon and are able to write it/visualize it easily. But you've reached that state of seeing it as a familiar whole through a bottom-up process so there's also a level of detail to that instant recognition that you might not have gotten otherwise, at least not as quickly as simply relying on exposure to the words.

Of course people do RTK in different ways with varying levels of success, but what I've outlined above was the ideal as I took it, and that's what happened after I completed it. My impression is about half the active members of the forum at any given time feel similarly.

RTK was an essential part of learning to read Japanese for me. A fundamental component in the production line process of my learning Japanese. I also view doing RTK with SRS (this site's flashcards or Anki) to be crucial.

And looking at above comments, if we're discussing methodology: I also quit reviewing my RTK cards as individual kanji cards once I finished, and simply did kanji in sentence/vocabulary SRS reviews when I felt I was growing fuzzy on what I learned in RTK in terms of deep recognition or writing ability (since handwriting the kanji, the muscle memory, aids memorization of the kanji as part of the brain's multimodal learning process). In retrospect I also would've combined RTK with other areas of Japanese learning. Both of these things we've discussed in detail elsewhere on the forum, though (just as indications of RTK ‘success stories’ are all over the forum).

Although I have still not finished RtK yet (Frame 1475... WOOT!) I would define it as a huge success story in my self-study to become literate in Japanese.

I myself began RtK at a intermediate level of speaking, and a low-intermediate level of Kanji.

The reason why I say that Rtk is a success story for me, is because the study of Kanji always felt absolutely hopeless for me, and I was begging to doubt my ability to ever become literate in Japanese. Thanks to RtK though, I absolutely feel as if I will be able to be literate one day, and that has really motivated me in my Japanese studies again.

You will not be able to read a newspaper after RTK, that much I know, but it will give you a huge advantage when learning vocabulary compounds. Being able to learn the "spelling" of compound words will really help in your vocabulary acquisition/recognition as you will know the basic meanings of what the word is comprised of.

交流会　+ Mingle, Current, Meeting = Social Exchange Meeting

I myself plan to study through RtK 1, then move onto SRS vocabulary/compound studies to fill in the gaps that will undoubtedly be left there when I complete the books.

RtK, for me, is the only STEPPING STONE that I know of that will allow me to get to literacy in Japanese.

On top of that, I find myself looking at, noticing, and being interested in the Kanji that surrounds me in my everyday life. Not to mention the compliments you will get when people see you studying

I did a Japanese class that was almost all speaking, so I really sucked at reading and writing. After about three years I knew maybe two hundred kanji and all the kana. In the two years since then I did RTK, and can now about Harry Potter level novels without too too much trouble (I'm guessing--I've never read Harry Potter, but I've never read anything famous enough that would work as a reference). I also passed JLPT 2.

How much of that is because of RTK? Dunno. I've barely studied at all the the last two years other than RTK, but I live in Japan.

I think Nestor's post sums up my view. I definitely do *not* think it was inefficient time for me. I've studied Japanese a bit off and on for years - with a bunch of short trips to Japan where I would learn a bit, forget a bit, etc. I also took it in school - learned a lot, forgot a lot.

RTK and an SRS exposes you continuously to Kanji with a pretty reasonable time investment. I'm not a 50 character per day person - finally on the home stretch after stopping it once and restarting.

That said, I find it's already been hugely helpful. Before, I would mix up things like 鞄 and 靴 very easily if it weren't clear from context - and my reading was atrocious. And many times if I saw a word in a different place (on a machine button, etc) - a kanji would look familiar but I would have no idea. Now, I can easily distinguish 連れる and 運ぶ and I can remember the meanings more readily.

Anyways - in short I've already found it has increased my comprehension and my *ability* to remember vocabulary. I don't really care about writing by hand, but I found before that even a kanji compound that I knew - I wouldn't recognize in the wild. If I saw 暑 in my reviews and then saw 箸 written somewhere, I'd get it all mixed up.