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I’ve been making my way through Remembering the Kanji 1, which I’m sure most, if not all of you, are familiar with. The book pretty much says you should go through the kanji in the order that they give in the book and just focus on keyword and how to at least recognize the kanji and worry about the reading later. Because I’m going through the book I’ve been ignoring the Kanji section of Textfugu for the time being since I didn’t want to confuse things by combining the two. Is this the right or wrong way to go about it? Just wanted the opinions of my せんぱい.
-sumimasen
P.S. Just wanted to mention a book I got recently and though others might enjoy, A Geek In Japan by Hector Garcia. Very fun and informative so far.
I don’t know much about Remembering the Kanji, but textfugu is a different approach to learning Kanji. It’s more about learning radicals which are like letters/puzzle pieces that build a Kanji. But as for Remember the Kanji I may get it at one point but not any time soon, textfugu’s pacing is actually good for me.
As for “A Geek in Japan” I read a review saying it’s a biased opinion and makes the Japanese look like bad people.
The Remembering the Kanji method is similar. You learn primitives that you put together to make more complicated Kanji and you can use stories to help you remember how they are put together. The kanji are introduced in a certain order so that the kanji you learn build on one another. I like going to http://kanji.koohii.com to look up stories that other users have come up with, so sometimes I find one on there that works better for me than what is in the book.
As for “A Geek in Japan”, all the reviews I had seen were all very good, however I’ve only just started reading it. So far all I’ve seen is the author’s love and respect for the culture…but maybe it changes as you go further in the book. It is from an geek and otaku point of view so perhaps that was seen as a ‘bad’ side of the culture. I’ll have to see as I read further, but thanks for the heads up, I’ll have to watch out for biased views in it.
-Sumimasen
My suggestion would be to stick with RTK if that’s working for you and then move onto vocab. Since you’ll already be familiar with the kanji when you study the vocab, you should naturally find yourself learning the readings and attaching them to the already familiar characters.
At least that’s how it was for me. Breaking the learning up into RTK, then vocab made it significantly easier for me. I have a lot more trouble remembering words containing kanji I’ve not learned with the RTK method, simply because having to memorize the meaning, new characters and readings for a word all at once is a lot of work – that’s a lot of information to take in and process.
In regards to the TextFugu method, at the current rate it’s most likely going to take years before Koichi has covered the same number of kanji you’ll find in RTK. So it seems to me like it would be a very slow way of learning. But of course what works for some is not going to work for everyone.
I’m about 250 kanji into RTK, and am comfortably doing 10-15 a day while holding down a full-time job. I got through all of the 1-4 stroke kanji in Textfugu before getting RTK, but for the time being I’ve put Textfugu on hold and am concentrating on RTK (Anki reviews for Textfugu vocab etc are still ongoing, of course). I’ve found it useful to concentrate on one of them at a time, and I’m hoping that when I get back to Textfugu that I can use stuff like the kanji cards in the Ultimate decks (Season 3) that I was previously ignoring.
I haven’t had any issues with going from Textfugu kanji to RTK, though note that they have different meanings for many of the radicals/primitives. I suppose this could be confusing if you are continually using both methods, or are switching back and forth between them. I haven’t had any issues with my approach, though. I do plan, after finishing RTK, to continue with Textfugu, including the readings/vocab for the 5 and 6-stroke kanji. So I’ve found both to be useful, but would recommend concentrating on one at a time.
Bit of a thread resurrection but I’ve been using Read the Kanji lately and have been really enjoying the site.
I prioritise the on’yomi reading in most cases since kun’yomi can (usually) be learned through vocab.Although I felt really dumb because I was thinking “Why is this so hard?” then I realised JLPT1 was the hardest, and JLPT4 was the easiest. Guess what I had it set to…and this went on for a few weeks before I realised. :P
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