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“First, note that the top half of the kanji consists of one and mountain. Of course, the “number 1″ mountain in Japan is Mt. Fuji. The bottom half, under Mt. Fuji, consists of crown and towel. Now for the story. Archaeologists digging under Mt. Fuji (Japan’s #1 mountain) in an ancient royal tomb (they know it’s royal because of the crown) discover what looks like a towel, but after they clean it up, they see it is actually a splendid royal sash for the king’s kimono.”
I can’t believe people actually write stuff this long to remember single kanji
@Yggbert: The more weird and wonderful the story, (sometimes) the easier it will be to remember! :D Plus, some kanji just don’t lend themselves to short and simple stories. From what I remember, the stories for “detach” (離) and “gloom” (鬱) were all ridiculously long, but thankfully I could remember them easily without one, just because they were such distinct characters haha.
I believe the appropriate response would be:
“I find your lack of vocab disturbing………”
Nah, I’m already satisfied
I think of it a little like Military training, you can drill and prepare, but I think the experience comes with the real blood (wild encounter) not just from anki but from native shows and real organic sentences. I’mmm just sayying
Jace Robinson: ter) not just from anki but from native shows and real organic sentences. I’mmm just sayying
Whats why most people use RTK as a base to go onto sentence mining or native reading material.
I’ve been picking up some new kanji lately from doing Core and I’m starting to notice if you just learn the readings instead of doing RTK you might be better off. I can associate the readings with the image of the kanji quite well with these newer ones, I can’t write them by memory but that’s not really important in any way right now. I think I’d much rather have just drilled kanji and picked up readings than doing the RTK method. Should have started Core back in December.
If you learn by readings you don’t even have to know what the meaning is, though I admit it does help for some compounds as sometimes the kanji used in combination make sense.
I believe I have to side with the anti-RTK group, not to mention it seems under represented. It seems that if you are anti-RTK, you will be shunned by the Japanese learning community.
I can see NO reason to take time to learn the Kanji, JUST by their English meaning and trying to memorize the word and a long paragraph just for that one sole purpose. This does nothing but allow you to kinda understand what you read without actually being able to ‘read’ it. Sure, you can TRY to interpret it, but actually reading it phonetically is obviously out of the question.
And since you don’t know how to read it, you can’t say it or hear it. Why do people both to focus so hard on 25% of their language acquisition? (and it’s not EVEN 25%)
Instead, learn atleast ONE vocab word using the kanji you are trying to memorize. This way, you can know at least one way to read the kanji, you have one new vocab word you can use, you know the basic meaning of the kanji if you see it in another compound etc etc etc…
Even today, I saw a brand new kanji compound 節電中 I knew 節 from 節約 and of course 電 from 電気 and obviously 中. Without ever having studied the kanji individually, or RTK beyond the first 35 or so… I could easily piece together the meaning.
Yes, I am against using RTK. I think it is basically a waste of time… UNLESS you JUST want to be able to look at Japanese articles or websites and try to get the basic jist of what they are trying to say.
If you want to SPEAK Japanese, don’t waste your time!
To add to what Ben is saying, its easy to just learn kanji through vocab. In fact, you can learn EVERYTHING through vocab. Its a very practical and straightforward method.
To break down what Ben was exemplifying even more, is that you can learn the meaning of the kanji 逃 if you know the word 逃げる（にげる）。
At the same time, you can learn their pronunciations.
You start to figure out after awhile that 訓読み for 者 is もの in the example of 裏切り者（うらぎりもの） and 音読み is しゃ in the many cases such as 参加者（さんかしゃ）。That is, if you started learning a whole bunch of words.Even complicated ones like 鬱陶しい, if you just knew it what it means, the kanji wouldn’t be a problem. You live in the 21st century, you can just look it up. You would then find out you read it as うっとうしい and what its meaning is. But since we are obsessed with kanji here, we can guess it has to do something about being depressed → of course if you knew the word 憂鬱（ゆううつ）
You learn vocab, so you obviously be able to use something that is of practical use.
RTK is for learning how to write kanji? You make customized clozed anki cards for that which are so simple to make and I’ve been doing that way before Khatzumoto began marketing that idea.
＿加者
参＿者
参加＿
参加者The reason for RTK is to make things “clearer”? Well now that you finished thats great that everything seems “clearer”. Say that to the buddy who is 2-3 months ahead of you in core2k which, by the way, you will end up doing anyway after your 2-3 months of time spending time with stories, meanings, and mnemonics. I don’t really understand what people really mean by seeing kanji as just one big incomprehensible text and suddenly this epiphany occurs where it suddenly becomes recognizable after doing RTK. I’m pretty sure thats how it is for any language you see that you don’t understand even for languages that use the Roman alphabet. For example, Cebuano, a Filipino language that I should be learning instead of Japanese.
6:1 Ug nahitabo, sa misugod pagdaghan ang mga tawo sa ibabaw sa nawong sa yuta, ug may nangatawo kanila nga mga anak nga babaye,
6:2 Nga sa pagkakita sa mga anak nga lalake sa Dios nga ang mga anak nga babaye sa mga tawo nga sila mga maanyag, nangasawa sila sa tanan nilang napili.
6:3 Ug miingon si Jehova: Ang Akong Espiritu dili makiglalis sa gihapon sa tawo, kay siya unod; apan ang iyang mga adlaw magausa ka gatus ug kaluhaan ka tuig.
6:4 Niadtong mga adlawa dihay mga higante sa yuta; ug sa human usab niini sa nahaduol ang mga anak nga lalake sa Dios sa mga anak nga babaye sa mga tawo, ug nanagpanganak sila; kini sila mao ang mga maisug nga tawo sa karaang panahon, ang mga tawo nga bantugan.
6:5 Ug nakita ni Jehova ang pagkadautan sa tawo sa yuta daku, ug nga ang tanang pagpalandong sa mga hunahuna sa iyang kasingkasing lonlon mga kadautan lamang gihapon.
6:6 Ug kini nakapabasul kang Jehova nga gibuhat niya ang tawo sa yuta, ug nakapasubo kini kaniya sa iyang kasingkasing.
6:7 Ug miingon si Jehova: Pagalaglagon ko gikan sa nawong sa yuta ang tawo nga akong gibuhat; sukad sa tawo hangtud sa mga mananap ug hangtud sa mga butang nanagkamang sa yuta, ug sa mga langgam sa kalangitan; kay kini nakapabasul kanako nga gibuhat ko sila.
6:8 Apan si Noe nakakaplag ug kahamuot sa mga mata ni Jehova.
6:9 Kini mao ang mga kaliwatan ni Noe: si Noe maoy usa ka tawo nga matarung ug hingpit sa iyang mga kaliwatan. Si Noe nagalakaw uban sa Dios.
6:10 Ug si Noe nanganak ug totolo ka mga anak nga lalake: Si Sem, si Cham ug si Japhet.
6:11 Ug ang yuta dunot sa atubangan sa Dios, ug ang yuta napuno sa mga paglugos.Uses no kanji and a recognizable alphabet, but still looks gibberish to me.
I understand straight up learning vocab may be really dry for some people, but not if its vocab you’ve been applying to and/or learning your favorite AKB show of courseeeee which ties in wonderfully with your studies. Which you should have been doing in the first place. Of course I would try to learn 25 new words today so I can try to understand what the lovely 入山杏奈 is saying the next day. Or laugh at something retarded like COWCOW’s あたりまえ体操.
The only person who is consider to be 論外, is Cassandra. But Sheepy finished RTK 2 years ago. Look man, I understand you had personal stuff to do in the past 6-8 months or so with losing weight and I’m mad proud of you but no one who finished RTK other than Mark who I’m raising myself (…or is it himself) has achieved this exponential-like progress in the Japanese ability.
You’re missing the goal of RTK, even though it’s been explained here a bunch of times. It’s also been said on lots of occasions that it isn’t for everyone, and not everyone will benefit from doing it. However it certainly wasn’t a waste of time for me (and numerous others), and I know that from comparing my retention on vocab containing kanji not learning through RTK, and those learned through RTK. If your retention of vocab is 90% without doing RTK (and learned at a quick enough rate), then you’re doing fine without it. For me it’s considerably more difficult to remember new kanji at the same as vocab though.
RTK isn’t supposed to teach you Japanese on its own. It’s just a method of breaking the learning up into more manageable chunks, in order to make things easier to remember. Trying to remember new kanji at the same time as the pronunciation and meaning of new words makes for a lot of information to try and store in the brain at once. With most other languages you’re only memorising the sound and meaning of vocab, as you already know the alphabet. Adding characters as complex as kanji on top of that means more to remember at once, which can make for slower progress and more difficult retention.
RTK just breaks the process down so you learn the characters quickly and efficiently, then when you learn the vocab your brain is just tying the sounds to characters it already knows. When I moved on to learning vocab, it was pretty much effortless to memorise dozens of words at a time all in kanji (it got harder when I started approaching 6000 words, but only because of the challenge of Japanese’s limited phonology).
However when I learn words with non-RTK kanji it becomes much more of a chore and takes a lot longer as I have to learn the kanji too. Though still not as long as it would with no RTK experience, as RTK provides a method to learn new kanji efficiently.
RTK isn’t some magical pill, it’s just a method of breaking up the memorisation process into more manageable chunks. For some that might be waste of time, for others it helps immensely.
“Uses no kanji and a recognizable alphabet, but still looks gibberish to me.”
Yes, but when you learn the word nahitabo for the first time, you’re not also trying to remember several complex characters for it. It would be the same as learning Japanese words if they only used romaji.
“The only person who is consider to be 論外, is Cassandra. But Sheepy finished RTK 2 years ago. Look man, I understand you had personal stuff to do in the past 6-8 months or so with losing weight and I’m mad proud of you but no one who finished RTK other than Mark who I’m raising myself (…or is it himself) has achieved this exponential-like progress in the Japanese ability.”
I’m really not sure what your idea of exponential progress is, but I can tell you I finished RTK less than 2 years ago (I haven’t been studying Japanese for 2 years yet). I have a more than 90% retention ratio of nearing 6000 words (and all their kanji) and have been reading native material (depending on complexity) for a long time now. I’ve been slacking off a lot lately due to other priorities, but I wouldn’t have got this far without RTK. I’ve compared it both ways and seen the difference in my own learning.
Not sure what point you were trying to make with that last paragraph.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by
Elenkis.
But to be a bit more serious (so that I can finally go to sleep), I only put what I said because its what I think and because my earlier conversation with KiaiFighter went down like this:
KiaiFighter
I left a nice anti-RTK post in TF for you to jump on ;) enjoy! =D
http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/remembering-the-kanji/page/2/
王維 拳
2時間前
王維 拳oh cool
KiaiFighter
2時間前
KiaiFighter=D indeed
王維 拳
2時間前
王維 拳mmmm well i dont have any intention of saying anything but i might as well add to what you are saying
KiaiFighter
2時間前
KiaiFighterThank you, I noticed in the thread that it looked like you had something to say, but were holding back ;)
The thread serves no purpose if it only presents one side of the debate..
王維 拳
2時間前
王維 拳well it is kinda the point of the thread
for whoever wants to try the method
i figured that if people want to try it, then they should try it
but i still think rtk is a waste of time lol
KiaiFighter
2時間前
KiaiFighterbut they should hear about the methods that work better for others
王維 拳
2時間前
王維 拳its true
too bad i usually end up sharing this with other idol fans
lol
And more seriously, I mean that you can understand most of this http://www.geocities.co.jp/Milkyway-Aquarius/7075/trainman1.html
I also did not know you knew and did so much so the original 電車男スレ in which the actual series and movie is based on shouldnt be too hard for you
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This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by
missingno15.
People who actually managed to pull through RTK and have guts to keep up reviewing generally agree that it was worth the time.
People that didn’t manage to do it, gave up halfway, or slacked off with reviews generally think it is a bad idea, and it ain’t worth the time.
Isn’t it easy to see that it will most likely only be beneficial if you actually have enough time, and are devoted enough to complete it fully, and keep reviewing?
I mean this argument could go on lol. We will never agree, and we shouldn’t because you can’t both have done RTK and not have done RTK, so how can we not be biased??? lol
I will remain neutral and say it has benefited me in some ways, but in other ways maybe has taken a little too much time. But I tweaked the program heavily, and did it in my own way, so I actually can’t comment on RTK, but rather my own method of doing RTK. Didn’t read about it anywhere, just came up with it like 600 kanji in.missingno15: it means you can read this
Is this another attempt at getting people to look at idol stuff? There’s not exactly much reading to be done on that link.
Edit: Just saw your second post.
I think it’s good to share different methods, as people learn differently and there’s nothing that works for all people. But arguing that a method is a waste of time while ignoring all those that it worked well for, just comes across as arrogance and not intended to actually help (and that goes for people who see RTK as the one and only solution too).
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This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by
Interesting points everyone raises. I’m still learning Kanji here on TF but am looking into other methods. I took the plunge and signed up to the WaniKani alpha. Haven’t been on it much, but from what I’ve seen, it looks very impressive. Nice clear layout, lots of info, etc.
At the moment for me, It’s looking like a toss up between WaniKani and the core series on iKnow.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by
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