Why “Remembering The Kanji” Is Great …But Also Isn’t The Best Way To Learn Japanese 

I am sure if you have started to study Japanese you are very aware of daunting task that is kanji, and I am sure you will have heard someone recommend “Remembering The Kanji” or RTK for short …but is this good advice?

Well, honestly, I don’t think so. I think the method is great for what it does, but for someone trying to learn Japanese, I don’t think it is the right approach.

So let’s look at what it is, my experience with this process and why I think it is great …but also not. 

What Is RTK?

I think it is really important to look at what ‘Remembering The Kanji’ actually is before you start deciding if it is good or not.

I guess you could describe RTK as a learning method, but really it is a book by James Heisig that was first published in 1977. The fact it is still being talked about today shows it has had huge an impact on the Japanese language learning community.

However, the goal of the book is to introduce you to kanji. If you complete the book you will be able to recognise and write 2200 kanji, which is pretty impressive.

These are also the most commonly used kanji in Japanese, called the “joyo kanji” which is like the “official list” of words that the Japanese government says all school kids should know by the end of school. So basically, if you know these 2200 words …you can get by in Japan. 

Peoples Expectations Of RTK Have Been Lost

If you have just read what I’ve said above you have probably said “oh great, if I just learn this 1 book, I will know all the Japanese words and basically be fluent” and this is expectation that has been wrongly placed on this book.

…and well, the book is going to fail you if you think it can give you everything.  

The book is not going to teach you all the kanji you need to know. It is going to give you the first steps to doing this. This is a subtle, but huge difference and this confusion of expectations is why this books effectiveness is still debated to this day.

The goal of the book is to get you to recognise the kanji and practice writing them. This is not the same as “knowing all the kanji”.

Heisig actually released a volume II and III to Remembering the Kanji and when you bundle all 3 books together …then you might be able to say that you will know all the kanji.

The main goal of Volume II is teach you the pronunciation of the kanji you learned in the first book, then Volume 3 is actually just an extra 800 rarer words that you will learn to recognise and then pronounce, meaning the total number of kanji you know will be 3000. 

You almost need to see Volume I as a “pre-Japanese course” it is effectively getting you ready to learn the kanji, by first getting your comfortable with recognising them.

My Experience With RTK

When it comes to my own experience with RTK I was very much sucked into the whole hype of “do this book and you will master Japanese” and I quickly realised that this wasn’t the case.

Basically my expectations of the book where wrong and maybe I should have looked into things more, but the allure of “you can learn all the kanji in 3 months” was enough to hook me in.

The reality is that I started strong and really enjoyed the process, but I got about half way though and really just started questioning what I was doing and then actually stopped.

I also didn’t even start the process properly. The book is designed to get you to write the kanji, and I didn’t do that, so I was instantly at a disadvantage, straying from the set path right from the beginning.   

After a few weeks I realised it was not the book that was the problem, it was my expectations of it and what I thought it was going to do for me. The book was not the answer to what I wanted from my studies and that is why I stopped.

I will go through some reasons why I liked it, and I why I didn’t, but ultimately the book does exactly what it sets out to do, it is just that I ignored that and thought it was going to offer me something else, so remember that when I start talking about what I didn’t like.

Why Is The RTK Method Good?

As I’ve already mentioned, the book accomplishes what it sets out to do.  If you want to learn how to recognise a kanji and be able to write them, then this book is perfect, you will achieve this if you follow what it says.

Remembering Through Stories Works

The whole basic principle of the book is that you can recognise kanji by assigning a silly story to them, and this does work. It is a little strange at first, but the more you do it, the easier it gets.

I did find myself looking at a kanji and breaking it down into parts and then suddenly remembering how one part links to another to form some stupid story that ultimately lead me to say the meaning of the kanji.  

This of course didn’t work 100% of the time, but I do feel it helped me remember more than I would have by just looking at the kanji and trying to remember it.  

The Radicals Are Important

Kanji are made up of smaller parts and you will notice that a lot of the same shapes appear in different kanji. This is especially true for the more complex kanji, which are basically made up of lots of smaller, more basic ones.

These more basic shapes are called “radicals” and you can kind of see them as the foundational building blocks of Kanji.

The book does spend time focusing on these radicals and this is excellent. A lot of the time this whole aspect is ignored by other teachers and I think it is actually really important to get a good grasp of these.

It will help you later on when things get complicated and I really like how Heisig tries to make us aware of this and explains how these really are the foundational elements of the kanji.  

You Can Use RTK As A Strong Foundation

I think RTK strengths is that it does exactly what it says.  It builds your Japanese foundation. It gives you the power to recognise kanji and build from there.

You will end the first book and basically be in the same position as a Chinese person who has decided to start learning Japanese.

The Chinese use the same characters as kanji, so they can recognise them and write them easily …but they only know the Chinese meanings. However, this is a huge head start for them and then they can start to build from this and start assigning Japanese meanings to the kanji they recognise.

If you complete the book, you will be in this same position. You will probably won’t be as strong as a Chinese person as they have been looking at and writing the characters for a lot longer than you, but you are still in a good starting position and as I said before, it’s more like a “pre-course” where it’s building your foundation so you can start building from there. 

What Are The Problems With RTK

This section is both easy and difficult to write. Really all my “complaints” boil down to my expectations being off. If you are like me and expecting to walk away knowing 2200 kanji perfectly, you are going to have a lot of complaints.

If you understand that the book is only trying to get you to recognise the kanji, then you probably will have very few negative things to say. I guess you could argue that the first problem with the book is that people don’t understand its purpose, which is exactly why our expectations are all wrong.  

Anyway, I will go through some of the common problems

You Won’t Learn How To Say The Kanji

After a few weeks of doing RTK I was feeling like I was taking in a lot of new words, but then I decided to try and read something in Japanese and quickly realised I did not know how to say anything.

I could recognise a kanji …but I didn’t know how to read it or pronounce it in Japanese.

Of course that’s not the goal of the book, but I didn’t really know that when I started.

(You can read more about – How Do You Actually Read Japanese Kanji?)

You Only Know The English Meaning

Carrying on from the above point, when I was reading some Japanese, I realised I kind of understood the sentence …but in English. I was able to recognise the kanji and sort of translate it into English …but as I mentioned I didn’t actually know what it said in Japanese.

This was kind of strange, it was like I could read the Japanese, but not really. It also meant I had no listening skills, I could just recognise what the characters meant in English.

As I’ve already mentioned, this is exactly what the book sets out to do! so how is this a complaint? Well, it all comes back to expectations and I was expecting to learn Japanese, not to be able to assign an English word to a Japanese character.

Of course I should see this as the foundations being built, I can come back and relearn the word with the Japanese meaning and it should be easier now. Maybe so, but just felt like I had learned hundreds of words …but hadn’t learned anything. I had no Japanese ability just some strange ability to say what some Japanese characters meant in English.     

3 Months Is A Long Time

If you follow the book, it should take you about 3 months to complete it and this is both a very short time and a very long time.

I guess if you zoom out and look at your whole journey, 3 months is nothing. However, when you are like 6 weeks into this book and you have that massive feeling that you haven’t actually learned any Japanese, it seems like a long, long time.  

The reality is that the RTK is more about your mental stamina more than anything. It is quite painful to sit down and try and learn new words every day and review what you have already done. It is fun for a while, but you can quickly get tired of it.

I almost want to say this is a positive, 3 months of grinding and you are done, but it’s not …its 3 months of grind to get the foundations laid down, then you have to do it all over again.

Really any sort of language learning is going to be a long slow process, it doesn’t matter what method you use, but it does feel like the RTk does drag and that will be linked to the two points above, where you don’t really focus on the Japanese and more on the English.

Double Kanji Words

When you actually come across kanji in the real world, they are often 2 or 3 joined together to create a word and RTK doesn’t fully prepare us for this.

The RTK method just teaches one kanji at a time and assigns meaning to.

To be honest, at lot of the time this is fine, and actually can be helpful when we meet these combination kanji. If we take 大学 which is the word for university, it is made up of the characters for big and study.

You can sort of see how a “big study” would imply university. It not perfect, but can kind of get a just of what is meaning through knowing the individual meanings.

I think learning the words in this way is alright, but not perfect. You can find as many words where this works, as it doesn’t. Just take the word for Japan -日本 …these two letters mean Day and Book …you can see how that is going be a problem if you come across this in the real world and wrongly assume it has something to do with days and books.

A Lot of The Kanji Can Look The Same

Probably the biggest issue I had with RTK is that a lot of the kanji can seem very similar and they also taught quite close together. I get why they do this and the English translations are different enough …but it’s still tough.

If we take:  水 氷 永 these 3 kanji appear in the book, one after the other and I really struggled with this type of thing, they all look too similar.

I would say that if I had actually done the book properly …and written these out, I may have noticed the differences a little more easily. However, I didn’t.

The real issue happened a few days later when was trying to recall the word. I would sort of recognise it and I would then basically try and recall my story, but the problem was …I was recognising the wrong kanji. I was looking at    水 …but I was recalling the story for氷.

I don’t know if there is any real way round this, the reality is that some kanji look similar, and is down to us to notice these small differences …and I have a feeling writing them out like the book suggests is probably going make us notice these!  

The Words Are In A Weird Order

When we look at the order of the words, in English, they are kind of strange. This really comes down to the fact that the word order is really based on the complexity of the kanji.

However, this does mean you end up learning words like “gall bladder”, which is something like the 31^st word you learn.

You will find yourself just asking “what” a lot of the time when you see the words you are supposed to learn. Of course by the time you get to 2200 everything will kind of not matter, but when you are 30 words in and start bumping into more obscure things it does feel very strange.   

You Can Quickly Forget Stuff

While the little stories help you remember things, they are not perfect and you can quickly forget things. I feel kanji are very 50/50 you either recognise something about them that you can start to get the recall process under way …or you just stare at it blankly as if it is the first time you have ever seen it.

I also think you do need to be seeing these kanji a lot. I know after I stopped doing RTK I did lose a lot of what I had learned. However, some have stuck, they are permanently in my memory.

I guess this is really the same for anything you are learning, some things just stick faster, and for longer compared to others. Although, the more you are exposed to things the better your success, so you will need to keep on top of things to keep your RTK progress.     

It’s Hard To Make Stories

Personally I found it very hard to come up with my own stories for each character. This is very much a me problem, and not a problem with the book.

I am just not very creative and I found this whole concept very challenging. What I actually ended up doing was looking at websites that show all the letters and just taking other peoples stories and remembering them.

Maybe that is not optimal, or even cheating, but it worked for me.  

You Need To Do Volume II

Really if you want to see success from RTK, you need to put in the time and actually do it all. If you are like me and stop half way, it’s a waste of time.

You need to actually do both books.

If you do this, you will learn to recognise the kanji and then you will learn their Japanese meanings.

This is a long and hard process, but I imagine those that have actually completed both books will have seen some good success. As I have already mentioned many times, our expectations are all wrong and we want all this right away, which is not the aim of the first book.

RTK Is Not What We Want As Learners

I think the problem with RTK is it is not actually what we want as leaner’s, even if it is a good system.

This again all comes back to the expectations. We want “this book will teach you kanji” and since that isn’t really what its goal is …it’s not what we want.

This was definitely my problem. I wanted to learn the kanji as Japanese and understand them as Japanese words …and that is not the goal of the book.

This is exactly why I walked away from the system. Maybe I should have told myself to shut up and just carried on and actually completed both books, but it just didn’t feel right to me.

As with most things, there is more than one way to do things and while the RTK method is good, it wasn’t the right one for me. It’s just not the way I wanted to do things and really all the “problem” I have discussed above are why, even if these are problems lie with me and my expectations, not the book and its goals.

Conclusion

Hopefully this makes the whole RTK process a little clearer and can help you actually understand what is what.

There will be some of you who read this and actually think this system will work for them, and that is great.

However, there will be just as many of you who read this and think the same as me, learning to recognise the kanji over a few months, only assigning an English word to them, just seems to slow or just not the right way to go about things, and that is also fine.

Personally I would say to just learn the word you find in your immersion. Learn to recognise the word and learn its Japanese meaning and pronunciation. It is slower and harder, but you will feel like you are learning Japanese.

If you want to give RTK a go, do it, but understand what its actual purpose is and that you will need to dedicate a lot of time to it, while not really “feeling” like you are getting anywhere, but you will be laying down your foundation.

Always remember, there are no right or wrong ways to do things, you just have to do what you feel works better for you.   

(If you are looking to learn Japanese, you can follow my plan –  Learn Japanese – The Plan For A Complete Beginner)