While I do subscribe to the theory "don't do boring study" and I exercise it every day by deleting sentences and grammar, rtk is the exception. sorry buonaparte, I get what you're saying, but the op really has to force 10-20k reps of heisig before they earn the privilege to start exercising that rule

IceCream Wrote:@nagareboshi: i'm not suggesting not to learn kanji at all, just saying that you don't need to learn to write before you can read...

And I did not suggest you did say anything along those lines. I agree that for acquiring reading and speaking skills it is not necessary to know how to hand-write the characters. I did not when i started out learning Japanese - except for the kana of course.

hereticalrants Wrote:I would reccomend learning both at close to the same time.

Don´t quiz both at the same time, though, that´s a recipe for a headache (the three column list posted above is an excellent example. You can only work with three terms if you already can associate two of them).

The three column list is an Anki deck now. This was just to show and explain how i look at kanji now as opposed to some months ago. Not doing anything but listening to radio or watching Anime while working through RTK is what i did from the get go.

For those not doing RTK fulltime it should be possible to learn both actual Japanese and Kanji writing. Say someone does 5 a day it would be a shameful waste of time not doing any actual studies.

Nagareboshi Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:@nagareboshi: i'm not suggesting not to learn kanji at all, just saying that you don't need to learn to write before you can read...

And I did not suggest you did say anything along those lines. I agree that for acquiring reading and speaking skills it is not necessary to know how to hand-write the characters. I did not when i started out learning Japanese - except for the kana of course.

hereticalrants Wrote:I would reccomend learning both at close to the same time.

Don´t quiz both at the same time, though, that´s a recipe for a headache (the three column list posted above is an excellent example. You can only work with three terms if you already can associate two of them).

The three column list is an Anki deck now.

... and the people who use it should already know either the character meanings or the kana word

IceCream Wrote:b.) buonaparte is also right, there's no need to do Heisig if it isn't for you. Learning the primitives and then getting straight into it is fine. I did it this way, and after a few months starting learning a few words for each kanji systematically (from core 6K), and found the common meanings that way. I've not had any particular problems with learning to read this way.

The advantage of RtK vs just learning all the primitives is that new radicals and kanji are introduced in a structured logical order.
Anyway you've mentioned before that you did Heisig to frame 1000 - you probably picked up alot more than you let on..

IceCream Wrote:I also cannot imagine how tedious it would have been to carry on doing Heisig before being able to read. I am thinking of learning to write soon, but i think it will be so, so, so, so much easier to remember how to write kanji i've seen thousands of times than if i was just trying to work through 2000 unknown symbols.

RtK is a tedious slog. Learning new kanji was fun, making up stories was hilarious, recognising characters in anime was great, but reviews were hell. I don't see how knowing the kanji already will make that part any more enjoyable, or how that will make your reviews (keyword -> story -> written primitives) any easier.

IceCream Wrote:im not sure where the idea of doing Heisig before learning any japanese came from (AJATT?) but i don't really go along with that so much...

I studied grammar and vocab along side RtK, plus immersion. Then when you finish you're immediately ready for the sentence method..