Before studying the book, I was under the assumption that Heisig encourages you to memorize Kanji via mnemonics without actually understanding anything. But the whole book works because it is very thorough in going through each component & radicals of the Kanji.

I have come across some Kanji books that start out like Heisig, the old edition of Essential Kanji I was very good at the start for basic Kanji but as soon as more complex Kanji came along it became very difficult since the radicals were not thoroughly explained.

I'm sure there are some decent Kanji books out there that do a decent job but there are far too many crap ones I have come across which just tell you the overall meaning and get you to copy & memorize. It's a bit like trying to memorize Maths problems without ever knowing how they work.

Last edited by genbaku (2008 January 14, 2:22 pm)

I just realised the other day ... what's really important about the RtK method is that it gives you a big lead on the kanji front. So you can start digesting more realistic vocabulary, instead of wasting time on chewed out stuff.

It's possible because for the 6 months or so it takes to go through the writing and meaning of the general-use kanji, you have an efficient means to retain all the characters learned so far, without support from readings, vocab conversation or anything else.

And so it's kind of a closed loop : without an efficient technique to remember the characters, it seems like the only valid way to learn the characters is by learning extra information at the same time : vocab, conversation, readings etc. It's more work, but it creates more "links" in memory to help rote memorization.

Does that make sense? It clicked in my mind somehow :p  What I'm trying to say is that from the point of view of a learner who does not use an organized mnemonic system for remembering Japanese characters, it logically seems non-sense to do without readings etc.

Perhaps that's the main point but difficult to explain to learners who are doubtful about the technique : the main point really is to be able to get those jouyou kanji under the belt in a reasonable time (like 6-9 months) so you don't have to study "chewed out" material which forces you to begin reading children's level Japanese, or to learn a limited set of words, or to present you words in hiragana because you don't know the characters yet.

With that said, that's not the full story. RtK is efficient, but doesn't address readings. Remembering the readings afterwards when you're exposed to so many characters is not as easy at it sounds. There are few organized methods there as far as I know, besides RtK2. I hope at least I'll help to plug the gap, especially for people who finish, RtK, with the Trinity update I'm working on. RtK2 is a good offering, but in this day and age, something like RtK2 shouldn't be a book, imho, it should be a software shipped with the RtK1 book to make the technique complete.

Heh that would be perfect, the book and this site are inseparable.

I just read the last post so I am responding to that, not necessarily the original topic.

I absolutely 100% agree that graded readers are the best way to learn how to read a language.  After I finished RTK and realized I could read simple Japanese, I found a set of graded readers.  But I blew threw that set in a few weeks.  After that, I scrounged around for stuff that was about my level, like the short passages from Genki II (unfortunately those were pretty much below my level at that point), but the main thing was that I wanted a short, interesting story or article that I could digest and infer the meaning of any vocab or sentence structure that I didn't know.

My next thing was to buy lots of manga of various sorts.  Unfortunately they either do not use the same kanji where other places do (Doraemon), or the patterns are completely different (informal language) to the point that I could only understand them with a pretty intensive dictionary session, no matter how young of an audience the manga was aimed for.

I basically want to be eased into every single thing that I learn in Japanese so that I never feel frustrated or hopeless.  If there was a place like suggested above where all the reading content was organized and coordinated so as to ease a reader into the new vocab, pronunciations, patterns, etc. that would make learning Japanese pretty much a no brainer, and lots of fun at the same time.  I think it would require a native speaker/writer and lots of time and effort on his/her part.  The next best thing would be an altruistic fluent non-native speaker who could take already written Japanese content and organize it in such a way.

So that I tie this all back to the original topic, learning this way is exactly how Heisig works.  He takes each thing bit by bit and shows it to you so that next time you see it, you are not scared and frustrated.

leosmith wrote:

danieldesu wrote:

After I finished RTK and realized I could read simple Japanese, I found a set of graded readers.

What was their name(s)?

It is called レベル別日本語多読ライブラリー.
It has 4 different levels, each with two volumes, and each volume has 5 small books (maybe 30-40 pages each or so).  As an example, here is the amazon.co.jp link for Level 1 vol 1 (the first level is easiest) and here is the link for Level 4 vol 2 (the last level uses the most kanji and the most grammar, I think about at JLPT level 2, if that means anything).

I started with level 4 vol. 2, and then went back to get level 4 vol. 1.  After that reading through those, I felt like I wouldn't get much out of level 3, but I went ahead and got one of the sets of level 3 simply because I like the variety of stories and stuff.  Also, they all have an audio CD to go along with them, which is good for listening comprehension.

You're VERY well-prepared to read compounds with this method.  My advice is to leave the haters be.

You're using a "different" method so I'm afraid you're a rebel now, welcome to the club

Does this method really leave the user unprepared to read compounds after completion of the first 2 books?

Doesn't make sense since RtK Vol. 2 is all about readings, and RtK1 certainly makes you very well prepared to RtK2, unless James Heisig is on a self-sabotage trip with his trilogy 

If they said RtK1 leaves you still unable to read the characters that would have beem correct. If they said RtK1 would leave you ill-prepared to learn the readings that's definitely false. You will not just know the writing of all jouyou kanji, but also will have seen the majority of the chinese radicals, and thus the "signal primitives" that indicate sounds in those kanji that agree with each other. You will certainly be well prepared to notice the similarities between characters and related them to the sounds.

I think it's a waste of time to debate whether RTK is useful or not, as any method of learning is only useful if it's useful to *you*. It either works for you or it doesn't. *shrug* I never understood why everyone gets so heated about something so completely and utterly subjective. I don't agree with his take on it-- he still tries to push it into a corner, even though he has no basis to do so. It's all a matter of what works for you, and he's in no position to judge how RTK can work for someone he hasn't even met yet.

Bah. I've already wasted too much time on this topic. I just think beginners should try the sample. If it works, great. If it doesn't, no biggie. Try something else. Just don't push it into a corner saying it's only for "certain" people.

I still find the wording to be offensive.  It is all very reminiscent of a certain woman from down under and her train wreck thread.  Here is what I got from it:

I am so good.  I am so great.  If you are not great, however, maybe it will work for you.

An improvement but still not unbiased.  I find it hard to come to terms with the fact that someone I thought was open to alternative forms of education can be so close minded.  I think the "if your smart you can do it my way" tone of the post is still going to turn people off to the book, and that is a shame.

dilandau23 wrote:

I still find the wording to be offensive.  It is all very reminiscent of a certain woman from down under and her train wreck thread.  Here is what I got from it:

I am so good.  I am so great.  If you are not great, however, maybe it will work for you.

An improvement but still not unbiased.  I find it hard to come to terms with the fact that someone I thought was open to alternative forms of education can be so close minded.  I think the "if your smart you can do it my way" tone of the post is still going to turn people off to the book, and that is a shame.

That's exactly the feeling i get from the posts, he shrugs the method of as a resort for those too stupid to do it the traditional way.