Kyle_N wrote:

This site is meant to be a companion site for Dr. James Heisig's book  "Remembering the Kanji".

http://kanji.koohii.com/learnmore.php


If this were any other internet forum you would be forever razzed..but luckily everyone is very nice here.

thanks

I feel that this question needs a sticky of some sort.

I'm deleting the "Stickies" topic which never seemed to take off, and adding the links here instead :

The cheekily titled "I just finished RTK1, please congratulate me" thread :
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=90

Tips for remembering the correct stroke orders :
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=69

Primitive positioning rules :
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=171

Post-RtK1 characters which can be useful for learning or simplifying earlier ones :
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=14323#p14323

lazar wrote:

haha sweet thanks, yeah i was really confused at the begining.... one more question tho, how does RTK help you learn japanese- it helps with knowing what the kanji mean, but it doesnt help with how to write/ read it in japanese does it?

Somebody more eloquent than me will, I'm sure, explain to you the merits of learning the writings and "meanings" of the kanji separately from the readings.  All I can do is point out that you're wrong, in that Heisig does teach you how to write the kanji, as that's pretty much the entire point of volume one of his course.  It says as much on the cover.

And as someone who has just reached the "small milepole" of 250 learned kanji in 10 days, I just can't resist to thoroughly and enthousiastically reccomend the purchase of this book. Do Mr. Heisig (if he's reading this: 10% of the profits yes?) and me a favour and do not hestitate, buy!

(On the serious side though: As someone who has had the "pleasure" of studying Chinese characters before using the traditional way of writing it down a hundred times, I can tell you that the superlatives needed to praise Heisig in a way appropriate for him have yet to be invented. As far as the process of making up images and stories is connected: it might seem a bit unorthodox and a lot of extra work at first but once you get the hang of it after a few hundred kanji, you will breeze through these kanji with ease, wondering how you could have ever had the smallest 'drop' of doubt as far as the method is concerned)

Last edited by roderik (2008 April 10, 4:26 pm)

~15 per chapter, huh? Sounds suspiciously like Genki.

I used Genki when I took Japanese in grad school (for the heck of it at first), and I have to say, if I had known about RTK beforehand, I would have gotten a whooooole lot more out of it. Endlessly writing kanji and memorizing for the next quiz/exam didn't serve me very well long-term, to be honest. I've found doing RTK1 and then drilling both ways with sentences in Anki is the way to go to remember this stuff better.

Last edited by rich_f (2008 April 11, 12:00 am)

ファブリス wrote:

I'm deleting the "Stickies" topic which never seemed to take off, and adding the links here instead :

Ah nice, thanks, is it also possible to add the links of the topics where they discuss the errors in the keywords for some of the Kanji in Rtk?

For doing RTK, I prefer to use this site, because you get a new set of reviews to do every 24h. With Anki, they just come up randomly, so it sometimes seems like it never ends. With this site, you can do your daily reviews, and then you know you're done.

But for everything else, Anki works best for me. And yeah, once you've done the RTK work, learning the rest of the stuff for kanji is a lot easier than it was at first. And I use Anki for that, too.

Since you're still doing Genki I, I'd go ahead and sentence-mine it and put it into Anki for review. That way you won't forget as much between tests and such. Put in anything you can get verified as being correct Japanese that's relevant to your class. Over time, it will help a lot. Just don't expect instant results. This sort of thing takes time to build up momentum.

ファブリス wrote:

Thanks for the support!

For those arriving with Google Airlines, these forums are a companion to the main site called Reviewing the Kanji where you can ... *drum roll* .... review the kanji (with Heisig's method) !

Visitors can learn more : Getting started, Reviewing, Benefits.

Who is Heisig?

What is "kanji"?

What is a drum? o_O


XD

It's implied that everyone has the book. And you'll need it, too, because the information on the primitives that make up the kanji is *not* on this website, as the primitives themselves aren't numbered. (At least not the ones that are only primitives, and not full kanji on their own.)

I highly recommend skimming through to read Heisig's notes (which are scattered throughout) before going too far. Whether you agree with him or not, he has a lot of useful info peppered throughout, and reading it will help.

So yeah, buy the book.

yeah I checked it out and it looked interesting... very comprehensive "trial" haha, definitely gotta get my hands on it asap, thanks all.

^^^

The first link is interesting for new RtK learners who already have some proficiency in speaking or reading Japanese.

The second link is a discussion on a project for a list of Japanese keywords, something newcomers to RtK don't need to worry about imho.