yudantaiteki wrote:

nest0r: I have never used RTK (although I am familiar with it; I've read the prefatory material and the first few lessons, and looked through the rest).  I joined this forum because I enjoy helping people out with Japanese, but I have no personal attachment to RTK.

Oh yeah, I must've lumped you in with Tobbs. I'm interested in the various reasons people have for coming to RTK *after* developing some moderate/high level of proficiency through other means.

Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 11, 6:09 pm)

nest0r wrote:

I'm interested in the various reasons people have for coming to RTK *after* developing some moderate/high level of proficiency through other means.

I was hoping to be able to remember how to write more kanji, basically (I've never really had a problem with the reading side). Unfortunately it didn't work...

I won't ever want to write a novel by hand but I would like to be able to pick one up in my hands and read it. The astronomical amount of time it would take to train your writing skill that high and I'm not talking about just doing rtk3 and saying you could doo it but rather SRS a productcion deck of maybe 30,000 - 40,000 words. If you just started reading from the get go and skipped writing entirely then you could get to a very high level of reading much faster than taking the time to learn to write which you'll use less than 1% of the time. Only reason I'm still doing it is because I'm going for the challenge of kanken, else I'd focus purely on reading, a skill I need 100x more than writing. I'd make a production deck for writing as the very last skill I absolutely perfect.

nest0r wrote:

I'm interested in the various reasons people have for coming to RTK *after* developing some moderate/high level of proficiency through other means.

After I reached about 1,200 kanji through rote memorization things started getting really blurry and I was having a hard time advancing. RTK is helping me clear things up.

Last edited by Womacks23 (2010 February 11, 7:12 pm)

raseru wrote:

You guys really overestimate native Japanese's kanji ability. They do not know 4000 kanji. They probably can't even write over 2000 kanji either. Nearly all the people raised in the computer/cellphone age have lost the ability to write any hard kanji. If you see them handwrite scripts and other things like that, it usually has lots of errors and completely wrong kanji

yeah, on any given day of the week they feel the hardest kanken level they could pass is 3級 at max. That's only 1600. 3000 - 4000 is some SERIOUS ability (even for reading).

Have you ever had to write an essay in Japanese for a job interview?

The question here is not whether writing any kanji by hand is useful, it's whether the ability to write over 2000 kanji by hand is useful.  Given that the majority of Japanese people can't do that, it seems unlikely that a foreigner applying for a job would have any need to demonstrate that kind of handwriting ability.

yudantaiteki wrote:

Have you ever had to write an essay in Japanese for a job interview?

The question here is not whether writing any kanji by hand is useful, it's whether the ability to write over 2000 kanji by hand is useful.  Given that the majority of Japanese people can't do that, it seems unlikely that a foreigner applying for a job would have any need to demonstrate that kind of handwriting ability.

Written tests with essays are very common in Japanese interviews. One of my friends had to do one for a job and managed to talk them into letting him use his dictionary. He got the job too.

pm215 wrote:

nest0r wrote:

I'm interested in the various reasons people have for coming to RTK *after* developing some moderate/high level of proficiency through other means.

I was hoping to be able to remember how to write more kanji, basically (I've never really had a problem with the reading side). Unfortunately it didn't work...

Why not? I can write all the RTK kanji really easily. Wasn't even hard, just scribbled out kanji/words once in a while during reviews. ;p

But yeah, going by what Womack and Tobbs said, that's what I generally assume, that people are looking for a more efficiently sustainable way to internalize the kanji. I won't speak for their experiences, but to me it's because of the various methods for learning kanji, the best of them focus on using a method to familiarize oneself with the radicals from the bottom-up till kanji's processed as a whole, giving the ability for robust reading. I get the impression it takes years of exposure to be able to do more than visually decode the most common kanji otherwise. SRS + system like RTK = Very good.

Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 11, 11:00 pm)

ocircle wrote:

I have JLPT level 1 certification, but when I'm talking with Japanese people, I tell them it's at the level of your average 5th or 6th grader.

Thanks. Maybe if we all do this people won't be like "Oh, JLPT1? I heard even Japanese people tremble in fear of this one!" any more.

nest0r wrote:

pm215 wrote:

I was hoping to be able to remember how to write more kanji, basically (I've never really had a problem with the reading side). Unfortunately it didn't work...

Why not? I can write all the RTK kanji really easily. Wasn't even hard, just scribbled out kanji/words once in a while during reviews. ;p

The basic problem is that it was completely disconnected from everything else I was doing with Japanese. So I got to a point where I could write all the kanji given the English keyword, but this doesn't help with writing Japanese (because there's no mapping in my head from Japanese word to English keyword) or even with reading it (because when I look at a kanji I think of the Japanese word (or nothing at all), not the English keyword. Heisig may claim that doing keyword-kanji reviews naturally gives you kanji-keyword but for me at least this just isn't true.) And then when I stopped reviewing RTK cards I basically forgot most of it again.

I think if I were going to try again, I'd (1) use Japanese keywords as described in other threads and (2) include kanji-form to Japanese word cards as well as Japanese word to kanji-form. I think I probably won't bother until/unless I'm back in a situation where I actually need to write things longhand more often, though.

mezbup wrote:

yeah, on any given day of the week they feel the hardest kanken level they could pass is 3級 at max.

I doubt most Japanese people who have been away from school for a while could even pass 3-kyuu without any studying.  There's a lot of obscure stuff on there that most people don't use in their daily life, like 4 character compounds and picking the exact radical of a kanji.  Also, since this is for native speakers, the testmakers deliberately pick unusual and tricky words.  I guess you only need 70% to pass so maybe some could, but it wouldn't be a walk in the park.

I haven't taken 3, but I showed my 4kyuu book to one of my private students (who is a gyaru and I suspect a kyabajo - not normally known for intelligence), and she knew almost all of the 4jijukugo. The majority of bushu are extremely obvious, and even if you guess you have a 25% chance of getting it right.

Your average university educated adult is not going to have any trouble passing 3kyuu I'm sure, even if they can't get a 100% score.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2010 February 12, 7:11 am)