Hi everyone! This is the first post I make on this subreddit that I’ve been reading for a month now. Since finding objective information here is rather complex, I want to ask for advice for my study of Japanese (assuming that I have just started).
I was wondering, after reading the numerous opinions on which method is more efficient to study kanji, I would have decided to learn them with RTK (I tried WaniKani but it is not for me, I tried to learn kanji in context but I noticed that I’m not very efficient with this method).
My question, therefore, is: in your opinion, not in a hurry to finish right away, is it more useful to approach RTK or RRTK? I admit that I don’t mind writing kanji, but having no way to write them, I think after a while I would end up forgetting how to write them (imo). So, are there more benefits following RTK or RRTK (considering I don’t want to rush and learn all the kanji in two days)?
Thanks a lot to everyone!
3 comments
Rtk isn’t bad at all but tbh learning kanji with vocab will kill two birds with one stone. You’ll get both readings and the readings that makes up that kanji. This is just my personal opinion
I learned my first ~1100 kanji with RTK and the following ~1100 with RRTK and in hindsight I would do them all with RRTK (in fact, I would probably stop completely after the most frequent 1000-1500 kanji). I did not think that the extra work of doing RTK over RRTK was worth the benefit of remembering them a little better. Don’t forget that both are only a temporary stepping stone for learning actual vocab and you are expected to eventually forget most of the mnemonics again anyway. I would only recommend doing RTK if you *definitely* want to be able to write kanji later. And yes, you will forget how to do that again if you don’t do it regularly.
Learning how to write kanji makes it a lot easier to break them down into different parts, instead of looking at it like a picture. This helps a lot with learning new kanji, visualizing them in your head, and especially differentiating kanji that look similar. But I don’t think it’s necessary to learn more than a few hundred of them, unless you see yourself needing handwriting skills in the future.