eBay or Amazon Japan (bluetooth or 2.4Ghz) would be a good starting place.

But, be forwarded of potential issue(s) with Windows.

I’m tempted to to buy one of those keyboards…but it may not actually be that much more efficient (past the learning curve). For example, by the looks of it, it’s two strokes to type any letter that uses han/dakuten which is the same for typing the letter using romaji. Also, notice  the letters up there with the number keys which adds an interesting dynamic.

Anyone have any experience using a jp keyboard on an English system? Is it an overall plus?

If you’re a beginner, I’m not sure you would want to use RTK. I’m not too familiar with it, but I believe you learn kanji starting with lowest strokes and move up. That means you’re going to learn low-stroke kanji that you probably won’t be using in every-day language. I mean, how often are you going to use 硝 in daily conversation? Unless that word has something to do with your job, you’re probably not going to use it. Yet, that’s the 115th kanji you’ll learn with RTK.

Personally, my primary goal is to communicate with people, secondary is learning kanji. So I study the iKnow Core series and pick up kanji along the way. According to this, only 1648 unique kanji are in the Core 6000. There’s over 3000 in RTK, that means you’re learning over 1000 kanji more than you need to start talking with people.

If you wanted to focus on Kanji, I would probably pick that list of 1648 from the iKnow series and learn it the Textfugu way.

However, what is really helping me a lot with kanji (and I wish I would’ve found it earlier) is Tagaini Jisho. When studying in iKnow, I’ll pause and look up the kanji and then break them down into their radicals, etc.

*edit, updated RTK kanji as previous example was inaccurate.
*more edit…..somehow this post teleported to a completely different thread

• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  lowercasej.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  lowercasej.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  lowercasej.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  lowercasej.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  lowercasej.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  lowercasej.

Yeah I agree Elenkis, that’s where having crowd-sourced mnemonics would be great.

To add even more value, you could take the dictionary even further and create mnemonics for groups of words that are similar, but difficult to distinguish (incl. transitive vs intransitive, etc).
起こす, 起こし, 起こる, 起こり for example.