Thanks again to Migaku for sponsoring this video! Use my affiliate link to get a free month while also supporting the channel :D migaku.io/free-month/britvsjapan
Keep in mind the way a Japanese language TH-camr learned is the way they learned, suggestions about alternative methods are usually sponsorships or guesswork on its usefulness There are multiple free tools which do what Migaku does for example
I’m one month into RTK and I’m really surprised that people find it boring. I feel like a Terminator being able to recall 300 kanjis from memory and write them down after just one month. I also use a brush and it feels amazing to write them beautifully. Maybe it will get boring after 1000th character…
@@Ignas_ 1300 characters in, it's interesting, sometimes tiring. From time to time i'm switching from classic RTK to just picking the most used kanjis, decomposing them like Heisig teaches and learning them. This is slower than going on the book order, but then I see those kanjis in my input all the time. At some point i would switch back to Heisig order and devour another hundred or two of kanjis. I also had to make a break of 3 months when i was traveling in Japan, I only added kanjis I saw on the street and did my anki reps. What i can't comprehend is how is it possible to learn whole RTK in 3 months. Not for me. Creating each story takes quite some time and it's tiring. I still think that there's no quicker way to learn kanji. However, you are not obliged to go through the whole book if you feel that you can easily pick any kanji, decompose it and learn it.
@@Ignas_ I'm around 1300 as well, it does get boring some days but it's a nice feeling looking at Japanese text and realising I recognise a bunch more kanji then before Like @gangqwerty did I've also have a separate flashcards list for random kanji I stumbled across, although this was mainly while I lived in Japan I did add the few remaining n5 kanji to that list yesterday
@@ganqqwerty I don't think anyone learns it all in three months unless they're some kind of savant, what my hopes are is to at least register that they exist. If I know if is a thing I can then distinctly look up its use in words to make another memory point for it
Yeah same. RTK is so fun! When you manage to draw those super complex kanji and see that they're really not that hard when you know the primitives you feel like a god. I remember first time when I got to the kanji for Dr. and learned to write it I felt like a caligraphy master lol.
Thank you..i've just started learning japanese..and..UHM...YEAH RTK WAS SO DEMOTIVATING...but now i can just make sentence cards and lazily kanji on the side based on the sentences i collected from watching movies....lol. THANK YOU!
Here's how I conquered RTK easily and having a lot of fun at the same time. 1. Do the first 200 kanji from RTK to get a hang of how stories work. Kanji Koohi has great stories. Some are so entertaining that I will never forget them. I personally find the first 200 kanji very easy to remember, but you can stop whenever you feel the first stroke of burnout. 2. Next, master 134 kanji primitives. These are kanji and primitive at the same time. These kanjis are hella important and become building blocks for other complex kanjis down the line. What's a complex kanji? It's just made up of 4-5 primitives arranged around one another, that's all. 3. Now, here's where the magic begins. There are a total of about 165 rtk primitives that are actually not kanji themselves. Yes, these are partial kanji, the very building blocks. LEARN THEM. It will take no more than a week. Just learn them and be thorough. Don't slack off. Do whatever it takes to burn these into your memory. They are easy shapes and come with easy to remember stories. 4. Now that you have mastered all 300 rtk primitives (some partial some not), you are ready to take on the rest of the 1800 kanji. How? You see, now you have all the puzzle pieces ready in your brain. Now, you just gotta assemble a bunch of them at a time to create other complex kanji with the help of stories. The stories now only need to arrange these primitives in proper order. You can literally do that on the go. Make your own stories as you come across new kanji while watching Netflix or anime. Whenever a new kanji appears, you will instantly know the primitives (can only be one of the 300) it's made up of. Make a story about the primitives and their positioning w.r.t one another. By then, you will have enough story making knowledge from the time you mastered the first 200. Use that now. Or, you can always keep koohi open in a pinned tab and search up the kanji in question to read other people's NSFW stories. I do that sometimes, too, when I am feeling lazy. 5. If you don't wanna go freestyle like I did, you can also just follow the JLPT sequence. Ignore all the complex kanji that fall in N1 for now. Focus on mastering all the 1000 kanji that you need to know for N2 and below. You can always acquire the remaining 1000 or so N1 Kanji while consuming content... First, make a solid base of 1000 kanji after having mastered all 300 primitives and bingo. The remaining kanji will come to you whether you actively seek them or not. After all, you already know what they are made up of. You have the cheat sheet of 300 primitives to unlock any kanji.
Hey, I am a little late to the party but Great Video! In addition one can also use the Migaku Kanji God to automatically create card decks in the classic RTK volume one order (the order found in edition 1 to 5), as well as in the 6th edition of RTK volume one. The Migaku Kanji God offers a lot of options and flexibility! Thank you for introducing and review the Kanji God Anki add-on!
Traditional RTK is a drag, and there are definite downsides to it. If you don't care about writing at all, then any other of the recognition decks are fine, but learning to write the Kanji provides additional long-term benefits for recognition too. It really internalizes the story you've associated with each Kanji, as well as gives you tons of extra practice recalling the meanings of individual primitives. When you practice from keyword --> kanji you start to crystallize the kanji stroke orders and the mnemonics will fall off faster. It is difficult, it is boring, but if you can make through the initial slog you will thank yourself in spades later. That said, if you hate RTK and it makes you want to quit, then of course don't use it.
did you manage to finish it quickly? 3 months do not look realistic to me, because it's bloody hard to consistenly come up with 20 new stories a day. 6-7 month seems like okay.
@@ganqqwertyNo. At the beginning I was doing 35/day, but I burned myself out after about 1000. Since then I've only been studying 5 a day. Tbh, my opinion of RTK has changed in the last 9 months. I learn kanji primarily through studying vocab now, and I don't bother with writing anymore. It is still valuable, but personally it was too much of a time sink, and I care much more about reading than writing.
@@auxiliaryboxes I think people should not make going through the whole rtk their goal. I will stop doing it as soon as I feel that I am comfortable enough and consider it a success. For now it still feels like a useful tool because of ridiculous amounts of kanji it allows to memorize.
@@ganqqwerty I agree. I still study Kanji with the RTK method but its not my goal anymore to memorize literally all 3000 of them. I think once you're past a certain threshold, its genuinely a better use of your time to study vocabulary. RTK just gives you a good springboard to get comfortable with reading Japanese.
Hey BritVSJapan, good to see you making vids. What's your take on Jazzy and Doth (not to mention quite a few other on The Moe Way), just skipping RTK & getting used to them through reading? As someone who's done RTK & encouraged others to do so in the past, my thinking has changed & I'm over kanji cards after seeing others success without. I think this add-on fixes the some problems with RTK, but doesn't fix RTK.
I learrned a couple hundred kanji without RTK and it wasn't bad at all. I haven't used any mnemonics or the sort, just learning them as I see them. I'm only now interested in RTK because I realized that I want the ability to produce rather than just recognise. I think that this is the only real benefit that RTK can provide.
@@d0xter742 Unfortunately, RTK isn't very good for production either, as it doesn't match what you'd be doing for production (eg practice what you play - isolated kanji study & writing does not equal writing out kanji in a sentence, which should make for good production). I don't know anyone who has had success using RTK for writing (not to say you can't, but I certainly wouldn't want to risk the time myself). I've seen people tackle production by writing or kanken decks (dekcs where you write the word - kind of like cloze). Personally, if I was interested in being able to write kanji, I would practice it in real writing.
I started with a pre-made deck of all RTK kanji and basically suspended all of them that I had never seen before. Then, as I saw them in writing, I un-suspended them individually to start actually learning them. I felt like I was wasting my time learning kanji that I might never see and this was a way around that. I still have a few hundred suspended since I've never come across them.
Hi mate On the 'Registered Fields' step 11:45 onwards, I am not seeing the options that you are in the dropdowns. For example only 'Front' or 'Back' on Field dropdown, not 'Expression', 'Meaning' and 'Reading' - Any idea why this might be?
Great video! So if I already have a pre-made deck with a set order (Tango) how do I get the learn ahead feature to create cards in the correct order? When I go to the 'add cards' menu, there's options for frequency, JLPT, and RTK order, but not one to follow the original order of my deck. Thanks!
I wouldn’t bother overcomplicating things like that. The tango deck is so early on in the process. Just go through the deck then after start sentence mining but use vocab cards. Also start reading as soon as you can.
Thank you for your tips and creating these videos. Could you explain how you started learning constructing your own sentences/being able to speak your own sentences in Japanese? I feel people like yourself, MattvsJapan and Khatz, are incredibly smart people with extremely high IQs where you're able to remember things and understand them much more quicker than the average Joe, like myself. I.e. Matt is clearly an intelligent guy, and both yourself and Khatz are computer science majors. I can understand memorising the kanji and vocab decks but I struggle creating (speaking) my own sentences even with Tae Kim etc. How were you able to incorporate free flowing verbal Japanese with the use of correct particles and grammar when studying the ajatt method? Any tips for the stupid man? Thank you again!
I understand where you're coming from, but there's nothing stupid about you. Keep in mind that those guys are first and foremost INSANELY dedicated to what they do. Matt learns Japanese for a living. It does not take away anything from their efforts, but you also should not put them on some sort of unreachable pedestal either. You can do it as well but be realistic about the bonkers amount of effort it will take you to reach their level. TL;DR It's probably not a matter of intelligence, but rather of work and dedication
Also I've seen you mention Tae Kim, so I wanted to share with you an amazing ressource for structure/grammar that's going to help a lot. Please check out Cure Dolly's TH-cam channel. That's a game changer th-cam.com/video/pSvH9vH60Ig/w-d-xo.html, really, please go watching the first videos and see how it goes. As for 'how to speak' it's quite a broad question. There are good reasons to think 'input, and then output'. So like, focus more on understanding a lot, and you'll acquire the language and speaking will come more naturally after how much you've been exposed to the language. So it will come naturally with time as well. Other than that, make sure you check Cure Dolly as it's a great help to understanding how the language actually works. Even if Matt might look very smart, don't forget you're looking at a guy that's already spent years learning the language !
@@goldeer7129 Hey thanks, I've been meaning to study Cure Dolly more as I hear great things. (Getting a bit overwhelmed with resources!) But this is one my go to list for grammar and structuring sentences once I have RTK in the bag and my first 1K deck of words. Without being able to recognise standalone Kanji, I can't remember the more complex "kanji words" in vocabulary decks.
@@nihongobenkyo3102 Cure Dolly also has a method to learn kanji that doesn't involve RTK nor writing by hand. The "organic" method, as she called it. I highly, HIGHLY recommend checking it out. ALL her channel is a goldmine, really
So if i have already started learning RTK, can I use this method? One method I'm conflicted of the RTK, is it only teacher you how to recognize it, now how to read / say it. soooo
It's just called 漢字辞典, although you might struggle to find it online. I picked it up at a DAISO when I was in Japan for 100 yen but haven't seen it online at all. It is really just a list of kanji as opposed to a dictionary as well, there's no definitions or anything, just word after word lol
This is great, but is it possible to just learn the deck in a regular order? I'm not too interested in learning kanji twice, once in this one and again in my mining deck. I'd rather brute force the ones I see in immersion and do an RTK deck on the side. The thing is, this one is really well set up and the UI is great. I just don't know how to use it like a normal anki deck.
@@BritVsJapan That's right! But wait there's more! With the Kanji God you can also add cards according to (1) Frequency, (2) RTK first edition to fith edition Order, (3) RTK 6 edtion Order, (4) JLPT order (5) Kangen Order, (6) Japanese School Year Order (7) Wanikani order, or (8) your own original order.
I don't think it's working properly. It's only adding them by frequency/other_metrics, not by the registered fields. You can literally spam Add_New_Cards till you reach 3000 kanji. I don't remember it being this way. Common sense would say add all the kanji from your deck, then add new ones if you desire. It doesn't do that.
So by my understanding, you need to manually tell the add on when you want it to create new cards? I don't quite see why you wouldn't just tell it to make loads of cards at once rather than having to keep going back and updating it regularly unless your source deck was changing too.
Not exactly. Lets say you use the Core2k deck. You connect the addon once, and it will create new kanji cards automatically until you are done with the deck. Afterwards it will create new kanji cards whenever you add a card to your deck(s), that contain a kanji you havent seen yet.
I think the vocab in jp1k is awesome but brute forcing kanji like that really leads to frustration. Also since it doesn’t have the meaning for specific kanji on the card it sometimes throws two kanji together at you for a word and you’re just supposed to understand by osmosis or something what those kanji each specifically mean. I got about 600 cards in, started to have extreme difficulty retaining the information and eventually dropped it. Some people may be able to pull it off, I can’t. A lot of people shit on Wanikani especially in the AJATT community but I am a couple months in and am having really good luck with it, but everyone is different.
@@papercliprain3222 I found the refold deck more easier and refined than MIA N5. But yeah, it's still relied on bruteforce. What still keep me to learn this two decks is the fact that I got kanji study to supplement the kanji strokes, breakdown, and sentences.
Great video, but I almost didn’t watch because of your click bait video title gif. For a video like this why not keep it real and leave the click bait aside? It devalues your content. This is high quality stuff!
honestly, i'm tired of all the 'best methods'. just do what works for you. but don't advertise it as the best. Its the best? based on iwhat? your personal experience? prove it. wheres the research?
NGL same here. Seen so many videos pop up recently that talk about the best method. I'm not saying this add on isn't great for what it's worth. Or that it's not optimizing the process. But it's doing the same thing as RTK but with advanced features. Which is cool. But in the end like you said just do you. At the end of the day you're still going to make progress. Still a good video, won't discredit the OG Matt though for his opinion and getting sponsors. Nice promo ad. 👍
I personally don't like the idea of never being "done" with kanji that this add-on seems to make you think, because after a couple thousand vocab/sentence cards, learning kanji just through osmosis seems natural and relatively easy. I learned around 1200 kanji in the beginning and then deleted my kanji deck a couple months after starting to learn actual Japanese. It felt so relieving and like a 卒業 from the training wheels. Everyone probably has their personal sweetspot of how many kanji to learn in advance. That seems like the actual reason why RTK or JP1K don't work for a bunch if people.
@@bartbabbe I've tried the add on, but like you said the idea of never being done is more daunting (to me) than going through the book. Just taking chunks of words and depending on how many sentences you're doing per day it's going to take forever to make a dent. The concept makes sense to get your feet wet with the common words. Won't deny that I have no room to talk as I'm going through and RTK deck now. But to me it's satisfying to be done with 25 cards and move on than see a whole ton of information I'm not really going to be looking at while repping cards. But that's just my opinion others may disagree.
I checked out their gh to see if I could steal a data structure with all the kanji and the primitives therein. Haven't found it yet but it would be fun to play with. I'm not sure it's going to work as well as RTK, rtk works because it shows you lots of kanji with the same element together and only builds on what you know, so you can't really avoid recognizing at least the primitives. If you just learn an arbitrary kanji and its primatives, you may be seeing those primitives for the first time or you may not see similar primitives together that help you distinguish them... So I think people who try to learn kanji this way are not much better off than just learning by recognition. For what it's worth the kanji are not really a prerequisite for learning Japanese. If you have audio to go with your text it matters very little, but many people are enamoured with the kanji so they focus on reading and writing skills probably a bit too early. I come across many kanji than aren't in either RTK lol, I just learn the sound of the word and usually I'll recognize the kanji if I see it again later. Admittedly if you don't have audio it makes learning Japanese impossible with out some preliminary step like this.
I think it is a big mistake to be so obsessed with kanji. Kanjis are nothing more than letters of the alphabet. Even if you could memorize all the kanjis in existence you still wouldn't be able to speak Japanese. Simply because you have memorized all 26 letters of the alphabet doesn't mean you can speak English. That is because you need words, not letters, to speak the language. First and foremost you need to memorize words. In Japanese, words are a combination of one or more kanjis, hiragana and katakana. But each individual kanji usually means nothing. You cannot use individual kanjis to make a sentence. For example 契約 is one single word made of 2 kanjis, it is pronounced as "keiyaku" and means "contract". But trying to memorize each individual kanji makes absolutely no sense. It is almost impossible to infer the meaning of the word by looking at the kanji alone. I myself have never tried to memorize kanji. To this day I still don't know how to write kanji. But I have no problemas reading newspapers, books or magazines. I believe it is a waste of time trying to memorize kanji. The best way of learning a language, any language, is by reading a lot. I started studying Japanese by reading magazines that had furigana, so consulting the dictionary was easy. I never tried to memorize anything, my goal was always to try to understand the text. I am right now studying Swedish by translating song lyrics. Song lyrics are usually very easy to understand and translate and also easy to find on the internet. I listen to the song while reading the lyrics. I learn pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, all at the same time. It is fun, easy, addictive and extremely efficient. I use Google Translate and online dictionaries. I haven't bought any books and don't attend schools. And I don't try to memorize anything, my goal is always to try to understand the text that I am reading. So I have never used Anki or any kind of flashcards. I see many people on TH-cam trying to memorize kanji. But memorizing kanji is IMPOSSIBLE. What does that even mean? What do you mean exactly by memorizing kanji? Even Japanese people don't memorize kanji. Memorizing kanji is impossible and unnecessary.
Rather than explaining why the costs outweigh the benefits you just use reductive logic (it's just letters), false claims (it's impossible), and personal anecdotes - including a completely irrelevant paragraph about Swedish which has a 29 letter alphabet. The benefit is that it allows your brain to distinguish the kanji and have a hint toward the words meaning. The purpose of the keyword is not to guess the meaning of words. The whole point of RTK is to leverage your brain's connection making ability. 契 "pledge" + 約 "promise" doesn't mean contract but its way closer than nothing. When you learn the word 契約 you can instantly recognize its components and after looking it up in the dictionary you will be much less likely to forget it or mistake it for another word. The question is: "Does this prior effort result in a net benefit?" It does for many people.
@@joejoe4207 Even if you have hints, you still have to look up how the word is read and the meaning, so its still nothing. Thank god i bumped first with the advise of studying words and never wasted my time studying isolated kanji. The only people ive seen against this method are people who are trying to retroactively justify the time they lost.
@Worzerz I guess more like : immerse in the language (generally like watching anime etc.), the words you don't know you pick them up and add them to your anki and learn vocab like that. (if you don't know the yomichan extension already : th-cam.com/video/qK5Gwl72vkk/w-d-xo.html) To learn more about that approach as well, you can also check out some of Cure Dolly's videos that cover this. I'm linking you her main playlist if you don't know her already : th-cam.com/video/pSvH9vH60Ig/w-d-xo.html
Learning Japanese vocabulary is one thing, but learning kanji just by seeing them in vocabulary is a different story for those of us who lack a visual memory. RTK book one and book two is what enable me to learn written vocabulary and to learn vocabulary while I read.
Thanks again to Migaku for sponsoring this video! Use my affiliate link to get a free month while also supporting the channel :D migaku.io/free-month/britvsjapan
Keep in mind the way a Japanese language TH-camr learned is the way they learned, suggestions about alternative methods are usually sponsorships or guesswork on its usefulness
There are multiple free tools which do what Migaku does for example
what are they called?
Your comment would have been much more useful if you had included links to those free tools. Please share so we know what the options are.
@@z5am search tatsumoto Japanese, that's the guide i used and all software is free
But you tell none of them….
Look at tatsumoto Japanese guide if you want to get anki cards from TV show subs (free works on both Linux and windows)
I’m one month into RTK and I’m really surprised that people find it boring. I feel like a Terminator being able to recall 300 kanjis from memory and write them down after just one month. I also use a brush and it feels amazing to write them beautifully. Maybe it will get boring after 1000th character…
So, did it get boring?
@@Ignas_ 1300 characters in, it's interesting, sometimes tiring. From time to time i'm switching from classic RTK to just picking the most used kanjis, decomposing them like Heisig teaches and learning them. This is slower than going on the book order, but then I see those kanjis in my input all the time. At some point i would switch back to Heisig order and devour another hundred or two of kanjis. I also had to make a break of 3 months when i was traveling in Japan, I only added kanjis I saw on the street and did my anki reps.
What i can't comprehend is how is it possible to learn whole RTK in 3 months. Not for me. Creating each story takes quite some time and it's tiring. I still think that there's no quicker way to learn kanji. However, you are not obliged to go through the whole book if you feel that you can easily pick any kanji, decompose it and learn it.
@@Ignas_ I'm around 1300 as well, it does get boring some days but it's a nice feeling looking at Japanese text and realising I recognise a bunch more kanji then before
Like @gangqwerty did I've also have a separate flashcards list for random kanji I stumbled across, although this was mainly while I lived in Japan I did add the few remaining n5 kanji to that list yesterday
@@ganqqwerty I don't think anyone learns it all in three months unless they're some kind of savant, what my hopes are is to at least register that they exist. If I know if is a thing I can then distinctly look up its use in words to make another memory point for it
Yeah same. RTK is so fun! When you manage to draw those super complex kanji and see that they're really not that hard when you know the primitives you feel like a god. I remember first time when I got to the kanji for Dr. and learned to write it I felt like a caligraphy master lol.
Makes my day! Greetings from Germany !
Brilliant, thanks. Looking forward to using it. Cheers. Lee
Thank you..i've just started learning japanese..and..UHM...YEAH RTK WAS SO DEMOTIVATING...but now i can just make sentence cards and lazily kanji on the side based on the sentences i collected from watching movies....lol. THANK YOU!
Tried Wanikani? The first three levels are free.
Here's how I conquered RTK easily and having a lot of fun at the same time.
1. Do the first 200 kanji from RTK to get a hang of how stories work. Kanji Koohi has great stories. Some are so entertaining that I will never forget them. I personally find the first 200 kanji very easy to remember, but you can stop whenever you feel the first stroke of burnout.
2. Next, master 134 kanji primitives. These are kanji and primitive at the same time. These kanjis are hella important and become building blocks for other complex kanjis down the line. What's a complex kanji? It's just made up of 4-5 primitives arranged around one another, that's all.
3. Now, here's where the magic begins. There are a total of about 165 rtk primitives that are actually not kanji themselves. Yes, these are partial kanji, the very building blocks. LEARN THEM. It will take no more than a week. Just learn them and be thorough. Don't slack off. Do whatever it takes to burn these into your memory. They are easy shapes and come with easy to remember stories.
4. Now that you have mastered all 300 rtk primitives (some partial some not), you are ready to take on the rest of the 1800 kanji. How? You see, now you have all the puzzle pieces ready in your brain. Now, you just gotta assemble a bunch of them at a time to create other complex kanji with the help of stories. The stories now only need to arrange these primitives in proper order. You can literally do that on the go. Make your own stories as you come across new kanji while watching Netflix or anime. Whenever a new kanji appears, you will instantly know the primitives (can only be one of the 300) it's made up of. Make a story about the primitives and their positioning w.r.t one another. By then, you will have enough story making knowledge from the time you mastered the first 200. Use that now. Or, you can always keep koohi open in a pinned tab and search up the kanji in question to read other people's NSFW stories. I do that sometimes, too, when I am feeling lazy.
5. If you don't wanna go freestyle like I did, you can also just follow the JLPT sequence. Ignore all the complex kanji that fall in N1 for now. Focus on mastering all the 1000 kanji that you need to know for N2 and below. You can always acquire the remaining 1000 or so N1 Kanji while consuming content... First, make a solid base of 1000 kanji after having mastered all 300 primitives and bingo. The remaining kanji will come to you whether you actively seek them or not. After all, you already know what they are made up of. You have the cheat sheet of 300 primitives to unlock any kanji.
Thank you this sounds like a good plan! Did you use any anki decks or add ons for when you were memorising kanji and their primitives?
@salierisneighbor9736 I tried to mention the links to the resources I used in a comment, but they keep deleting it for some reason. Sorry.
@nitin nishant ah its okay! If you put spaces in between the links I think they should go through
@nitin nishant spaces in the links themselfs I mean
If that doesn't work you can try just putting the links in base64 encryptor online and then send that text
The legend is back.
Hey, I am a little late to the party but Great Video!
In addition one can also use the Migaku Kanji God to automatically create card decks in the classic RTK volume one order (the order found in edition 1 to 5), as well as in the 6th edition of RTK volume one. The Migaku Kanji God offers a lot of options and flexibility!
Thank you for introducing and review the Kanji God Anki add-on!
Traditional RTK is a drag, and there are definite downsides to it. If you don't care about writing at all, then any other of the recognition decks are fine, but learning to write the Kanji provides additional long-term benefits for recognition too. It really internalizes the story you've associated with each Kanji, as well as gives you tons of extra practice recalling the meanings of individual primitives. When you practice from keyword --> kanji you start to crystallize the kanji stroke orders and the mnemonics will fall off faster.
It is difficult, it is boring, but if you can make through the initial slog you will thank yourself in spades later. That said, if you hate RTK and it makes you want to quit, then of course don't use it.
did you manage to finish it quickly? 3 months do not look realistic to me, because it's bloody hard to consistenly come up with 20 new stories a day. 6-7 month seems like okay.
@@ganqqwertyNo. At the beginning I was doing 35/day, but I burned myself out after about 1000. Since then I've only been studying 5 a day. Tbh, my opinion of RTK has changed in the last 9 months. I learn kanji primarily through studying vocab now, and I don't bother with writing anymore.
It is still valuable, but personally it was too much of a time sink, and I care much more about reading than writing.
@@auxiliaryboxes I think people should not make going through the whole rtk their goal. I will stop doing it as soon as I feel that I am comfortable enough and consider it a success. For now it still feels like a useful tool because of ridiculous amounts of kanji it allows to memorize.
@@ganqqwerty I agree. I still study Kanji with the RTK method but its not my goal anymore to memorize literally all 3000 of them. I think once you're past a certain threshold, its genuinely a better use of your time to study vocabulary. RTK just gives you a good springboard to get comfortable with reading Japanese.
Hey BritVSJapan, good to see you making vids. What's your take on Jazzy and Doth (not to mention quite a few other on The Moe Way), just skipping RTK & getting used to them through reading?
As someone who's done RTK & encouraged others to do so in the past, my thinking has changed & I'm over kanji cards after seeing others success without. I think this add-on fixes the some problems with RTK, but doesn't fix RTK.
Hmmmmmmm kanji eater
I learrned a couple hundred kanji without RTK and it wasn't bad at all. I haven't used any mnemonics or the sort, just learning them as I see them. I'm only now interested in RTK because I realized that I want the ability to produce rather than just recognise. I think that this is the only real benefit that RTK can provide.
@@d0xter742 Unfortunately, RTK isn't very good for production either, as it doesn't match what you'd be doing for production (eg practice what you play - isolated kanji study & writing does not equal writing out kanji in a sentence, which should make for good production). I don't know anyone who has had success using RTK for writing (not to say you can't, but I certainly wouldn't want to risk the time myself).
I've seen people tackle production by writing or kanken decks (dekcs where you write the word - kind of like cloze). Personally, if I was interested in being able to write kanji, I would practice it in real writing.
@@KanjiEater ah gotcha. ty for the info
I recommend at least a couple hundred just to get a head start with distinguishing the radicals. Goes a long way.
I started with a pre-made deck of all RTK kanji and basically suspended all of them that I had never seen before. Then, as I saw them in writing, I un-suspended them individually to start actually learning them. I felt like I was wasting my time learning kanji that I might never see and this was a way around that. I still have a few hundred suspended since I've never come across them.
Hi mate
On the 'Registered Fields' step 11:45 onwards, I am not seeing the options that you are in the dropdowns. For example only 'Front' or 'Back' on Field dropdown, not 'Expression', 'Meaning' and 'Reading' - Any idea why this might be?
I’m currently about a week through my Kanji studying, and I think I’ve gotten the hang of at least 50 kanji.
Not all "primitives" (from RTK) are actual kanji radicals. Don't use those terms interchangeably.
I don't have any decks other then the Genki japanese deck. What's the most popular deck for N5-N1?
I really dislike videos that are :
"Hey guys, there is a much better way to do these things..
And by the way, they are the sponsors of this video..."
Thanks for this. I'm curious: How many hours on Anki over the three months to learn the 2,200 kanji? Thanks!
Question 2: You mention "primitives". Is that the same as "radicals" or something else?
Question 3: What is that beautiful orange dictionary showing the kanji? Thanks again.
Thank you. When I click on vocab it is not showing example sentences. Am I missing anything please help.
LingQ and Satori Reader both do this same thing, no?
I have a question, I'm just starting to learn Japanese and about the different ways of learning kanji, but isn't this similar to wanikani?
Great video! So if I already have a pre-made deck with a set order (Tango) how do I get the learn ahead feature to create cards in the correct order? When I go to the 'add cards' menu, there's options for frequency, JLPT, and RTK order, but not one to follow the original order of my deck. Thanks!
I wouldn’t bother overcomplicating things like that. The tango deck is so early on in the process. Just go through the deck then after start sentence mining but use vocab cards. Also start reading as soon as you can.
Thank you for your tips and creating these videos.
Could you explain how you started learning constructing your own sentences/being able to speak your own sentences in Japanese?
I feel people like yourself, MattvsJapan and Khatz, are incredibly smart people with extremely high IQs where you're able to remember things and understand them much more quicker than the average Joe, like myself. I.e. Matt is clearly an intelligent guy, and both yourself and Khatz are computer science majors. I can understand memorising the kanji and vocab decks but I struggle creating (speaking) my own sentences even with Tae Kim etc.
How were you able to incorporate free flowing verbal Japanese with the use of correct particles and grammar when studying the ajatt method? Any tips for the stupid man?
Thank you again!
I understand where you're coming from, but there's nothing stupid about you. Keep in mind that those guys are first and foremost INSANELY dedicated to what they do. Matt learns Japanese for a living. It does not take away anything from their efforts, but you also should not put them on some sort of unreachable pedestal either.
You can do it as well but be realistic about the bonkers amount of effort it will take you to reach their level.
TL;DR It's probably not a matter of intelligence, but rather of work and dedication
Also I've seen you mention Tae Kim, so I wanted to share with you an amazing ressource for structure/grammar that's going to help a lot. Please check out Cure Dolly's TH-cam channel. That's a game changer th-cam.com/video/pSvH9vH60Ig/w-d-xo.html, really, please go watching the first videos and see how it goes.
As for 'how to speak' it's quite a broad question. There are good reasons to think 'input, and then output'. So like, focus more on understanding a lot, and you'll acquire the language and speaking will come more naturally after how much you've been exposed to the language. So it will come naturally with time as well. Other than that, make sure you check Cure Dolly as it's a great help to understanding how the language actually works.
Even if Matt might look very smart, don't forget you're looking at a guy that's already spent years learning the language !
@@goldeer7129 Hey thanks, I've been meaning to study Cure Dolly more as I hear great things. (Getting a bit overwhelmed with resources!) But this is one my go to list for grammar and structuring sentences once I have RTK in the bag and my first 1K deck of words. Without being able to recognise standalone Kanji, I can't remember the more complex "kanji words" in vocabulary decks.
@@nihongobenkyo3102 Cure Dolly also has a method to learn kanji that doesn't involve RTK nor writing by hand. The "organic" method, as she called it. I highly, HIGHLY recommend checking it out. ALL her channel is a goldmine, really
@@nihongobenkyo3102 You may also want to check out her book "Alice in Kanji Land"
How do you get example words at the top of your card containing the kanji?
when you're studying with Kanji God should you be trying to memorize the readings for the Kanji as well or no?
yea I was wondering that too
I think you should only concentrate on learning the keyword and the strokes if u want to write the kanji as well.
And, obviously with a story.
So if i have already started learning RTK, can I use this method? One method I'm conflicted of the RTK, is it only teacher you how to recognize it, now how to read / say it. soooo
is writing them necessary?
Bro What's the name of the the first book you were holding on the intro?
It's just called 漢字辞典, although you might struggle to find it online. I picked it up at a DAISO when I was in Japan for 100 yen but haven't seen it online at all. It is really just a list of kanji as opposed to a dictionary as well, there's no definitions or anything, just word after word lol
This is great, but is it possible to just learn the deck in a regular order? I'm not too interested in learning kanji twice, once in this one and again in my mining deck. I'd rather brute force the ones I see in immersion and do an RTK deck on the side.
The thing is, this one is really well set up and the UI is great. I just don't know how to use it like a normal anki deck.
I think there is an option in the settings to force it to the RTK order
@@BritVsJapan That's right! But wait there's more! With the Kanji God you can also add cards according to (1) Frequency, (2) RTK first edition to fith edition Order, (3) RTK 6 edtion Order, (4) JLPT order (5) Kangen Order, (6) Japanese School Year Order (7) Wanikani order, or (8) your own original order.
I don't think it's working properly. It's only adding them by frequency/other_metrics, not by the registered fields. You can literally spam Add_New_Cards till you reach 3000 kanji. I don't remember it being this way. Common sense would say add all the kanji from your deck, then add new ones if you desire. It doesn't do that.
So by my understanding, you need to manually tell the add on when you want it to create new cards? I don't quite see why you wouldn't just tell it to make loads of cards at once rather than having to keep going back and updating it regularly unless your source deck was changing too.
Not exactly. Lets say you use the Core2k deck. You connect the addon once, and it will create new kanji cards automatically until you are done with the deck. Afterwards it will create new kanji cards whenever you add a card to your deck(s), that contain a kanji you havent seen yet.
What happens if i’ve already started my deck
Migaku have a section on this in one of their videos: th-cam.com/video/y9bmWLvUBQo/w-d-xo.html
I wonder what your opinion on the JP1K deck is, since they use a somewhat different approach to learn Kanji.
I think the vocab in jp1k is awesome but brute forcing kanji like that really leads to frustration. Also since it doesn’t have the meaning for specific kanji on the card it sometimes throws two kanji together at you for a word and you’re just supposed to understand by osmosis or something what those kanji each specifically mean. I got about 600 cards in, started to have extreme difficulty retaining the information and eventually dropped it. Some people may be able to pull it off, I can’t. A lot of people shit on Wanikani especially in the AJATT community but I am a couple months in and am having really good luck with it, but everyone is different.
@@papercliprain3222 I found the refold deck more easier and refined than MIA N5. But yeah, it's still relied on bruteforce. What still keep me to learn this two decks is the fact that I got kanji study to supplement the kanji strokes, breakdown, and sentences.
When I finally die and go straight to hell, my punishment will be RTK
Hahahaha you make fall over my seat. I understand why u deserve that punishment XD
Rip matt's neck
Damn didn't think anyone would notice my shoddy photoshop skills xD
🥰🥰🥰🥰
Great video, but I almost didn’t watch because of your click bait video title gif. For a video like this why not keep it real and leave the click bait aside? It devalues your content. This is high quality stuff!
honestly, i'm tired of all the 'best methods'. just do what works for you. but don't advertise it as the best.
Its the best? based on iwhat? your personal experience? prove it. wheres the research?
NGL same here. Seen so many videos pop up recently that talk about the best method. I'm not saying this add on isn't great for what it's worth. Or that it's not optimizing the process. But it's doing the same thing as RTK but with advanced features. Which is cool. But in the end like you said just do you. At the end of the day you're still going to make progress. Still a good video, won't discredit the OG Matt though for his opinion and getting sponsors. Nice promo ad. 👍
pretty much all of the methods suck, that's why these videos keep coming.
I personally don't like the idea of never being "done" with kanji that this add-on seems to make you think, because after a couple thousand vocab/sentence cards, learning kanji just through osmosis seems natural and relatively easy. I learned around 1200 kanji in the beginning and then deleted my kanji deck a couple months after starting to learn actual Japanese. It felt so relieving and like a 卒業 from the training wheels. Everyone probably has their personal sweetspot of how many kanji to learn in advance. That seems like the actual reason why RTK or JP1K don't work for a bunch if people.
@@bartbabbe I've tried the add on, but like you said the idea of never being done is more daunting (to me) than going through the book. Just taking chunks of words and depending on how many sentences you're doing per day it's going to take forever to make a dent. The concept makes sense to get your feet wet with the common words. Won't deny that I have no room to talk as I'm going through and RTK deck now. But to me it's satisfying to be done with 25 cards and move on than see a whole ton of information I'm not really going to be looking at while repping cards. But that's just my opinion others may disagree.
I checked out their gh to see if I could steal a data structure with all the kanji and the primitives therein. Haven't found it yet but it would be fun to play with.
I'm not sure it's going to work as well as RTK, rtk works because it shows you lots of kanji with the same element together and only builds on what you know, so you can't really avoid recognizing at least the primitives. If you just learn an arbitrary kanji and its primatives, you may be seeing those primitives for the first time or you may not see similar primitives together that help you distinguish them... So I think people who try to learn kanji this way are not much better off than just learning by recognition.
For what it's worth the kanji are not really a prerequisite for learning Japanese. If you have audio to go with your text it matters very little, but many people are enamoured with the kanji so they focus on reading and writing skills probably a bit too early. I come across many kanji than aren't in either RTK lol, I just learn the sound of the word and usually I'll recognize the kanji if I see it again later. Admittedly if you don't have audio it makes learning Japanese impossible with out some preliminary step like this.
I wouldn't say that kanji is the hardest part, but homophones and fast pace speaking. Reading japanese is probably much easier than listening.
I think it is a big mistake to be so obsessed with kanji.
Kanjis are nothing more than letters of the alphabet.
Even if you could memorize all the kanjis in existence you still wouldn't be able to speak Japanese.
Simply because you have memorized all 26 letters of the alphabet doesn't mean you can speak English.
That is because you need words, not letters, to speak the language.
First and foremost you need to memorize words.
In Japanese, words are a combination of one or more kanjis, hiragana and katakana.
But each individual kanji usually means nothing.
You cannot use individual kanjis to make a sentence.
For example 契約 is one single word made of 2 kanjis, it is pronounced as "keiyaku" and means "contract". But trying to memorize each individual kanji makes absolutely no sense. It is almost impossible to infer the meaning of the word by looking at the kanji alone.
I myself have never tried to memorize kanji.
To this day I still don't know how to write kanji.
But I have no problemas reading newspapers, books or magazines.
I believe it is a waste of time trying to memorize kanji.
The best way of learning a language, any language, is by reading a lot.
I started studying Japanese by reading magazines that had furigana, so consulting the dictionary was easy. I never tried to memorize anything, my goal was always to try to understand the text.
I am right now studying Swedish by translating song lyrics. Song lyrics are usually very easy to understand and translate and also easy to find on the internet. I listen to the song while reading the lyrics. I learn pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, all at the same time. It is fun, easy, addictive and extremely efficient. I use Google Translate and online dictionaries. I haven't bought any books and don't attend schools.
And I don't try to memorize anything, my goal is always to try to understand the text that I am reading. So I have never used Anki or any kind of flashcards.
I see many people on TH-cam trying to memorize kanji.
But memorizing kanji is IMPOSSIBLE.
What does that even mean? What do you mean exactly by memorizing kanji?
Even Japanese people don't memorize kanji.
Memorizing kanji is impossible and unnecessary.
Rather than explaining why the costs outweigh the benefits you just use reductive logic (it's just letters), false claims (it's impossible), and personal anecdotes - including a completely irrelevant paragraph about Swedish which has a 29 letter alphabet.
The benefit is that it allows your brain to distinguish the kanji and have a hint toward the words meaning. The purpose of the keyword is not to guess the meaning of words. The whole point of RTK is to leverage your brain's connection making ability. 契 "pledge" + 約 "promise" doesn't mean contract but its way closer than nothing. When you learn the word 契約 you can instantly recognize its components and after looking it up in the dictionary you will be much less likely to forget it or mistake it for another word. The question is: "Does this prior effort result in a net benefit?" It does for many people.
@@joejoe4207 Even if you have hints, you still have to look up how the word is read and the meaning, so its still nothing. Thank god i bumped first with the advise of studying words and never wasted my time studying isolated kanji. The only people ive seen against this method are people who are trying to retroactively justify the time they lost.
why would anyone want to write by hand? who writes by hand in their own language nowadays? lol
it makes me laugh when people claim to learn 25 new kanji a day. This is as absurd as fluent in 3 months.
Yeah. 8-10 is reasonable
RTK is awful. learn the kanji through vocab
@Worzerz I guess more like : immerse in the language (generally like watching anime etc.), the words you don't know you pick them up and add them to your anki and learn vocab like that. (if you don't know the yomichan extension already : th-cam.com/video/qK5Gwl72vkk/w-d-xo.html)
To learn more about that approach as well, you can also check out some of Cure Dolly's videos that cover this. I'm linking you her main playlist if you don't know her already : th-cam.com/video/pSvH9vH60Ig/w-d-xo.html
Learning Japanese vocabulary is one thing, but learning kanji just by seeing them in vocabulary is a different story for those of us who lack a visual memory. RTK book one and book two is what enable me to learn written vocabulary and to learn vocabulary while I read.