Your questions are actually answered by Heisig himself. Did you read the introduction?

It's a divide and conquer approach, RtK. The focus isn't on literacy, it's on sowing the neurological seeds in memory pathways to "get the kanji in your head" to begin with. After you've gone through RtK and reviewed them all in Anki (for example), and have a solid retention rate, one large aspect of vocab memorization (having to remember how to write the kanji) is taken out of the equation.

Readings will only frustrate you if you try to learn them out of context, as there is no single "reading" for kanji, and even the most common kanji have multiple readings which will really only start to becoming intuitive learning them in context. 

Doing RtK as it is actually takes a lot of work out of the process of breaking into beginning learning Japanese.

Kanji dictionaries a different kettle of fish altogether, as they generally require a certain learning to be able to use, unlike a standard dictionary which you can simply open up and dive into.


Readings are something you generally get a feel for after a while. There will always be rare kanji and uncommon readings, variations of usage for first names (every parent wants their child to be special, right?), etc. but for the most part, at your stage of learning you are going to get more bang for your buck by getting through RtK, getting those kanji in your brain, and soaking into a nice and easy entry level vocabulary deck or some sort to get used to common kanji readings in context.

I'm just trying to get the most out of my studies.

Understandable but when it comes to Heisig's approach, you're simply better off not trying to over analyze it and add more stuff to it, and, well, riding it out. Basically, it works, and the faster you get through it and embrace the employed way of approaching kanji memorization, the sooner you'll be able to actually use them.

I was in your position, only not only readings but I wanted to learn the Japanese names for each radical, etc. and "do it all at once". This was the prime reason why it didn't actually start studying for a good few weeks, trying to find "The Perfect Method". Essentially the best thing for people such as ourselves is to simply drop the predisposition with perfectionism and give methods an honest try.

After a week or so of RtK, you'll get a better understanding of the reasoning for the answers to your questions, and will be able to determine a more suitable pathway for your learning, having at least experienced the process first-hand.

Last edited by uisukii (2013 January 04, 5:53 pm)

So would it be best to completely hold off looking up the dictionary meanings
until completing the book, or books? I only have the first volume, but given the length of
all three books, I'd rather not wait 'til the completion of all three, if that were necessary.
Also, would it make more sense to avoid reading stuff in Japanese until
I have the dictionary readings in my head?
I feel like reading directly after Heisig might be more like decoding in english and less
like reading in Japanese.

Who the heck is MrT?

Thanks guys.
Next I"m off to figure out these Anki decks everyone keeps talking about. I'm sure it'll be much easier than figuring out Kanji!

I advise on doing RTK Lite, which is a smaller subset consisting of the most common ~1100 Kanji and also includes required Kanji to build others from, this allows you to gain benefit from RTK as soon as possible, especially since most of the Japanese you read at the beginning has almost the most common Kanji only.

Then, you can add unknown Kanji as you encounter them.

hershoreline wrote:

So I have a a copy of Heisig's 'Rembering the Kanji' and one thing I find really frustrating is that there are no readings of the characters nor are there any names for the meanings in Japanese. For someone like myself, who has only been studying Japanese for a few months now, this seems to be a real disadvantage--even though the stories would probably be immensely helpful when it comes to remember the kanji. But ultimately, in a larger sense, I'm a little confused about how this is supposed to help someone at my stage of learning. Am I to believe that I must look up each character separately in order to find the readings and the words that correspond to each meaning? This seems like a lot of extra work, and it is only compounded by the fact that I'm no master at looking up characters in a dictionary.
Is there a reason that these things aren't included?
And if there is a good reason, what could I use to s upplement Heisig's book?

No, it's not a lot of extra work.
In fact, Heisig is saving you time.

There's no really good systematic to figuring out kanji reading other than just knowing the word. So, in that aspect, learning kanji readings is mainly rote memorization and recognizing the same kanji used in many other words.

Adding kanji reading would be counterproductive (and he explains it numerous times, including the intro).  If I told you a kanji has "ka, so, tsu, and do" as readings, there's still no way to figure out which is the correct reading for a given word. You're just gonna end up looking the word up anyway. Also, if you read the wikipedia article for kanji, many of the kanji readings for certain kanji were imported from China during 4 different dynasties. There's hardly any consistency when it comes to readings and no guarantee that you'll even use all the readings for a kanji.

Most kanji have maybe 5-10 readings. So if there are 2000 general use kanji, you're talking about 10,000-20,000 readings to memorize!

Heisig is more for remembering and writing kanji. This becomes valuable because it makes it easy to memorize words. Heisig also makes it easy to keep people from confusing kanji that look similar. When you're done with Heisig, you'll know what all 2000+ kanji mean and recognize them easily. From there, grab some manga (or whatever) to learn readings.
It becomes so much easier to learn readings when you can identify each kanji and for many/most words you can even figure out their meaning immediately!

Better to learn readings as you come across them when reading manga/books/etc.
Words are easier to remember when you actually see them used in real life.
Manga in particular is good since many manga has the kanji reading for EVERY kanji.
The furigana is right there. So you'll have no trouble looking words up.

Here is a free image of a 4-panel comic:


Imagine if all the furigana was there for each kanji and you knew the meanings of all the
kanji from Heisig. Learning new words would be a breeze.

Btw, I bought the Henshall book and it was a waste of time (and money).
With Heisig, you could get all 2000+ done in 3 months and never have to
worry about it ever again. Once you finish it, the hardest part of learning Japanese is mostly over.

Anyway, good luck.

Last edited by chamcham (2013 January 05, 3:36 pm)

＠chamcham what is the kanji next to 引＿?

Marumaru wrote:

＠chamcham what is the kanji next to 引＿?

Gotta say it's a point in favor of RTK that I went looking for ages and didn't realize what you were looking for until erlog made me realize you meant  弘

partner55083777 wrote:

@hershoreline, The problem with RTK is that you end up studying a lot of kanji that you'll never use, and never even see until way past the intermediate/advanced stage.  It's not really a problem per se, but you could be using that time to study actual Japanese. 

Memorizing kanji compounds (especially if you're just focused on recognition) is just like memorizing words in any other language.  There is nothing special about it.  If you want to learn how to write them, then an organized system like RTK is a pretty good, but certainly not required.  Do you really want to be able to write the kanji?  If this is true, then you'll need to put in a lot more effort than just RTK. 

Doing all of RTK is not going to save you any time in the long run.  However, doing RTK Lite or Ultralight is a pretty good idea.  I think RTK Lite is just the common kanji along with the parts that make them up.  For instance, you would have the kanji 強, because 強い（つよい） is a really common word.  But you would also have the kanji 虫 (むし--because it makes up part of つよい) and 弓 (ゆみ--it's not a common word, but it does help you to remember 強).  After you get to the intermediate/advanced stage, you could go back and do the rest of RTK.

I'm going to have to disagree here.
It depends on what you're reading.

If you plan on reading Japanese novels (小説 or light novels), you definitely need to learn at least all of the RTK1 kanji. I wrote a program to count the number of unique RTK1 kanji in a file. So it tells you all of the RTK1 kanji that appear in a given text.

Japanese novels often requires knowledge of 1500-1900 RTK1 Kanji to read them
cover to cover. That's practically all of the RTK1 kanji.

Japanese TV dramas, on average, require knowledge of 400-550 different RTK1 kanji for a 1 hour episode. When you combine all the subtitles for all episodes, there are typically 900-1200 RTK1 kanji used throughout the series. So you might be able to get away with RTK Lite in that case (depending on how common the kanji are).

Here is some sample data from the recent drama "Rich Man Poor Woman".
It has an Information Technology/Computer Science focus, so it clearly requires
a higher reading level.

Number of RTK1 kanji used in each episode
Episode 01: 599
Episode 02: 521
Episode 03: 496
Episode 04: 520
Episode 05: 527
Episode 06: 506
Episode 07: 499
Episode 08: 416
Episode 09: 443
Episode 10: 402
Episode 11: 435
ALL: 1172 (number of RTK1 kanji used in the entire series)
AVERAGE RTK1 kanji per episode: 487

In conclusion, to watch TV drama, a knowledge of 1200-1400 kanji would probably be good enough. For novels, you absolutely need to learn all of the RTK1 kanji (and possibly some from RTK3). I'm guessing that news broadcasts and newspapers would be somewhere in between.

Lastly, I've noticed that many rare kanji are often used in names. So maybe you'll only see them in names, which naturally makes them uncommon. So I'm guessing that ignoring the characters not in RTK Lite will lead to problems reading names. Depending on your circumstances, this might not be a big deal. Coincidentally, RTK Lite skips 樹. So you wouldn't be able to recognize 樹 in the comic above.

The keyword for 樹 is "timber-tree". I use "tree", "drum" and "glue" as my primitives. Story I use is "Timber-trees are the trees taiko (drum (FRAME 1444)) drummers glue together to make their largest drum." I actually play taiko. So the story is a good fit for me.

Last edited by chamcham (2013 January 06, 6:49 am)

To know all of the kanji that are in any given light novel or nonfiction book, yes, it's useful to know all of the RTK1 kanji.

But you can get a pretty high level of comprehension with about 1200-1400 kanji. Or rather: if your grammar and your vocabulary are pretty good otherwise, then knowing about 1200-1400 kanji won't be much of an impediment to reading, if you don't demand 100% comprehension. And if your grammar and vocabulary are not that high yet, you probably should be reading a lot of things that have furigana or that use a fairly limited number of kanji.

@ partner: You're right, I probably could study Japanese without studying the Kanji, but, in addition, I really want to be able to read Japanese; I like manga--though that isn't isn't the only reason I'm interested in Japanese.

You can study reading and writing Japanese without specifically studying kanji. You just have to focus on learning vocabulary -- it happens to be vocabulary that's written in kanji, sure, but if you want to learn "geothermal" you don't have to learn that "geo" is earth and "thermal" is heat. It might help, but it's not necessary. Likewise, you don't have to learn 抽, 象, and 的 to know that 抽象的 means "abstract."

RoyalBlue wrote:

chamcham wrote:

Japanese TV dramas, on average, require knowledge of 400-550 different RTK1 kanji for a 1 hour episode. When you combine all the subtitles for all episodes, there are typically 900-1200 RTK1 kanji used throughout the series. So you might be able to get away with RTK Lite in that case (depending on how common the kanji are).

Here is some sample data from the recent drama "Rich Man Poor Woman".
It has an Information Technology/Computer Science focus, so it clearly requires
a higher reading level.

Number of RTK1 kanji used in each episode
Episode 01: 599
Episode 02: 521
Episode 03: 496
Episode 04: 520
Episode 05: 527
Episode 06: 506
Episode 07: 499
Episode 08: 416
Episode 09: 443
Episode 10: 402
Episode 11: 435
ALL: 1172 (number of RTK1 kanji used in the entire series)
AVERAGE RTK1 kanji per episode: 487

In conclusion, to watch TV drama, a knowledge of 1200-1400 kanji would probably be good enough. For novels, you absolutely need to learn all of the RTK1 kanji (and possibly some from RTK3). I'm guessing that news broadcasts and newspapers would be somewhere in between.

Awesome post, thank you! Always wanted to have more Information on this subject.
Can you perhaps share the total number of unique Kanji Rich Mann Poor Woman used? Or were all the Kanji used covered by RTK1 ? Kinda hard to imagine to be honest, but would be really awesome.

It's a Python script that I wrote.
It only counts RTK1 Kanji so far. I haven't add RTK3 kanji (or the full 6000 kanji set used for the "Kanji Kentei" exam) yet.

So, for the record, Rich Man Poor Woman uses 1172 RTK1 through the entire series. But, on average, it uses 487 RTK1 kanji per episode. Most drama have less variety in the kanji they use. I'd say "Rich Man Poor Woman" requires above average literacy compared to most dramas. If you can remember 80% of RTK1 kanji that you review, you'd only have to study roughly 100 (i.e. the remaining 20%) kanji to recognize all the characters in an episode of "Rich Man Poor Woman".

Last edited by chamcham (2013 January 06, 7:04 am)

@chamcham, Fillanzea pointed this out, but you're conflating doing RTK with knowing kanji.  Reading a novel requires knowledge of 1500 kanji (and probably an order of magnitude more words), but that doesn't mean you necessarily have to learn how to write them. 

It takes a lot of time to learn how to write all 2000 kanji, and this is valuable time you could use to learn actual Japanese.  From an efficiency standpoint, it might make sense to just do RTK Light and then Core 6000, or even just Core 6000 without ever touching RTK Light.  So far I've seen no study indicating that RTK + Core 2k/6k/10k takes less time than doing just Core 2k/6k/10k.

Also, keep in mind that efficiency is not the be-all-end-all when it comes to studying.  Ease is also very important.  People are psychologically much more likely to continue something when it's easy.  It is probably easier to do RTK (Light?) and then work through Core 6000 than just jump straight into Core 6000.  It should really be up to the individual.  Some people will really benefit from RTK, while it will bore others to death.  It shouldn't be touted as something that you must do, or something that you feel inferior/dumb for not doing. 

The number of RTK kanji in an average drama/novel is almost completely irrelevant when trying to decide whether or not to do RTK.  RTK is not going to get you through a drama, even if you do both RTK 1 and 3.  Studying vocab and grammar is going to get you through a drama.  Going through RTK will probably help with learning vocab, but it may not be the easiest or most efficient way to doing it.

hershoreline said that his (her?) goal was to read manga.  You can certainly achieve this goal without doing RTK.  It may be faster or easier without RTK.  (However, It may be faster or easier with RTK.)