After visiting Japan three times, including a month-long honeymoon, I decided to start on the long path to understanding the language. My wife learned Japanese in college, and so I started on her books, but got frustrated when I came across kanji early on that I had no idea about how to read or how to learn.

I had read the intro to RTK1 at the Rainbow Plaza in Fukuoka while there for an email pitstop, and I liked the approach. So I decided to learn kanji first. I take it this is not really a typical approach, but now I'm about 670 kanji into Heisig, and thinking about what to do next.

I plan on putting Pimsleur 1 on my iPod, and starting in with some basic textbooks (I have situational functional japanese). Any other advice? Should I start learning the readings now (or after I finish RTK1), or continue with Heisig while I start learning the grammar basics? Am I totally messed up? Is RTK1 a waste of time without learning some of the basics first?

Any ideas / perspectives would be appreciated.

You can start with RTK1 just fine, but remember it's more a long term approach. I.e. you need to complete it entirely before it starts paying off. If you're looking to start using Japanese in the short term, then it might be better to just learn / practice some vocabulary. In either case I would recommend learning the kana (hiragana and katakana) right away if you haven't already. That won't cost much time, and will be very useful immediately.

I think it depends on how much time you have to devote to Japanese studies, but if you have the time I don't see anything wrong with studying kanji in parallel, particularly so if you are using the RTK method. But if your time is limited, kanji studies can tend to monopolise your studies at the expense of learning the language, if you are not careful.

What I would certainly not recommend is that you bother yourself with learning the readings (読み) until you have completed RTK1. This is central to Heisig's method ("divide and conquer") and you ignore his advice, which is clearly set out in the book, at your peril.

No previous knowledge of Japanese is required in order to study the RTK way, so it's not dependent on anything you are learning in your other language studies. I would have started on RTK earlier if I'd known about it at the time.

I think what you are doing is just about right. Do listen to those Pimsleur tapes, and maybe get something easy to read on grammar (I very much recommend taking a look at Lammers 'Japanese the manga way" even if you don't care about comics). When you study vocabulary, definitely put kanji on the flashcards, even if you have not covered them yet. If you like drilling wordlists (I do, but I realize that not everyone does) take a look at "Kanji in Context", really a nice book. Your textbook is good too, I think.

aboros Wrote:After visiting Japan three times, including a month-long honeymoon, I decided to start on the long path to understanding the language. My wife learned Japanese in college, and so I started on her books, but got frustrated when I came across kanji early on that I had no idea about how to read or how to learn.

What sort of books were you reading that showed you kanji early without explaining what they meant?

Quote:Is RTK1 a waste of time without learning some of the basics first?

I don't think so. It's just quite a separate endeavour unless you use some kind of Japanese keywords system (which I'm promoting) or until you complete RTK 2. All you are learning is the writing of the kanji. It's pretty difficult to glean anything more than a really shallow understanding of the meaning from the keyword.

I would definitely do some normal Japanese study in parallel with your RTK work. Just treat them as completely separate until you get on to RTK 2. If you aren't doing so already, I would highly advise taking classes.

wrightak Wrote:What sort of books were you reading that showed you kanji early without explaining what they meant?

The textbook I was looking at introduced kanji early on in practice sentences and examples. The book explained the meaning, but I didn't have any way of learning the kanji when they were just used in passing.

Piitaa Wrote:In either case I would recommend learning the kana (hiragana and katakana) right away if you haven't already.

I actually learned the kana first (mostly while I was still in Japan), although my ability to write them has faded, I can still read them fairly well. I'm reading a kids book ([kana]mina unchi[/kana]) to practice.

Sadly, classes are out of the question for lack of time, but I'll look into the "Manga Way" book - thanks for the suggestion.

wrightak - I know I've read about your keywords system on other threads, but can't remember where a good example is - could you point me towards a good description? I'm curious.

I'm not surprised to hear the advice to give the readings a wait, but is there anyone who feels like the additional effort of learning readings (maybe just one per kanji) along the way would pay any dividends?

Here's what I'm noticing....I read hardcopy books. So, when I come across a good sentence to save in my studies, I'll want to type it in. Especially if the sentence uses a new word. If I know A reading of a kanji, then I can use the IME or JWPce to type in the kanji, picking it out of the list of candidates...even if I've used the wrong reading to type it in! So, having ONE reading per kanji has that advantage. Once I've got the word/sentence in an electronic medium, then there's lots of dictionaries (one built right into JWPce and WAKAN and probably others as well.)

CharleyGarrett Wrote:If I know A reading of a kanji, then I can use the IME or JWPce to type in the kanji

That's an excellent point - the only way for me to type kanji currently is to used eDict or some such to look it up by SKIP or whatever. Knowing a reading would be great - even just for putting kanji in a spreadsheet or word file, or for using flash card software.

I finally got Pimsleur from the library, and thoroughly enjoyed this choice remark from the short chapter on learning to read Japanese:

Quote:When you can recognize some 50 basic Japanese Kanji characters, the rest will be fairly easy, as you will probably be able to guess what a new character may mean just by looking at it and identifying the component parts.

If that's the case, I think I'm doing something wrong. <grin> More than halfway through RTK1!

I learned using Japanese the Spoken Language, and it's fantastic if you have a tape of all the drills and if you really do take the time to memorize the core conversations. Sure it uses romanji, but it has accent marks and so on. (If you want to learn to speak without an accent).

You will have to get a Japanese person to do these conversations with you.
Learning to speak Japanese well and fluently might be impossible to do alone. The reason I say this is because it requires a level of automaticity that goes beyond RTK. You want things to be instantaneous every time you want to say them.

You might want to consider taking a class or something. Otherwise, Pimsleur or JSL (which also has good grammatical explanations). The class that I took used JSL, so I was lucky. This is for speaking I hope you realize. Do you want to speak to real Japanese people or just read books? Anyway, finish the RTK, then prepared for a grammatical nightmare