Hello all,

This is my first post in this forum and I want to start by saying it has been very useful and helpful reading some of the other topics. As a brief intro, I've been studying with the RTK method for about 4 months now and I'm at 1000 kanji. The method has been working as intended - i.e. it's been very helpful for learning to write and recognize the characters.

However, I read some online reviews of RTK and I've seen some people criticize the method as actually being bad for learning Japanese in the long run. To expand on that, I've read that RTK creates a crutch for the learner that becomes an impediment to learning the language. Supposedly, the use of a single key word per kanji seems to be the main source of the problem because many (if not all?) kanji have multiple meanings. For example, the kanji for noon 午 can also mean horse. The argument against RTK asserts that if the learner only associates 午 with the keyword noon, when he encounters 午 in it's other meaning of horse it will lead to confusion and mistakes. Hence, the argument says RTK is a detriment to learning Japanese overall. Again, this is just what I've read online.

So my question is has anyone who has studied Japanese after RTK run into the problem described above or any other negative effects? How did you reconcile the multiple meanings of a given kanji and did you have problems using/reading/writing the kanji in the correct usage and context? Basically, is there a bad side of using RTK?

Thank you for any input you may offer.

I used RtK after about 3 years of ineffective in-class Kanji study. Since completing RtK, I have moved from the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Kanji reading/recognition, all the way to the top.

My opinion is that is you are just starting to learn Japanese, you need a better base than RtK. You need to study all aspects of the language and build up a good base. Once you have that base (Genki 1, Genki 2), RtK will increase your J-power levels past 9000.

You will be blazing by the people who are criticizing it!

And, seeing how I have stopped reviewing RtK decks and have moved onto intensive advanced vocab/grammar studies, I can tell you that going through RtK has been a huge help in remembering new compounds and sentences.

Some negatives are:

- Initial time required to complete it
- Time required to continue reviewing
- Some keywords are confusing/wrong (e.g. 町 being village instead of town)
- Hard to know when to stop using it

lardycake Wrote:- Hard to know when to stop using it

This!

Once I finished RtK, I stopped reviewing about a month after.

You eventually have to move away from learning English meanings for the Kanji in English, and start studying JAPANESE!

Welcome!

There are numerous complaints about the Heisig method, and why it is better not to do it, and learn it the old way. An excerpt: "But no one that has learned Japanese that I know of has used RTK." or "I've been talking to my girlfriend, who is Japanese, and when I proudly know the word for xy, and how I have learned the Kanji she only gave me a weird look. Then she told me, that the word I told her to know actually has two Kanji, and I felt dumbfounded. So bottom line RTK is no good." More can be found on Amazon etc.

But I can tell you that you can do RTK, without worrying of running into such problems, once you jump into vocabulary learning. The English words will fall away sooner or later, and even though many of them have to do with the actual word, are only there to build some connection between keyword - story and kanji you are supposed to write. Just finsih it in a speed you are comfortable with, and don't worry about other peoples complaints, as long as it works for you. It did for many others, including myself, so ...

[Katsuo]

highfade Wrote:I've read that RTK creates a crutch for the learner that becomes an impediment to learning the language. Supposedly, the use of a single key word per kanji seems to be the main source of the problem because many (if not all?) kanji have multiple meanings. For example, the kanji for noon 午 can also mean horse. The argument against RTK asserts that if the learner only associates 午 with the keyword noon, when he encounters 午 in it's other meaning of horse it will lead to confusion and mistakes. Hence, the argument says RTK is a detriment to learning Japanese overall

If a beginner in English learns the word 'right' as the counterpart to 'left' would we say, "Oh no, you mustn't learn that! Right has other meanings too, like 'correct' and if you learn it as the counterpart to left you'll never be able to learn the other meanings properly!"

Of course not. You learn an important meaning first, then add others to it as you progress with the language. After a while you forget many of the English keywords and associate the kanji with the Japanese words you know that contain it.

For example, having completed RTK years ago, when I see 午 the first things that come to mind are 午前、午後、and 子午線.

RTK more or less applies prototype semantics. And it's cognitively way more easy (speaking from experience) to create a single path (ie one kanji) with a vague meaning, then branching other meanings and readings, than trying to learn reading-meaning combos plus a shape (like in kanji books). As long as you don't restrict yourself to RTK, there usually isn't any problem.

All the downsides have been listed by Lardycake and vanish after a while; as for the reviewing time, after a year it's very low (maybe an hour or two a week in my case), so only the initial reviews are time-consuming, but it's more a pain than a downside, since be it traditional or RTK you have to put some work in.

It's an age-old discussion, but the success rate should of learners should be an indication.

I took college-level Japanese classes, and perhaps 90% of the (non-Chinese, non-Korean) students who tried to study kanji the traditional way either learned nothing or never got beyond ~500-800 characters. The remaining 10% either were extremely persistent, had an extremely good visual memory, or starting making up their own mnemonics in an unsystematic way. Even of those students, hardly anyone could write (actually I think I'm the only one from that year who learned how to write Japanese besides my 二世 ex-GF, but only years later after using RTK!).

The fact that Japanese people find the approach weird is pretty meaningless. They start learning kanji as kids after they already speak Japanese like native-speaking children.

Finally, many, many members of this forum have achieved very high levels of Japanese reading ability in relatively short time (<3 years). Not all of them used RTK, but most did.

But it's just as Alec_xvi and lardycake say. My suggestion would be to stop reviewing a character as soon as you've learned the first word that uses it. So e.g. suspend the character in your RTK deck when it has come up in Core2k6k for the first time, or when it shows up in Genki or whatever material you're using. As soon as you see the character "in the wild" the keyword will fade and be replaced by one or more contextual meanings, or even no meaning and just a reading.

What I'm missing in most reviews, and also a bit in the posts above:

RTK's purpose.
RTK is not there to teach you Japanese vocabulary, or grammar, or every single nuance a single kanji conveys. It is primarily meant to teach you to really see the kanji. To make you acquainted with the different parts a kanji can be build up from. To make you acquainted with stroke order, and how that can help you to distinguish kanji. To teach you the broadly applicable method of making up stories to memorise something. In short, it helps you to organise a thousand, two thousand, in the long run (post-RTK) ten thousand ji/zi in your mind with less confusion. A nice effect is that you'll also associate at least one (at least derived) meaning with every kanji, which is a good starting point.
Hence, it should always be used as a complement. You can for example start out studying Japanese, and after so much grammar and vocabulary note that those kanji really look very similar and you start to confuse them. Then start RTK. Or just do a couple of hundred kanji from RTK and read all the text, and then start on grammar and vocab. It'll help too. It's a very useful complementary tool with specific benefits and I do not see how, if properly used, it'll harm your study.

My main concern with RTK comes in when people wait to finish RTK before they start actually learning Japanese.

There are a ton of people who get to 1200 frames or something and then they get bored, drift away, get distracted. There's nothing wrong with that, it happens to everyone who's self-studying a language, but if you come back to it later you're basically starting at zero. (I don't know how solid the mnemonics actually are in people's minds, but I hear a lot on the forum about people who are on their second or third tries and starting from the beginning...)

Even if you just have a few months of aural Japanese study, at least you can ask where the bathroom is. And I think there's a lot of motivation that comes from using the language. So when you're at that point where you've been studying for three months, four months, and you can't do anything with the language yet, I think that's where a lot of people get burned out.

here's the thing.

When you actually have japanese text in front of you that you're trying to read, what you eventually need to know is the pronunciation and meaning of whole words and how they relate to the words around them. For that purpose, recognizing the characters (being able to tell them apart), knowing how they are read, and knowing their meaning are all useful things. But I'd argue the most useful is knowing how they are read, because then you can then a) start reading them and b) look them up in a dictionary. Just having a vague keyword meaning in English isn't all that useful in the long run because you're going to be learning word meanings by the bucket loads as you go along anyway. If you're set on RTK, just bang it out of the park in a month or two so that you know like 80% and then start learning Japanese. The key words will help you guess word meanings here and there but you'll be making dictionary lookups to get pronunciation and you'll be learning the meaning in context anyway so learning the meanings independent of actual japanese sounds is of limited usefulness. Can you imagine a japanese person memorizing the spelling and a vague japanese meaning of 2000 english words/prefixes/suffixes before learning how any english (via sound) or even learning the basics of pronunciation?

KanjiDevourer Wrote:What I'm missing in most reviews, and also a bit in the posts above:

RTK's purpose.

To be fair, this is not easy to understand. Heisig is not a teacher or a pedagogist, and his introductions are not very good (to say the least). He says some things in both the RTK 1 and 2 intros that are total nonsense, and if you take it too seriously, it can cause problems. While it's very easy to see that RTK shows you how to associate a kanji with an English keyword and write the kanji, it's much harder to see how this fits into an overall program of Japanese study.

Before I had come to this forum, I had met a number of people in real life who had started using RTK. Without fail, every single one of them had the same misconception -- that after using RTK they would know the "meanings" of the kanji and then they could just read Japanese by figuring out the words from the kanji meanings (or else that RTK would take care of the majority of what it takes to read Japanese and the rest would be quick and easy).

I really wish that he would reprint RTK 1 and 2 with introductions written by someone else who had teaching and pedagogy experience and could explain more clearly how you should use RTK with an overall Japanese learning program, and exactly what RTK will and will not do for you. Sometimes people seem to treat this as obvious, but it's not obvious for a lot of people.

My personal recommendation is to go with RTK Lite (look for Nukemarine's posts on it), and don't worry about mastering 100% of the kanji, just get through it fairly quickly. If you enjoyed it and want to keep going, then you can learn the rest of the kanji in RTK 1. If not, you can move on to actual Japanese study and you'll be able to learn the rest of the kanji later.

When I started 2 years ago I remember reading PR for RTK2 in particular that suggested that you might want to order a subscription to the Asahi shinbun after finishing the book because you'd know the meanings and pronunciations for all the kanji... what a load of crap they ought to be sued for something like that. Talk about snake oil... Tellingly I wasn't able to find it again for a quote.

There seems to be an inability to regulate language-study publishers' wild claims about their entry-level study tools. Rosetta stone is obviously the biggest offender in this discussion...

nadiatims Wrote:But I'd argue the most useful is knowing how [kanji] are read, because then you can then a) start reading them and b) look them up in a dictionary.

RTK isn't just about reading, but writing too. Just compare the writing ability of someone who completed RTK to someone who didn't. It's obvious.

On a separate note, RTK is unparalleled in one respect when it comes to reading: distinguishing between similar looking kanji. I've noticed those who haven't used RTK often have to look up kanji in a dictionary to distinguish them (although look-ups decrease over time), whereas such look-ups are more or less unnecessary for those who completed RTK.

Completing RTK is a drop in the bucket when it comes to learning Japanese. However, that doesn't mean it isn't useful. Anyone who is serious about being able to write (by hand) in Japanese is foolish not to take advantage of RTK.

Using RTK will make kanji a million times easier to relate to. Seeing a kanji will call to mind the concept that the kanji embodies. It simply takes down one barrier to understanding with the kanji.

Many rail against using RtK but I know more kanji than many of my Japanese friends. I can't think of a good reason NOT to use RtK.

I've put together my thoughts on studying kanji with Heisig in this thread:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=9007

Didn't get many critical responses, so I guess, not everything there is rubbish

If anything, you would emphasize the last point from my post there - there is nothing in Heisig method that is inherently prohibiting you from studying the language at the same time.

vileru Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:But I'd argue the most useful is knowing how [kanji] are read, because then you can then a) start reading them and b) look them up in a dictionary.

RTK isn't just about reading, but writing too. Just compare the writing ability of someone who completed RTK to someone who didn't. It's obvious.

Anyone who writes out japanese regularly in their studies or use of japanese is going to internalize how to write them. RTK teaches people to write because it involves writing, as does any other writing practice. RTK is a good resource for showing stroke order though, and the ordering is great. The stories/keywords are unnecessary in my opinion. I'd wager there's value in just going through the book in however many sittings it takes and writing out each kanji a couple of times by hand, without making any particular effort to memorize the keywords or construct stories. Then start studying japanese. Use RTK as a reference only if/when you forget stroke orders (or you could just check a website...).

nadiatims Wrote:The stories/keywords are unnecessary in my opinion.

My guess is that you say that only because you 1) live in Japan (hence have constant exposure to kanji), 2) reached level where kanji is one of the least problems.

So, as a matter of balance, here is what have to say as a not advanced learner - the stories/keywords are necessary in my opinion.

i agree with nadiatims.

within months of completing RTK i pretty much threw it away and keywords/stories don't help at all when it comes to real japanese™. helps a lot for stroke order and recognition though. when it comes to i+1, it's not just vocab word+1 but it could mean stroke order, reading, etc. i think it's good to get stroke order out of the way.

writing by hand arguably isn't important and you can fix it through other means, perhaps writing it on a vocab card in Anki or even through a handwriting trainer. i've yet to see someone make fun of me for using hiragana instead of kanji.

When a Japanese person sees a kanji, two things come to mind: a) what is means and b) how it is read. That is why my Japanese friends say that when they see something in Chinese they cannot read it, but they can get the gist of what it says. When a westerner looks at a kanji they don't know a) what it means or b) how to read it.

Remembering the Kanji takes care of the first part by internalizing the meanings of 2,000+ kanji. Once you know this, learning the readings is a much more manageable task. Whether you use RtK or not, you WILL create a variation of his system yourself, because unless you are psychic, you can only relate what you don't know with what you know. To go from kanji--->reading is possible, but going from kanji--->meaning--->reading is MUCH faster in the long run. Also, kanji--->reading without learning the meaning will waste a GREAT deal of time in the long run.

Quote:Whether you use RtK or not, you WILL create a variation of his system yourself, because unless you are psychic, you can only relate what you don't know with what you know.

This is not true. There are a couple of cases where I'll distinguish some very similar kanji with "This one has the horse radical and that one has the tree radical," but I've become largely fluent without anything like RTK.

I'm not psychic, either.

probably no long term negative effects except the time wasted and the amount of people who, like Fillanzea said, get bored and quit Japanese altogether.

If you learn some compounds containing the same kanji together, you can learn the meanings each kanji takes, the readings, and the words themselves at the same time.

If you want to write by hand, it's probably helpful though...

japanese people also don't explicitly memorize meanings, they learn meanings through context. i don't even remember which keywords go with what and it really doesn't help that much in the long run.

here's an easy example:
私の学校　
私立学校

i'm sure if you ask for the meaning of each individual kanji they'll know but the bottom line is that they know the meaning and reading of both phrases without bothering to assess each kanji's individual meaning.

(private / study, exam) = My school
(private, stand up, study, exam) = Private (non-government) school

But if you look at the radicals in a kanji to figure out which kanji it is, you are doing EXACTLY what RtK helps internalize, the ability to tell the difference between characters based on how they are constructed.

Yes Japanese people don't memorize meanings, but they have an internalized system of what characters mean. Heck, in children's writing materials you see a picture of a bug next to the kanji for "bug." Kanji embody concepts, and keywords are a starting point for non character based language people to internalize it.

[ファブリス]

Yes you're going to be a kanji PIMP :p