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Lots of people do the kanji recognition thing, actually. I don't see why you'd use Heisig's keywords for it, but hey.
Basically Heisig teaches you how to write kanji, not how to recognize them. Writing them out and doing decks English-to-Japanese also helps you remember the fine details of the kanjis better, as often you will recognize a kanji easily but if you were to say how it is written or tell the fine lines apart you probably couldn't. It's all a matter of what you want to use these kanjis for, really.
Imho I don't like the Heisig recognition idea since if you're doing recognition anyway you might as well learn the actual meanings rater the Heisig keywords (which are great for remembering individual kanjis and making stories, but are not really precise when it comes to a Kanji's meaning. But each with their own.
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Don't use RTK, it's flawed because it does not take into account pronunciation. 80% of Kanji are Phono-semantic compounds.
I really feel sorry for those who did RTK, because you made up and memorized crazy stories for a majority of the kanji when it is totally unnecessary.
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The point is that going from English to Japanese is much harder than doing it the other way around. Basically if you only study how to go from Japanese back to English, you will find it very difficult to actually produce Japanese. This is not a concept that is restricted to RTK.
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Not everyone on this forum does RTK, actually! Different opinions are a good thing.
RTK is only flawed if you misunderstand its purpose. It won't get you far as far as using the language goes, but it will help you in the long-run. Like I said, each with their own.
Also, like I said, writing will help nail down all the minor differences and details about kanjis which you might not notice when simply recognizing a kanji.
RTK 2 has little to do with meanings, and it's not my kinda thing anyway. I mean, RTK keywords are overtly simplified and (rarely, but it happens) sometimes have nothing to do with the actual meaning of the kanji. The system enables you to remember the kanjis, but not to know all of its meanings. Sure, 肘 will always be elbow, but lots of kanjis you will never encounter with their RTK keyword meaning.
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mmm so shall i take it the general consensus is that i should flip around my anki deck? if that is so back to the rest of the questions: will flipping it around like totally screw up my deck? will it cause me to fail at remembering everything ive done already?
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it's the Review the Kanji forum, not Heisig's RTK forum.
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Stian Wrote:warakawa Wrote:Don't use RTK, it's flawed because it does not take into account pronunciation. 80% of Kanji are Phono-semantic compounds.
I really feel sorry for those who did RTK, because you made up and memorized crazy stories for a majority of the kanji when it is totally unnecessary.
It's much easier to recognise the kanji in texts after doing RTK. I mean,
飛行機 become "fly"+"going"+"mechanism" instead of moonrune, moonrune and moonrune. And havinga fuzzy understanding of the fact that these moonrunes with 行 in the middle should be pronounced ひこうき is not easy. The reason I used this example was that I encountered the word before actually knowing more than the middle kanji, and I kept failing that word.
Also, what are you doing here anyway? This is the RtK forum after all...
I don't think you know what phono-semantic compound actually mean, you're referring vocabulary made up of compound kanji. I am talking about individual kanji
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cha..._compounds
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By far the most numerous characters are the phono-semantic compounds, also called semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds. These characters are composed of two parts: one of a limited set of characters called 'radicals', which are often graphically simplified and which suggests the general meaning of the character, and an existing character pronounced approximately as the new target word.
Examples are 河 hé "river", 湖 hú "lake", 流 liú "stream", 沖 chōng "riptide" (or "flush"), 滑 huá "slippery". All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes, which is a simplified pictograph for a river, indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water; the right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator. For example, in the case of 沖 chōng (Old Chinese /druŋ/[56]), the phonetic indicator is 中 zhōng (Old Chinese /truŋ/[57]), which by itself means "middle". In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic indicator; this process means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today.
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Isn't using pronunciation with radical and primitive a positive modification to RTK method?
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If you'd like to discuss it in a separate thread, I'm sure several of us would be happy to indulge you.