May 8th? 8 months from now?
I'd go with your first plan, unless you feel like it would burn you out.

It's far more efficient to go through all of RTK and then study everything else (which is why Heisig recommends that in his remarks) ...
But, (Heisig doesn't mention but I believe) this is with the caveat 'if you can keep your focus'. So many people don't do it because they tire of doing only RTK and crave variety, and since motivation is key to successful studying, that makes sense.

Ha, its funny because I'm in biology and chemistry at college this year and the workload for those classes are high; so I empathize with you on that matter.

What you want to do:
2042 kanji - 455 kanji = 1587 cards
Tae Kims Grammar Guide = 800 cards
Core 6k = 6000 cards - whatever you have done
Genki II = ??? cards

So around 8000 cards, and at 50 a day, and roughly 160 days.  The test is 7 months away, at about 215 days away, so you have a good amount of time to finish all of that and more.  However I think it's a matter that only you can decide on. 

SomeCallMeChris has a point when he said do RTK first.  For example in Genki I, chapter 3 the words 勉強 and 聞く　are two vocab words that are presented. Both of those words contain kanji that are taught at the end of RTK.  Personally I have a divide and conquer approach to my japanese.  I finished RTK before doing anything else.

However in your situation it might not be a bad idea for you to have a more balanced approach.  Maybe set up a schedule something like this one, with an emphasis on RTK:

Monday: Core
Tuesday: RTK
Wednesday: Tae Kim
Thursday: RTK
Friday: Core
Saturday: RTK
Sunday: Tae Kim

Throughout the whole week you will be getting a little bit of everything.  IMO I would drop Genki II, I'm sure there won't be anything in there that you won't see in Core or in Tae Kims.  It also won't take long to finish RTK and you can then devote more time to other things.

Another option: just learn the 214-or so radicals and go from there. Give them names/stories like Heisig, but don't bother attaching stories to 2000 kanji. Major downside is getting them all straight in their various forms. But if you can do that, you'd save a ton of time.

This is the spreadsheet that has all of the good info:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc … tVlE#gid=0

RTK isn't going to be even slightly helpful for passing a test in May which is covering all of the Japanese language and not just writing 2000 characters.

Doing Genki, the Core series, as much other decent grammar sources as you can find will have you in great shape by May if you keep at it. Doing RTK seems like a total waste of 3 months to me given that none of your other Japanese skills are going to improve at all during that period. And your test is a JAPANESE language test. Not a kanji writing test.

Too many people here seem to think RTK is absolutely vital / critical to complete and learning to read any Japanese is impossible without it. Hint : Its not.

I just took the reading portion of the test, got a 22/36 . I still didn't take the listening, speaking, and writing portions yet. I'm fairly confident on the writing part because it seems easy. For example we make up presentations, or respond to some text-messages with the choice of using polite form or not. Speaking, ehh scared to try. Listening, didn't try. I heard it's native level speed though.

Edit: Yes, it should take me about a month to finish RTK from where I am.

Last edited by Xanpakuto (2013 September 10, 7:14 pm)

NightSky wrote:

Vempele wrote:

NightSky wrote:

Doing RTK seems like a total waste of 3 months to me given that none of your other Japanese skills are going to improve at all during that period.

It'll take OP a month to finish RTK at his stated pace. Where do the other 2 wasted months come from?

Even now reading back I don't see anywhere its written he has already progressed enough to expect to complete RTK in 1 month.

Fact is, lots of people attempt to complete RTK quickly and *usually* are unable to finish in a months time. I estimated 3 based on what most people tend to require, assuming they actually stick with it and don't give up. Actually probably most people take 6-7 months to finish RTK.

I could tell you I'll just study 200 new ones a day and be finished in 10 days, so its no big deal. Real life isn't quite like that though and I'll almost definitely miss out on that estimate.

I'm already on the fence with RTK because I'm not convinced even in the long run its worthwhile, but for someone who needs to improve their Japanese to some level in a reasonably short time .......... it seems they should focus on the Japanese language itself rather than study something else and hope they can catch up later.

Agreed.  Even if it would take a month to get through RTK, it seems strange to lose a month studying RTK when that month could have gone towards studying Japanese.  There's no reason why the OP can't go back to RTK once the test is over, but for now, it seems like the better idea would be to focus on actual Japanese.

PotbellyPig wrote:

I am confused by this statement.

Wow at your post, sorry. This board obviously encourages RTK big style, and on the whole I've no problem with that because it does have some benefits too. But you have to realise its absolutely not a *necessity*, its just supposedly more efficient in the long run as it can potentially speed up remembering vocabulary etc.

How is studying kanji from RTK not studying Japanese?

Well quite simply you don't learn a single word of Japanese the entire time you are doing it. You are as much studying Chinese as you are Japanese. The keywords you learn are not really helpful for actually trying to read any real Japanese -- they are useful as hooks to write the characters. It might be helpful later but ones Japanese doesn't improve at all during the RTK studying period.

How is the person going to go through Core 2000/6000 at any decent pace without understaning the Kanji?

I did, and I did it easily too. Put simply, you just learn them as they come along. You don't need to write them thousands of times, you see the Kanji in whatever word its in, and if you see that word enough times (which you should via Anki or whatever) then you will remember it. And the same characters will appear over and over and over again, so it becomes very easy to remember them.

And actually I completed Core 6k *very* quickly once I actually decided to bother with it. Kanji isn't difficult, the hard part is remembering thousands of new Japanese words.

NightSky wrote:

But you have to realise its absolutely not a *necessity*, its just supposedly more efficient in the long run as it can potentially speed up remembering vocabulary etc.

RTK is not a necessity, but if you're going to do it, it's better to do it first. For many of us, it would take a lot more studying and a need to try to come up on the fly with some mnemonic in order to start recognizing a strange character. If you've done RTK (or even RTK lite), if you encounter some strange character you have the tools to build a consistent mnemonic.

If one wasn't going to do RTK at all, that would be a different case, but if you are then the efficiency it gives involves doing it -before- memorizing thousands of kanji words making that memorizing faster.

If you've already memorized thousands of kanji, you don't really need RTK (unless you're having trouble learning to write them in stroke order, I suppose, but I really can't properly remember characters that I can't write anyway so I have trouble imagining that.)

Personally, I couldn't go in cold to memorizing thousands of kanji words without RTK, I know this because  I tried. In fact, I could read manga with furigana quite well before I did RTK, but unadorned kanji, I simply couldn't make them stick.

In retrospect, systematically learning the 214 radicals would probably also do the trick. It's really just a matter of being able to consistently deconstruct your kanji, calling the components by the same, simple name every time you see them, so that you can come up with consistent mnemonics.

Given that the OP intends to do RTK, I don't think it makes any sense at all to learn thousands of kanji words first with all the frustration of trying to recognize complex unnameable bits, and then do RTK later to create a system of mnemonics... for kanji you already learned to recognize the hard way.

If it really couldn't be fit in, then I'd say RTK lite, but I don't think it's actually a problem, although it's true the month could actually become 2 months.

Last edited by SomeCallMeChris (2013 September 11, 11:33 pm)

SomeCallMeChris wrote:

Personally, I couldn't go in cold to memorizing thousands of kanji words without RTK, I know this because  I tried. In fact, I could read manga with furigana quite well before I did RTK, but unadorned kanji, I simply couldn't make them stick.

Well, I don't know what to say really. I've *never* studied Kanji individually, all I did was make sure that any word I learned was learned with the proper characters at the same time. So if I made a flashcard for the word 仲間 or whatever, the flashcard would have that on one side and 'なかま, <english explanation>' on the other side. That's all I ever did, and after doing lots of that (as you pretty much need to do, doing Core6k is more or less the same) I saw all of the characters regularly enough to know how to read each word.

So when people say "I couldn't make them stick" I genuinely don't understand what they were trying to do. I've never "tried to make them stick" ever, I've just always learned words without caring what the characters are and over time made the connections between the same character in different words. And now my Anki deck has some 2500 unique characters in it and I read fine, including unknown words I haven't seen before through having so much exposure to their onyomi.

I guess I just don't *get* what peoples problems are, because they seem to be saying "I have to do RTK because doing X is too difficult" - when I've never done X or understood why its important anyway.

Maybe just everyone is difficult and simply RTK infact is a necessity for some people. But I don't think I'm in anyway smarter or much different to the average person, so I pretty much always assume people just give up far too quickly or are otherwise just too intimidated. Sounds like maybe you were different though so I just really don't know.

NightSky wrote:

Well, I don't know what to say really. I've *never* studied Kanji individually, all I did was make sure that any word I learned was learned with the proper characters at the same time.

If you found it easy to just memorize words made up of unknown symbols I think you are an exception.

I simply could not do that, and I sort of intuitively and half-thinkingly tried to create mnemonics for kanji components on my own before finding RTK, but I did a terrible job. I would have 'the tree' and 'the branchy tree' (木 and 未 in their left-hand radical forms), and then after running into a recognition mistake have to re-learn characters because I had been mistaking  失 for a 'branchy tree' or for a 'really branchy stick' (牜), or maybe I mistook a 'branchy stick' (扌) for a 'really branchy stick' (牜) ... and that's just the simple left hand side. 義・実 ・美・羊 components all feature a lot of parallel horizontal lines, and there are a bunch of 式 type enclosures that aren't quite the same, like 武 and 威 which to me were perhaps something like 'criss-crossy lines', 'criss crossy lines with an extra stroke' and 'extra-criss crossy lines closed in'.

*cough* Obviously, I never wrote any of this down or planned any of it out, these were just spontaneous names for things that I thought to myself when trying to think about and make sense of an arbitrary shape or figure out what made one character different from another, in the midst of trying to figure out why I had made a mistake.

(Obviously, calling similar components by similar names made it pretty much impossible to create distinct identities for similar characters, but I wasn't trying to create a mnemonic system, I was just trying to recognize a character, and then recognize why I'd made a mistake recognizing a character.)

I can't understand how you can simply look at a complex shape like 議論 and just remember it. I would 'memorize' a word like this just fine until I met another two-character word that had two 言 left-hand sides and discover I'd been just blipping over the right hand sides entirely. Then maybe I'd focus on another element until I made another mistake. Words and characters that I thought I knew would constantly be disrupted by learning something new that had some similarity. That's what drove me to decide that I need a 'system' for kanji.

Obviously, enough repetition and all this irons out, every failure teaches you to pay attention to one more stroke or component or which character comes first ... but I feel that that's like working your way through a dark labyrinth by running into walls over and over again. Sure, studying the map doesn't actually cover any distance in terms of walking through the labyrinth, but when you have the map memorized you walk into a lot less walls and get through it a lot sooner and with a lot less pain.

Personally, I would go with #2.  The reason being is that I have found for myself that learning several things in parallel is more efficient and fun than one at a time. 

Learning 50 kanji per day means that you will have 350 kanji that are "freshly" learned in just that past 7 days making for a lot of confusion between kanjis that haven't "sunk in" yet.  Not to mention that learning kanji several hours per day for weeks could make want to jump out a window.  In strategy #2, you will have the same amount of bits of information to remember, but they will be of a different type, minimizing the things that are able to be confused with each other or bored with.  On the contrary, studying different but related information tends to reinforce each other.  For myself, I believe there is a small efficiency gain of maybe 5-10% by studying things in parallel.

On the other hand, I am not studying Genki so I am not familiar.  If a lot of kanji is used in Genki, where you could practice the kanji as you add vocabulary and such, maybe a hybrid strategy(eg Say 30/20 RTK/Genki) would be better.

Last edited by yogert909 (2013 September 12, 5:24 pm)