I’m at 1680+ kanji in RTK (5\~20 cards per day depending on my mood). At first, I was very excited and really into it, never missing anything. And I’ve started to see the benefits, identifying and distinguishing kanji with no problem (and still do). The problem started at 1200-ish kanji, I noticed I began to rush through some cards, it didn’t always happened but when it did I often took some time to fix it and go on. This is happening because it’s getting quite boring for me, and I’m considering in abandoning it and just focus on learning the rest through immersion like I’m doing right now.
Don’t get me wrong, RTK is cool af and greatly helped me and was certainly worth my time, however It seems to me it’s enough the baggage I got from it. I thinking in just sticking with sentence mining, manga, anime and news reading.
I just made this post just to get some different viewpoints. So, what would y’all do in this situation? Keep with RTK until at least reaching 2600+ or moving on with only 1680+ kanji and sticking with learning the rest through encountering it from immersion?
8 comments
Out of the ~3,000 kanji from RTK1+3 I thought it was:
– very useful for the top 500 most frequent, if only to introduce you to the general methodology
– useful for the 501-1000 most frequent kanji, assuming you like the methodology
– less useful for the 1001-1500 most frequent kanji, because many keywords were poorly chosen
– pretty much useless for the 1501-2000 most frequent kanji, because many of the keywords were *really* poorly chosen and you won’t see words containing those kanji for a very long time anyway
That’s when I stopped and frankly too late. I recommend people do the most frequent 500 first, the next 500 in case they like it, and then probably most people should stop there.
I think you’re gut is absolutely right here. Learning kanji in isolation is mostly training wheels for beginners and is super useful for people who are intimidated by Japanese at the start. If you’re bored then it’s a good sign that you can probably just learn vocabulary as a whole instead of doing kanji by itself.
I would suggest to fight through it, up the daily new kanji to around 50 and be done with RTK2 in two weeks, then get some rest while only doing reviews and then continue picking up new ways of learning.
RTK is great, but I think doing only 5-20 a day is to few and will inevitably lead to boredom. It’s something that you should power through as fast as possible.
RTK has some rough sections later in the book.
Agreed with others that some English keywords are lousy. Others are obscure or difficult to differentiate. The Koohii stories helped me a lot with the stories but not the keywords.
You might scan the remaining 500 kanji for high-frequency kanji and just learn those. Not necessary as you know the system, but after all the effort you have made this far, it would be a nice way to close down that stage of your study.
If you’re bored, you’ll stop learning. Move on.
I quit RTK 1 at 1700 kanji and feel like I got what I needed out of it. I’ve forgotten pretty much all the mnemonics but I’ve retained stroke order and the ability to pick apart kanji into their constituent parts and that in and of itself is IMMENSELY useful.
I just started the book, I’m at chapter 3. So far I’m finding it really helpful but it seems to me if you don’t get much benefit from it anymore then just move on to something else, no point going through the rest if it’s not helping. I do have a minor grievance, Why doesn’t he include the readings for the kanji? It’s frustrating having to look every kanji up in a dictionary for readings to add to my cards.
I went from using the method to just using the deck to write them through rote memorization. Try that perhaps