I started RTK1 just recently and so far I haven't attended any Japanese classes, though that will change this autumn. That means I have just a very vague idea of that language and difficulties appear when learning it.

Having gone through the first 200 kanji, I'm now wondering if I should include the kun-yomi to my paper review cards. The intention would be not to specifically try to learn the reading right away together with the keyword and the stroke order, but rather hoping that for some cards the reading might stick or in some cases could even be included in the story.

I know that learning the on-yomi might not be a good idea when not finished with RTK1, due to the groups, but as far as I've understood it, there is now easy way to learn the kun-yomi than by simply learning the reading for every kanji individually. Which would be very time consuming and depressing, I guess.

It might of course be more contra productive than helpful, but I was wondering if anyone else has tried something like it and if it is a useful idea at all. I'd be grateful for any help here.

Thanks

So, I'm still working my way through RTK1, but my advice would be to hold off on any readings and just blow through RTK1 as fast as you can.. I personally, could have finished it this summer if I had bucked down and put in a good month's worth of 50 a day or so.. which isnt THAT bad, but instead I was lazy, and now I'm finding it dragging out over a few months because of my school responsibilities.

But anyways, personally I dont think that learning readings through stories is the way to go, I would recommend one of the things on AJATT (http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com) an interesting site about a guy who became reasonably fluent in 1 year. I am not saying that you should follow everything he says (1, because i dont want to start a flame war, and 2 because that would be hypocritical, as i certainly dont even come close to following what he says to do.. some of his advice is great, and some of it less so.) but the best advice that i think he has, is to learn to read sentences, ie you see a bunch of kanjis and kana, and you can sound everything out and understand the sentence. He advocates the use of an SRS (spaced repetition system) (wikipedia it if you dont know what this is, there are a few great ones out there, including Anki, which I would recommend) to do this, which is pretty essential. I have (against the AJATT advice, he says to wait until after RTK) been reading sentences for about a month.. and my yomi knowledge has shot through the roof without ever memorizing a single new yomi (i knew some from class.. but not that many) ... so i would advocate the two methods at once.. hit RTK hard (and if you can finish quick, just do RTK) but at the same time (especially if RTK will take a few months) if you are interested in starting to learn yomis, start reading sentences.


good luck with japanese! hopefully i havent told you anything too obvious or confusing! 頑張って！ (ganbatte! - do your best)

Thanks a lot for your reply, skylarth.
I'll definitely give Anki a try, since I finally realized that reviewing with the cards on this side (as great as they are) is not a good idea when the learned keywords are in German. There seem to be quite big differences between the chosen keywords of these languages.

About the AJATT-thread, I had stumbled earlier on and was thrilled by the idea to learn Japanese in such an efficient way. After visiting his side though, I'm two-minded about the whole approach, too. Non the less his side made me pick up my old French books and start reading them again. It's slow going but so far it was fun.
For my Japanese this kind of approach is out of the question at the moment, since I have now idea about the grammar and know next to no vocabulary. It might be a good idea though to read through a few hiragana-texts, just to improve my ability to recognize those letters, even if I don't understand the meaning of the texts.

Hmm, so should I interpret your answer that you think it not such a good idea to put the kun-yomi on the rewieving-cards? The idea to put them on the cards now, stems from the understanding (vague as it might be), that there are no rules and no easy way out but to swot those kun-readings.
At the moment I'll probably just keep going with RTK1 as fast as possible, as you suggested. Though reading the introduction of lecture 11 yesterday evening was very frustrating ... I'm supposed to redo all those 10 previous lectures?! The worst part of this is that I can perfectly understand the reason why.

Thanks again, and 頑張って to you too. (hey, I recognized the fist of the two kanji...yay!)

I do not know if this was discussed somewhere else, but I just stumbled over your post and wanted to share my experience with you because I tried to do the exact same thing.
I did this with the first 250 Heisig Kanji and after that I do not recommend it, mostly because it is an awful lot of work. But, there are also real difficulties which cannot be ignored:

a) lot of work: you have to look up every single character and I was forced to use two online dictionaries because the one I used for the meaning and pronunciation did not show me on-yomi or kun-yomi

you do a) (=lot of work) only to discover b) which is there is no exact kunyomi for this kanji

b) has several reasons:

1. the heisig keyword represents the kanji well in its meaning, but the kunyomi is too specific

2. there is only onyomi

3. there is a kunyomi but it in all cases additional hiragana characters like in a verb or an adjective must be added which can get confusing

here are some examples:

kunyomi goes well with left= hidari= ひだり= 左
not well with: see= miru= みる= 見る
impossible with: craft= GU/KU/KOU (no kunyomi)

So, you do not only have to look up the words but also to think about it and I doubt that the benefit is worth the time plus you probably get more confused than it helps

More importantly, Heisig himself does not endorse the practice, IIRC. The whole point of RTK is break the task down into smaller, do-able tasks. Trying to learn readings on top of writings is just going down the same road you're trying to avoid in the first place.

I'd say it's best to switch to Japanese keywords or something similar when you finish the book.

In addition, I think it should not go unnoticed that we're trying to internalize the meaning of the Kanji (you see it, you may not know what the exact keyword but you know a meaning of sorts). That's hard to do in anything besides your native language or very strong second language.

Some think that the keyword is the meaning (usually those denegrating RTK), I think it's more of a useful tool to help get to the meaning and connect it to the kanji.

I'll only do it for obvious kanji. 山, 赤い, 前, 水,　川. Stuff I know.

Now that I'm using Trinity alot, I figure I'll get my Kanji to Japanese keyword fix there. Let's face it, my keyword to kanji is hitting the 8 month spacer for a majority of RTK1.