ただいま！I’m back!

First of all I need to apologise for disappearing. This blog was intially to chronicle my mission to learn all the Kanji in 3 months using Heisenberg, RTK book and when I failed and life got too busy I stopped, so naturally the blog stopped too.

However I am back and stronger than ever! Which is a lie because I have a sprained ankle but I digress..

I’ve secretly been using RTK again and will surpass 1300 Kanji tonight. But that’s not all, I’ve also been using Pimsleur’s audio teaching method for practicing speaking and listening and, and, The Great Choko library as a way to find appropriate reading material for my level. I’m also doing a Japanese GCSE. woop…..

So here is the reason why I decided to come back to RTK. 

For those unfamiliar RTK stands for Remembering the Kanji, a book by a guy with a PHD, revered as the great DR. Heisenberg. Unless his a real doctor, which would be awkward.

Anyway it breaks the Kanji into smaller components he calls “primitives”, which sometimes are the Kanji’s radicals and sometimes not. The way to learn a specific Kanji is to make a story out of it’s primitives, which should help with placement (which primitive goes where) and ingrain into your visual memory. The whole point is it is meant to beat rote memorization and therefore you can cram a lot of them into one day. It’s a mnemonic method.

With RTK you only learn an English keyword to associate with each Kanji. You don’t learn any Japanese whatsoever. What’s the point? Well Heisenberg argued that it’s harder for westerners to pick up Kanji as we don’t share the alphabet like Chinese and Korean (used to). If we have the kanji at our disposal, it makes picking up the hardest aspect of Japanese easier, the writing system. And this is the reason I came back to the RTK method.

Whenever I’d learn a new word, I’d see Kanji I remembered from my previous study of RTK and it made learning the word a lot easier (It also showed how powerful the mnemonic method was which was actually quite scary). I didn’t have to faff around with stroke order, or copying it hundreds of times, the Kanji was just there. Granted RTK is not an easy task, but with a sprained ankle and a few months to spare I thought, well what do I have to lose? (The answer is hair, I’m losing lots of hair, RTK is not easy!). But is it worth it? I think so.

I’ll update with some more details of how I’m supplementing my study, what I think of Pimsleur and keep you guys updated about progress. Anyway, the more you learn, the more you know? Right?

• I'm back! Kanji
• japanese
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• Pimsleur
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