Today is the day on which I completed about 350 kanji of RTK1. I have started adding flashcards ( heavy paper; kanji on one side and onyomi and kunyomi readings on the other side, and the keyword seperating the readings. )

I know that Onyomi readings would be successfully dealt with in RTK2 (I own all three), but then, what about the Kunyomi readings ????

I want to be able to read "real" Japanese as soon as possible. I mean, we all know that 猫 is read as "neko" or 話す　is read as "hana.su" and other basic stuff. But how about the other oh-not-so-common kanji with their Kunyomi readings ???

To conclude this, I WILL NOT be learning Onyomi readings till I start RTK2, but I quite couldn't quite follow his Kunyomi procedures. And also, a great number (nearly 65%) of the 350 kanji's Kunyomi readings have stuck with me. For eg:- when I see the kanji 泳, I look at the primitives, recall imagery and get the keyword "swim", and I also get the Kunyomi reading "oyo.gu"

Should I continue doing it this way ?? NOTE, I am not going to be touching ONYOMI readings till RTK1 is done with. Moreover, even Prof. Heisig told us to learn the kunyomi readings as we come across them.


SO, what do you people on here think ? :O

We think you should stop using capital letters in your titles.

Doing RTK with the readings is unconventional and typically advised against. But, if it's working for you, then feel free to keep doing it. I'd be interested in seeing the results. Do you fail a card if you don't remember the reading?

I did at one point entertain the idea of having a common reading on the card, and hopefully accidentally learning it just because I see it every time I see the card, without regard for intentionally learning it. I never actually did this, sadly. Or perhaps it was for the better.

Also, do consider using an electronic approach for your flashcards (like Anki) if you haven't already. How do you choose what flashcards to review? Anki will likely save you a lot of time and probably offer you a better scheduling algorithm than your own. There are plenty of pre-made decks, with RTK being the most popular. There is one deck with the readings you're looking for, as well as words that use them. Look into that one. It's called "RTK 1 and 3 w/ Kanji Definition and Yomi".

It's hard to give you advice on whether you should continue like this because we don't know anything else about what you are doing. How long did those 350 take you? Are you learning anything else besides just RTK?

I did RTK1+3 in one phase and learned to read in the next phase. I basically learned to associate meanings with the kanji, as you will learn from doing RTK. Over time it get's easier and you will have the meaning inside your head. Then learning to read should be done by a context basis(via sentences). You learn both types of reading, when the kanji is a single, the ones that are just by themselves are Japanese pronunciations, while the ones that are linked (usual idioms,etc) are Chinese readings but with Japanese sounds. It's best to divide the work, it's easier on the memory. Learning to read fluently (advanced level) will take time. It took me 1.5 years of self-study to acquire such a fluency. I'm still learning till this date and won't stop. There are a lot of kanji left to learn (my goal is 3000+).

I think that it's ON reading or onyomi, but never onyomi reading, because 'yomi' means reading.

That nitpick aside, I think kunyomi in general are vocabulary words in and of themselves and it makes little sense to study kunyomi except as vocabulary.

Since the RTK keywords are not always the meaning associated with any kunyomi for a given kanji, it is probably a bad idea to learn the kunyomi as part of the RTK process. You would then be learning a meaning, a word, and a character... but although the meaning is attached to the character, and the word is attached to the character, the word is often not going to be that exact meaning and sometimes nothing even -close- to that meaning.

Personally I've found learning vocabulary directly more efficient than learning readings first. At some point you just start to see patterns with the way some kanjis are spelt.

[Zgarbas]

HA! Questionable Content fan?

Betelgeuzah Wrote:Personally I've found learning vocabulary directly more efficient than learning readings first. At some point you just start to see patterns with the way some kanjis are spelt.

This.

Learning onyomi readings in isolation is stupid. Some may not be used that much while others maybe used in only certain words that hold a certain semantic meaning. You'll pick up the onyomi meanings over time.

Howdy! I'm about where you're at (around 300) and while I first fancied the idea of doing the same, I would advise against it.

Personally, I follow the AJATT approach (AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com). Sure, you COULD memorize all the On and Kun readings for 3,000 characters, but then when you reach a sentence with that Kanji, you will still have to figure out how to pronounce it IN THAT CONTEXT, which is key IMO.

I'd say first, worry about remembering what they each mean. Input proceeds output. Then, worry about how to pronounce them in each context. I'd really advise checking out AJATT sometime. I've found some very valuable approaches to the language there that I'm sticking to.

I went through RTK2 before doing much, if any, reading. I don't know whether it was the most efficient approach, but it was nice being able to guess word pronunciations to look them up in the dictionary... And I didn't have much trouble learning to pronounce new words.