yudantaiteki Wrote:I learned kanji without RTK and I know many people who did as well. My question wasn't whether RTK was necessary to learn kanji (I know it's not), but whether it was necessary to follow the basic plan that tends to be favored on this forum.

I'm not sure there is a basic plan favoured on this forum...

yudantaiteki Wrote:

kainzero Wrote:When I took a class last year, I remember people telling me how they'd remember kanji. "Oh yeah, there's a squiggly line here and then a plus sign here..."

I don't know how you could function like that.

I learned kanji without RTK and I know many people who did as well. My question wasn't whether RTK was necessary to learn kanji (I know it's not), but whether it was necessary to follow the basic plan that tends to be favored on this forum.

I think there are probably a lot of us that didn't follow the basic plan that is popular here.

I did RTK... but more or less at the end of an intensive course that put me at roughly N5 level. And i did classes up to N4 level. I learned the N5 and some of the N4 kanji conventionally. The RTK kanji aren't any stronger or weaker in my head, although i guess RTK was a relatively painless way to get a lot of them in there. I did RTK lite quickly (actually the union of JLPT2 kanji and grade school kanji, i think 1100 or so), then only added kanji as i encountered them. I learned a lot of words that i hadn't studied the kanji for, but they did seem to take longer to learn (long enough to justify learning the kanji separately, i don't know).

I didn't really do RTK properly either, most of my stories are simply the shortest sentence i could come up with that had all the primitives in it. Probably about 10% i just learned as pictographs because making a story was too much of a pain in the arse. RTK is good for getting you used to breaking kanji down into components so that it's not just a mass of squiggles. It's not the only way to do that. I was breaking down kanji in that way before i did RTK.

I didn't really do the sentence method, not as many here have suggested. I've done neither KO2001 nor Core6k (did Core2k mostly, then gave up). I did do sentences for grammar, purely recognition (mostly from MNN then N3 and N2 grammar books). I tried doing sentence picking from stuff i was reading but got bored of that pretty quick.

My basic strategy is simply reading and adding the words i don't know to an anki deck. I haven't really done AJATT at all (maybe why my listening is lagging, whatever).

yudantaiteki Wrote:

kainzero Wrote:When I took a class last year, I remember people telling me how they'd remember kanji. "Oh yeah, there's a squiggly line here and then a plus sign here..."

I don't know how you could function like that.

I learned kanji without RTK and I know many people who did as well. My question wasn't whether RTK was necessary to learn kanji (I know it's not), but whether it was necessary to follow the basic plan that tends to be favored on this forum.

Not that I'm saying RTK is the only way, because I'm sure that sooner or later a Japanese language learner will find out about radicals and how they make up kanji. To me, that was the most important part of doing RTK and something that you can do through many methods, if you decide to cover stroke order and kanji recognition separately.

I just don't know why they don't teach that earlier and why none of the textbooks cover it.

Anyway, if you believe in the i+1 stuff, then yes, RTK would be important for sentence method. (Kanji recognition + stroke order + reading + meaning is a lot to swallow.) I don't study using i+1 though, so I'm not sure.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

kainzero Wrote:When I took a class last year, I remember people telling me how they'd remember kanji. "Oh yeah, there's a squiggly line here and then a plus sign here..."

I don't know how you could function like that.

I learned kanji without RTK and I know many people who did as well. My question wasn't whether RTK was necessary to learn kanji (I know it's not), but whether it was necessary to follow the basic plan that tends to be favored on this forum.

Oh that. No, I don't think any plan makes RTK mandatory part of the path. It can be included or substituted with something else.

Think of it like this: If you don't learn Hiragana/Katakana then you're stuck using Romaji to learn Japanese. Simarly if you don't learn Kanji at least at the recognition level then you're stuck using Kana/Romaji. All the resources/plans seem to come in spreadsheet formats or have furigana. As such, it's a small matter to convert those to kana or even romaji.

I'm not saying anything new by thinking that having a grasp on Kanji will help in the long run. So your brother can learn Kanji as he comes across them. That's a lot early on, which makes a streamlined method like RTK more attractive. Attractive, but not necessary.