Hello, everyone!

I'm a brazilian sansei, and finally engaged seriously into learning japanese.
I just finished Part One (Lessons 1-12) of RTK 1 and I'm really happy to finally being able to memorize kanji, since like many people, I had a bad experience with Nihongakko as a kid.

I'm sorry if it's a stupid question what I'm about to make, but I didn't find anything specifically related to that in the forum.
My terrible doubt is: how can I jump from knowing the meaning of the kanji and knowing how to write it to knowing how to read the kanji in japanese?

Ex: the kanji 一. I know it means "one" or "first", but how can I get to learn to, in a japanese text, read "ichi" or "hito(tsu)" or else, to learn how to pronounce the character, since in RTK there isn't anything about this? Heisig makes it very clear in the Introduction of the book.

Thanks in advance!

Well on the computer Rikaisama or Rikaisama can tell you and the meaning. Install it and go on a weblage written in Japanese and be amazed lol

Basically You look up the word in the dictionary to find out the readingDk

RTK 2 goes onto this, though most people say it's easier/smoother to just learn as you go. From what I understand, you just need to learn the basics about the difference between kun-yomi and on-yomi, then go ahead and start learning vocabulary. As you learn vocabulary (in Kanji) you'll be learning on-yomi and kun-yomi along with it (i.e. at jisho.org if I look up a word I can generally guess which sounds come from which kanji, and if I can't, I hit the "Kanji details" and figure it out from there.)

And then you just choose if you want to learn it passively through experiencing the common onyomi/kunyomi when you encounter vocabulary (while you're actively learning the vocabulary themselves), or actively by, for example, making an Anki deck for seeing a Kanji and having to say its onyomi/kunyomi to get that card "right" (Most people wouldn't do this, especially because a lot of onyomi are very rare and better to learn on a per-word basis)

OR you could use RTK2 to do both actively at the same time, though I've heard this is very challenging/discouraging.

Uzeil Wrote:RTK 2 goes onto this, though most people say it's easier/smoother to just learn as you go.

I just realized that after posting, haha. This post http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1864&page=1 is somewhat useful in this matter. There are some users that don't recommend RTK 2, or even RTK 3. But how to "learn as you go"?

Some people say to just learn vocabulary after finishing RTK 1. Is that the method you guys used? What do you recommend?
I'm going smoothly through RTK 1, but sometimes I feel that I should be doing something more than "just" that... I guess it's just kinda frustrating to look at japanese manga, books or tv shows and, even though I can know the meaning and extract some tiny bits of information from what the context shows, I still can't read it. Maybe I'm just too anxious to learn...

Besides all that, jisho.org really seems interesting and reliable. I'll definively use it.

For me personally I've noticed that i just pick up things through reading sentences with furigana. I use the website iknow.jp and the grammar text 'Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar', which provides A LOT of sentences with furigana. It doesn't take many sentences for a pronunciation to stick. You read a sentence a few times or you see another sentence with the same character, same furigana and voila. It kind of happens like diffusion, naturally.. After learning RTK, the diffusion happens easily because you have some background with the kanji you are seeing. I do have RTK2 and RTK3 which I will probably go through.

iknow.jp, pronounces the sentence for you too and you just have to take some time to match up what you hear to the written sentence.

I think it's definitely easier to just focus on RTK and finish it and then focus on vocabulary because it makes vocabulary learning faster since you know and can recognize the kanji that make up the vocab word. It makes it stick in your head better than if you didn't know the character. Depending on how much time you have and dedication, you could finish RTK1 in 2 months, which is about 30-40 kanji a day. If that's the case, it's not that long of a wait.

Uzeil Wrote:learn it passively through experiencing the common onyomi/kunyomi when you encounter vocabulary

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Best answer.

You need to put yourself in the position where you are actively encountering vocabulary. How you choose to do this depends on your interests - do what you find fascinating. It will get easier and you'll get better as you persist. Most students of Japanese will be baffled by kanji when encountering new vocab but you will have the advantage of RTK.

shinsen Wrote:You need to put yourself in the position where you are actively encountering vocabulary. How you choose to do this depends on your interests - do what you find fascinating.

So, from this part on, it's more like the AJATT immersion "method", right?

akemimeka Wrote:So, from this part on, it's more like the AJATT immersion "method", right?

Sure, if you want to call it a "method". I'd say more like "common sense", lol. Find something to read that you find interesting enough to keep yourself motivated. Yes, I said "read" on purpose. You can watch anime or listen to J-Pop until the cows come home and hardly progress unless you expose your retinae to Japanese subtitles or lyrics.

Thanks, everyone. You helped a lot! :)))