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.

Zgarbas wrote:

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.

well i use alot of his keywords cuz i didnt feel to make up one for 2k kanji.. ive changed a few like 3 or so but..

id like to use kanji rlly for reading, we are in the age of technology for the most part ill be typing them. sadly for university i do need to write them but thats a separate issue, so look at it from the perspective that i want to read them rather than write.

so are u saying u didnt bother with rtk1 and just did rtk2? "you might as well learn the actual meanings"

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.

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.

I usually don't write things like this, but you seriously piss me off.
You better fix your rude attitude around here or get off this forum. I haven't seen a single post from you that was remotely helpful or insightful - it's always "I'm right, and I feel sorry for all you other guys, because you're all wrong". Grow up.

Last edited by Zorlee (2012 August 29, 1:42 am)

kevester wrote:

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?

I'm not sure about screwing up your deck, but you may indeed fail at remembering everything. However, if you feel it's worth it, you won't be the first person who had to fail through pretty much everything in order to "start over." When I stopped reviewing for a while about a year or so ago, I had to force myself through all the cards again, but in the end it was doable and you'll recover! Just let the reviews come, answer honestly, and restudy what you need to as you go.

warakawa wrote:

Don't use RTK,

warakawa, I'd like to refer you to our forum rules.

sigh.. exactly what  iddidnt want yall are slowly switching it to a screw u warakawa heisig rules topic rather than my question. nevertheless atleast some ppl are answering and stuff ty ojousan lol..man i hope i still remember everythign well.. so do u think i shud just get a new heisig deck or just continue from where i am (after flipping the Q and A ofc)

kevester wrote:

sigh.. exactly what  iddidnt want yall are slowly switching it to a screw u warakawa heisig rules topic rather than my question. nevertheless atleast some ppl are answering and stuff ty ojousan lol..man i hope i still remember everythign well.. so do u think i shud just get a new heisig deck or just continue from where i am (after flipping the Q and A ofc)

Sorry for that..

I would recommend you to start over. But you should be able to progress very quickly at first because you are in fact familiar with the characters.

warakawa wrote:

it's the Review the Kanji forum, not Heisig's RTK forum.

But the forum is linked to kanji.koohii.com, which is infact made to review kanji from the Heisig book.

Last edited by Stian (2012 August 29, 2:12 am)

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_ch … _compounds

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.

JimmySeal wrote:

warakawa wrote:

it's the Review the Kanji forum, not Heisig's RTK forum.

Forum Rules wrote:

About this forum and the RTK method

This forum is first and foremost a means for the ReviewingTheKanji members, to support, encourage and help each other to complete the RTK self-study method.

Because of this, discussions on alternatives or modifications to James Heisig's original method will only be tolerated so long as their are done in a positive manner and aim to help members to reach their goal (be it completing RTK or attaining kanji literacy).

@kevester - My advice would be to flip the cards back around and go on reviewing.  You'll probably have a lot of failed cards at first, but you'll probably have retained a lot too, and it will balance out eventually.  The reason Dr. Heisig recommends reviewing in this direction is that it gives you the ability to write the kanji, and kanji recognition (significantly easier than production) mostly comes along automatically as a bonus.  Reviewing kanji->keyword is far less helpful in terms of remembering how to write the characters.

ye im leaning towards just flipping it, even tho stian said start over.. ill prolly see how that goes first.. cuz schools starting back plus itd prolly be a huge emotionally depressing blow to start completely over... well.. what can i say atleast i found out now rather than later...

Isn't using pronunciation with radical and primitive a positive modification to RTK method?