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Hello everybody,
I've been very interested in learning Japanese for many years but have never really gotten around to learning it until now. I am starting high school this August and will be receiving formal Japanese classes as part of my curriculum, but I just have one simple concern:
I do not yet know the kanji. I only just started using RTK and am only at frame 243. From seeing what people write about their own experiences, getting through this book takes a pretty damn long time, so I don't think I will be anywhere near finished with the book before at least september.
My concern is not really the time it takes to learn it as such, I like to take things at a very slow pace. I am worried, however, that my formal Japanese classes might interfere with my kanji studies since this seems to be what the professionals say. I believe I remember reading in the intro to RTK that using the book in conjunction with formal classes is not recommended.
Would anybody here who have been in the same situation be able to confirm this? Is it really going to hamper my ability to read, write and recognise the kanji, or can it be done?
Thank you in advance.
Joined: Nov 2010
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It shouldn't interfere with your studies or confuse you in any way, but if you feel that you don't have a lot of extra time to dedicate to RTK, add fewer new cards and scale back as necessary.
I recommend RTK. It's pros and cons have been discussed at length in this forum, but I'll give a quick rundown of my experience. I didn't like it or trust it at first and was very skeptical, but it has been very helpful overall. The payoff is less immediate, but it will help tremendously in the long run. It allows you to identify thousands of kanji based on their components. Based on my experience, it's much more difficult and confusing to learn kanji through rote memorization.
Don't worry about when you finish. Focus on making progress. I'm in my third year of studying Japanese in college, and I wish I had done RTK from the beginning. I'm around frame 600, and I can already see huge improvements in my overall studies. I don't plan on being done with RTK until December, so you're already going at a faster pace than me.
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I just did 20-25 kanji a day and finished in several months.
I started noticing a huge improvement around the 600 mark, where I could actually start recognizing many kanji that I saw.
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Also RTK doesn't teach the readings while they'll probably want you to learn them in class. I haven't been in a Japanese class but I guess that what people find the most difficult is the appearance of the characters though? You'll have the edge there.
It's perfectly fine to take your time, but I think many agree that in the long run it's not very important how thorough you are with your stories. I think you'd benefit from using the stories on here and not minding the effectiveness of them too much in order to complete RTK faster for your class.
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As mentioned in other threads, you can do RTK Lite (KO2k1 1-1110) or RTK Ultralite (KO2k1 1-555) which are the more common kanji though you still learn it in the Heisig order.
There's a slight downside as the heisig orders via primitives. If you use abbreviated orders, you'll get a primitive that's used just once and might not be seen for awhile. So for, no solution to this problem exists if you used abbreviated lists. Still, learning 555 kanji that accounts for 80% of all words you'll ever use is a good investment.
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@Nukemarine
Do you happen to know how the issue that a kanji that is used as a primitive in some other kanji but is not used as a kanji by itself is resolved in the light decks?
To give you an example, let's look at 濃 (濃い is a basic vocab) - the primitives here are (water, bend, sign of dragon). So, in order to make use of mnemonics you need to remember 水 (easy, often used as a primitive), 曲 (easy, you are likely to need to learn 曲がる), 辰 (?) and the question is whether the light decks would include 辰 as a kanji to learn. (This may be not the best chosen example but you should get an idea.)
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I think the Genki series claims 250 kanji, but it's... not really. You could probably do a few readings and a few words with everything but yeah, it won't be a complete mastery. For example, you can know 大 and 分, probably as 大きい and 5分 but you probably won't know 大分県。 And they also teach you a lot of words without kanji too, which I feel gets really pointless because with many of these words you almost never see them in kana.
With that said you can easily do RTK with that and they both kinda help each other. One of the first kanji they teach is 曜 and that looks like a pain if you don't know radicals, but when you do it's actually quite easy. It also becomes easier to learn the vocabulary with kanji instead of just learning the kana form so it becomes more relevant.
