I've given RTK three or four gos at this point, and I haven't made it past a couple hundred kanji without getting severely burnt out and frustrated and thinking it's pointless. And I've been going maybe 20 kanji a day.

Has anyone /not/ used RTK? If so, how do you study kanji? I originally started without it - I've never been a huge fan, I'm just not a mental-image person - and used Core 2k until I started confusing some vocab. Did parts of KO2001 and found it not too difficult. More fun than core 2k. I did start to see the patterns and start guessing how words were likely to be read, even without studying individual kanji and their readings.

I know RTK is like the backbone of this site, but for those who just haven't been able to force themselves into it...how did you study Kanji?

Use RTK. I'm just sayin'.

^ not very helpful. I'm just sayin'. ¬.¬

I can't get into RTK either. I've started over like 2 or 3 times. This has been going on for two years. I haven't gotten anywhere. 'Specially since I was anxious to read and RTK wasn't putting me anywhere near that goal.

So I decided to do something else. I looked for a method that would teach me to read as well as write the kanji at the same time, and I stumbled upon Alyks's movie method (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1768). It has Heisig's idea of breaking kanji down into primitives and creating stories, but this way the stories are all related to a specific onyomi, so you can write and read the kanji you learn.

So that's what I'm doing. Feels like it'll help me more than RTK did

I took a lot of Heisig's ideas and made my own system. Mostly by just changing the learning order and changing the names of primitives and such. I never used a single story from the book.

While doing RTK I was also learning real etymologies as given in Henshall`s Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. This helped me to enrich my understanding of kanji, and to understand the logic behind RTK system better. I prefer to remember real logical explanation for characters, but in many cases where certain origins of a kanji are not known RTK methodology was really helpful.

If you're going at 20 a day and getting burnt out, that may be a good indicator that you're learning too many a day. Since the level of difficulty starts to pick up once you're past the first hundred, it may be a good idea to lower the amount of kanji you're learning. Maybe lower it by half and see how that goes? Sometimes a slower pace is the answer

I've done rtk lite and am now working to finish rtk. I find it waaaaay more difficult to recoginse kanji I haven't studied by rtk.

You could try rtk lite. I couldn't make it through rtk, with so many kinda rare kanji coming up. Doing rtk lite made way more sense, so I could get though it.

Having said that I get the impression standard rtk is more efficient in the long run (if you can make it though)

I didn't do Heisig.
I learned all the radicals and the rules of stroke order. Then I learned words in the texts I was Listening-Reading http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading_...ssages.htm
but only after I understood what I was listening to.

I didn't do RTK. I tried it and realized it wasn't for me.

But I don't 'study' kanji, either. I use iKnow.jp to learn vocab, which includes having to recognize the word in its kanji form.

Some day, perhaps, I will make an organized go at studying the kanji... But I'm not planning on it.

I didn't use the RTK methodology, I found just memorising them by rote with the assistance of Anki was easy enough. But I did learn all the ones in RTK1.

i never used RTK. i got a few hundred in then burnt out, and just decided to start studying Japanese instead.

i used anki, and just learned through subs2srs to start with. Then i used the core6k to organise my kanji knowledge by learning all compounds with a given kanji. i went through with just a grade-order kanji book and learned the meanings of a kanji along with / through the words. (remember to watch out for similar radicals!)

i've no doubt that RTK gives you a deeper knowledge of kanji, but i can read fine without having done it. i also think it'd be unimaginably easier to complete RTK now i can actually read rather than just cramming 2000+ kanji i've never seen before into my head... there's a japanese version as well, so i'd probably do that...

nohika Wrote:I know RTK is like the backbone of this site, but for those who just haven't been able to force themselves into it...how did you study Kanji?

Really, everyone is different. Some insist on every stage being fun because they know that if it isn't fun, they won't study. Others hate doing "fun" stuff if it involves a lot of time and little apparent progress. Neither is "wrong". The only way you can go wrong is if you pick a method that doesn't match your personality. Know thyself.

RTK is for people who are targeting the advanced levels from the get go, but are ok with it taking a couple of years, and hence are willing to take a substantial detour. It involves making seemingly little progress in japanese itself in exchange for future rapid progress. If you're the impatient sort, it's *not* for you. If having the ability to write 2000 kanji while only knowing like 10 words bothers you, it's *not* for you.

RTK isn't the only way to learn kanji. I learned the N5 kanji the good old fashioned way: "write this 10 times". Even then though, i was breaking the complex ones up into components. It just seemed stupid to try to learn 新 as a single blob. RTK just provided a system where someone else had done all the thinking already. I personally was never terribly strict on the "imaginative" stuff. The real key to RTK is the composition of complex kanji from simple ones.

Kanji Damage is a similar approach, although one thing i don't like about it is that it is focused on recognition, not writing, and hence the stories often aren't specific enough to be able to reliably write the character.

I've never used RTK either.
When I first started I didn't really study kanji specifically, just tried to remember them as they came up in textbooks. That really only seemed to work for the about 100-200 and then I started forgetting them too quickly.
After that I used paper flash cards and anki, learning the readings at the same time and a couple of uses of each kanji. After about a year or so I could read about 1000 kanji and after about 2 years I was up to 2000. Certainly not as fast as people claim to have achieved using RTK, but I did know the common readings of all those kanji after that time.

Different methods work for different people. I found the hardest part was going from knowing a few hundred up to near a thousand. I really needed to do slightly boring flashcard practice to get through them. After that I could read a lot more Japanese material so I found myself picking up new kanji just from context and anki was really just to make sure.

I'm shocked. Are all of you suggesting that this is just a forum of nice people interested in learning Japanese and in Japan, who offer various resources for free and share their experiences because they want to be helpful? That we can just pick and choose whatever suits us and our individual learning styles...?

A few months after completing Heisig, I have to admit it wasn't the 'imaginative memory' gimmick that made it useful for me, but the 'break a kanji down into discrete elements which are often repeated and assign them names". Actually after about a couple of hundred kanji I would stop making up elaborate stories in my head and instead just used word play or more shallow images. Yes it did reduce my short term efficiency in memorizing, but in the end repetition (anki) is going to solidify the memory and not the story. RtK in the end wasn't exactly for me, I appreciate the foundation it gave me for recognizing and recalling kanji, but I don't see myself doing RtK volume 3 as I consider it a huge waste of time. If I come across a new kanji often enough while I'm reading I will eventually remember the elements and reading anyway, I'd rather learn on the go from now on instead of making it into a purely academic study of elements.

I never used RTK; I hadn't even heard of it when I started studying.

I pretty much went with traditional methods -- I took a class so I used Nakama 1 and 2, then I used Basic Kanji Book and Kanji in Context (and Intermediate Kanji Book to a certain extent); when I got to KiC I was also incorporating some native materials as well.

Woah, so many replies - that's what I get for sleeping all night, I guess.

@Tokyostyle - I don't have the "imaginative memory" required for it, I guess. I can visualize all I want, and I still come back the next day having to re-learn the kanji all over again. It's frustrating and makes me want to throw my laptop out the window. Violently. My biggest goal/dream in Japanese is to be able to read - not to write/speak/whatever. I'm not super-interested in learning how to write the kanji. I think part of what makes the reviews hard is that I write them out almost every time I see them - because I can't adequately "visualize" the kanji to make sure I'm right otherwise. I ended at about 300 kanji in, I think?

I don't /hate/ kanji. It's fun - I'm the crayzee that plays Nazotte oboeru for fun even though I can't totally understand everything. I'm just not a huge fan of learning it totally in isolation - right now I'm adjusting to a bunch of different things and don't always have time to study lots, and "wasting" it on RTK when I could be learning more vocab seems frustrating to me.

@Nuriko - I'd love to slow down, but literally it would drag RTK out for far too many months and I would rather throw myself off a cliff. Not quite literally on the last part, but it's quite tempting.

@caivano/IceCream - That's what I did before. I've tried Heisig multiple times and just couldn't really get into it. So I used Core2k and learned vocab. I've also dabbled in KO2001 and really kind of liked it (as dorky as that sounds). I might give that a try again - focus on burning through Kore 2k/6k and work on grammar on the side. My focus is to read, not to write/produce/whatever...though I do work on listening when I can spare some time.

@Zigmonty - Right now due to things all happening at once, I don't have as much time to study as I used to. And instead of wasting the time on RTK (no offense), I'd rather use it to do something that's slightly more enjoyable - I'm really prone to burn-out and for some stupid reason constantly pick fields that are more prone to burn-out in general. I would like to eventually be "advanced" - I'd like to be able to read novels. But I'm perfectly fine with only reading light novels for a while - I don't mind using Yomichan or Rikaichan. I'm guessing it would take a while reading light novels to cement enough knowledge before trying "real" novels.

@Irixmark - the one hard thing about the majority doing RTK means very few alternatives (beyond the traditional "WRITE 500 TIMES ROTE MEMORY FLAME!") are discussed.

Hrm. The most annoying part about RTK is that I can't do the reviews on my phone due to how the things show up - I try to keep the story hidden. Is the "lazy kanji" version the one where you read the story every time? I think it might help if I stopped writing the kanji, but then I feel like I'm cheating...bah.

I dunno. Studying a language is hard work - I think the hardest is deciding how to do so.

I did RTK1 and RTK3 learning some onyomi on the way. At the time it worked well for me, but if I could go back in time and learn Japanese knowing what I do now, I wouldn't do RTK. I might use the book to learn the stroke order of the radicals and systemically learn a word or two for each kanji in the heisig order, but I wouldn't go through the whole story making process. Now I'm learning mandarin and I'm picking up hanzi and new primitives fine just by learning and writing vocabulary.

I used RTK. There's no quicker, easier, and more effective method for internalizing the kanji. It doesn't really rely on mental images, though a lot of people think of it this way. You've got a lot of replies in this thread, so perhaps some of them will give you ideas.

I think it was fate that someone bumped Nukemarine's thread - since I'm starting a full-time job and full-time school, I think working through at least the basics of that would help. I might do JtMW instead of Tae Kim, though - or maybe not. Tae Kim would be easier and more convenient.

Thanks guys. Doing half is better than doing nothing.

nohika Wrote:I've given RTK three or four gos at this point, and I haven't made it past a couple hundred kanji without getting severely burnt out and frustrated and thinking it's pointless. [...] I've never been a huge fan, I'm just not a mental-image person

Well, it is possible to learn Japanese without using RTK, as many others have done before (as for me, I've used it and it transferred well for Chinese, which I've decided to focus on, so I don't know how it would be otherwise). Having said that, I don't know if you're interested but, in general, unless you have something that makes it impossible for you to do it, using mental images is just a matter of practice and, like many other things in life, in the beginning it's hard but, if you persevere in the right way, it gets progressively easier to the point that it seems like a waste of time when you don't use it—like touch typing, for example. Just for the record, stories and mental visualization is something that many non-savant* mnemonists—people who can remember extremely long lists of data—use in addition to the method of loci, including the famous (in this area) Dominic O'Brien and Ben Pridmore. From their Wikipedia pages:

Ben Pridmore:
"Like most memory experts, he creates a mental story, comprises a sequence of images that he has permanently memorised as representing number groups, playing card pairs etc. ..."

Dominic O'Brien:
"Using the dominic system every pair of digits is first associated with a person. Dominic O'Brien feels that stories and images created using people are easier to remember. This encoding is carried out ahead of time and the people are reused, since it can take quite some time. ... Once the mappings of pair of digits are in place a sequence of digits can be converted into a story by first encoding pairs of digits as people or actions and then chaining these people and actions together."

But yes, as others have already said, the visualization part is only the second half of Heisig's method; the first half is disassembling the characters, giving each part a distinctive meaning, then using the parts to construct other, more complex characters with them. It's easier to understand the usefulness of and apply the first half but both are actually sound advice, with which it's possible to work around a severe limitation a normal human brain has when it comes to memorizing and retrieving random things from memory.

* Savants, like Daniel Tammet and Kim Peek, have different brain structures, so they are able to memorize things differently and more easily.

nohika Wrote:I think it was fate that someone bumped Nukemarine's thread - since I'm starting a full-time job and full-time school, I think working through at least the basics of that would help. I might do JtMW instead of Tae Kim, though - or maybe not. Tae Kim would be easier and more convenient.

Thanks guys. Doing half is better than doing nothing.

The only thing easier and more convenient about Tae Kim is that the text is selectable and I think there might be a deck for it. Otherwise it's inferior to JMW, from what I've seen. JMW is a perfect marriage of basic grammar principles that incorporate content from references like Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and JSL, and a native media approach with sentence breakdowns. In my opinion. ^_^

Edit: I also think it does a better job of intuitively and clearly explaining the structure of Japanese, from the perspective of Japanese, which is ironic since that's one of the main stated purposes of Tae Kim's guide.

nest0r Wrote:

nohika Wrote:I think it was fate that someone bumped Nukemarine's thread - since I'm starting a full-time job and full-time school, I think working through at least the basics of that would help. I might do JtMW instead of Tae Kim, though - or maybe not. Tae Kim would be easier and more convenient.

Thanks guys. Doing half is better than doing nothing.

The only thing easier and more convenient about Tae Kim is that the text is selectable and I think there might be a deck for it. Otherwise it's inferior to JMW, from what I've seen. JMW is a perfect marriage of basic grammar principles that incorporate content from references like Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and JSL, and a native media approach with sentence breakdowns. In my opinion. ^_^

Well the one thing I wasn't sure of was how much translated to each Tae Kim section...I have almost 200 sentences mined from JtMW and wasn't sure where that went to Tae Kim. Heh. I'll shoot to finish it by the time I hit the end of the kanji and vocab.

Gonna read the whole thread now. Thank you guys. I really appreciate it - I think I can make it through the first 1110 kanji. Dunno if I'll do the Subs2SRS though - I'll browse around for some anime and maybe just watch that instead. I know subtitles tend to be hard to find, I think?

Edit@nestor - I really do like it. The only thing I find slightly lacking are the example sentences, but if I'm really stuck I can horde the dictionaries. Once I finish it I might do that anyways - add a couple more sentences per point if I have trouble with it. I think someone mentioned afterwards reviewing kanzen 3kyuu and then moving onto 2kyuu?

I just finished with the movie method, and I'm glad I did it. I guess that's not using RTK.

I think it would really help you out, nohika, if you looked into some of Dominic O'Brien's writings on memory. Practicing some traditional mnemonics would certainly help you to do the RTK mnemonics. (How to Develop a Perfect Memory is the best of his books I think.)

I didn't use RTK either; I used a fairly traditional approach not dissimilar to yudantaiteki. (I tried RTK later on when I already was fairly well able to read, in the hope it might improve my writing, but I found it was if not wasted time at least not very good use of it. I don't really do mental images, more tending to word-association, but I did manage to do the full 2000-odd with a decent recall rate at the time. It's just that it was completely not linked to anything else I was doing with the language.)

If you're not getting on with RTK then I think it's perfectly reasonable to do something else instead.