I support the strategy of learning vocab and grammar alongside RTK, but I'd advise against linking the two tightly together. It's hard and counterproductive to learn readings in isolation, especially with RTK order. It doesn't hurt to have readings and/or vocab examples in your kanji deck but don't push yourself to remember everything and grade reviews based on kanji production alone.

What I did instead (and don't regret): learn vocab based on frequency (core etc.) and/or what you encounter. If an important/common word you want to learn is written using kanji you haven't learned yet, just take note of it and focus on recognizing it by kana and audio (and SRS!). This results in building knowledge that I like to think of as a Venn diagram: vocab of which you don't know the writing on one side, kanji of which you don't know the reading(s) on the other side, and a crossover middle with kanji that you can relate to vocab and vocab of which you know how to write it. This 'gap' can be frustrating while you're still doing RTK but in my experience it starts solving itself rather quickly once you're done with RTK, provided you study and practice enough (don't hesitate too much to dive into real reading at that point, it won't get much easier by waiting).

Last edited by Savii (2013 July 15, 8:31 am)

gahshunk wrote:

Before I go into anything else let me say that my primary goal here is to learn how to read Japanese, after that I'll focus on the speaking/listening portions. I've read around and gathered that essentially RTK doesn't teach you the readings, or at least not all of them.   How would one effectively go about learning the readings while making their way through RTK?

By finding words in English, or any other language you speak, that sound like those readings, and incorporating them into the story. There are some stories around here that attempt that.

However, this will not give you the ability to read Japanese. Japanese (or any other language) isn't read by people deciphering each Kanji, associating it with a reading, and then sounding it out to figure out what is meant.

Instead, you read by recognizing whole words. Ever see a Japanese kid read out a word they don't know, and then everybody starts laughing? That's because he had the readings of the Kanji memorized, but, since he didn't actually know the word, he used the wrong readings and the result was gibberish. You need to know the words before you can read them. But you don't necessarily need to know the readings of the Kanji. If you know the word, and know the general meaning of each Kanji, and maybe even know how to read one of the Kanji, that's generally enough to read the whole word, with ease.

Of course, learning the readings isn't completely useless. It helps with the learning process. But I am not convinced that memorizing the readings will give you enough of a leg up to justify the effort. It depends on how easy a time you have with it, i suppose.

I never tried this, wouldn't advise it. I like learning a language mostly naturally, from native sources, without actually studying. Unlike with other languages, there are things you need to study about Japanese. You can't just learn them naturally: those are the ability to recognize Kanji, and the writing of a core set of often used words, to start you off. But readings of all Kanji isn't one of those things. If you learn the language itself (naturally, from native sources), and you learn to identify Kanji (with RtK), that then allows you to proceed to learn the writing system from written sources, simply by reading native material with the help of furigana, Rikaisama, etc.

You of course don't have to learn all the language from spoken word, before starting to read. You can learn from both, in parallel. I did find that it helps to be slightly ahead with the spoken language, compared to reading skills.