Before I share my learning routine and advice for RTK I would like to write about my personal experience first: When I started to learn Japanese, kanji seemed incredibly difficult. They were just a chaotic combination of strokes to me. Then I came across the book Remembering the Kanji (RTK) by James W. Heisig. Volume 1 presents a total of 2.200 kanji (including most of the jōyō kanji ). I used the german version of Remembering the Kanji The beginning was promising. I easily learned the first few hundred kanji. This experience was amazing. I never thought that this could be possible. But then I made the mistake of proceeding too fast . I saw forum posts of other RTK users who claimed that they “finished“ RTK in 3 months or even less. This motivated me and I tried to learn 25 kanji a day. Even though it was difficult to create memorable stories for this amount of kanji every day I moved on. After my first try to learn kanji with RTK, I forgot a great part of it after I "finished...
While trying to learn Japanese I struggled most of the time. Looking back, I've spend so much time searching for promising methods, read about them or watched videos from different language learners who claimed that their method would be the most effective — instead of actually learning Japanese. Even after knowing so much about language learning, I still didn't know how to use this knowledge to learn Japanese. I knew the theory, the recipe. I tried some methods and combined different parts that seemed useful but I never felt satisfied with the results. Switching so often between different methods wasn't beneficial. I always asked myself if there's an even better method out there. With the "right" method, I thought, I would be able to learn Japanese the "right" way, like the other language learners I saw on the internet. Being not able to really make progress with one of these popular methods, I had the impression that I did something wrong a...
Please note that I write about what works for me and share advice based on my own experiences. If you have a different opinion or if you use other methods, that's absolutely fine. Do whatever works for you. . . . When I learned my second language (English) at school, we did a lot of grammar exercises. Writing was hard because I focused too much on grammar rules. I wasn’t able to write correct sentences intuitively. After graduation, I started to watch my favorite TV series in English because the new seasons weren't available in my native language. I also began to read blogs and forum posts about language learning in English. Over time, my English improved a lot. I can use it intuitively now because I unconsciously internalized so many sentence patterns and expressions. At some point I stopped thinking about grammar rules and just trusted my feel for the language. This doesn’t mean that I never make mistakes, of course, but I can express myself quite well and without much diff...
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