I'm at 508 Kanji.

On my Anki I have a 90% retention rate of 'young' cards, so I'm remembering them pretty well.

However I find that when I'm glossing over Japanese text, I can identify kanji that I know how to write, but the keyword takes some effort to come to mind, or I can't make it come to mind at all.

Is this normal? I know Heisig says don't go kanji->keyword, but a lot of people here seem to reference being able to 'understand texts without knowing the actual pronunciations or words because they knew the basic gist'.

Can most of you gloss over a kanji and quickly know the keyword? Or are you like me?

Quick to go keyword -> Kanji. Slow to go the other way around.

Not really, no. I've finished RTK quite some time ago, but going Kanji > Keyword has never been a priority to me. You should probably focus your attention on learning vocabulary once you are done with RTK and sooner or later you'll kind of "know" the meaning of most kanjis by heart.

That's what I thought. I was just worried I was doing something wrong.

I always feel good in my Japanese class in high school when I write 見る instead of みる... I'm so easily satisfied.

No, soon you will be thinking of kanji by their different pronunciations and which words they are used in, more like what a native does.

yeah, i always used to think that i must be doing it wrong because it was sort of hard to go kanji -> keyword. then i realised that it served no real purpose except to glean some quasi-meaning out of the kanji i was presented with while watching tv or skimming websites or whatever though it would be completely wrong as often as it was right.

now that my vocab is growing and i'm not repping my heisig deck anymore (i know, i know, but i just haven't got the time to do sentences AND vocab AND heisig so i had to let something go) the keywords are falling away, the kanji remain and the space left behind is getting filled by readings, meanings and words...

so yeah, don't stress on it one bit.

Having finished RTK recently I only see the story for a few of them. What does come instantly is seeing the components (house, soil, water, person, etc) and remembering how to write it.

There are three modes I use when playing Japanese games:
Write down unknown things for lookup later.
Read the words I can, don't read the words I can't, try to understand.
Japanese Fail Mode: Just skip all the text and go straight to the gameplay.

In mode #1 or #2, if you can't read the word, I try to think of the keywords together might mean, since it's extremely common in Japanese to have the keywords related to the actual word and rare for them to be unrelated to the actual word.

Like take a random sample of words a beginner didn't know:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6117
There are 80 words there. Now let's identify ones that are NOT related to the key words.
挨拶 push open + be imminent = greeting?
頂く (heisig error, I think)
私達 me makes sense, but accomplish?
順調 obey + tune = favorable?
土産 soil + products = souvenir?
お守り guard = charm? This doesn't make sense to me but it might to others.
足りる leg = be sufficient?
慎重 humility + heavy = discretion?

8 words out of about 70. There are 80 words on the list, but you can't count words with 0 kanji. So that is absolute, undeniable proof that the keywords will help you get the meaning 9 times out of 10 (approximately). You have to use some other method to learn how to read it. I'm struggling with this myself. Understanding the meaning is usually not difficult, except that when I see a kanji I have only about a 50% chance to recall the keyword.

The RTK kanji I've learned seem to go through three stages for me, with the stage of any particular kanji depending on how often I've seen it after I learned it through RTK.

For example, a few weeks ago, I learned 信, which has the keyword of "trust". At first, when I saw it, I thought of the keyword. About a week later, I started to think of it less as the word, and more as the wordless idea of trusting something. A couple of weeks after that, it became simply "しん". I can go back to the keyword and story, but it takes more effort now than going from the kanji to しん.

Mushi, I know that you are a speaker of Japanese since your parents are Japanese, so it's a bit difference, but I too find that Japanese words that I know are much easier to think of the Kanji for.

That was badly worded. For example, 見る. 見 comes to mind instantly when I see the keyword "see" because I know "see" is みる and somehow I just know みる is 見る much quicker than having to break down the keyword and story or even just keyword -> kanji recollection.

jcdietz03 Wrote:There are three modes I use when playing Japanese games:
...I try to think of the keywords together might mean, since it's extremely common in Japanese to have the keywords related to the actual word and rare for them to be unrelated to the actual word....

I do pretty much the same thing as you when I'm reading things. Usually method #2. If it's games, I'll probably do #3...but hey, I'm weak willed an a prisoner to entertainment.

But regarding figuring out the "meaning" of words based on keywords. I definitely do it to a certain extent. If I'm browsing something and I don't care too much about it, that is. An example of this would be 保証 and 保障. EDICT gives them as the same "guarantee, security," but they're different. You could give a convoluted heisig-type story to help with the difference, but just by the keywords themselves you couldn't figure out the difference between them if they were unknown words.

zachandhobbes Wrote:Mushi, I know that you are a speaker of Japanese since your parents are Japanese, so it's a bit difference, but I too find that Japanese words that I know are much easier to think of the Kanji for.

That was badly worded. For example, 見る. 見 comes to mind instantly when I see the keyword "see" because I know "see" is みる and somehow I just know みる is 見る much quicker than having to break down the keyword and story or even just keyword -> kanji recollection.

I know what you mean, and I feel the same. 見 is very compelling as both kanji and word.

Some might wonder why I or anyone else would bother to use Heisig if you're ending up at the reading anyway. But I continue to be impressed with the benefits of RTK, and I don't believe I could get too many kanji to that third stage as readily if it weren't for Heisig. As it is, my mind is a hodgepodge, and there are only a select few kanji that I've seen often enough for them to be kanji > reading. Most of them are still English keywords, Japanese keywords, wordless ideas, or at worst, just stories with the principal meaning forgotten.

jcdietz03 Wrote:お守り guard = charm? This doesn't make sense to me but it might to others.

Oh, oh, this *so* makes sense! A thousand お守り must have passed through my hands in my lifetime. You get one when you want to get well, when you want to pass a test, or when you want to travel to Mexico without getting diarrhea. You hang one on your rearview mirror, you put one on your backpack. You go to a Shinto temple to pray, then you get one. Then, you go to a Buddhist temple and get another one. You give one to your mom. Your mom gives you back like three of them. You visit your grandparents and end up with five more, etc.

Why? Because we believe the kami of these charms will protect you and 守る you when we're not there.

If you´re having difficulty with recognition, practice recognition.
It´s ok to have cards where all you have to do is look at the kanji and have a general idea of what it means. You can then either pass/fail the card, or optionally write it out first.

zachandhobbes Wrote:Can most of you gloss over a kanji and quickly know the keyword? Or are you like me?

Quick to go keyword -> Kanji. Slow to go the other way around.

Bit hard to explain, but i'll try. When i see a kanji i know in a word i don't, a guess at the reading pops into my head (onyomi or kunyomi depending on which is most likely from the form of the word)... but that reading *means* what the kanji means. Ie, many kanji are read as こう but when i read one of those kanji, it's like each of the こう's are a different word that mean different things. So when i see, for example, 外交, がいこう pops into my head, not just as sounds but a meaning loosely translated into english as "external mingling" or something along those lines, but far more vague than that.

I feel you. I have the same problem, and I'm currently at 500 kanji.

For example, the other day in the subway station, I got out at the station Chungmuro (I live in Korea), and it was written in hanja (Korean kanji) as 忠武路. I recognized the second kanji as one I'd learned, and written many times, but I couldn't remember the keyword.

BUT it was easy to look it up since I happened to have the RTK book with me, and once I remembered that it was 'warrior', it seems to have really deepened itself in my mind, and it comes to me quicker when I review it keyword -> kanji now. So I think that the problems with not remembering keywords will go away once you start learning vocab and associating the kanji with words and sounds.

Perhaps I'm totally off since I'm only one quarter through RTK, but it seems to me that what all our senpais say about not worrying about it too much will be true in the long-term.

Hmm. I have made 3/4 of my way through Heisig but I still can't recall most keywords when I see a kanji. Most of the times I can only say "yeah I learned that one..." without having any other connection with it. The only kanji I can actually recall a keyword are those which I knew before Heisig already or where the keyword is the japanese equivalent.

When I learn new vocabulary I usually don't make the effort to look up the keywords for those specific kanji because I figured it would be a waste of time. But I'm starting to wonder - maybe I should do that? Does it help learning new vocabulary (i.e. being able to actually write the new word from memory) if you also recall the keywords for it? For example 交差点 - would it be beneficial to learn it as a chain of keyword meanings? Like: mingle-distinction-spot. Or is it a waste of time and I should just learn it as crossing and somehow memorize the kanji used? How do you learn new vocabulary? And if you use the keywords as a reminder for the kanji used - do you write them on the flashcards somewhere? Incidentally, 交差点 is the only vocab where I did use a keyword chain to remember the kanji used in the word, and I'm forever wondering if it makes sense or not.