Hello,
I have started to learn Kanji with Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji because it had many recommendations online. My goal was to learn the words after I know the character’s rough meanings. Recently, I came across a comment on this subreddit about how Heisig’s keywords are optimized for writing the Kanji, and if you just want to read, then it’s better to use something like the Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course (with their reading exercise books used in addition).
Since my goal is mostly reading, I have since been unsure if I’m been wasting time learning the Kanjis the RTK way without their readings and vocab. I like the way of breaking the characters down into components and remembering them with mnemonics, but maybe not learning the readings at the same time makes it harder in the end.
Am I adding an unnecessary step?
1 comment
Definitely drop RTK in favour of KKLC unless you still can’t tell similar kanji apart.
You’ll do quite a bit of backtracking to learn real meanings dependent on vocabulary and possibly unlearning inaccurate and misleading keywords from RTK, so while there’s more information to take in from KKLC, it tends to be more accurate.