I’ve done RTK and Textfugu as well.  I started RTK at around the end of Season 2, which is the earliest I would recommend. It’s helpful to have learned all the hirgana, katakana, and have some vocab/sentences going in Anki so that while you’re doing RTK your brain is getting adjusted to the “alphabets” and some words.

I started off doing RTK alongside lessons, but then halfway through focused solely on RTK so I could get it over with, but do what feels most comfortable and the most IMPORTANT thing is to ALWAYS do your reviews, and on top of that, don’t burn yourself out.

I still continued my Textfugu Kanji learning (as in kept doing reviews during RTK, and then continued with it afterwards, the kani+readings, not the mnemonics), as I found it didn’t interfere with RTK at all.  Most of the Kanji have the same or similar meaning so it’s not a difficult mental adjustment.  If anything, continue learning the readings from Textfugu as those are pretty helpful.

I would definitely get rid of the Radicals deck, and all future radical learning.  It gets really confusing as Textfugu and RTK’s radicals are completely different.  Once you finish with RTK, you will mostly know Textfugu’s kanji, and in the event that there is a new one, you will be a mnemonic boss so can make up your own in the odd case.

This website will make your life much much easier.  The stories in RTK are boring most of the time, many of the stories here will stick with you for life (even when you don’t need them anymore).  You can download an ordered RTK deck in Anki, and release the suspended cards as you go through the book.  Add the stories off the website (or your own), to the back of the cards.

http://kanji.koohii.com/

RTK is not for everyone (nor is any method), but I’d say it was one of the most important things I did in my learning, as my brain was just not coping with kanji at that point.

Baccano, Welcome to what I’ve been telling everyone who asks “How does I learn za Kanji?” and every time without fail they won’t listen, won’t write and wow look at that you either quit Japanese or have spent 6 months learning nothing.

And people still ask why I’m so sarcastic/rude to the Japanese-learning community.

My bad, I don’t mean solely writing. But a lot of other advice as well. Writing is predominate though.

Also no, I seem to have a really low tolerance for stupid shit everywhere :)

I stopped writing kanji because I saw no benefit, my recognition is pretty fine without doing that. I’m going to take the writing of kanji more seriously when I start university but until then it’s too big of a timesink, grammar and vocab are more important when you can only spend so much time on Japanese.

Your definitely right about the amount of time it takes i’ve decided on learing 20 day and to review my anki deck with the added 20 it’s taking me one and a half hours, plus I’m finding it’s harder to remember vocab. but I’m seeing an improvement so it’s worth it.

I also wanna point out I don’t think it’s just the act of writing it out that is helpful but actually forcing yourself to recall just from the meaning. If you can just see the kanji in your head that’d also be helpful. Basically I don’t think mindlessly writing out kanji over and over is really of much benefit.

I did TextFugu Season 1 and then started RTK. After the 7 months I spent on RTK, I tried to get back in to TextFugu and, for me, it is too confusing to go through the kanji with another system.

I have somewhat of given up on TextFugu for now and use Anki for sentences and other options for grammar.

I have no idea if things would have gone better had I just stayed with TF. There was no WaniKani option at that tme either.

Now 1650 of 2200 Kanji through RtK (writing each time I review). Absolutely glad I’m doing it, would recommend it to anyone.

And… that’s all I got. xD

@ the initial question

10 years ago