Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
by timr on Friday May 15, 2020 @12:41PM
(#23194197)
"You have to learn kanji the same way you have to learn the alphabet."
The RTK/RTH method is nothing like learning an alphabet: at no point in my education did we sit down for weeks and "learn the meaning" of A, B, C...etc. For phonetic alphabets like hiragana and katakana and roman and hangul, it's absolutely worthwhile to memorize the shapes of the characters, because there's a small set of them, and once you know them, you can convert written words to sounds. With RTK, that's not true at all.
An adult of average intelligence can learn to read kana in a week. That's time well-spent. Spending months memorizing the "meanings" of kanji is a whole other process, of dubious value.
"Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't a big deal."
This is true, and is the way that Japanese children learn the language: you learn a character, along with some words that contain the character. To the extent that individual kanji have meanings, you learn them in context.
"I don't know why you are saying "move on" because as I said, it is one more thing you have in your toolbox."
Most people who do RTK don't do it this way -- they do things like the OP, and try to "memorize X kanji in Y days". I think that's largely a waste of time.
The RTK/RTH method is nothing like learning an alphabet: at no point in my education did we sit down for weeks and "learn the meaning" of A, B, C...etc. For phonetic alphabets like hiragana and katakana and roman and hangul, it's absolutely worthwhile to memorize the shapes of the characters, because there's a small set of them, and once you know them, you can convert written words to sounds. With RTK, that's not true at all.
An adult of average intelligence can learn to read kana in a week. That's time well-spent. Spending months memorizing the "meanings" of kanji is a whole other process, of dubious value.
"Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't a big deal."
This is true, and is the way that Japanese children learn the language: you learn a character, along with some words that contain the character. To the extent that individual kanji have meanings, you learn them in context.
"I don't know why you are saying "move on" because as I said, it is one more thing you have in your toolbox."
Most people who do RTK don't do it this way -- they do things like the OP, and try to "memorize X kanji in Y days". I think that's largely a waste of time.