Errol246
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 2012-05-02
Posts: 50
Hello everybody,
I've been very interested in learning Japanese for many years but have never really gotten around to learning it until now. I am starting high school this August and will be receiving formal Japanese classes as part of my curriculum, but I just have one simple concern:
I do not yet know the kanji. I only just started using RTK and am only at frame 243. From seeing what people write about their own experiences, getting through this book takes a pretty damn long time, so I don't think I will be anywhere near finished with the book before at least september.
My concern is not really the time it takes to learn it as such, I like to take things at a very slow pace. I am worried, however, that my formal Japanese classes might interfere with my kanji studies since this seems to be what the professionals say. I believe I remember reading in the intro to RTK that using the book in conjunction with formal classes is not recommended.
Would anybody here who have been in the same situation be able to confirm this? Is it really going to hamper my ability to read, write and recognise the kanji, or can it be done?
Thank you in advance.
prink
Member
From: Minneapolis
Registered: 2010-11-02
Posts: 200
It shouldn't interfere with your studies or confuse you in any way, but if you feel that you don't have a lot of extra time to dedicate to RTK, add fewer new cards and scale back as necessary.
I recommend RTK. It's pros and cons have been discussed at length in this forum, but I'll give a quick rundown of my experience. I didn't like it or trust it at first and was very skeptical, but it has been very helpful overall. The payoff is less immediate, but it will help tremendously in the long run. It allows you to identify thousands of kanji based on their components. Based on my experience, it's much more difficult and confusing to learn kanji through rote memorization.
Don't worry about when you finish. Focus on making progress. I'm in my third year of studying Japanese in college, and I wish I had done RTK from the beginning. I'm around frame 600, and I can already see huge improvements in my overall studies. I don't plan on being done with RTK until December, so you're already going at a faster pace than me.
Inny Jan
Member
From: Cichy Kącik
Registered: 2010-03-09
Posts: 720
Errol246 wrote:
getting through this book takes a pretty damn long time [...]
Not necessary, many people are able to go through RtK in 2-3 months (it averages to 25-35 new kanji a day, not an unreasonable figure).
Errol246 wrote:
[...] formal Japanese classes might interfere with my kanji studies
They should not. In fact, they may complement each other. Take a look at this post of mine - maybe the approach from there will work for you (it works for me).
Errol246
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 2012-05-02
Posts: 50
Thank you everyone for your helpful responses. It is a huge relief for me to hear that my formal classes are not going to interfere with my RTK studying.
The guy in the other thread said that he wasn't sure what to say about my situation because he doesn't know how Danish high schools work. This is how it works:
The high school that I will be attending is not one of your usual high schools at all, not even when compared to the normal Danish high schools. I have already been to two different high schools in Denmark, one being a totally normal high school and the other being an International Baccalaureate (IB), which I'm sure some of you have heard of. And if you have heard of it you will probably have a pretty good idea in your head of why I dropped out in the middle of the first year 
This 'easier' high school, which I will be attending in August, gives the students a lot more elbowroom to choose which subjects they want to take and concurrently how long they want to take to finish it. The Japanese classes here (as far as I'm concerned) will only provide each student with a set of 250 kanji (including writing and pronunciation), so when rethinking this issue, I actually have nothing to worry about at all. By the beginning of the academic year I will probably already be able to recognise 1000 ^^
Last edited by Errol246 (2012 May 17, 4:13 am)
Inny Jan
Member
From: Cichy Kącik
Registered: 2010-03-09
Posts: 720
@Nukemarine
Do you happen to know how the issue that a kanji that is used as a primitive in some other kanji but is not used as a kanji by itself is resolved in the light decks?
To give you an example, let's look at 濃 (濃い is a basic vocab) - the primitives here are (water, bend, sign of dragon). So, in order to make use of mnemonics you need to remember 水 (easy, often used as a primitive), 曲 (easy, you are likely to need to learn 曲がる), 辰 (?) and the question is whether the light decks would include 辰 as a kanji to learn. (This may be not the best chosen example but you should get an idea.)
kainzero
Member
From: Los Angeles
Registered: 2009-08-31
Posts: 945
I think the Genki series claims 250 kanji, but it's... not really. You could probably do a few readings and a few words with everything but yeah, it won't be a complete mastery. For example, you can know 大 and 分, probably as 大きい and 5分 but you probably won't know 大分県。 And they also teach you a lot of words without kanji too, which I feel gets really pointless because with many of these words you almost never see them in kana.
With that said you can easily do RTK with that and they both kinda help each other. One of the first kanji they teach is 曜 and that looks like a pain if you don't know radicals, but when you do it's actually quite easy. It also becomes easier to learn the vocabulary with kanji instead of just learning the kana form so it becomes more relevant.
