My way of Remembering the Kanji – The Tools
During the past 11 months I have been slowly learning how to write kanji following James Heisig’s method described in his Remembering the Kanji book. While the book gives you the groundbreaking approach to learning kanji, it is usually not enough on its own to get you through all 2042 characters. I’ve experimented with different tools and methods and found one that worked the best for me. This is the first post in the series explaining my way of doing RTK. Hopefully my experiences will also help others on their journey through RTK.
The Tools
- Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig
- Reviewing the Kanji
- Anki
- Writing surface and writing utensils
Since it’s the essential part of the whole method, you should get RTK book. To save some money I suggest half.com where you can get it from someone who already finished. Also, recycling is good.
RevTK website is a great tool for sharing the stories. This means you can have easy to remember stories even without being too creative and original yourself. The site also has a decent SRS tool for kanji reviews, but I found it too limited for my own needs.
Anki is the best SRS program I’ve found so far. It works well for my RTK deck, but it’s even better with keeping all of my decks (kana, sentences, C++…) together in one place so I can save time while reviewing.
I first wrote just “paper and pencil”, but in reality you could use just about anything to practice writing. As long as you have a surface on which you can write out the kanji and something to write it with. Even your hands and fingers could be enough to satisfy this requirement.
That’s it. Assuming you have a computer with internet connection, these are all the tools you’ll need to learn the kanji the way I’m learning them. In the next post, I will describe how to effectively and efficiently learn new kanji, add them to your deck, and review.
[...] my last post, I listed the tools that I use for studying the kanji the Heisig way. Now, I will explain the [...]