Home Forums Tips, Hacks, & Ideas For Learning Japanese TextFugu vs. RTK for learning Kanji?

This topic contains 55 replies, has 16 voices, and was last updated by  MisterM2402 [Michael] 12 years, 10 months ago.

Viewing 15 posts - 31 through 45 (of 56 total)
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  • #23045

    Guess you are right, but I was just about to write the exact same thing in English so I decided to just go ahead and copy pasta my journal from earlier, saving me some work in the progress(though not much to be honest). I know you always read my entries(for the lolz) so I had expected you commenting on it, and so you did haha.
    If you shouldn’t use Japanese when you know little, when do you consider it being appropriate?… Also you can’t call this using Japanese, it is just taking sentences I have written earlier, get them corrected, add some new stuff and then post them ;P

    #23049

    Luke
    Member

    I’ll try it a bit longer, I guess it will be really good when I do finish it. I just don’t like feeling that I’m not making much progress!

    #23052

    I don’t know how far you are in the book, but I should hit 1000 by today, and I can tell a difference compared to before when I hadn’t done the book. I recognize a ton of kanji, and because I have already done hiragana vocab there are some kanji that I can just associate with a kanji right a way, without learning what hiragana to attach since there isn’t any. This is only with nouns though 車、猫、魚、男 etc.
    Also kanji.koohi.com is a great resource for stories – but you most likely already know that one :P Heisig sucks at stories, so I would recommend to take a look at the community’s stories right from the beginning.
    Adding stories to the front of your cards will also make it way less frustrating when reviewing. Read page 43 if you doubt it is alright :P  

    #23054

    @Yggbert: It’s more the kanji that increase in complexity than the stories. It’s the number of radicals that indicate how “complex” a story will probably need to be, and a lot of kanji don’t seem to have all that many radicals. There *are* a couple of behemoth kanji that have really long stories, but I found I remembered them just from their uniqueness than actually having to remember the story haha.

    And yup, the people at kanji.koohii.com are better at writing stories than Heisig, but you should still read the book for his commentary and advice and whatnot. I stuck with his stories for quite a while, and they were mostly ok; I just found the ones at koohii to be more interesting, that’s all.

    #23055

    Hatt0ri
    Member

    A question for those who are done with RTK: do you delete a kanji from RTK Anki deck when you learn the same kanji as a part of vocab in another deck?

    #23059

    @Hattori: Nah, just keep doing them. Covering a vocab word somewhere else doesn’t guarantee that you know how to write that kanji, which is the point of RTK. Say you learned 優 and the next day you learned the word 優しい, it wouldn’t really make sense to delete the RTK card.

    #23063

    Luke
    Member

    Hmm ok, I will stick with it. It does seem to be working, hopefully I will hit a point where I feel I’m making a lot of progress soon, I’m almost at 200 kanji now. I’m thinking of doing around 50-100 a day, I’ll see how well I get on. I might do 100 and just stop doing anything else until I finish the book, I’ll still do Anki reviews but may give Lang-8 and the rest of TextFugu a break just to get through this.

    #23073

    Anden
    Member

    I started 100 a day, but the reviews became enormous and long. I’d be wary about 100; I’m not saying don’t do it, but you may be prone to the burn-out much easier when your reviews could take possibly up to three hours or more every day. Eventually I went down to 50, then 20, then ten after around 1200 as the reviews were really killer.

    #23074

    Hatt0ri
    Member

    @ Mister: I’m definitely deleting them, I was just wondering if someone else did it. Maybe I’m overseeing something, but since my vocab reviews include writing down kanji, it should be the same… Also, now I’m curious as to how long will it take me to completely delete the RTK deck :)) So far I have 386 unique kanji in my vocab deck.

    #23083

    @Hattori: Ok, I don’t really get that method XD If you are just going to delete the card after what could be only a day of seeing it, why are you even bothering with RTK in the first place? What good will it do if you just give up looking at the cards altogether? You may as well just ditch RTK and keep on learning kanji through vocab.

    @Yggbert: Unless you’ve REALLY got nothing better to do, don’t do 100 per day XD The reviews get too much even after a few days. I had to drastically reduce them because it just got horrible. That was when I’d stopped doing everything and did only RTK, and while I was unemployed and in the house all day, so I had plenty of time but it just didn’t work haha. Everyone has different limits, of course, but by the end I think I was doing anything from 30-60/day, which was still quite a lot.
    Keep doing Anki, but TextFugu isn’t going ANYWHERE fast, so it’s not like there is anything to “give up” XD

    #23087

    Luke
    Member

    That is true, should probably stop rushing, don’t even know why I am trying to rush everything. It’s years before I’ll finish university anyway lol.
    Sort of feels like I just want to finish RTK to get to the ‘good stuff’, the good stuff being learning more grammar and kanji compounds. I think Read the Kanji will be insanely good when I finish RTK though, my one problem with that site is it teaches you compounds 90% of the time, which makes it quite difficult to learn kanji on their own, since you often have to learn 2, or maybe even 3 kanji per card.

    #23102

    @Yggbert: Yeah, it feels good once you’re done and on to the “good stuff”, but it just gets overwhelming if you rush through it too fast.

    #23111

    Hatt0ri
    Member

    @ Mister: Method is quite simple – learn the kanji with RTK, review it through vocab. I finished RTK in September, I won’t delete any kanji I learned just “yesterday”. I wouldn’t be doing this if I were still going through RTK, that’s why I asked a question “for those who are done with RTK”. But with time everyone has to be able to write down kanji from vocab and not from keyword, so it’s better to start practicing that sooner than later.

    #23174

    @Hattori: Oh, I thought when you said “for those who are done with RTK” you meant “This is a question directed at those who have done RTK”, with the feeling that you were asking what we did while we were in the middle of RTK. Sorry haha. So yeah, that seems fine – I haven’t been doing it, even though I probably should have. Saying that, I did suspend my whole kanji->keyword Anki deck just yesterday; I think maybe only suspending the cards for which I know vocab would have been a better idea, even though I still do review on koohii as well. For the longest time, I was going through Core 2000 without writing them down as I answered them, which also seems kinda stupid XD; it takes much much longer to do the reviews each day, but it’s a much better way of doing things.

    #23232

    Luke
    Member

    Well it has been a few days and I’m more positive on RTK now, I am retaining these meanings better, doesn’t seem as daunting either. I asked the designers of Read the Kanji if they will be adding a way to learn kanji on their own instead of compounds and they told me they’ll look into it, if they had that implemented before I’d definitely be using that instead, but hey RTK isn’t all that bad so I’m happy to keep at it.

    I just need to figure out how to split my time between RTK and doing other stuff, I always do my reviews on Koohii and Anki, but I do need to finish off TextFugu as well. I meant to do that after I finished the ultimate lists. I’m doing around 1 lesson a day on RTK now, this can be a bit dumb because some lessons are really long and others really short, I’ll probably settle at 30-50 kanji a day to keep the reviews somewhat manageable, I have around 1600 left to learn I would estimate so it shouldn’t take me that long to finish. It can’t come fast enough!

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