**Edit: I'm going to use this first post as a forum reference for my YouTube videos to help these classes.

Rem. The Kanji Classes Links
YouTube RevTK Register/Review Walkthru sorry for the blurry video
RevTK GoogleDocs Sort first 555 2k1KO in Heisig order.

Graph Paper spreadsheet

Lesson 01-37 Kanji Stories pdf Copy of my own stories
Lesson 01-37 Kanji Stroke Orders pdf made using stroke order font

Lesson 01-06 Kanji Spreadsheet
Lesson 07-12 Kanji Spreadsheet
Lesson 13-18 Kanji Spreadsheet
Lesson 19-24 Kanji Spreadsheet

Lesson 01-06 Primitives pdf
Lesson 07-12 Primitives pdf
Lesson 13-18 Primitives pdf


Rem. The Kana Classes Links
Using Anki to get RTKana Decks
Reviewing the Kana Spreadsheet


Kanji Lessons

Lesson 1: 一二三四五六七八九十口日月田目
Lesson 2: 古明品早世自白百中千専上下朝員
Lesson 3: 見元負万的直具真工左右有切則別
Lesson 4: 丁町可子女好母兄小少大多夕外名
Lesson 5: 石器川水原願源活消況泊土寺時均
Lesson 6: 火点魚黒量同向字完安木林森村相

Lesson 7: 本案未末味妹株若兆状然牛特告先
Lesson 8: 界茶合現全理主注金道造車連前各
Lesson 9: 格客額夏運高京週売学覚書敗枚故
Lesson 10: 言計話語読調談式試成減止歩企正
Lesson 11: 証定走題遠初市姉制製転芸雨冬天
Lesson 12: 立商北毎海複欠歌次資音暗識亡方

Lesson 13: 脱説増東歳県地風記電家場洋達差
Lesson 14: 着雑準確午習曜国因園回店心忘認
Lesson 15: 誌思応意息忙慣憶必手義議打指持
Lesson 16: 提担接研械型才材存在更友投設支
Lesson 17: 技軽反返販菜受払広台始窓去法会
Lesson 18: 室育出山入込分公欲常残死耳取最

Lesson 19: 買規賛失鉄力男功協行律徒待彼役
Lesson 20: 税和移秒秋私利季米数類様求等算
Lesson 21: 答人住体仕他休信依個値億使便宿
Lesson 22: 保符賃代貸化花何荷内肉座以似営
Lesson 23: 年夜施遊旅物屋局遅昼示社禁祭察
Lesson 24: 由届押申果課所近質昨作雪録急当

**End Edit**

I've been in discussion with the volunteer manager at the Fleet and Family Support Center on the Yokosuka Naval Base about starting up a class to teach Kanji and Kana. Although there's the quick double take (you mean you want to "teach" kanji?), the people there seem excited at the idea. I presented my basic lesson plan and resources just to show it's ready.

So, in September I'll be doing a Kana class every month. It'll be six lessons, 1 hour each teaching from Remembering the Kana. The problem is it's twice a week for three weeks, but that's a personal opinion.

The Kanji class should start up in October. I've arranged that to be RTK Ultralite, which is using the first 555 from KO in RTK order. I'll also hold up introduction of new primitives until they're used in the smaller set ex: Tongue doesn't show up until the "language" kanji. Since it's set to be two lessons a week for twelve weeks that'll limit me to the first 360 kanji in the list.

In both cases, I'll be leaning heavily on the books, and even encourage the students to buy them. In addition, I'll be introducing ways to do this on one's own and various resources available. I hope with the Kanji class some students will quit cause they find out they can do it faster on their own.

Here's hoping it works.

I wish you good luck on this endeavor. I hope the students enjoy RTK and I think its awesome you are spreading the love of kanji with other people.

As much as I like Heisig, and think that whoever tries to learn by rote memorization over Heisig has no idea what disservice he's doing to himself, I've wondered many times what an actual classroom lesson on Heisig would look like. Can you elaborate on how you plan to carry your lessons? You plan to present your stories to the class? Or give them primitives, and let them work their own?

perrin4869 Wrote:.... Can you elaborate on how you plan to carry your lessons? You plan to present your stories to the class? Or give them primitives, and let them work their own?

It's simple enough, I'll teach 15 kanji a lesson. Before hand I'll have gone through the kanji and ensure that the primitives have either been taught or get taught prior to being used. I've copies of the book in my lesson guide so I'll either mark the kanji if it's in the list or circle it if used as a primitive. The key is to track primitives that are skipped early on until they're used in a RTK Ultralite list.

During the lesson, I either give them Heisig, mine or even ask them input for visual stories. In addition, I'll stress the visual part and other aspects of learning, review and anything else. The key is don't do that off the cuff, write in the lesson plan definite reminders of what to talk about.

The only thing I give them is a print out of a spreadsheet they can get on their own from GoogleDocs, a copy of what primitives are covered that lesson along with suggested meanings/characters that can be used for them, and a graph paper. In addition, I'll help any set up a RevTK account or use Anki if need be.

Of course, no plan ever survives contact with reality. I'm sure this'll change as time goes on. As it's volunteer work, I'm not going to feel too bad if I make some mistakes. Just a chance to smooth the process should the time comes to be paid for my efforts.

Well, I know that I might have used some guidance at the beginning, for some reason I realized the importance of visual stories much later on (I got too caught up on the stories at the beginning, and it hurt me later on, when I couldn't recall very basic kanji). I wish you luck, and please keep us updated on the progress of the course.

In a classroom setting I think it would be fun to bring in props to represent the various primitives and have students create mini-skits for each kanji.

For example, student A could wear some gaudy necklace (or even a mohawk if you had one) to represent "Mr T" while student B holds a couple of branches to represent a "tree". For 休, Mr T would act all tired and wanting to take a break. Then, observing a nice, shady tree he walks over to take a nap underneath its branches.

You could also take pictures of each kanji being acted out for students to keep for future reference.

sheetz Wrote:In a classroom setting I think it would be fun to bring in props to represent the various primitives and have students create mini-skits for each kanji.

For example, student A could wear some gaudy necklace (or even a mohawk if you had one) to represent "Mr T" while student B holds a couple of branches to represent a "tree". For 休, Mr T would act all tired and wanting to take a break. Then, observing a nice, shady tree he walks over to take a nap underneath its branches.

You could also take pictures of each kanji being acted out for students to keep for future reference.

...

sheetz Wrote:You could also take pictures of each kanji being acted out for students to keep for future reference.

Or blackmail

It's kind of interesting, I've always wondered about what RTK would be like in a classroom. I think it would be a great experiment, but there are two main problems which stand in the way of it working well in a group setting:

1) Different stories work for different people. I've had perfectly reasonable stories not work at all, but when replaced with something completely nonsensical stuck really well.
2) "Inappropriate" stories are probably out for the classroom setting. This is a shame, because usually those are the best kind.

Impressive initiative Nukemarine.
You're actually going to teach learning how to learn kanji! The ultralite idea is good too. What is great is that a classroom setting will provide what we needed most when we where doing RTK without RevTK (which happens): interactional support. Students comparing stories, their learn rate, etc (plus the feedback you'll gain on how good you teach) is really the best incentive.
I know I'm old school, but I also suggest you do some rote drills for the kana cessions (even as homework).
Anyway, best of luck for the bright future.
Respect!

Class starts this Monday, Sept 13th. The volunteer coordinator told me the class filled up to its maximum of 20 students within a day of the announcement. Plus, most of those 20 seem interested to continue with the Kanji course that starts up in October.

Now let's see if I fuck this up.

Good luck nuke! They already have more motivation than the students in my college Japanese classes! A lot of students in the lower levels won't even open up their textbooks unless the teacher says to study something specific

Will you tell them about Anki or kanji.koohii.com?
kana =
You teach it by rote memorization right.
Like あ = a = あああああ = I'm falling, い = i so あい = love, う = u so あう = to meet (don't have to memorize the words, only あう = au and say it correctly).

Another issue that comes up in education is measuring progress. Since this isn't for a grade, will you measure progress at all?

I will start next friday teaching the kana using the heisig method to some "pupils", former class mates after school somewhere.. I suppose it's the best when we start with Shuji and go on with Shodou - to practice their handwriting (orz.. they suck, i already saw them~)

jcdietz03 Wrote:Will you tell them about Anki or kanji.koohii.com?
kana =
You teach it by rote memorization right.
Like あ = a = あああああ = I'm falling, い = i so あい = love, う = u so あう = to meet (don't have to memorize the words, only あう = au and say it correctly).

Another issue that comes up in education is measuring progress. Since this isn't for a grade, will you measure progress at all?

I'll just be using Heisig's "Remembering the Kana" method which, like RTK, splits kana up into smaller components and attaches those images to a keyword that's activated by the pronunciation. There's no need for drills, as words are given to practice the new kana which also practices the older kana.

In addition, they can make flashcards which'll be the word in Romaji on one side (with Romoji version of the kana in the corner) and the kana answer on the back. Later they can even "translate" the kana words and find out what they mean in English. Heck, they can add stories for the kana and it's parts if they want.

Plus, yes, I'll definitely teach about using Anki and kanji.koohii.com as I find/found them essential in my studies. However, the class is limited in time, so I can't go into details about these and other useful systems. Perhaps a one or two shot class at a later date should kana and kanji prove to be a hit (start small, build till you fill your space given, move to a larger area or program).

For kana, there's little reason to gauge progress. They live in Japan and it'll quickly become apparent how they're doing. With kanji, I'll probably use Anki with the Pimsleur cram timing plug-in for the class. I won't grade them, but they can tell how they're doing. Hopefully, they like how much easier it is to do self study and continue doing just that.

Again, time will tell with all this. I'll make mistakes, learn from them, and adapt from new or unforeseen situations. As I already have three years experience as a teacher of adults, I know this is inevitable with any class. Of course I'll keep the board updated.

From glancing exposure to showing people how to use RTK, and seeing their success with it, even with tiny bits, this will be a success because anything is better than how people learn kanji now. (or more importantly fail to learn kanji now) Or even Kana.

Do the class a favor though, and try and put more than one together when you can.

Will you be asking them to review on their own?

What a cool project! I take it the kana class a prereq for the kanji class?

Have you thought about what you're going to do at the end of the kanji class if people want to continue? More kanji class? Tell them to study on their own and/or form a study group? Start a grammar class?

Please keep us, um, posted.

Well, the Kana class for this month is half over. That means everyone that attended all three classes got to see all the Hiragana in addition to the silly stories. Now it's on to the fun part which is Katakana. I say that as I think most people find it the most difficult, while Heisig's method may make it easy to distinguish and remember the characters.

Some things I've learned: Write out the romaji, give the pronunciation guides (english words that sound similar), give the "keyword" then write out the kana as I go through the story. I then give them a quick proportion drawing in a 2x2 square box. Finally, its writing the three sample kana words.

What I also do now is write similar looking kana side by side so they can easily see the similarities and differences. This helps as I can explain why I'm using the same term for parts of the kana (ex: Seven Dwarves, Dagger, Cape, Toe, etc).

Some liked it, some didn't. Some went and bought the book to learn on their own. Some bought the book but still attended the class. I've also given the RevTK website a number of times. For me, it's been a fun experience and I look forward to continuing it.

Nuke, do you have a speadsheet with the 555 kanji in your RTK Ultralite set?

cjane Wrote:Nuke, do you have a speadsheet with the 555 kanji in your RTK Ultralite set?

Download this link as a spreadsheet of your choice:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=...l=en#gid=0

Sort entire list by RTK order column, highlight the first 555 (book 1) and sort those by Heisig order column. That'll get the Ultralite set.

Today kicked off the first day of teaching my first Kanji class. Some students carried over from the Kana class that finished last week. All total about 20 students for the first day.

To help them out, I've made a YouTube video to help walk them through registering and reviewing on kanji.koohii.com. I'll make a similar video for the Kana classes on how to use Anki and download the kana deck.

Little update:

I've taught two complete classes of RTKana. Both classes stayed under 50% attrition, which sounds bad, but turns out is MUCH BETTER than other Japanese courses taught for free at the Fleet Family Service Center (they get up to 90% loss). As the FFSC is now advertising at the indoctrination class (a 1 week class all members must attend soon after getting stationed on the Yokosuka base), I'm expecting a much larger 3rd class.

Only problems I'm having with what Heisig presented:

1. Plosives and Voice marks - He puts it right at the end of chapter 6 after all the kana are taught. It would have been better to introduce those two items early on, in addition to giving sample sounds for the variants (べ baby, ぺ　payday, じ jeep, ざ bonanza, etc.). That'd also help give more variety of sample words.

2. Katakana - he still used sample words that had kana not introduced yet.

Other than that, the story on あ has gotten big laughs even when I reference it latter. In addition the fourth chapter in katakana dealing with フ and it's variants I really enjoy teaching

On the kanji side, I'll be going into my 8th lesson (of 24 scheduled). One thing that got introduced was to "review" the last three lessons 1 kanji at a time. So if I'm teaching the fifth kanji, prior to that I write the words for the fifth kanji from the last three lessons. After I teach the new kanji, I'll give the answers to the reviewed one in addition to reminding them of the story.

Only change I'll be making starting in January is cutting the Kanji class down to 16 lessons (2 months). I'll still be using the same order, just stopping at lesson 16 (there are 37 lessons total for RTK Ultralite). This helps increase the number students introduced to the method. In addition, those that attend a kana class will only have to wait at most 1 month if they decide to try out learning kanji.

So far I've taught 3 kana classes and continue to refine how I go through it. Now, unlike the book, I introduce the voiced and plosive marks in lesson 1 to use it through out. In addition, I give example words in romaji and kana. Yet another class starts on December 2nd.

The kanji class is nearing the end, as I'll stop around lesson 18. The students still give positive comments though I won't know till later if this class directly aided their later Japanese exploits.

I also posted links to lots of documents and spreadsheets that students or anyone can access. If I make time, I'll try to finish up the primitive sheets.

I love the way you're going about this. I've been thinking of putting something like this together for my local 'Anime lovers' meet-up group. It's the closest thing I can find to a bunch of Japanaphile nerds around here.

Thanks for providing the spreadsheets and other resources, Nuke, you're a gentleman and a scholar.

Here's an update on the class:

I was able to teach six full classes of Hiragana/Katakana. I really enjoyed teaching these, and it seemed to get better as time went on. For Kanji, I got in about two full classes. These were more difficult in that they're longer and makes it hard for a working person to consistantly show up to classes.

My plans were to back off teaching a Kanji class after the one that started in March. Basically, each month I'd teach a 3 day Hiragana class one week, then a 3 day Katakana class the next week.

Anyway, when the earthquake hit in Sendai, events unfolded meaning I had to cancel teaching all classes for the near future.

One, I'm a video teleconference coordinator in addition to being the lead electronics technician supervisor for my command. That that command was tasked among other things with being the communication hub for the relief efforts and disaster monitoring for the US naval forces meant we had to pull 12 hour+ days for the last few weeks. Fortunately that's calmed down to the point of having a real routine.

Two, most of my students have been new arrivals to Japan. That pretty much all incoming personel have been put on hold meant even if I still taught a class, no one would likely show up.

Anyway, this creates a good reason to continue making the YouTube videos. What I put on the videos is pretty much how I taught the classes. The public affairs officer is looking into an idea to put these (or create new videos) on the base's commander's channel as an constant series newcomers can watch and learn.

If things return to normal in a few months, hopefully I'll be able to start up volunteer teaching again.