Have you tried just making a vocab deck and learning to recognise compounds?

It might not be necessary to study them in isolation if you don't want to write, but it can't hurt. It shouldn't take too long compared to the overall task of learning the language. There's no need to keep reviewing forever, and I certainly wouldn't consider stories necessary either.

Last edited by dizmox (2011 September 03, 2:21 pm)

I don't think you are likely to find a faster way to learn the Kanji than RTK+SRS, and I think that if you try RTK+SRS you will find that knowing the correct writing makes remembering and recognizing easier.

Even if you are not interested in writing them yourself, understanding them as written strokes helps to read others' handwriting (which appears sometimes even in published works), calligraphic brushstrokes, etc., and most importantly helps distinguish clearly very tiny differences in appearance.

Nonetheless, some people have done pure SRS learning so it's certainly possible, perhaps even in the same time as RTK+SRS, it's just more a roll of the dice... you might finish faster, you might finish slower.

dmatsui wrote:

I have little use at the moment for handwritting as well but I still found going through RTK very usefull. Before RTK I tried learning japanese kanji initially by going character by character and learning the readings in conjunction with each character. By 400 characters however (and at the time no SRS program) It became clear that this was not easy and not efficient. I found it particularly difficult to tell the differences between several similar characters. A problem I think RTK, by the use of learning characters in parts and ordering similiar characters together, alleviates. So even if you dont have an interest in writing I think RTK certainly has its uses.
You could of course just try what dizmox suggests and see how far that gets you. I'm not sure which would be most efficient and I'm curious what kind of problems you may or may not encounter by not doing RTK.

Kanji are categorized by their radicals. There are many resources that are designed to learn Kanji and the how they are categorized.

Rewriting a certain kanji once or twice won't do any harm.
It increases recall of the vocabulary.

Also, I agree with Omoishinji.


The shared anki deck "Heisig's Remembering the Kanji (RTK) 1+3", (which is the most downloaded deck in the Anki repository),  has a link to every story on every flashcard. It's a very straightforward deck that makes it easy to try out.

If you don't like RTK, I assume you would have to learn words through context for the most part.

Simultaneously, you would learn words through media and you would look up whatever grammar you need to.

That's pretty much what I do now..

Last edited by MacMiller (2011 September 04, 2:27 am)

Sounds like you may want something along the lines of Katzu Lazy Kanji method.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/bl … ard-format

Never done it but it's something like that.

I did a fairly traditional course of Japanese study through college, with all the kanji production that entailed, but since then I've focused almost 100% on reading comprehension more than writing comprehension.

* This will kill you on the JLPT if they still do the questions where you have to differentiate between 検、験、鹸, etc. (I passed level 1 the year before they changed the test, so I'm not sure if they've changed that part.)

* The occasional times when I do have to handwrite something, it's extremely embarrassing to have to pull out my dictionary to figure out how to write it.

* Despite those two caveats, I think it was the right way to go for me. Have you ever read those articles about how you recognize words even if the individual letters are scrambled? http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/ … equestions
If you read enough in Japanese, it starts to be the same way -- I can glance at 試験 and recognize what the word means, without thinking of the individual kanji in it, and even if I might spell it 試検 if you asked me to write it.

(I don't live in Japan or use Japanese in a professional context -- I just read for my own research and pleasure -- so I'm rarely embarrassed by the need to write a kanji I don't know. I would like to improve my kanji writing abilities one day, but I'd rather get better at reading.)

I find that using rtk actually helps recognition now even without writing.  It helps you break the character down in your head when you see them and tie it to a general meaning.  I also find reviewing by recognizing rather than producing from a keyword more valuable for my interest in learning how to read faster.

Last edited by Aquablue (2011 September 07, 4:05 pm)

tokyostyle wrote:

but moving on to real Japanese helps a whole lot too!

No need to move on. Once you've gotten the most common kanji down, you can do RTK and learn Japanese vocab simultaneously.