I've mostly gone through RTK Lite - going through it again more thoroughly at the moment. My recognition is okay for the RTK Lite characters, as well as for a lot of words that I've just seen all over - 醤油 or 南瓜 or whatever. Yet I find my *production* is awful. When I see 醤油 I know what it means and I can select it from a kanji lookup on the computer when I type it, but I couldn't write it by hand. I feel that this also makes my reading very slow and laborious - making it hard for me to tackle native texts. If I don't know a few characters or words, I get very hung up.

So, I'm wondering the best way to work on production for compounds. I'm fine for when I see paragraph, I write 項 with little thought. Yet when I see 項目, I can recognize it but would have trouble remember that it's "paragraph" and "eye" or whatever.

I've seen various methods - writing down compounds twenty times, hiragana to kanji cards, etc. I'm curious what people recommend for this specific issue? Some kind of J-J sentence cards, just vocab cards that require production (hiragana-kanji), or what?

Hope that makes sense.

Try kana to kanji production cards for vocab/sentences. The only downside is that, it really drains the time. So I'd say set a limit, like 20-30 cards per day and you should be able to write kanji from memory(as it creates very strong memories,it should help burn the kanji readings into your head as your writing it from memory based solely on the kana you see in the question card)

Other things you could do is go online and see japanese journals written by japanaese and copy those out. But for this to work well, I'd recommend one having good reading/understanding skills before hand. As it just makes writing easier, as you just need to concentrate on the writing only

Production is really good, I try to practice it out a lot when I get the chance but writing fluently is the last skill one should worry about. Understanding being the most important, then reading, then speaking and lastly writing. But eventually obviously your going to want to be able to use all skills

If it's just a vocab card, do you do anything to distinguish or do you always put it in a sentence in context?

I'm much more concerned with recognition than production as I can't even read a simple novel - yet I find myself often stumbling over words I know. I'll see the word 誘拐 and can't remember if it's たいほ or ゆうかい - or sometimes a totally different word. (I'll often mix up related subject matter, or related sounds). I never would mix up something like 読み込み中 as I know what each character means and how it's pronounced. Yet before RTK, I might have confused 読む and 売る.

Maybe I need to focus on readings for kanji, yet I feel like that might be a waste of time as there always seems to be a zillion exceptions. I'll try to do limited production - it does seem to take forever to write out stuff, and I just want to get to the level where I can enjoyably browse Japanese language texts. Not concerned about writing at the moment, yet anything I can write is very easy to read...of course.

haplology Wrote:I'm much more concerned with recognition than production as I can't even read a simple novel - yet I find myself often stumbling over words I know. I'll see the word 誘拐 and can't remember if it's たいほ or ゆうかい - or sometimes a totally different word. (I'll often mix up related subject matter, or related sounds). I never would mix up something like 読み込み中 as I know what each character means and how it's pronounced. Yet before RTK, I might have confused 読む and 売る.

Maybe I need to focus on readings for kanji, yet I feel like that might be a waste of time as there always seems to be a zillion exceptions. I'll try to do limited production - it does seem to take forever to write out stuff, and I just want to get to the level where I can enjoyably browse Japanese language texts. Not concerned about writing at the moment, yet anything I can write is very easy to read...of course.

Being concerned with readings is good, that doesn't mean you have to study them specifically though. Think about it, do you know any other word with 誘? I, for one, knew 誘惑 (yuuwaku). Do you know any word with 誘 where it's pronounced tai (not likely )? That knowledge alone should be enough to clear up such problems. Of course, it takes time to get to that stage though, but don't worry. The more words you know, the easier it gets.

I started doing the production cards and I think they will be very helpful, both for regular learning and for cementing the RTK stuff that seems to fade away.

Simple things like I know 渇 is thirsty, and I probably could recognize 渇いている when I saw it in context - but I doubt I could've written 渇く. Maybe it's just me, but I think the production is necessary, otherwise I find myself not understanding words that I should already know.

Right now I'm just doing hiragana on one side, kanji (and English meaning) on the other. Maybe I'll add sentences when I get too many similar readings, but I don't want production cards to take forever.

I was thinking of trying to look up a sentence for each one - will have to search for the spreadsheet. I have The Wisdom dictionary on the iPhone that has a lot of good example sentences, but not nearly enough to restrict kanji.

For instance, I'd like to mostly restrict kanji to RTK that has already been learned. In other words, if I'm working on character 573, then the sentence shouldn't use an RTK that is number 1834 (and thus not already learned).

Hmm, do you know where that RTK spreadsheet is? I tried to search for spreadsheet, compounds, rtk, etc - but I find RTK2 and RTK3 spreadsheets and various other Hanzi spreadsheets, etc. Not sure exactly what I'm looking for.

haplology Wrote:If it's just a vocab card, do you do anything to distinguish or do you always put it in a sentence in context?

I don't think you should ever learn a word without at least a phrase associated with it. People sometimes say you don't need them, but I think there's always *something* you don't know about the word that a sentence or phrase will help with. If it's a noun, you can learn the counter as well, or a common verb that goes with it (i.e. do you know how to say "Put soy sauce on [a food]" or "brew soy sauce"?)

haplology Wrote:Hmm, do you know where that RTK spreadsheet is? I tried to search for spreadsheet, compounds, rtk, etc - but I find RTK2 and RTK3 spreadsheets and various other Hanzi spreadsheets, etc. Not sure exactly what I'm looking for.

I think icecream is talking about the RTK with japanese keywords, so search for "japanese keywords" in the topic title.

Ah, I've seen the RTK with Japanese keywords. Was trying to decide if I should go through again with Japanese keywords. Sometimes the English keywords seem a bit useless. If I mix up transcend and surpass - does that really make a big difference? Yet if I mix up 早い and 速い, it can make a real difference.

Do people recommend starting over with Japanese keywords, or just adding compounds and sentences as examples? When I see 厚い I know what it means, and when I see 太い I know what it means - yet I sometimes screw up the keywords (as in English they can be interchangeable, but I don't see 太い and 厚い as interchangeable in Japanese).

I get a bit too caught up in nuance, but then can't understand a basic podcast. Hmmph.

@haplology > What I'm doing with my RtK reviews is changing them as they come up, instead of going through the entire thing. Note that this is only when I do the reviews on the computer, not on my iPod. A kanji comes up, I'll go in and change the keyword into a few words that I know it's in.

Might save some time instead of going through all of RtK again