I’m going through Genki right now and was looking into getting Kklc but I’m not sure if kklc is best. I’ve heard lots of good and bad with RTK and wanted to know what it was like going through it and dealing with kanji vocab after it and if it is overall worth it.
4 comments
Use KKLC and not RTK.
RTK is trash in my opinion.
But to be fair for some people it works like wonders
RTK worked for me. The keywords will eventually change into concepts and Japanese words without you even noticing it. Just make sure you study vocabulary while doing RTK. But to be honest, I see RTK more fit for those who want to follow a more intensive route. RTK + Tango N5/N4 Anki decks + Cure Dolly/Tae Kim and then straight to native content while looking up unknown grammar points and vocab is my suggestion.
It’s different things. Kanji is kanji, vocabulary is vocabulary. What I mean is that we basically have words and each word has specific pronunciation and is written in specific way. Because there are only 2-3k most common kanji, but ~30-40k common words, each kanji appears in tens of different words and usually it’s not random, but used for specific reason, so if we group such words, we usually can trace some common trait.
RTK and similar approaches aim to learn how kanji looks and use such common traits for the meaning. It’s usually the reason why some people don’t like it, because you don’t really have any practical impact. For example, if you see 水着, which combines 水 (water) and 着 (cloth), you can’t say for sure what exactly it is. It might be diving suit, it might be swimsuit and so on. But we can’t say that such common traits are useless either, because if you know that みずぎ is a swimsuit and it’s written as 水着, it makes sense, because what else we would use if not water and cloth components?
Whether you learn kanji via vocabulary (i.e. learning words with kanji in them), or you take the time to study kanji in isolation, you should eventually arrive at the same place. Which route is harder for you depends on your individual abilities and proclivities.
My advice is to learn through vocab (as you’ll need to know words ultimately anyway – the language consists of words, not kanji), but supplement that with something like RTK. See how you get on. If it feels too slow or too much work, then drop the RTK. A good vocabulary is worth more to a beginner.