When you see a kanji what you want to be able to do is produce the Japanese word. Knowing the RTK keyword can be handy for guessing the meaning of words you don't know, but it's not vital.

The thing that keyword->kanji is good for is that you can then remember how to write Japanese words by remembering that しんぶん is written as new+hear, for example.

No, I do not think this is bad. a) Remembering keywords is not a necessary skill. At least in my opinion the main use of keywords is helping to write a Kanji. b) It will develop over time, as you keep your reviews up and as you keep learning vocabulary. The important thing is seeing a Kanji and being able to identify it's proper Japanese meaning. That's what you should go for.

Evil_Dragon wrote:

The important thing is seeing a Kanji and being able to identify it's proper Japanese meaning. That's what you should go for.

You're saying that I should be able to identify the meaning of a Kanji when I see it. Isn't this equivalent to being able to produce the keyword? (which is what I am having trouble with)

If you mean being able to produce a Japanese reading (pronunciation) however, RtK itself will not do this for you ...

totsubo wrote:

Evil_Dragon wrote:

The important thing is seeing a Kanji and being able to identify it's proper Japanese meaning. That's what you should go for.

You're saying that I should be able to identify the meaning of a Kanji when I see it. Isn't this equivalent to being able to produce the keyword? (which is what I am having trouble with)

If you mean being able to produce a Japanese reading (pronunciation) however, RtK itself will not do this for you ...

No, that's not what Evil_Dragon means - he means when you see Japanese vocabulary (whether Kanji, Kanji-compound, or not), you should learn its proper Japanese meaning in the context of that sentence (what you should find in a dictionary).  Now, this meaning may correspond to the keyword or be somehow related to the keyword, but maybe not. 

Nonetheless, the proper meaning is much-much more important than the keyword.

Knowing the Japanese pronunciation will also be important.  You also should learn the reading that if you are serious about doing the textbook.

Doing RtK is supposed to help you learn Japanese.  It does not replace the main objective of learning Japanese for real.  You must still learn vocabulary and readings.

kfmfe04 wrote:

totsubo wrote:

Evil_Dragon wrote:

The important thing is seeing a Kanji and being able to identify it's proper Japanese meaning. That's what you should go for.

You're saying that I should be able to identify the meaning of a Kanji when I see it. Isn't this equivalent to being able to produce the keyword? (which is what I am having trouble with)

If you mean being able to produce a Japanese reading (pronunciation) however, RtK itself will not do this for you ...

No, that's not what Evil_Dragon means - he means when you see Japanese vocabulary (whether Kanji, Kanji-compound, or not), you should learn its proper Japanese meaning in the context of that sentence (what you should find in a dictionary).  Now, this meaning may correspond to the keyword or be somehow related to the keyword, but maybe not. 

Nonetheless, the proper meaning is much-much more important than the keyword.

Knowing the Japanese pronunciation will also be important.  You also should learn the reading that if you are serious about doing the textbook.

Doing RtK is supposed to help you learn Japanese.  It does not replace the main objective of learning Japanese for real.  You must still learn vocabulary and readings.

Learning the "proper Japanese meaning" means what, exactly? Kanji aren't words, but they do all possess some intrinsic meaning, which is more often than not associated with past and/or present usage patterns. Take any random character, say 埋 for example. The RtK keyword is: Bury. Does this individual unit of meaning change in a sentence with the compound "埋め草" (filler words) or "埋葬虫" (carrion beetle)? No, it doesn't. And, in words (especially verbs) where this character appears alone, the individual unit of meaning that accompanies this character is far more important than trying to assign meaning to the character based on frequently changing contexts.

FutureBlues wrote:

Learning the "proper Japanese meaning" means what, exactly? Kanji aren't words, but they do all possess some intrinsic meaning, which is more often than not associated with past and/or present usage patterns. Take any random character, say 埋 for example. The RtK keyword is: Bury. Does this individual unit of meaning change in a sentence with the compound "埋め草" (filler words) or "埋葬虫" (carrion beetle)? No, it doesn't. And, in words (especially verbs) where this character appears alone, the individual unit of meaning that accompanies this character is far more important than trying to assign meaning to the character based on frequently changing contexts.

Often the English keywords will be inaccurate, misleading or incomplete. Enough context gives you the exact meaning with the nuances and everything.

alyks wrote:

Often the English keywords will be inaccurate, misleading or incomplete. Enough context gives you the exact meaning with the nuances and everything.

Yeah a great example of this is 屋 which Heisig gives as roof, which is a meaning of the kanji, but by far the most common meaning of 屋 is as a suffix meaning shop, 本屋 (ほんや) for instance. I have been walking around for the past week seeing 屋 everywhere and thinking, why on earth are they telling me that they have a roof? When I came across it in my textbook and everything fell into place.

RtK is just the first stage in a long process, but from what other people have said it seems to be a great way to lay the foundations to Japanese learning.

Tobberoth wrote:

What you should mainly think: Heisig teaches you how to write the kanji. That's the number 1 thing because it's the one thing which is really hard to learn without a proper mnemonic technique (writing it a few thousand times does NOT work).

The meanings in English are just a small bonus which makes learning new vocabulary slightly easier, it's not worth spending time to make that bonus more stable. Once you know some japanese words for a kanji, you'll think of those when you see the kanji, not the english meaning.

See, I offer an alternate opinion. The importance of Heisig's method is not that you'll be able to write the kanji afterwords. It's that you'll be familiar with them and able to easily form relationships due to your familiarity with a large variety of material that otherwise might have been insurmountable had you studied it in a traditional manner.

(I've finished RtK 1 and done bits of RtK3. I've also played around in RtK2 and taken a different approach to studying readings. I live and work in Japan, have a Japanese significant other and generally do all or most of my business in Japanese.)

The meanings in English and the familiarity with the material are RtK's biggest benefits. I can't think of a single job or profession, outside of fringe stuff like writing letters to lonely old people part-time where you'll have to write the kanji. Without that environment, even with regular review, you'll eventually lose all of that writing prowess that RtK instilled in you because the relationship between matching a keyword to a kanji and actually matching Japanese words (and other kanji) to the sounds you'll eventually map to those kanji is completely different. What I'm saying is that when it comes down to actually writing characters fast enough to preclude the use of other reference materials in real, written Japanese, you'll still need to put in years of work before you're able to match a native's proficiency and speed.

However, that isn't to say that Heisig's method is useless. Just like the cursive script you learn in grade school that eventually becomes impractical, when you do RtK you prime your memory and create clusters of neurons that eventually make learning other kanji-related relationships feel a lot more natural. The meanings, in my opinion, even in cases where Heisig himself admits his keyword is "out there," play a huge part in that. I tried to explain this to a friend of mine the other day using the kanji for 駅. I know it's hard to imagine not knowing that kanji (and/or the reading, えき). But while a lot of people initially learning Japanese know the phonetic unit: えき, they may not know the kanji. Later, when they start going through RtK, they'll learn 駅 as "station". They may or may not associate it with えき, a word they already know, at that point in time. But later... And this is the beauty of RtK, later, when they're out somewhere, they'll mention it, or they'll see that kanji affixed to a station banner and those neurons will fire, fusing two seemingly unrelated granules of information together and they'll realize: "Hey, that kanji means: Station-- and I know a word for station... えき... I wonder if that's the reading?"

Heisig tells us that RtK will teach us to write the kanji because in order to learn them, he needs to trick us. When you devote all that energy to learning to write them, and their respective parts, your mind creates a foundation for the rest of it.

FutureBlues wrote:

I know it's hard to imagine not knowing that kanji (and/or the reading, えき). But while a lot of people initially learning Japanese know the phonetic unit: えき, they may not know the kanji. Later, when they start going through RtK, they'll learn 駅 as "station". They may or may not associate it with えき, a word they already know, at that point in time. But later... And this is the beauty of RtK, later, when they're out somewhere, they'll mention it, or they'll see that kanji affixed to a station banner and those neurons will fire, fusing two seemingly unrelated granules of information together and they'll realize: "Hey, that kanji means: Station-- and I know a word for station... えき... I wonder if that's the reading?"

Quoted for truth. And this effect, to me, is the thing that the Heisig-haters out there just don't get... that what we're doing, as much as learning to write, is setting up mental pathways such that when we encounter any given kanji "in the wild," once we make the connection, it's OURS.

Last edited by annabel398 (2009 January 09, 12:50 pm)

I also wanted to add my 2 cents about writing as well:

FutureBlues wrote:

I can't think of a single job or profession, outside of fringe stuff like writing letters to lonely old people part-time where you'll have to write the kanji.

A foreigner can get by in Japan without being able to write, but expect to write as much as you do in your own country if you want to fully participate. Reading handwritten stuff is necessary, and I think writing helps develop that skill. Some jobs require writing to some extent. Many Japanese businesses are slow to automate and rely on hand-written forms. Besides, nobody wants a typed love note on their pillow....not just lonely old people...

FutureBlues wrote:

[...]even with regular review, you'll eventually lose all of that writing prowess that RtK instilled in you because the relationship between matching a keyword to a kanji and actually matching Japanese words (and other kanji) to the sounds you'll eventually map to those kanji is completely different.

I think your 駅　example applies here. If your brain can fuse the station=駅 bit to the 駅=えき bit, then I don't see why the existing writing link would disappear. This fits with your idea of adding info to an existing mental foundation.

I agree that the ability to write does get rusty without practice, however. I think this is because during RTK we initially rely on our stories to build the kanji. If the English keywords are going to fall away, then we need to practice writing in order to maintain our ability to write a kanji without reliance on a story. But this is maintenance, not a completely different project.

Being able to write (in the practical sense) just isn't a priority for many. Some continue to write only as a vocab learning technique. 

When I studied Japanese, all our assignments were handwritten, so the learning benefits of writing were just an added bonus. I'm curious ...are Japanese assignments in university done on computers now?

tokyostyle wrote:

(Also, in Japanese class (国語) there are going to be some assignments that have to be hand written.  Typically on the specially boxed paper for writing assignments.)

My god I HATE boxed paper We had to start using it for essays just before I left Japan, it was horrible.

1. There's really intricate rules of how many boxes to skip at what points... like the header has to be 3 boxes in, the name has to be 2 boxes in from the left etc etc.
2. Make a slight error without noticing and you're finished. You have to rewrite everything since the error, forget about just changing that one error.

I am probs going to get slated for this but I setup my SRS to ask keyword to kanji and the other way round. I did this for a few reasons. I saw some kanji on a sign and I knew I had done them in Heisig but could not remember the keyword. Its quicker to look something up in Heisig's index to see if you have done it if you know the keyword.  I am studying Japanese for busy people at a local college and each time I wanted to chat to the teacher about a kanji being able to say oh thats logic or thats ri is useful. When I get some new vocab it can quite often be a single kanji and the keyword can often be very similar in meaning such as verbs or adjectives.