Update and Praise for Heisig’s RTK

So thanks to a much slower weekend then usual I’ve had lots of time to catch up and review putting my smart.fm studied count up to 600! Now that I’m done the first 3 steps I’m going to wait a bit before I move on to make sure that I get these items firmly set in my mind they’re not feeling too concretely set in my memory yet. This will also give me time to decide whether or not I’ll move on to just pronunciation in smart.fm after this.

As promised I will also elaborate on some of the impressions that Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji” (RTK) book has made on me and explain how they have changed my ways of thinking about my study.

So some quotes from the introduction:

“In a word it is hard to imagine a less efficient way of learning the reading and writing of the kanji than to study them simultaneously. And yet this is the method that all Japanese textbooks and courses follow. The bias is too deeply ingrained to be rooted out by anything but experience to the contrary.”

“I do not myself know of any teacher of Japanese who has attempted to use this book in a classroom setting. My suspicion is that they would soon abandon the idea. The book is based on the idea that the writing of the kanji can be also based on the idea that the pace of study is different from one individual to another, and for each individual, from one week to the next. Organizing study to the routines of group instruction runs counter to those ideas.”(this quote is seriously making me reconsider whether I want to take language classes while in Japan or not)

“The idea of “mastering” the kanji comes from overexposure to schooling, the notion that a language is a cluster of skills that can be divided and completed. No language can do this…” (this is a fault in thinking I make too often in life. I do it with sports, academics, hobb0ies. Although I think is is a flaw of logic, it can do wonders to provide motivation to meet a goal

“The best order for learning the kanji is by no means the best order for remembering them.” (that is the key aspect of smart.fm vs RTK1. one gives you more useful things right away, but at a cost of more work to remember them. RTK has me needing less reviews than smart.fm)

“Using kanji as primitives allow one to review known characters at the same time as learning new ones.”

“The meaning and writing, the two hardest part of kanji, separated from everything else.” (this seems to make sense to me)

The book also gives a great analogy about memorizing a kaleidoscope. If you just look for a long time and try to remember the image you are using visual memory, but the next time you pick one up and look you encounter a problem. Since it always looks so similar either you replace the previous image in memory or the two get mixed up. The solution the book offers is to use imaginative memory and make a story. you then don't remember the image but the story.

for example given this image:

you could imagine two wizards (one with a hat pointing up, the other with it pointing down) under a sun gazing into a crystal ball with rays coming out...

Now i bet you can remember this part of the image weeks after reading this (please leave comments if this is true).

"You shouldn't ask yourself why you forget some kanji, but instead ask why you remember the others and apply that technique to the others."

"If you are confusing one kanji with another… Take a careful look at the two stories. Perhaps you have made one or the other of them so vivid that it has attracted extraneous elements to itself that make the two kanji-images fuse into one. Or again, it may be that you did not pay sufficient attention to the advice about clarifying a single connotation for the key word."

Reply to my Jamaican feedback

This is a reply to the post jamaicanlearningjapanese made for me. Since I seem to making rather long posts I’m going to try do this point form

- bad episodes at the banks/ post offices/ illegible mail/ no conversations/ police paranoia? Hearing all that both terrifies and excites me at the same time. It’s going to be interesting time for sure.

- As stated in my previous post, I withdraw a lot of my claims about your methods. I now know the difference between Heisig and AJATT. I was making comments about AJATT not having pronunciation or use but it was really Heisig I was talking about. Also you WERE getting pronunciation and use through AJATT. You separated the writing and speaking using two methods. Now that I’ve had some more experience, I fully believe this to be the smartest way. I will likely do a similar system myself. I am thinking of switching to kanji only through RTK and keep going on smart.fm only using the romanji pronunciation only.

- Great point with the linguistic jargon like “dangling modifiers”. For any of our readers, be weary if any method you are using focuses on these.

- You make a good point. The fact that you are in Japan and I in Canada is no minor difference. AJATT makes a less sense for me here and now, I might consider jumping into it once I am over there.

- I cannot take in ONLY Japanese media as well. I’ll try and think of some things to send you that I have found and liked if you’ll do the same. (although I get the vibe our music tastes may vary a bit)

- It’s funny you mention the realization of 10,000 considering that’s how the Japanese count (ie: forty ten-thousand NOT four-hundred thousand). I was just remarking that it seemed odd to me since I felt that suki should have been one of the first things to learn due to its high use, but I now realize that view is short-sighted and is in fact the harder way in the end.

- Interesting to hear you say about needing to look up words you know. It makes a lot of sense now that I have seen that kanji, even on their own, have different meanings and pronunciations than the one keyword you learn (ie: I have been told 生has 22 pronunciations and almost as many meanings). Again this was due to ignorance on my part due to lack of experience, and nothings a better teacher than experience.

- Kotoba is one of many apps making me seriously consider getting an iPhone when I am out there.

- I agree with your statement. No matter what method you use, learning Japanese is not easy. (But as I’m sure we both agree it is not impossible. Anyone can do it if they want to)

- With my homer comment I wasn’t making an argument in favour of rote memorization, only that the story seemed unnecessarily abstract. However I’ve realized two things now.

1) The more abstract, the more you remember it (like you've said).

2)It’s only too abstract to me since we are different people, with different backgrounds and different ways of thinking. I was making stories just as abstract without realizing it. The difference was that I wasn’t doing it deliberately or systematically like you were (and I would pay for this later). This became clear to me when I was studying the world “world”界 and I had a mental image of atlas holding the world on his back. I also thought using the same object in many stories would make things confusing, but instead I have found it helps you review old kanji the same time you learn new ones! If anything my un-systematic use of objects and stories is more at risk of getting confused with each other. Although you still need to make sure you don’t start using inner objects as the meaning of a kanji, it can be overcome by focus. (ie: 真truth has me thinking of a guy using a needle as a tool, threatening to stab it in an eye unless the truth is told. I need to blow the importance of truth up in my mind to make sure I keep the right meaning. It takes longer but works great for me)

- my initial argument was “why bother learning poignant or rend? Instead focus on more useful words.” But now I realize how learning a few obscure words is well worth the little time and effort considering how much they help with the other useful kanji you learn later on in the Heisig method.

- The brain is a wonderful thing. Having worked a lot in computers and tech I’ve gained a better appreciation for how much more amazing it is then most people even realize.

- 15 year olds unable to read the newspaper sounds surprising. But Heisig makes some similar points about the inefficencies in the Japanese school system which I’ll bring up next post.

hmmm... Still seems pretty long. oh well

Long overdue update

So there have been some developments since my last post.

First, I'm now up to 535 items studied and 242 of them mastered for anyone following me on smart.fm! (and I've also done ~200 kanji in Heisig's RTK...but more on that below!)

Although this is pretty good progress, it’s hard to say if it is good enough to meet my goal by my initial deadline. I only say that because I have noticed a slow down of my pace on these new items and expect it to get even slower in the future. One reason being that the difficulty was a major step up in part 3 compared to parts 1 and 2. I guess this is why there are 33,334 users on level 1 and only 4,660 users on level 3. (and only 982 seemed to have made it to the end of the core 2000). Another reason being that I’ve started doing Heisig as well which cuts into my time.

Much more interesting news is the new discoveries/realizations I've made after reading the feedback given to me and through my struggles with these newer, harder words. I have some lengthy comments to make on the feedback but I’ll save those for my next post to keep this one shorter.

The feedback helped me realize that I my previous critiques were made with insufficient knowledge of what the AJATT method (and some others discussed) were about. In hindsight now I have come to realize that my critique was about the Heisig method, not AJATT. My opinions were directed at the concept of only learning single kanji and had nothing to do with the immersion aspect that AJATT preaches about. So feel free to go back to my previous post and replace AJATT with Heisig.

With that stated I will say that I think the AJATT method (basically increasing your Japanese input through heavy immersion) is a good idea, but it should still be done intelligently. The immersion should be at a level where you can pick out some items from of the media. If too much of it is beyond comprehension and goes over your head, the method becomes inefficient. The common argument is that kids learn their first language through immersion. However they watch kid shows where they don’t understand most of what’s going on, but they do get some. I don’t think kids would learn a language through immersion if they just watched documentaries. The immersion needs to be at/near the right level for you.

Another thing I will say is that my method and Heisig method should be reversed on my hill diagram from before. I will explain why below:

At the same time as I was starting to look into the other methods I began step 3 on smart.fm and experienced a lot of problems. One of the reasons for this was that I was didn’t consciously realize that a lot of the words in the previous lessons I had already either seen or heard so I only had to learn the other parts that I didn’t know. Having that little foot in the door took a great load off my mind and is what let me fly through the first two steps. When all of a sudden I had not seen any single kanji in a multiple kanji word and had no idea how to pronounce any part of it, each item became much harder for the mind to digest, like eating a hamburger in one bite. (hence why my method is the uphill battle).

I found I was forgetting these kanji more often than the previous lessons and that's when I realized my way just wouldn’t work. It would be so much easier to learn one kanji at a time, increasing difficulty instead of starting with ones that I can’t even make out the details at size 12 font (ie: 建設 construction, 機能 function, 状態 state/appearance)

So I read the preface/introduction of Heisig and a few other books from a website full of resources and RTK made a lot of sense! It even talked about the Japanese school system teaching in order of usefulness and how it is actually a bad technique for memorization. At this point I realized I really need to define WHY I’m learning the language. WHAT I want to use it for. HOW LONG I plan to study the language. Etc. It also helped me realize there is a difference in what is the best method to LEARN kanji and the best method to NOT FORGET kanji. Heisig also made a very good point about the difference of visual memory and imaginative memory which I will discuss more in my next post.

Although now I think the Heisig method is the SMARTEST way to learn the language, a lot of the words are obscure and will likely not get used often. Hence it is a longer but easier/smarter process to focus only on kanji meanings then switch gears later to application and pronunciation. (this is why it should have the gentle curvy path).

I would only do Heisig now if my goal was only to “one day learn the language” but I realize that a big part of my goal/desire is to be able to make friends and function in Japan as close to my arrival date as possible. And that starts in 2 months! Committing to Heisig, although the smarter way to go, will not give me the skills I need in time to use them so I’ve decided to do a hybrid system now. I alternate multiple times throughout the day on which method I study. So I feel better about my studies and have already noticed some benefits, but it is slowing me down so we'll see if I can still make that goal of 1000 items by Jan. Wish me luck!