Where my RTK+Kanji koohii brothers and sisters at?

14 comments

1. I did RRTK and transitioned into a mix of JLPT and N5.
   I already had knowledge of grammar pre-RRTK

   I’ll be moving to self-sentence mining after N4 probably.

   RTK isn’t ancient- it’s just a method that isn’t necessary and in some cases not recommended.

   It is meant to strictly help make Kanji look less like scribbles and more like radicals formed into words. Also helps teach proper stroke order.

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3. Nice work! I was using this method too and making a lot of progress until I got bogged down in the 600s. I started finding it challenging to do my SRS reviews in addition to adding/studying new kanji. I was using Kanji Ryokucha on my iPhone for drawing kanji during flashcard drills and found it very helpful. Good luck finishing off RTK! I hope to join you at some point 🙂

4. I’m doing it right now! I do have rtk 2 and 3 too and even tho some people say they are useless, I think they are quite good
   2nd volume is focused on RTK1 kanji’s readings. I would recommend buying it as an ebook on amazon because it’s quite cheap.
   RTK3 is advanced-kanji (not 常用漢字).

5. Yeah, I did this combo early on and what it taught me came in massively handy over the following years of study. I wrote down the kanji as I recalled them, and it left me with a notebook full of densely-packed kanji that kind of scares any Japanese people I show it to.

6. I did RTK once, and it definitely wasn’t for me. It was *very* dry, and sometimes I’d feel like there wasn’t much progress or motivation at all to continue. I got to the 400th kanji or something before I quit everything altogether because I couldn’t stand how boring my studying sessions was.

   Fast forward 2 years, and now I’m currently learning Japanese again using my own method. It mainly consists of a anki mining loop: Mine new vocab cards everyday using Yomichan and native materials (VNs, movies, Immersionkit), review old cards, rinse and repeat. I’ve learned about 600 vocab cards and 500 kanjis in around 4 months. This may not seem like a lot, but I also incorporate learning grammar into my mining sessions (I like understanding what I put into my Anki deck).

   This method works for me because 1. I know the readings of the words I learn, which I can recall whenever I read VNs or watch anime, 2. I can understand more grammar and sentence structures because I read a lot whenever I mine new cards, and 3. (Most importantly) It’s a lot more fun to have the freedom to be able to learn what you want to learn (as opposed to having to follow a learning order in RTK).

7. I use koohii to get stories

   I didn’t use RTK really though. I tried KKLC but I didn’t like it at the time.

8. I liked the RTK book. It was a shame the koohii site shut down; you can still access the old forums at [archive.org](https://archive.org); that is a gold mine of sources and ideas.

   Heisig provides a free PDF of the introduction and chapter 2; I think that is worth a quick read.

   https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2012/12/RK2-4th-Sample.pdf

   Rather than use RTK2, I think it time to dive into a Kanji vocab book to learn words and their pronunciations (I strongly recommend you find a source with example sentences for each Japanese vocab word, rather than just a one-word english translation).

   For kanji and vocab, it flashcards (paper or SRS) are popular. For SRS software Anki is most popular but SuperMemo has a more advanced algorithm. Regardless, this article might help you:

   https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm

9. I’m at 400, taking a break because I’ve skipped the reviews a few times and now a lot of cards have accumulated in my Anki deck, which I can’t remember (I keep confusing the ones with arrow, quiver, fiesta, parade and march).

10. I liked doing RRTK along w/ a good Core2k deck. I paced the Kanji much quicker than the vocab. I liked this approach as it helped my vocab learning significantly, making it much easier to remember/recognize the kanji in my new vocab words. For anything i’d already learned in my RRTK deck, i already knew the rough meaning of the word and just had to learn the reading and specific context of the word (intransitive vs. intransitive vs. some other similar nuanced version of the word).

    Before doing this, new vocab words were really hard for me to remember as i was faced w/ the task of learning: recognizing the kanji, what it means, how to read it, and it’s meaning in the context of the sentence. Now multiply that by however many new vocab words you are learning per day, and you can see how that might be slow/frustrating.

    I found that the core2k deck followed fairly nicely w/ the RRTK 1250 deck. I was doing 20 new kanji per day and 5-10 new vocab per day. If i ran into a new vocab word w/ a kanji i hadn’t seen yet, i’d first check the RRTK deck using the card browser, and if it didn’t exist there (rarely happens early on), i’d look it up on google “kanji + mnemonic” which would usually get me either a Heisig or WaniKani mnemonic to help me remember/learn it.

11. Kanji koohii was a great resource when I was doing RTK, some of the stories were hilarious and the weirder ones made it easier for me to remember it.

12. Ok makes sense, thanks! Yeah reading is important to me, so I’m happy to crunch them out. Plus it helps I just enjoy writing kanji and appreciating the beauty of the written language. Bonus if I ever want to learn Chinese one day too.

13. I manage to pass the n2 after 1 year and a half of learning, I started after few months of learning to do rtk and tbh it helped a lot but not how you think it does.

    For me rtk helped me a lot with the motivation. Doing anki with rtk was fun and helped me being more familiar with kanjis. When I met the kanjis again and I learnt the true meaning with the reading it felt very very satisfying. It was like finishing a puzzle where you had the pieces bit it didn’t blend together until that moment.

    So imo if you have fun doing it then keep going because you will get more familiar with the kanjis but it isn’t going to do much if you aren’t using the knowledge you gain.

    At the end of the day one of the most important thing in learning a new language is the motivation. It is a marathon not a sprint.

14. I’ll comment here now that it has dropped off the top page.

    Use RTK to learn the alphabet. Don’t use Anki when you are doing it. If you are forgetting Kanji, then you did not use a story that was violent/sexual/offensive enough to remember the Kanji in one go.

    RTK is good for one thing, and one thing only: learning the 2000+ character alphabet that Japanese is written in a short enough time to make learning the language possible in the native script. It gives you rough glosses, and no readings. It also, if you pay attention, reforms the usual brute force attempts to learn new things into systematize mnemonic based learning.

    One of the reasons why it is seen as necessary in the Chinese learning community is because Japanese natives teaching the language are teaching student that Kanji is somehow not basic to how Japanese is written. Chinese teachers laugh at students who do not learn the characters, and Japanese teachers do not, though they should.

    Japanese is written in Kanji, and the language in its entirety is based around that. It is, in that sense just like Chinese, it’s just that Chinese does not have kana, and Japanese does.

    Take no more than a month or so to get through it, and stop looking to others to get things done, as you have mentioned doing so in other comments in this post.

    It really only makes sense once you have remembered 2000 Kanji to understand how things fit together, and readings are one of those things. Use English keywords, don’t use Anki, shoot for 50+ a day by making sure your stories are better chosen to be more shocking sexual and violent offensive.

    It is a one trick pony, but that one trick she’s a beaut. Get done with it as fast as possible and never look back.