SomeCallMeChris wrote:

Anyway, I'm not trying to say that RTK is the only way, just that it has some powerful points - providing a mental 'handle' for the character, learning 'one thing' instead of everything,  component-analysis to simplify the task of remembering and reduce confusion, and of course, learning to draw the character which aside from enabling writing makes it much easier to recognize a character regardless of the font it is printed in (although one does have to learn to recognize variants for some components, but if you think of them already as components and not arbitrary strokes, that's easy to comprehend.)

i agree with all of this. and to answer OP's question, there are no negative effects. nothing bad happens.

the only reason why i bring it up is mostly because i wonder if RTK could be further refined. and i personally can't check myself with a "new" RTK because i can't forget RTK. for me the most valuable things were stroke order and breaking kanji into components.

yudantaiteki wrote:

Chinese and Japanese people will tell you they can get the gist, but they can't.  If you actually give them some Japanese or Chinese and ask them to tell you what it means, they won't be able to (in most cases).  What they mean is that they can spot words they know, but that's not the same thing.

i think a lot of people use basic hints and context and then convince themselves that they understood it after the fact. my korean coworker sometimes looks at me studying japanese and could guess at what things mean with kanji but that's the extent of it, it's not definitive, and he knows it.
i would not be surprised if this is the same strategy employed by otaku who watch anime with english subs, and because they're so used to the story tropes and context as well as how people sound in different ranges of emotions, they feel like they can understand raws when they're really guessing based on all the context and confirming it after the fact.
and this isn't to make fun of them but it's hard to understand what you don't know.

Last edited by kainzero (2012 April 24, 9:57 pm)

@somecallmechris:

it might be that you were expecting too much of yourself? It probably is far too painful to do that with paper flashcards though. Anyway, my failure rate was really horrible too doing that, but had levelled out by 21 days to a comparable figure to other reviews.

btw, after i'd finished the deck and done 21 days of reviews of the last one i just deleted the deck and got on with real japanese. Because yeah, while learning vocabulary lists can sort of prime you to learn vocabulary in context, you don't really get a feeling for the words until you see them in context. If you've taken them from context, it's a different thing, i guess, but that wasn't the point of it.

Yeah, learning more than one thing at once causes more failures in the short term. But it's also less time consuming overall, i think. Again, this quite possibly varies from person to person. But there are benefits to it as well, particularly in the case of japanese. So, to start with, i never tested specifically on the kanji, just built up a feeling as to the meaning through learning the words. But the reading of the word is closely connected to the kanji and sometimes divided by meaning (like in 方　かた・ほう). So, if you get the reading wrong, you wonder why, take another look at the kanji, go to your deck and compare it with another kanji with a slightly different radical, or the same kanji with a different meaning etc, and figure out which one you mixed it up with and where the radical is different. There are more cases where you get the meaning of the word as a whole wrong and it's totally unrelated, but since the object is just to prime the meanings anyway, anything close enough will do.

Overall though, Fillanzea's way is also fine. I don't think it really matters which method you choose, as long as you don't take very long over it, and get on with reading real japanese. Because in the end, no matter which way you go, stuff only really comes together after you read a ton of real life stuff. And there is a point where it really does come together nicely. For example, my word list really wasn't long enough to have enough examples for each kanji after grade 6, so i carried on without really having much knowledge of the kanji after that. But nowadays, it just doesn't really matter anymore. After grade 6, there's an awful lot of kanji that have only one reading and one meaning anyway, so it settles down eventually, it's just a matter of patience really. But yeah, using furigana can be quite deceptive, i much prefer the take-a-guess-then-mouse-over method.

rrr sorry, quite long winded.