I used RtK after about 3 years of ineffective in-class Kanji study. Since completing RtK, I have moved from the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Kanji reading/recognition, all the way to the top.

My opinion is that is you are just starting to learn Japanese, you need a better base than RtK. You need to study all aspects of the language and build up a good base. Once you have that base (Genki 1, Genki 2), RtK will increase your J-power levels past 9000.

You will be blazing by the people who are criticizing it!

And, seeing how I have stopped reviewing RtK decks and have moved onto intensive advanced vocab/grammar studies, I can tell you that going through RtK has been a huge help in remembering new compounds and sentences.

Last edited by Alec_xvi (2012 April 24, 2:30 am)

lardycake wrote:

- Hard to know when to stop using it

This!

Once I finished RtK, I stopped reviewing about a month after.

You eventually have to move away from learning English meanings for the Kanji in English, and start studying JAPANESE!

highfade wrote:

I've read that RTK creates a crutch for the learner that becomes an impediment to learning the language. Supposedly, the use of a single key word per kanji seems to be the main source of the problem because many (if not all?) kanji have multiple meanings. For example, the kanji for noon 午 can also mean horse. The argument against RTK asserts that if the learner only associates 午 with the keyword noon, when he encounters 午 in it's other meaning of horse it will lead to confusion and mistakes. Hence, the argument says RTK is a detriment to learning Japanese overall

If a beginner in English learns the word 'right' as the counterpart to 'left' would we say, "Oh no, you mustn't learn that! Right has other meanings too, like 'correct' and if you learn it as the counterpart to left you'll never be able to learn the other meanings properly!"

Of course not. You learn an important meaning first, then add others to it as you progress with the language. After a while you forget many of the English keywords and associate the kanji with the Japanese words you know that contain it.

For example, having completed RTK years ago, when I see 午 the first things that come to mind are 午前、午後、and 子午線.

It's an age-old discussion, but the success rate should of learners should be an indication.

I took college-level Japanese classes, and perhaps 90% of the (non-Chinese, non-Korean) students who tried to study kanji the traditional way either learned nothing or never got beyond ~500-800 characters. The remaining 10% either were extremely persistent, had an extremely good visual memory, or starting making up their own mnemonics in an unsystematic way. Even of those students, hardly anyone could write (actually I think I'm the only one from that year who learned how to write Japanese besides my 二世 ex-GF, but only years later after using RTK!).

The fact that Japanese people find the approach weird is pretty meaningless. They start learning kanji as kids after they already speak Japanese like native-speaking children.

Finally, many, many members of this forum have achieved very high levels of Japanese reading ability in relatively short time (<3 years). Not all of them used RTK, but most did.

But it's just as Alec_xvi and lardycake say. My suggestion would be to stop reviewing a character as soon as you've learned the first word that uses it. So e.g. suspend the character in your RTK deck when it has come up in Core2k6k for the first time, or when it shows up in Genki or whatever material you're using. As soon as you see the character "in the wild" the keyword will fade and be replaced by one or more contextual meanings, or even no meaning and just a reading.

My main concern with RTK comes in when people wait to finish RTK before they start actually learning Japanese.

There are a ton of people who get to 1200 frames or something and then they get bored, drift away, get distracted. There's nothing wrong with that, it happens to everyone who's self-studying a language, but if you come back to it later you're basically starting at zero. (I don't know how solid the mnemonics actually are in people's minds, but I hear a lot on the forum about people who are on their second or third tries and starting from the beginning...)

Even if you just have a few months of aural Japanese study, at least you can ask where the bathroom is. And I think there's a lot of motivation that comes from using the language. So when you're at that point where you've been studying for three months, four months, and you can't do anything with the language yet, I think that's where a lot of people get burned out.

KanjiDevourer wrote:

What I'm missing in most reviews, and also a bit in the posts above:

RTK's purpose.

To be fair, this is not easy to understand.  Heisig is not a teacher or a pedagogist, and his introductions are not very good (to say the least).   He says some things in both the RTK 1 and 2 intros that are total nonsense, and if you take it too seriously, it can cause problems.  While it's very easy to see that RTK shows you how to associate a kanji with an English keyword and write the kanji, it's much harder to see how this fits into an overall program of Japanese study.

Before I had come to this forum, I had met a number of people in real life who had started using RTK.  Without fail, every single one of them had the same misconception -- that after using RTK they would know the "meanings" of the kanji and then they could just read Japanese by figuring out the words from the kanji meanings (or else that RTK would take care of the majority of what it takes to read Japanese and the rest would be quick and easy).

I really wish that he would reprint RTK 1 and 2 with introductions written by someone else who had teaching and pedagogy experience and could explain more clearly how you should use RTK with an overall Japanese learning program, and exactly what RTK will and will not do for you.  Sometimes people seem to treat this as obvious, but it's not obvious for a lot of people.

My personal recommendation is to go with RTK Lite (look for Nukemarine's posts on it), and don't worry about mastering 100% of the kanji, just get through it fairly quickly.  If you enjoyed it and want to keep going, then you can learn the rest of the kanji in RTK 1.  If not, you can move on to actual Japanese study and you'll be able to learn the rest of the kanji later.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 April 24, 6:01 am)

nadiatims wrote:

But I'd argue the most useful is knowing how [kanji] are read, because then you can then a) start reading them and b) look them up in a dictionary.

RTK isn't just about reading, but writing too. Just compare the writing ability of someone who completed RTK to someone who didn't. It's obvious.

On a separate note, RTK is unparalleled in one respect when it comes to reading: distinguishing between similar looking kanji. I've noticed those who haven't used RTK often have to look up kanji in a dictionary to distinguish them (although look-ups decrease over time), whereas such look-ups are more or less unnecessary for those who completed RTK.

Completing RTK is a drop in the bucket when it comes to learning Japanese. However, that doesn't mean it isn't useful. Anyone who is serious about being able to write (by hand) in Japanese is foolish not to take advantage of RTK.

I've put together my thoughts on studying kanji with Heisig in this thread:

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=9337

Didn't get many critical responses, so I guess, not everything there is rubbish

If anything, you would emphasize the last point from my post there - there is nothing in Heisig method that is inherently prohibiting you from studying the language at the same time.

nadiatims wrote:

The stories/keywords are unnecessary in my opinion.

My guess is that you say that only because you 1) live in Japan (hence have constant exposure to kanji), 2) reached level where kanji is one of the least problems.

So, as a matter of balance, here is what have to say as a not advanced learner - the stories/keywords are necessary in my opinion.

When a Japanese person sees a kanji, two things come to mind: a) what is means and b) how it is read. That is why my Japanese friends say that when they see something in Chinese they cannot read it, but they can get the gist of what it says. When a westerner looks at a kanji they don't know a) what it means or b) how to read it.

Remembering the Kanji takes care of the first part by internalizing the meanings of 2,000+ kanji. Once you know this, learning the readings is a much more manageable task. Whether you use RtK or not, you WILL create a variation of his system yourself, because unless you are psychic, you can only relate what you don't know with what you know. To go from kanji--->reading is possible, but going from kanji--->meaning--->reading is MUCH faster in the long run. Also, kanji--->reading without learning the meaning will waste a GREAT deal of time in the long run.

probably no long term negative effects except the time wasted and the amount of people who, like Fillanzea said, get bored and quit Japanese altogether.

If you learn some compounds containing the same kanji together, you can learn the meanings each kanji takes, the readings, and the words themselves at the same time.

If you want to write by hand, it's probably helpful though...

Last edited by IceCream (2012 April 24, 12:08 pm)

But if you look at the radicals in a kanji to figure out which kanji it is, you are doing EXACTLY what RtK helps internalize, the ability to tell the difference between characters based on how they are constructed.

Yes Japanese people don't memorize meanings, but they have an internalized system of what characters mean. Heck, in children's writing materials you see a picture of a bug next to the kanji for "bug." Kanji embody concepts, and keywords are a starting point for non character based language people to internalize it.