No, they don't come with a Japanese word pre-packaged.
You can search the forums for the 'Japanese Keyword' thread if that's what you're interested in.

If you want to 'get a leg up,' you can try adding the most common on'yomi as a primitive in the story -> there's a limited amount of them, and like こう is used over 60 times, so it would show up quite often.

But if you're just starting out, don't worry about that kind of stuff yet. RtK isn't supposed to teach you vocab or readings. You're more-or-less supposed to just blow through it to get the kanji in your head, so you can get to learning actual Japanese. The fastest way is to associate them with english keywords.

but it seems to me that it would be more efficient to also learn the Japanese word of the kanji as well.

The problem with this is that there's many words for one kanji, and one kanji doesn't correspond to one word. If you did learn one Japanese word per kanji, you're still taking an extra step of trying to learn a word that you don't know, and associating that with a kanji you don't know. It's faster to just go english->kanji.

But if you don't like that idea, then yeah -- there are the Japanese keywords, or the idea of adding the reading as a primitive (look around for the movie method, it's a similar approach)

Last edited by Asriel (2011 February 19, 10:59 am)