I can't give you any real methodology advice, but whatever it is you decide upon, it has to be fun. A nine year old has to want to do it and enjoy it. It has to be play, not study.

You could use the primitives from RTK to create stories with her, but not go through it in RTK order so that she can still put her knowledge to use in the books she's doing now.

Or you could wait til she's about 13 or so, and then start her on this site...  When I was that age I was far more mature than a lot of people who post their stories up, so I think she would be able to handle it... But of course, your decision

One possibility: to learn kanji and words simultaneously, while supporting her acquisition through media

Subscribe to your local Japanese channels, buy some shows or children's books periodically (every few weeks or months), support acquisition with written and spoken language (acquisition being familiarity)

If I recall correctly, the Japanese education system teaches 教育漢字 through rote memory. However, students have seen the characters since birth (and can read relatively complex texts by the age of 6 or 7). Also note that that the ~1000 characters are covered in the span of 6 years.

Make her interested (e.g. establish a "need" for the language through familial ties, media, or culture). Cater to her level of interest or patience, let her learn at her own pace.

random quote

“The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.” Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Last edited by Aspiring (2013 September 10, 1:02 am)

I'm pretty reluctant to venture into this, since it smacks of giving  advice on how to raise your child.  But that being said, well okay . . .

As a teacher of literally thousands of Japanese students (not students of Japanese, which is a different thing altogether), I must say that RTK seems like a really terrible idea for kids. 

Breaking the kanji into component pieces:  good idea.  Using mnemonics:  again, good.  Studying hundreds and hundreds of abstract kanji before using them in real life:  really terrible.

The thing about kids is---how to put this in educational terms?---they're just kids.  They're still trying to figure out why rainbows happen.  It'll be a long time before they start running up credit card debt or trying to get that car out of a ditch or wearing inappropriate midriff tops to clubs.  They're still like, Wow, a turkey sandwich for lunch!

And here's the thing about parents:  everyone's got a dream for their child.  And that's great.  They could be a pianist, or a soccer player, or a senator, if only they started Now.  And they encourage their kids, with the weight of parental position, to work hard every day to accomplish that goal.  But quite often, the goal is the parent's, not the child's.  Certainly that's understandable, since we all realize how valuable it is to start early, and what it means to pass on an opportunity.  Often, because we did as well . . .

But yeah, okay, enough of that soapbox.  It's just that RTK seems way too hard for children.  Like an order of magnitude too.  Here in Japan, kids are learning English by singing songs, doing dances, and running around interviewing their friends about their favorite animals and sports.  Even their Japanese classes are light by RTK standards. 

To an adult, it's easy to be analytical.  Take 2200 cards, divide that by X number per day, and there you go.  Put the whole thing into a computer program, review Y per day, and work your plan.  But kids are still amazed that honey comes from bees.  Actually, that is kind of incredible when you think about it.  And rainbows too.  But anyway, I apologize if I overstepped my bounds in telling you what's best for your child, but I would encourage you reconsider such a rigorous approach to learning.

As someone that also teaches Japanese children, I agree with JapaneseRuleof7. The way children learn is different from the way adults learn. Immersion and repetition work a lot better, and stick a lot faster.

Also, children have one key advantage that adults do not. They have time. RTK is meant for adults to be able to quickly enter and study the Japanese language. It's assuming you're on 2-5 year path to some sort of measurable ability in the language that uses their level of communication ability in their native language as a target.

Children are not on that same path. They're still trying to learn their native language too. It's really okay for it to take longer for a child than an adult, and so something like RTK just isn't a good fit for young children. Someone in this thread mentioned before how fast Japanese children learn characters at the rate of the first 1000 in 6 years as if that was hugely fast. It isn't that fast. It's actually quite slow, and that's okay because it's putting them on a trajectory to have decent facility when they're 17 or 18.

I would suggest immersion in your home and with your wife along with something like the Kanji Kentei step books. If your child is getting enough Japanese input(TV, music, conversation, manga, etc.) in the home from a young enough age then they WILL learn Japanese without you having to do very much.

You will have to do explicit teaching at certain points to make sure certain skills like kanji and writing aren't falling through the cracks, but for the most part you don't need to teach so explicitly in the same way adults tend to need.

mrbryce wrote:

3. children have a higher capacity for learning compared to adults

Children do have a higher learning capacity, but they also tend to have less patience for adult-style learning. The quickest way to burn a child out is to try to explicitly teach them things. Children learn best through immersion, play, games, and experiences.

Children are ALWAYS learning about something even if it's not the thing you're trying to teach them at that moment. If you surround them with enough of the things you want them to learn and be curious about then they will learn them.

In the case here with a native Japanese speaker inside the home the advice to me becomes very clear. Stop worrying so much about kanji, have your wife speak as much Japanese to the child as possible, and surround that child with things that most ordinary Japanese children would have such as television, music, and manga.

Last edited by erlog (2013 September 10, 7:38 pm)

erlog wrote:

I would suggest immersion in your home and with your wife along with something like the Kanji Kentei step books. If your child is getting enough Japanese input(TV, music, conversation, manga, etc.) in the home from a young enough age then they WILL learn Japanese without you having to do very much.

I agree with you on everything except for this small issue. Both my parents are native speakers of Gujarati who speak to one another (and my brother and me) in Gujarati. However, they always let my brother and I respond in English (since our school was in English and we grew up in an English-speaking area). Eventually, our Gujarati died of disuse and neither of us can speak the language any more. We just are able to understand it.

What I'm trying to say is that you should immerse your daughter in Japanese, but also make sure she practices speaking in Japanese. Just immersing her alone isn't going to enable her to speak in Japanese.

Marble101 wrote:

What I'm trying to say is that you should immerse your daughter in Japanese, but also make sure she practices speaking in Japanese. Just immersing her alone isn't going to enable her to speak in Japanese.

I agree with this, and I should have been less forceful in the "immersion = language skills" for children. Practicing production is extremely important too, but as kind of a daily life thing and not as a serious adult-style study thing.

Aspiring wrote:

I totally agree with erlog but from my own perspective I did not intend to imply that children in Japan learn the characters fast, if you catch my drift

I see. In your post the sentence before that was about children reading complex texts by the age of 6 or 7. So I thought you were implying that Japanese children pick it up at a rapid pace. Sorry for misunderstanding your point.

JapaneseRuleOf7 wrote:

I'm pretty reluctant to venture into this, since it smacks of giving  advice on how to raise your child.  But that being said, well okay . . .

As a teacher of literally thousands of Japanese students (not students of Japanese, which is a different thing altogether), I must say that RTK seems like a really terrible idea for kids. 

Breaking the kanji into component pieces:  good idea.  Using mnemonics:  again, good.  Studying hundreds and hundreds of abstract kanji before using them in real life:  really terrible.

To an adult, it's easy to be analytical.  Take 2200 cards, divide that by X number per day, and there you go.  Put the whole thing into a computer program, review Y per day, and work your plan.  But kids are still amazed that honey comes from bees.  Actually, that is kind of incredible when you think about it.  And rainbows too.  But anyway, I apologize if I overstepped my bounds in telling you what's best for your child, but I would encourage you reconsider such a rigorous approach to learning.

I think this is pretty much what I was thinking in my head when I felt that RTK was the wrong approach to take -- thanks for putting it into words!

And thank you to everyone else for the great posts, this is a great thread.  No worries about feeling like you're telling me how to raise my daughter -- I asked the question in the first place because I wanted to know if anyone else had advice or experience with a similar situation. 

Last edited by Kurisu2 (2013 September 11, 10:17 am)

SomeCallMeChris wrote:

So, many years  ago (as in, before youtube so I don't know that it ever got on there) I watched a few of a really clever series of videos aimed at grade-schoolers that showed somewhat fanciful interpretations of where kanji came from that ultimately showed you how to draw the character in stroke order. They were somewhat crudely drawn brightly colored animations.

The closest I can find anymore is some videos that show you a picture of something and dissolve through the historic evolution of the character, which is really not so clever as that doesn't really help you remember it and isn't nearly as engaging to children.

Unfortunately, a few google searches for this haven't turned it up, but maybe somebody knows what I'm talking about and can point to it. But, searches for 漢字　動画　キッズ　学ぼう etc, turn up quite a lot. Make sure to include キッズ or 小学 in any search pattern or else you get a lot of not so useful links.

That sounds absolutely perfect for her. Does anyone else remember more about this?

Kurisu2 wrote:

I'm worried about this too. Time to make a rule about speaking Japanese only in the home. Good anecdote, thank you.

It's OK if you speak English, as long as your wife only speaks Japanese to her.

Children do not learn faster than adults -_-. The brains of most adults are already developed compared to children. We have past experiences, their making them. The only thing kids has over adults is the immersion environment and time.

Last edited by Xanpakuto (2013 September 12, 3:25 pm)