Well yesterday after not doing my RTK reviews for going on over a week I've decided to call it quits with reviewing RTK Kanji they were starting to bore me, I feel like I know less of the English meanings and how to write them from the English keyword than I did when I finished learning the kanji many months ago and as they say when you get bored of something in your target language its best to throw it out rather than sacrifice your interest. Not to mention it was taking up a lot of real world sentence mining and immersion time.
Now some people might say that this is a bad idea that I wont be able to write the kanji from memory and so on but I think a disagree yeah maybe if you said to me write the kanji for "table" for example I might not be able to write it off the top of my head but I sure can read it in Japanese if its in front of me.
For many weeks now my English to kanji recognition has been getting worse and I think its down to the fact that my Japanese ability is starting to take over I've lost interest on retaining the english to keyword recognition and prefer to know the Japanese readings even if it sacrifices some of my ability to write from memory.
Personally I'm going to be going completely for recognition I want to be able to read and understand Japanese before I can actually speak and write it and when I do finally go back to learning to write I'll probably give the movie method a try, as by then I will already know the readings for all the kanji that I will need to know it will just be a case of internalizing them into written practice.
I'm not saying that I regret doing RTK on the contrary I think without it I wouldn't learn the readings so easily it has given me the ability to recognize the difference between kanji and to not fear them just because there's a lot of them who cares if you need to know over 2000 when you think about it its not that large a number, I bet many of us know over 2000 pieces of information on our favourite hobby for example but we don't go crying about how much there is to learn and why? because we just enjoy it and don't worry about when we will master what ever it is, it just happens.
Comments (5)
"best to throw it out rather than sacrifice your interest"
Couldn't agree more. Something not falling into place, just throw it aside and spend your time doing other things. In the time you would have wasted on doing what you couldn't do, you can instead do 10 other things and by the time you come back to it, it may fall into place without any problems.
Yo, I did it too, about 2 months after finishing RTK. I don't regret it. I don't think I will.
I wonder whether it might be worthwhile to make a new RTK review system where the goal isn't to write a kanji by hand but to type it by IME. Typing it would require knowing a word it's used in, or at least one of its readings. And it would more accurately reflect how real Japanese people today "write" kanji.
That does sound like a good idea as people can always advance onto writing by hand once they have learned the readings and how to type them on the comp
This is actually one of the reasons I wrote readthekanji.com, I just really wanted to focus on reading and actually understanding the words in the context. It was just easier for me to learn writing after I already had a base of what they looked like in my head.
I feel like many people tout RTK as the absolute best system for kanji, but I think people just need to try lots of different methods, not just one. They are all beneficial in their own unique ways, and this leads to a nice well-rounded study.