/jp/ - Otaku Culture

[Anonymous No.]

Why do people memorize kanji?

It just fucks you up once you start learning vocabulary and you need to unlearn almost everything you just learned because you have thousands of meanings in your head that are useless. Very rarely can you see a word, remember the meaning for each character in the word, and then logically combine them to know the meaning of the actual word. There's too many possibilities when many times you might be memorizing 2-3 possible different meanings for each kanji. There's no way to correctly infer the meaning most of the time, you will just have to memorize the full word, but then what was the point of memorizing individual kanji?

I don't get it. People can spend over a year doing something like RTK and what's the point? There seems to be this common idea that you have to memorize kanji, that's one of the first big steps in all the guides, but why?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752452
>People can spend over a year doing something like RTK
Because they r fucking stupid moutbreathers.

[Anonymous No.]

I always assumed that RTK was for people with agnosia who are unable to remember images and need a little story to help them.

Kind of like: "Furry and white. Be careful, it might bite!" for people who have trouble remembering what a cat looks like.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752487
That's exactly what I thought too.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752452
>>9752487

RTK shouldn't be spent on a year on.

It's useful because it supercharges the learning process. You can be reading at a decent level in 3 months if you complete RTK fast.

[Anonymous No.]

But how will I understand kanji-jokes without it?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752452
Actually, I've found that you can in fact get the meaning of compounds if you know the individual kanji meanings. Not always, but it's a good start, and when you actually find out what it means you'll be able to make a new connection about why the compound is the way it is.

And no, I don't use RTK, I use Genki and Tobira.

[Anonymous No.]

It's stupid to learn kanji without vocabulary.
What do you learn then? Just the "meaning" and the readings?

And it's also useless to learn vocabulary without kanji or not learn kanji readings (because when you face a word you've never saw before you can guess what is its reading and meaning easily)

[Anonymous No.]

While this is true, it does help with remembering the kanji itself. Tearing it down to radicals, and putting it into the context of other similar kanji helped a lot for me.

Without this, you'd just have to remember a complex shape. And when you see a similar kanji, you might mix them up forever, because used their common feature to identify the first one.

I gave up RTK around 800. I'm slowly picking up the actual words and meanings while I'm reading VNs. But I already see the pattern: The only kanji I'll ever remember are part of those 800, or the extremely common ones.

[Anonymous No.]

What are some good ways to start learning vocab?

[Anonymous No.]

People learn in different ways. I picked kanji up slowly as I looked up words while reading and got used to them, but a guy I knew in high school learned the kanji at a staggering rate with Heisig and managed to learn their readings and all their compounds later somehow. I'm more of a scatterbrain and he was more of an analytical thinker, so I think we both just learned in the ways we found were easiest to us.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752576

Not at all. RTK and then learning readings in context is simply the fastest way to complete fluency.

When someone did better than you (like your friend) the human mind has a tendency to write it off as him being "special" so it's not your fault.

[Anonymous No.]

I rushed through RTK in less than half a year just because I wanted to get familar with Kanji. It helps telling the similar ones apart from each other and learning vocabulary is a lot quicker.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752582

That's not rushing. A month or less is rushing.

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752452
That's why you use RTK and learn only their meanings, because meanings are more concrete than the readings. The readings change all the time in context, so it's best to memorize those in context. The meanings of Kanji, on the other hand, don't change. If you spend a year on RTK, your doing something wrong. Do it how it's mean to be done, one RTK lesson per day, and you'll be done in 2 months.

>Very rarely can you see a word, remember the meaning for each character in the word, and then logically combine them to know the meaning of the actual word.
Once again, if you can't do this for new words that you haven't seen before, then you're not learning anything. In worst case, you do RTK to familiarize yourself with common Kanji so you won't be intimidated by them when you're actually reading material.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752618
You're all a bunch of lobotomized plebs. Taking longer than 100 hours couldn't even remotely be considered rushing.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752638

Are you trying to be funny or something? It's not working.

[Anonymous No.]

I finished RTK in 23 days and am glad I did so. I had a much easier time memorizing vocabulary afterwards.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752559
>when you face a word you've never saw before you can guess what is its reading and meaning easily [by knowing its kanji signs]
I don't think that's true. From what I've seen so far, jukugo meanings are often only vaguely related to their kanji signs. Still, it's not like we don't have any time to waste, so I'm just going to keep learning individual kanji despite knowing better. Might be a autism or OCD related thing.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752649
Is that your jelly speaking?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752622

katzumotosama said RTK is the best method so I'm going by his word and not some neckbeard OP from 4chan.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752671
Who?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752673


http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about

[Anonymous No.]

the big problem with RTK is that a lot of the definitions are inaccurate. it's to be expected since it was written in, what, the 60s?

I prefer kanjidamage because he gives a few examples of words in which the kanji appears in, along with other stuff. sadly he has changed his site layout so that you can no longer have all the kanji on one page.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752683
Dude that link looks fishy as HELL. I'm not getting any virus today.

[Anonymous No.]

>sadly he has changed his site layout so that you can no longer have all the kanji on one page.
I can see all the kanji on one page just fine.

[Anonymous No.]

No one spends a year on RTK.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752689

Agreed. Heisig showed me a character for "sue", then a week later i see the actual word "sue" and it doesn't even use the character. That's just one example.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752452
>Why do people memorize kanji?
Because they do mean things individually. As in there are words that aren't made up or 2+ kanji.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752683
fuck youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

[Anonymous No.]

RTK a shit xD

[Anonymous No.]

Learning kanji through the RTK or kanjidamage method seems like a poor use of time to me. I would even say that learning words out of the context of a sentence is a poor use of time.

There's no reason that you can't just start with sentences. That's what I did and it worked fine. I would grab a sentence, usually from a VN I was playing, and then I would add a few new cards to anki based on that sentence. For new words I would look them up on jisho so that I could add in little notes in the answer page that would mention the meanings of the kanji that make up the word.

So you will simultaneously be learning vocab and grammar while naturally picking up kanji meanings along the way since your brain will begin to see the connections between the meaning of the kanji character and the meanings of the words it is usually used in.

There's no need to study any of these things individually. It makes more sense to do all three simultaneously by studying sentences instead setting aside a block of time for just drilling kanji or vocab.

[Anonymous No.]

Doesn't really matter which learning method you decide to use as long as you are studying well every day. If you're comfortable doing it a certain way then great.

Have you done your reps for today?

[Anonymous No.]

I did RRK in 3 months and it really helped me while learning japanese afterwards.
RTK doesn't teach you meanings, it teaches you a *UNIQUE* name for each kanji. This name does not necessarily cover the most frequently used meaning (or any meaning) of the kanji, but just being able to identify the kanji makes learning much easier.

I definitely don't consider those 3 months wasted.
The problem is idiots thinking they're learning japanese when they do RTK and then getting frustrated when it doesn't work that way.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752683

I've never understood why Khatzumoto so strongly suggests using RTK. It doesn't seem to go with his philosophy for learning. In many of his posts he stresses the importance of always having fun as you learn and that all of your Japanese studying should be done in an enjoyable way, but then he says that you should use RTK.

RTK is pure mindnumbing boredom from any way you look at it. It's just grinding over and over again every day for several months. There's nothing fun about it at all and it can take a fairly long time. It's not like the kana where you just grit your teeth and push through it in an evening or two.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752763

The idea in studying kanji is to be able to tell similar ones apart. It also makes it much easier to draw them yourself when you can break them down into radicals.

[Anonymous No.]

The meanings you learn are really not that important. What's important is seeing a kanji and thinking "hey, I know that kanji. So when it's used in that context, it has that meaning, I'll keep that in mind", rather than "alright, this unique set of lines means this, I'll try to remember than in case I encounter the very same set of lines in the future".

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752581
Fuck off Rajeev.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752802
I do both, am I fine?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752792
>>9752802
What these turbonerds so eloquently explained.

[Anonymous No.]

>It just fucks you up once you start learning vocabulary
Why are you learning kanji separately from vocab? Are you an idiot?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752833
Any method is fine if you're comfortable with it. There are multiple ways to learn.

[Anonymous No.]

I think the big problem with mnemonics is that they are filled with so much junk information.

They clog your head with a lot of irrelevant data and it has always just confused me. There's so much data that needs to be memorized anyway and it's easy to get to a point where you see a character, you remember the mnemonic, but it gets all mixed up and you can't remember what the real meaning was since your head is swimming with, "COcaine brings ten times as much happiness as hot spices. The manager SIGHed as the employees stole The manager of the Indian restaurant wore a crown made entirely out of spices. The KOdomo will grow old someday with ten dentures in her mouth." and all sorts of nonsensical junk information that fucks with your head. Does it mean spices, restaurant, dentures, stealing, cocaine, old, or indian? Who knows, it's a clusterfuck.

In general I think that mnemonics are awful and never should be used. I think the drill it in method works better since you don't learn any non-essential information.

If 握手 means handshake and it's pronounced as あくしゅ then I will put my face a few inches away from the word, strain my eyes so I'm really focusing on the appearance of the word, and then start saying "Handshake. あくしゅ. Handshake. あくしゅ." and do it over and over again.

[Anonymous No.]

Japan need to developing a vocabulary... it's an archaism using characters like those and makes more difficult for anyone (including the japanese) to learn their language.

If Japan wasn't so retarded about their xenophobia and national pride... even the Turkish and Koreans had done it...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_alphabet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752871
whats wrong with having japan making it hard for worthless scum to learn their language?

if your japanese spirit cannot carry you through then you should just give up nerd

[Anonymous No.]

oh my god shut the fuck up nerds
"I am superior because I chose a different way to learn japanese"
-you

Just let people do what they want, it all boils down to learning Japanese in the end.

[Anonymous No.]

nerds

[Anonymous No.]

I printed RTK, it was a waste of good paper, that book it utter shit.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752919
Well duh, loser. RTK is pretty outdated and there are better memonics these days.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752898

NO FUGGER!
MY WAY THE BEST
I AM SUPREME
BOW BEFORE SENDEI

[Anonymous No.]

The best mnemonics are the ones you make yourself.

[Anonymous No.]

Too lazy to start a new thread. Is there some kind of plugin/script that can show the hiragana and definition? I plan to study by reading the japanese wikipedia

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752928
Sumimasen sensei, your sugoi way is obviously superior.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752930
You could use the jisho.org ``bookmarklet''?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752930
rikaichan/rikaikun(chrome)/rikaisama(improved fork)

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752938
>>9752935

thanks ill check it out

[Anonymous No.]

Am I doing something horribly wrong with chiitrans2?

It hooks up to games fine, but then it starts spamming me with text. It's the text from the game, but it's the same line over and over again hundreds of times.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752964
Yeah.

[Anonymous No.]

>Wanikani
http://www.wanikani.com/community/nyankou
You learn the radicals alongside kanji and vocabulary so you know which reading to use when. I'm in the beta and I was learning kanji on my own with and android app called Obenkyou but I was never sure when to use which reading. Wanikani is fixing that.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752986
>Wanikani is fixing that.
"That" being what I learned incorrectly from obenkyo.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752790
well i found it to be a fun exercise. it was satisfying to finally be able to recognize kanji. my entire life they just looked like random shapes to me.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9752919
>>9752836
>>9752923

False. Ignore these children. In order to learn Japanese in the fastest way possible RTK must be completed prior. Idiots do RTK and think it teaches them Japanese, and then post about how "it doesn't work" solely out of pure ignorance.

[Anonymous No.]

You don't learn kanji with RTK. It's just for, you know, remembering kanji.

[Anonymous No.]

I never could get into RTK.

I went the eroge every day route instead. It's probably less efficient, but it's a hell of a lot more fun.

[Anonymous No.]

I cant convince myself to choose, in every thread there's never an agreement on what's the preferred method for kanji, so i just spend more time with vocab. After learning 400 words or so, here I am with zero kanji knowledge..

[Anonymous No.]

But kanji is easy as HELL to pick up.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9753171
>there's never an agreement on what's the preferred method for kanji

Because there is no "perfect" method for learning it. Learning is a personal thing, just try and see what works best for you.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9753064
But how exactly do you learn Kanji from reading eroge if it doesn't give you the meanings, or even the on/kun yomi?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9753214
You use a dictionary, silly.

[Anonymous No.]

RTK did help me a lot. It obviously didn't teach me ANYTHING and at the time I was wondering if it was a complete waste.

The thing is it familiarizes you with a ton of kanji. Not in meaning or reading. IN APPEARANCE. You don't really have to learn to write the kanji if you've done RTK already. I don't think it's necessary at all but it does help a little.

HERE'S THE THING: If you're going to do RTK you have to do it FAST. It shouldn't take you more than a week or you're just wasting time.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9753214
A text hooker?

[Anonymous No.]

>>9753281
>hooker
lewd

[Anonymous No.]

>>9753346
Not as lewd as my ████ in your ████

[Anonymous No.]

>>9753362
o_O

2lewd4me

[Anonymous No.]

>>9753346
I forgot to sage.
>>9753362
I'm not familiar with those kanji yet :3

[Anonymous No.]

why are you flaming each other for their learing methods? Each brains works different. Some need the mnenomic form RTK and some dont. For myself, I have not many problems to remember the translation of a kanji but I got some problems to remember the Kun or On. I wouldnt need RTK coz I can remember figurative things quite good.

@Topic: How the fuck do you wanna understand japanese without kanji?

[Anonymous No.]

It seems to me that RTK is for writing, not for reading.

You're starting with the assumption that the only goal with kanji is to read it.

Which is really fine for most truNEET purposes.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9754493

ONLY RETARDSN EED MNENOMIC

TRU

[Anonymous No.]

>>9756365
You type like a retard.

[Anonymous No.]

Would somebody of below average intelligence be able to learn Japanese with hard work and perseverance?

I'm dumb but I really want to learn.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9756497
Yes.

[Anonymous No.]

I learned over 50 runes just from playing video games and I wasn't even trying. that's only like 2% but I'm sure I could do a lot more if I was actually trying to learn the language.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9756497

Maybe I sound like a teacher or a father who wanna give his kids advice, but in my opinion its all about how hard you work. There are no "dumb" people. there are just people who work hard for their goal (e.g learning japanese) and there are people who dont work hard.

My grade in school were pretty bad. I just never learned coz I wasnt interessted in this shit. but now on university I choose what I find interesting and for me the learning is fun.

Same with learning japanese. If you really want to learn it and if you have fun by doing it you can achieve your goal.

[Anonymous No.]

>>9756476
whoosh