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.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 6 months ago by  Elenkis.

I recommend iKnow, but as Mark says everyone is different. You can try it out for free and see how you like it.

The reason I like it has nothing to do with “flashy things” and everything to do with the method it uses for teaching words. I simply find the way it has you learn and review words in a variety of different ways each session is more effective at getting a word stuck into my memory.

Most people I’ve seen recommend Aedict seem to be unaware of JED. Personally I find Aedict is slower to search and doesn’t have the export functionality of JED, which is pretty much the only thing I’d ever use an edict based dictionary for anymore.

Something I like about JED is that you can tag a bunch of words and then export them as an Anki deck. So if I come across some new words I want to drill into my head, I’ll tag them and export. Then I can open up AnkiDroid and the new deck will be there for me to study.

When you feel ready to make use of a better J-E dictionary you should consider getting the Kenkyusha 5th edition in EPWING format, then use it with the EBPocket Pro app on your Android phone. Expensive but superior to any other J-E dictionary you’ll find, and still cheaper than buying a denshi jisho with the same dictionary would be.

I think the core iKnow app and system is much better than the old smart.fm, and that’s what I care about most. I find that it has become a more effective tool for learning vocab, and for me, that is worth paying for.

If it’s content created by other users that interests you, then I can see why you would be disappointed. But most of the user created courses in smart.fm were really quite poor and got little use (and I created and shared some courses myself).

Tom, I did RTK at the same time as going through textbooks and learning grammar. RTK alone would probably have got boring for me.

I just didn’t focus much on vocab until after I was done with RTK.

Fish legs/fins is a radical that appears at the bottom of a kanji.

Volcano is in fact the kanji for the number 8 – はち. I don’t even know why Koichi teaches it as a radical.