HonyakuJoshua Wrote:@Zigmonty how do you know this is a record: can they prove it? Do they have evidence?

They don't need to. I know from my own pace that the numbers some have quoted are possible if they invested the amount of time per day they claimed.

You seem to have missed the point. This isn't really a community that responds well to dick waving, and frankly, your inspiration is unneeded here: we already do take kanji seriously. You won't find many illiterate learners here, people who have given up on kanji because they're just too hard. This is a community that largely professes a "kanji first" learning style.

However, there is taking kanji seriously and then there is taking kanji more seriously than the Japanese do. Learning 6000 kanji before knowing any actual japanse is just silly: you know kanji that many japanese people don't know. Kanji that are never used. While getting trounced by a 3 year old in actual vocabulary.

I agree with Zarxrax, it's kinda neat. Just like those guys who can recite pi to a huge number of digits. Doesn't inspire me to want to do the same though.

Am I the only one who doesn't think that the OP is doing this for the money he gets for our views? I doubt that would amount to more than a few cents.

But still, maybe he should have lurked a bit more and see what this forum is about before posting. This feels like someone going in a juggling forum and posting "hey, look at this video of me throwing a ball in the air and catching it 1000 times in a row!". Someone might appreciate the patience to have it filmed, but most would be left wondering "yeah, so?".

So, just to reiterate what others have already said, anyone who has gone through rtk1 can do up to grade 8 in that program with ease, and got a good half of those in grade 9 covered too. Some people then decide to go on and complete rtk3, which is another 1000 kanji or so. I know that many of the posters in this forum have been done with rtk1 for a long time, not counting the hundreds of people that use the site to review but don't frequent the forums. Many of these people get through the book in a matter of months, with the occasional user doing a speedrun in a couple of weeks.
That's the audience you are trying to impress.

Just to add to that, most everyone who decide to go through it, considers the whole thing as just a prerequisite step to get started. Or a way to aid them in continuing their studies, if they had already started. Nothing more than a foothold anyway.

There has been a lot of discussion on the topic of English definitions for kanji, with them being possibly misleading, the need to 'forget' them while one gets Japanese vocabulary that can better represent them, etc.
You are basically ignoring all this and saying "hey, I know the readings (???) of some thousands of kanji because I can select the more-or-less-arbitrarily associated meaning from five possible answers".

Multiple choice answers... really?

I was curious so I tried the program, and went on to try grade 0 (the 3841 kanji not in the jouyou list, I guess). Mind you, I don't know anywhere close to 6000 kanji. I completed rtk1 and then forgot about it, according to my vocab deck I've seen maybe a little less then 2500 kanji by encountering them in the wild. For most of them I wouldn't be able to give an English definition, and a lot I wouldn't recognize out of context. So I guess I suck compared to a lot of people here who take kanji (esp. writing) more seriously than me.

So I tried the first 200 or so from rank 0 (randomized). except for maybe 10-15 I hadn't seen any before. Still managed to get an 80% right.
The vast majority where kanji for plants, fish, flowers, insects, it was more or less evident just by looking at the radicals. Since the possible wrong answers seem to be chosen completely at random, it was easy to proceed with some guesswork. Example:

Q: 鯵
A: horse mackerel / rough, clumsy, violent / surprise & confusion / skin, tell, report / arrowhead

I know the kanji in question its actually quite common especially for people living in Japan, but it's the first one the program gave me now. Even without having ever seen it, one could make a reasonable guess and be right.
Someone with a better understanding of the logic behind radicals composition could probably get an high % of correct answers without much effort.

Now, if you get 100% on the whole set in a single session, that's surely impressive.
For starters, I don't think many people would have the perseverance to aim to click almost 4000 in a row without messing up at least once. I know I accidentally double-clicked and got a wrong answer almost immediately after starting.
The time it takes to do it in a sitting would also be impressive, with the pressure of it being recorded and having to start over after a single mistake, even more so.

Of course the learning part would also hold its weight. But most people would be left wondering why on earth one would go out of his way to learn "English definitions" (with all their faults) for such a vast set of kanji.
I doubt anyone would feel inspired.

Sorry for the long post. Back to my lurk bubble I go.

Edit: I guess what I wanted to say was already explained with less rambling in some of the posts before, I need to learn to read better before posting.

Also, it doesn't seem to me that the OP is actually interested in learning Japanese, just “kanji and their definitions”, or maybe I misinterpreted some of his replies.
But in the case I'm right, I'm not sure why he's posting in a forum of Japanese learners...

Wait, so all you need to be able to do is recognise the character with help from a selection of not-very-trickily-combined answers? I don't think that can be classed as "knowing" a kanji by any definition. Reading and writing is what knowing them is all about, and those questions completely omit both. There's also no guarantee that you'd remember the meaning without the prompts, or even recognise the character outside of the program.

Heisig'ing 6000 kanji and reviewing them to maturity in Anki would be 'kinda neat', since you would actually know them in some capacity, and could at least go on to do something with the knowledge. Kanji Gold just sounds like a waste of time.

for your next challenge, I challenge you to complete なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習(改訂版) for the NDS to 100%. That's what I'm currently working on

Lol... it's multiple choice? And the wrong answers are obviously wrong, randomly chosen kanji? I retract everything i said, this is seriously impressive! Sign me up!

huh? why's everyone being so mean to this guy?!? he even asked politely rather than just posting the links. EDIT: oh wait, he did post the links, but he was polite...

and to ask him to repost his videos on youtube just so he doesn't get anything from your clicks is stingy at best. If you're interested enough to click on the link, why shouldn't he get something for it? If you're not interested then don't press it. Why should he have to go and post his videos somewhere else if your going to click on a link either way?!?!? It's not like you're paying anything...

lol, weird.

IceCream Wrote:huh? why's everyone being so mean to this guy?!? he even asked politely rather than just posting the links. EDIT: oh wait, he did post the links, but he was polite...

and to ask him to repost his videos on youtube just so he doesn't get anything from your clicks is stingy at best. If you're interested enough to click on the link, why shouldn't he get something for it? If you're not interested then don't press it. Why should he have to go and post his videos somewhere else if your going to click on a link either way?!?!? It's not like you're paying anything...

lol, weird.

I think mostly (as someone else phrased it earlier) that this kind of was a show of "dick waving", since this was like his first post to show how much cooler he is than all the other kids. I think on most Japanese forums they'd be like HOMG THAT'S SO AWESOME, but here we're kind of based on kanji-based learning, so it's really not as impressive.

Plus the whole multiple-choice thing with randomly selected answers that are (obviously) wrong. Especially since it's English meanings, and nothing of Japanese. It's almost like a multiple choice version of kanji-to-keyword w/out the stories/writing of Heisig. Kind of.

I mean, if this is how he gets his jollies, all the better to him, but I don't think it's quite the impressive feat he thinks it is. That's mostly what we were discussing, I think.

When a person says something like "I'm impressive" or "I'm smart" about him/herself when introducing oneself, I momentarily lose any kind of interest in that person, no failure.

jettyke Wrote:When a person says something like "I'm impressive" or "I'm smart" about him/herself when introducing oneself, I momentarily lose any kind of interest in that person, no failure.

That, and their definition of "read" is an English translation, not the Japanese かな。

It's the equivalent of a Heisig-er going around saying "I can read 2000 kanji! See?" Without...actually being able to read them.

Edit: Now, if he could recite all the meanings and give some example vocab for each kanji, then I might be impressed. Still probably not due to his way of introduction, though.

"I can read kanji in English" lol

nest0r Wrote:At any rate, I'm not really down with people joining this forum not to contribute as a person, but just to make money/get hits/etc., thinking that simply because it's Japanese related we're willing to become cogs in their work-from-home machine or whathaveyou, but if you're going to interact with people as a member, that's cool, though I won't be clicking any of your links myself, unless I feel like there's something useful there, or I want to give back to your contributions in some way (since I know there's money involved, however miniscule you say).

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:OK then I will upload the links onto YouTube who don't pay money. The only reason why I used triond is because I have a dongle and I can't upload to Youtube with a dongle. It seems to be easier to upload to Triond. I will use a friend's broadband internet and upload to YouTube. I'm not here to make money I just want to showcase that 2000 kanji are easy to learn and that Kanji Gold is possible to beat.

Money was only one of the things I listed. I also mentioned ‘hits’ as part of a dynamic of new members not actually wanting to contribute, and instead merely joining a thematically related forum in order to promote themselves and garner some form of currency, be it literal money or page views, effectively commodifying community members rather than treating them as human beings and fellow learners.

You're paying lip service to inspiring others and such, similar to that Wes fellow in recent threads, who copy/pastes the same comments across multiple forums linking to their YouTube channel, and posts nothing else. It just rings hollow to me. There are so many ways you could've gone about sharing your video that would have likely resulted in complimentary and supportive responses.

IceCream Wrote:huh? why's everyone being so mean to this guy?!? he even asked politely rather than just posting the links. EDIT: oh wait, he did post the links, but he was polite...

and to ask him to repost his videos on youtube just so he doesn't get anything from your clicks is stingy at best. If you're interested enough to click on the link, why shouldn't he get something for it? If you're not interested then don't press it. Why should he have to go and post his videos somewhere else if your going to click on a link either way?!?!? It's not like you're paying anything...

lol, weird.

Only a few people were bothered by the paid link thingy (although that does have a spammy feeling). I was picking on him purely because his first post on this forum was about how awesome he was. It's pretty much an automated reaction for me.

I guess when he came here he imagined that everyone will be like:

jettyke Wrote:I guess when he came here he imagined that everyone will be like:
http://t2.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/11/44/59/400_...fu3GiM.jpg

So here it is:

zigmonty Wrote:Only a few people were bothered by the paid link thingy (although that does have a spammy feeling). I was picking on him purely because his first post on this forum was about how awesome he was. It's pretty much an automated reaction for me.

Got to agree to that, when your first post basically talks about how great you are your going to earn yourself some animosity. Part of the reason I love this forum is because no rubs their superiority in my face, I'm a beginner and everyone here has been so helpful. Posting something like this just makes you look like a jerk.

http://www.youtube.com/honyakujoshua

All the kanji on Kanji Gold are guessed correctly on here.

My favourite set is

zigmonty Wrote:Lol... it's multiple choice? And the wrong answers are obviously wrong, randomly chosen kanji? I retract everything i said, this is seriously impressive! Sign me up!

Are the wrong answers in the following set obvious?

Hashiriya Wrote:for your next challenge, I challenge you to complete なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習(改訂版) for the NDS to 100%. That's what I'm currently working on

Yeah I'll defo do this once a book i translated is published thanks for telling me about this I didn't know about it.

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Lol... it's multiple choice? And the wrong answers are obviously wrong, randomly chosen kanji? I retract everything i said, this is seriously impressive! Sign me up!

Are the wrong answers in the following set obvious?

Did you really just necropost to reiterate how awesome you are?

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Lol... it's multiple choice? And the wrong answers are obviously wrong, randomly chosen kanji? I retract everything i said, this is seriously impressive! Sign me up!

Are the wrong answers in the following set obvious?

About half of them are, yes. In any case, good job, but why do you keep waving the cursor around in circles? It makes me queasy.

I don't know most of the kanji in that video just linked and I'm working on a PhD in Japanese literature. There are much better things you can do with your time.

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Lol... it's multiple choice? And the wrong answers are obviously wrong, randomly chosen kanji? I retract everything i said, this is seriously impressive! Sign me up!

Are the wrong answers in the following set obvious?

While watching the first 2 minutes or so I started noticing that some of the English keywords for kanjis would pop up as some of the wrong choices for other kanjis... Even though I'm not very far in RTK1 myself I could guess quite a few of them when you got further into the video by excluding the choices that you marked as correct earlier on in your video and some very basic radical knowledge... So it would seem that quite a few of them becomes obvious through a combination of radical knowledge and the principle of exclusion (assuming you know some of them of course).

But yea, good job on getting all of them correct regardless, I doubt I'd be able to run perfectly through it anytime soon myself.

P.S. How did you know which of the empty fields where correct at 0:13? Seemed a bit fishy to me, though I might have overlooked something...

It's cool you set a goal for yourself and reached it. Congratulations.

I don't get why all the hate here. It seems some people have such a low self-esteem that they have to overcompensate by attacking other people. "Mum, a random guy at the internets thinks is cooler than I! T_T ". Do I get hate points too for my post? :3

The videos would be more interesting if you added some nice background music. 5 minutes of silent video grow old quick.

Have you used Kanjibox? There you get points for answering fast, and if you do great you can go into the rankings.

zigmonty Wrote:Did you really just necropost to reiterate how awesome you are?

I hadn't actually completed it last time.



@ Jimmy but about half of them weren't and that made it HARD - I moved the cursor to show I wasn't using my hand to search a dictionary. Thanks for the positive feedback.


@Isbilenper i just guessed the blank boxes - in my other videos I get it wrong and ignore it. Thanks for the positive feedback.

@Sebastian I will put music on in time - have got 100% on the highest level on kanji box before - I'll video it next time - Thanks for the extremely positive feedback.

@the Japanese literature PhD person - people do things that seem daft to other people because they enjoy them - as Mallory said "because it's there" - I have been offered funding for a PhD but I wanted to do this because enjoy it. So no, there aren't really that many better things, I personally, could do with my time.

[Zgarbas]

Sebastian Wrote:It's cool you set a goal for yourself and reached it. Congratulations.

I don't get why all the hate here. It seems some people have such a low self-esteem that they have to overcompensate by attacking other people. "Mum, a random guy at the internets thinks is cooler than I! T_T ". Do I get hate points too for my post? :3

The videos would be more interesting if you added some nice background music. 5 minutes of silent video grow old quick.

Have you used Kanjibox? There you get points for answering fast, and if you do great you can go into the rankings.

I don't know about the others but I have rarely seen a community as elitist yet completely mislead as the Japanese learning community (not this one. This forum is wonderful <3. I cannot stress that enough). I guess others have had the same experience and want to keep this forum asshat-free?

(seriously. One of the main reasons I never did RTK was because most people I met who did it were such elitist asshats, whilst still having a really low level because of their utter elitism. This guy with his "I know 6000 kanji in this program without knowing the most basic things about the language, look how awesome I am" is a bit triggering.)