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ok well… it’s going to be a task in itself to root out what i need and don’t need. i’ve decided i’m going to start RTK today – keep going on my merry way with textfugu, an yes – take certain things that sound fun from AJATT
it just sounds so tempting.. fluency in 18 months..
but then i see things like.. “10,000 hours of japanese audio”.. and my brain melts a little in preparation…
I just listen to a lot of music, podcasts, audio from anime and movies, j-drama… what have you.
I’m not gonna do this while I sleep tho :Pwhen watching anime/dramas, do you think it really matters if subs are on?
sometimes i find myself enjoying t more without subs, because when subs are on, i’m always reading the text, and trying to match it in my head to what they’re saying.. then i get distressed when it doesn’t sound the way i expect haha
I’d use teh subs to pick out sentences I am interested in and enter it into anki and study it.
You probably wanna grab a “totally legal” “copy” of nihonjin no shiranai nihongo ( a j-drama). It’s pretty cool to get started into the business. Maybe search around for d-addicts and you shall find it with j-subs.
ah thanks i’ll look into that. i’m gonna start building a library of things to get into (j-drama) – aside from the usual anime, etc.
i’ve really appreciated your help a lot. I have one last question though.. hah.
As for studying RTK, what is a good efficient way? I know you’re supposed to use Anki and Reviewing the Kanji, but should i still write down everything (meanings, stroke order etc) in a notebook before entering them into other programs?
basically, what’s your method?
thanks!
When I did it, I wrote down the kanji and name in my Japanese notebook, just for reference (and I guess the act of writing it out helps you remember). Look up a Shared Deck for RTK instead of creating your own – that would take forever! :P I believe the RTK deck is at the top of the list because it’s been downloaded the most. File>Download>Shared Deck… just incase you didn’t know already :)
It wasn’t until quite a way into the book that I discovered a really useful strategy – use kanji.koohii.com for reviewing keyword->kanji but then use Anki for reviewing kanji->keyword. Doing it both ways (giggidy) really helps – you might see a kanji out in the wild and think “oh… what was that one again?”, just because if you only do it keyword->kanji that’s all your brain will be used to.
Another suggestion: my “cram” technique. After you’ve written a certain amount of kanji in your book (or however you do it), say every 10 or 15, select the cards in the Anki browser and click Actions>Cram…>Random order. Go through the list a couple of times, clicking “Soon” each time so that it will show the card again. Not very good if you like keeping your Anki stats high, but they don’t really matter, right? If you’re really bothered about stats, just make a duplicate deck to Cram with. I stumbled onto this method about halfway through, and let me tell you, it increased my “first-time review success %” on koohii tenfold (I’m being serious). I was pretty shocked at how much better it was doing this XD
Any more questions, just ask :P
Mister, funny that you mention the method of doing both Keyword-> kanji AND Kanji-> keyword. I wrote a post on the RTK forum asking if this method would be a good idea, because I was considering it.
This is what he said, in two seperate posts:
“Only do keyword to kanji, not the other way around.
Actually, in the long run it’s not really all that good to associate the kanji with the keyword. Eventually you should just be associating the kanji with the word in Japanese that you have in mind.
Really what RTK does well is establish the kanji in your mind, rather than give you the meaning of the kanji. Certain kanji are associated very strongly with a single concept (especially when they are the kanji for simple nouns). But the vast majority of kanji are used in too many ways for a single meaning to be very useful to the learner.”
—
“Well, the goal isn’t to be able to see a kanji and think of the keyword. So hopefully you’ll never be able to do it. Basically, the process should go something like this.
You learn the keyword ‘perfect’. You do flashcards going from ‘perfect’ to 完.
Later, you learn the word 完結, which is pronounced ‘kanketsu’ and means ‘conclusion’. And when you see 完結, you think kanketsu, and you know the meaning is conclusion (once you know the word very well you won’t think that the meaning is conclusion, because you won’t be translating it to English in your head anymore). At no point are you going from 完 to keyword–because the keyword doesn’t have anything to do with the meaning, nor the pronunciation, of the word.
Even though the keyword didn’t help you in the case of 完結, it was still useful to do RTK in this case. Why? Because you KNOW 完, even if you can no longer associate with an English keyword. It has a place in your mind, and you can write it.
In some simple cases, like ‘cat’, the keyword will be more useful because it will give the English meaning. So, when you see 猫 you will think ‘neko’, which means ‘cat.’ But ultimately you don’t want to think of the word ‘cat.’ You want to ditch the English, and just think of the concept of cat.
So, in the long run it’s really never useful for you to go from the kanji to the keyword. You should be able to go from the kanji to the reading and the concept.”
—
This logic made a lot of sense to me, so I stopped stressing so much about one keyword and am just focusing on keyword-> kanji.
Not knocking your method, because we all learn differently of course; just adding a bit of insight to this. :P
I don’t want to get into a big debate about whether or not kanji->keyword is good or bad, but to say that the only purpose of the keyword is to help you remember the kanji seems a little strange to me. If that were the case, it seems more likely that Heisig would have avoided using so many similar keywords and instead opted for more memorable ones. It seems there is a reason he chose the keywords he did and that those ideas could be used to draw meanings from compounds.
If you saw 完結 for the first time and knew the keyword for each kanji as perfect+tie you’re probably not going to be able to recognize it as “conclusion” but, once you’ve looked up the meaning you can use the keywords to help you remember the meaning.
The idea that you should go kanji->reading->meaning seems a little ridiculous as it bypasses the whole point of using kanji at all.
If the meaning of the individual kanji 完 has nothing to do with the meaning of the compound 完結, why was that kanji selected for that word?i guess i’ll just follow anki and go from
Keyword > Kanji then lol
i have to figure out how to take that whole RTK anki set and break it up into lessons.. haven’t figured that out yet
Well for me, going kanji->keyword really helped. I think it strengthened the connection between the two. For me, just because “perfect” and “tie” aren’t really all that related to 完結 doesn’t mean they wouldn’t help me learn the word. So when I’m drilling vocab and I see 完結 I would think “right, so that’s ‘perfect’ and… ‘tie’… ah yes, that’s ‘conclusion’”. Whether the keywords actually relate to the vocab they are used in – and in a lot of cases they actually do – it doesn’t matter because the association goes on in my brain regardless. Obviously there comes a point when I know the word well enough not to think of it in terms of Heisig keywords.
As an example of keywords that DO make sense: 飛行機 – aeroplane – composed of “fly, go, machine”. How would that NOT help? :P Or how about 結婚 – marriage – composed of “tie, marriage” – the marriage keyword is obvious and I think of tie as “tie the knot”. Though, in both cases, I don’t think of them in Heisig-terms anymore, because I just “know” them now.
And, even though I do drill both ways (giggidy), like he says, “Eventually you should just be associating the kanji with the word in Japanese that you have in mind.” – that’s what I do.
Looking at the big wall of TextFugu vocab stuck on the… wall behind me, I’m finding it difficult to find cases where the Heisig keywords *don’t* make sense XD
Also, I think as I learn more words, I rely on Heisig’s terms less and less, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t *really* helpful.
And as one last point, I have 2 decks for TextFugu vocab – one backwards, one forwards. I was finding that when writing lang-8 posts, I was thinking of what I wanted to say in English and couldn’t convert it to Japanese because my brain wasn’t trained to go that way :P Going English->Japanese actually really helps going Japanese->English (i.e. I got much better at going Japanese->English after creating the second deck). It means more reviews but meh, I can live with that – it pays off in the long-run, for me at least.
Works for me, don’t see why it *can’t* work for anyone else. I’d say give it a shot and if it doesn’t work, just scrap it :)
oh oh hold the presses for one second!
i was about to forget about textfugu kanji and do RTK + Textfugu core lessons, BUT, i just realized that koichi uses the kanji learned on textfugu in the lessons… so for the sake of the actual lessons… it seems i might have to just learn the kanji on the website as well.. @___@
also, i have no input on study technique yet, so i’ll leave you guys to hashing that out haha
No hashing here. T_T Like I said, everyone learns differently.. Mister proves his point above. :P
I had that same logic when I was thinking of trying both methods at the same time.
It started with an instance when I was looking at some kanji sentences and I saw a kanji that I recognized from studying RTK; I couldn’t remember the keyword, though it was on the very tip of my tongue… it was frustrating.
However, it doesn’t happen often enough to be a problem for me. I figure the more I study them, the less likely that will happen (which is rare anyway). Also, I find that when I make mistakes like that, it plants them into my brain better and I won’t forget them as easily.
Also, the thought of doing double RTK study kind of makes my head hurt. It’s getting to a point for me where I’m getting a bit sick of it… so to keep it less stressful, I think it’s better for me to stick with one method, lest I throw the whole thing out the window (computer and all). :P
My apologies for derailing the thread slightly. D:
Good luck with whatever study methods you choose and remember to haaaave fun. :D
Multany, in regards to textfugu kanji keeping up with the lessons… if you’re behind or completely slacking, the bit of kanji that does actually show up in worksheets etc can be derived from the ‘all’ menu.
You can go back to the actual kanji lessons later, but when you do you’ll already know a few just from picking them up in lessons.
The Kanji portion of fugu is considered stand alone and is used along side the regular lessons, but there isn’t a set ‘you must know all these before proceeding’ mandate. Koichi just throws those in there to pressure you to learn it faster (in a good way).
The Kanji section here is fleshing out quickly btw… better and better every week.
On RTK for a moment… if you’re going through the heisig anki deck and don’t have the actual book, then it probably won’t do much for you.
Go and grab at least the sample PDF which has the first 275 or so, and read through the first few lessons, then set anki to only display up to that number in frames (the cards are labeled with their frame number).
>>The Kanji section here is fleshing out quickly btw… better and better every week.<<
At the current rate it will only take another 3.5 years or so to finish doing the jouyou kanji :p
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