Should I start RTK if I already have a lot of kanji experience?

8 comments

1. No. Pick up a book, magazine, or newspaper and do it the hard way. Easier, more fun , more relevant, and cheaper too.

2. I’m in a similar boat: I’m around N3, I know a lot of kanji, and now I want to focus on working through the ~3000 most common vocab. Therefore, I want to focus on the kanji used most often in those vocab, so I don’t want to restart in RtK order (or anyone else’s order), which doesn’t take into account frequency.

   IMO, mnemonics really are the way to go. I don’t know how you’d consistently differentiate very similar kanji in the long run, like 惑 vs 感, without them. And breaking things down into radicals, like 其 (chess piece) for 期, really speeds up both learning and reading speed for me. With a good mnemonic, reinforced with reading, I almost never forget a kanji, and when I do I can relearn it almost immediately.

   With that being said, you don’t have to use vanilla RtK. There are sites like Kanji Damage ([http://www.kanjidamage.com/](http://www.kanjidamage.com/)) or Wanikani ([https://www.wanikani.com/](https://www.wanikani.com/)) that work too.

   There’s a site I prefer called Kanji Koohii ([https://kanji.koohii.com/](https://kanji.koohii.com/)), which is basically a wikified version of RtK. Users suggest stories, and even alternate radicals, some of which are *way* better than what Heisig came up with.

   So I make my own mnemonics, in my own order, but I always check Kanji Koohii for good story ideas and good radical ideas. Here’s what I do, and what you might try:

   * Start by looking up the kanji on something like Jisho or Kanshudo. See what most common words it appears in, so you understand the ‘flavour’ of the kanji.
   * Ignore Heisig’s keyword (or Wanikani’s or Kanji Damage’s) if it doesn’t quite fit. Sometimes people have a better suggested keyword on Kanji Koohii, yay. Sometimes not, so I just come up with my own.
   * I don’t do the ‘one word per kanji’ nonsense that all the sites seem to prefer. So for something like 段, I ignore ‘grade (RtK)’ or ‘step’ (KD) and use ‘Stairs, Vertical Level’ in my Anki deck. Some get long, like 験 for me is ‘Verify, Test, Experience’, because it has a few ‘flavours’.
   * Then I look up stories and radical suggestions on Kanji Koohii, and less often on WK or KD. A lot of times, they have good ones, or they spark ideas for my own stories.
   * I *really* like Kanshudo’s component search for coming up with good radicals. For instance, [https://www.kanshudo.com/searchcg?q=%E5%85%B6](https://www.kanshudo.com/searchcg?q=%E5%85%B6) or [https://www.kanshudo.com/searchcg?q=%E3%91%92](https://www.kanshudo.com/searchcg?q=%E3%91%92). The latter is how I decided on the keyword ‘risk’ for 㑒, because it makes sense with all the kanji associated with 㑒.

   I’ve been doing this for months, and have gotten through 225 new kanji so far. I do 4-6 kanji per day, and it takes me around 30-45 minutes to come up with good mnemonics, but then the flashcards are easy, and I actually have a 95% SRS retention rate for new kanji and 97% for mature kanji (which is *really* good). That’s around 20 minutes total studying per kanji, even including SRS reviews!

3. I did RTK with Anki around a similar level. Full N3, 500~600 kanji. I’d learned to recognize those kanji by writing them thousands of times but the writing never really stuck. I’d maxed out my ability to learn kanji by rote, and because of that my ability to learn vocab had hit a wall too.

   RTK was incredibly helpful for me. I did the book in a year and it really helped me learn to tell the kanji apart, and let me get on with vocabulary and reading. However, because I already had a vocabulary of thousands of Japanese words, I customized my Anki deck to take advantage of that.

   I did the first couple of hundred kanji the standard way but discovered that only using English keywords caused me to make a lot of stupid mistakes for kanji I could actually read in context, and it was also preventing me from linking kanji to words I already knew.

   For example, 好 has the keyword “fond.” Asking that by itself is how you get an N3 student to fail the question for a kanji they can read in their sleep. I changed my keyword card to read:
   fond すき、このむ、コウ
   and then I always knew what kanji it was asking for.

   Each of my keyword questions looks like that. I’d also skim down the vocab list to see if it was in any words or names I already knew well, and if so I’d often work them into my mnemonic. It only took a little extra time, and it let me have immediate use of the kanji I was learning.

4. I wouldn’t recommend doing it even if you had no familiarity with Kanji whatsoever.

5. Absolutely not.

   I don’t even need to read beyond the title to tell you that’s a horrible idea.

   RTK is dysfunctional even for beginners because it doesn’t teach readings, the concept of having multiple meanings, or a way of learning writing that isn’t *glacial*.

   The end result is that you can’t read anything using it, you’re misinformed into thinking you know the meaning when at best you know *a* meaning (sans nuance), and using the method over an extended period of time means you’ll be taking 10x longer to learn kanji compared to even rote memorisation, meaning you’ll never accomplish the pace required to match fluent speakers.

   It *maybe* has *limited* use for *absolute* beginners, but as soon as you’re comfortable with kanji I would drop it like a hot potato.

6. I think if you’re able to look at a kanji and deconstruct it into its individual parts, or “spell it”, so to speak, there’s no need to go through RTK.

7. Here’s your choice: know about 2500 Kanji in a month, or not.

   Still got to read and study afterwards, but in a month you could never have to worry about Kanji again.

   RTK (the book, not some random thing someone did on the internet), Kanji.koohii.com+ one month of concentrated effort.

   Done with Kanji for life. Or not do it, and come back in a month asking how to learn Kanji again.

8. I never liked the premise of RTK but mnemonics are no bad thing at any stage. The mnemonic isn’t required after you’ve learnt the kanji so any you already know can just be ignored or marked easy with no further study if you’re doing Anki. New kanji can be learnt with a mnemonic. I’d recommend Wanikani or similar deck in Anki rather than RTK though.