/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>418
For the kanji: google RTK. You'll be thankful.

>>59412
I think he meant it's suboptimal to do it the "Heisig way", because you're supposed to do it at your own pace, but I haven't read the introduction for some time so I could be wrong.
Then again I don't see how it would interfere with your own studies. You probably learn only a few kanji a week anyway.
If you reall want to do RTK (I can only recommend it) check out http://kanji.koohii.com/.. It has a nice review program especially made for RTK and many user stories for the later kanji where Heisig doesn't provide any stories. I use it myself and it's great.

>>59412
I think he meant it's suboptimal to do it the "Heisig way" in a *classroom setting*, because you're supposed to do it at your own pace, but I haven't read the introduction for some time so I could be wrong.
Then again I don't see how it would interfere with your own studies. You probably learn only a few kanji a week anyway.
If you reall want to do RTK (I can only recommend it) check out http://kanji.koohii.com/.. It has a nice review program especially made for RTK and many user stories for the later kanji where Heisig doesn't provide any stories. I use it myself and it's great.

>>78816
Fail.
You should have gotten RTK instead.

>>85722
Does it really matter though?
If you dedicate one or two hours a day you can get through the whole book within a couple of weeks.
After that you can ace all those classes easily and basically rape the Kanji tests. If Kanji aren't the hardest part of any japanese class it chances are it's shit and and going there is a waste of time.
Of course if you only go to some 3 month course RTK won't help you at all.

Heisigfags, report in!

How long have you been studying?
How many kanji have you learned?
How much time do you spend each day and how many kanji do you lean?
What do you use for review?
What do you plan to do after you're done?

I started a month ago and learned my 850th kanji today. Usually I spend 2 hours a day and try to tackle 30 kanji which I usually manage to do. Review takes roughly 30 minutes. After playing around with Mnemosyne and Anki I found out about http://kanji.koohii.com and use that for reviewing now. It's really nice and has this stack system, so I can decide myself what kanji to review instead of the program telling me what it thinks is best. It also has a ton of stories for all kanji covered in RTK including the third book, which helps since I'm somewhat lazy and not especially creative.
After I'm done I'll start the infamous "sentence method" as proclaimed on AJATT, but I'm not going to follow it to the letter. I'll get one or two grammar books first to get more of a feel for Japanese, although I won't memorize them in and out, since I think that will come naturally as I progress further in my studies, but a few sentences with limited vocab focusing on grammar won't hurt.
Then I'll just pick up whatever I want to learn and put it into my SRS. And probably read a lot of manga with furigana to boost my kanji readings ability.

For those who don't know: That's a screenshot from kanji.koohii.com, a kanji reviewing site for use with Heisigs RTK.

>>129393
Also note that unless you don't use RTK it will be pretty much useless to you.

There are some decent posts, but if you post them here, there's gonna be a bit shitstorm how they all suck.

In the end learning Kanji is a matter of stamina and willpower. Anyway. I firmly believe some methods are better than others. And before the shitstorm starts:

Do Heisig and use http://kanji.koohii.com as a resource site. You can get the RTK books via rapidshare. Look for Heisig in the Rapidshares section.

I hope you're aware of the fact, that this might take "some time".

>Heisig

You know what you've brought upon you with that.

I did the complete RtK Series and I won't have been able to get down that many Kanji in less than half a year without it.

People that bitch about it, ar either dumb or too lazy to do something seriously, therefore they claim that it fails.

How long have you guys been studying Japanese? If you're just starting out, RTK won't seem obvious. If you've been studying a semester or two, it should be pretty apparent. I took 6 semesters in college, and I saw the benefits after the second chapter of RTK. It just makes it SO much easier to remember how to construct proper kanji from memory, as well as to deconstruct them when you see them on paper.

The other question I have for you: how are you studying RTK or Kanji in general? Are you using some SRS/flash card system? Because if you're not, you're going to get frustrated quickly.

So 京都 is きょうと, that famous Japanese city I so love to visit. I don't have to think it's the "East Metropolis," based on Heisig's keywords, because I've seen it so often, I just know it's Kyoto. But if I was just learning it, it makes a nice crutch. Same goes for 沖縄 or おきなわ, the place in the "Open Sea" where you can find a chain of beautiful islands that looks like a "straw rope" from above. It's a crutch you CAN use (you don't HAVE to) until you internalize it as simply おきなわ.

I find it's especially handy for place names.

I can also keep 待つ　and 持つ straight now.

I think of RTK as lubrication for my Japanese skills. It won't make or break you, but it will make things a LOT easier.

I finished RTK about 5-6 weeks ago, and now I find that my ability to learn new kanji compounds/vocab is a heck of a lot easier than it used to be, simply because I can look at a kanji, and recognize it. I may not always know the keyword right off the bat, but I can look at, tear it apart into pieces, and reconstruct it.

RTK creates a lot of memory hooks and placeholders in your brain for kanji, the same way you do so when learning an alphabet. "A" may not have a meaning, but it occupies a spot in your brain you associate with it. RTK is sort of the same thing. You create connections between kanji and keywords not so much so you can use they keywords to "guess" at Japanese words, but so when you encounter kanji in Japanese, you understand how the characters a) are written, b) fit together, and c) you understand that if all else fails, you have a quick and dirty set of pre-made mnemonics to remember the compound until your brain fills in the gaps with Japanese.

I've learned Kanji from a combination of memorizing the individual kanji and learning actual words. I don't understand what RTK is for. I guess if you want remember how to write Kanji based on some single "meaning" that might only be right half the time. for example, what does it give for 行? go? what do you do when you have to read 行う?

Kanji is a starting point, not the end all of learning Japanese. Even if you memorize how to write all the jyoyo kanji and what they mean, i guarantee you'll know nothing. Plus, if you really want some "meaning", any good Kanji dict will have it.

>>572373
It is.
Don't believe those fags who're bitter because they didn't find out about RTK earlier and wasted hours upon hours drilling random strokes into their minds... and failing.

Knowing 有名 for example is more of an issue with learning vocab. Would you have been better able to guess the meaning of this word if you had learned 有る (to exist) and 名前 (name) first? You have to learn both kanji and vocab to learn Japanese. RtK is just about assigning a keyword to each kanji to make it easier to recall.

You might (or not) be able to guess 有名 means "famous" from just recognizing the characters as "possess name," but you won't have to work as hard to recall "What are the kanji for 'famous' and how do I write them?"

And actually, my native Japanese teacher said 有名 means "You 'have name' that people recognize, so you're famous!" So you might not be able to figure out 有名 means 'famous' if you didn't already know it. But when you are reading and come across 有名 written somewhere later, you will be much less likely to have forgotten its meaning.

After getting through RtK, there will be some words you can guess the meaning of and some you can't. But you will have a much faster time learning new words if you have a meaning/keyword for each of the kanji than if you think of them as a bunch of seemingly random lines.

>>572710
How exactly does RtK help you with this? The kanji already have meaning; that's the point. If you are trying to learn a compound without understanding the logographs in it, then you are just stupid.

>>572752
>>How exactly does RtK help you with this? The kanji already have meaning; that's the point. If you are trying to learn a compound without understanding the logographs in it, then you are just stupid.
Simple: After finnishing RTK I already knew both characters. I also knew they mean "possess" and "name". "Possessing a name" comes close enough to "famous" right? It just snaps together like lego. (Like photo: copy and reality)
Learning the reading becomes a breeze since I don't also have to remember the characters themselves. I just know: "possessing a name" is "famous" and that in turn is "yumei". The first two steps become subconscious fairly quickly and I'm left with actually useful knowledge.
This is much faster than doing it all at once, even though it might look like there are more steps involved.

An issue I have with RTK is that the kanji are presented in a very strange order. It's almost like memorizing words from A-Z. There are some really obscure ones in there that you wouldn't see in a lot of texts. I guess it's nice to know, but there's a reason why kanji are usually presented in a "commonness" order.

I think a lot of people fall into the trap of, the best way to learn Japanese is to know everything 100% from start to finish. If you try and do that, you're going to move along very slowly and not learn real Japanese.

>>573093
A flashcard program to review what you've learned.
If you're not using one you should start as soon as possible to not forget what you've learned.
For RTK I can recommend kanji.koohii.com. It's made especially for RTK, easy to use and it has great community. When you reach Part 3 where Heisig stops providing his own stories it will probably help you greatly since there are many stories from users, so if making up your own seems too troublesome you can just use other peoples stories.

>>573318
Well don't use it then. OP was asking how to go about with RTK, not whether to do it or not.

why do you guys always have to say how good rtk is? Just let them think what they want. Plus it's awesome when not many people know the kanji but you do

stop sharing the help >:[

>>573381
RTK's aim isn't to understand japanese, it's to read and write it properly, including even the stroke order.

>>573389
>why do you guys always have to say how good rtk is?
But It's not :) You spend your 6 months going over RTK as if it were the bible, and we'll see how good it does you when you come on over.

Heisig is a horrible method to learn kanji, and only idiots who are unable to learn anything without some gimmick shortcut study it.