[jesselt]

I'm pretty sure that Kirakira and I both understand the whole point of RTK, but some of the claims that are being made don't make sense...

Originally Posted by LorenPaul

well.. when you were 4... you could say "radio" but you couldn't write it..

i'm just doing it in reverse. i'm learning to write the symbol for radio and then learning the word.

Not exactly... When i was 4 I could say "radio", but I could also understand what I was saying. What you are doing is like learning how to recognize a picture of a radio, but having no idea how to actually say the word for it. Again, I understand that RTK isn't supposed to teach you how to say the word for it, but it just seems sort of counterproductive to spend that much time learning how to read Kanji in English, especially when it becomes completely useless in many compounds. As I posted before, just because you can understand the English equivalent for 新 and 聞 doesn't help you read 新聞 at all unless you want to understand it as "new listen" or "new understand" or something equally useless.

I question the entire method of AJATT + RTK when the entire point of AJATT is supposedly about learning Japanese just as a child would through immersion, when children certainly don't process new information in any way comparable to RTK. Children don't translate Kanji in their heads when they see them any more than we translate English words into Kanji to process them, and children usually don't come up with cleaver stories in order to tell Kanji apart - they just rely on the fact that 犬 and 大 are not the same despite the fact that they look similar.

I think that if RTK works for you then that's great and you should continue that method, but there's no reason to think that it is clearly superior to the "useless" textbooks and language classes, regardless of what AJATT tells you. Different people learn things differently, and I can promise you that I will never look back and regret not using RTK to increase my learning speed by 500% or whatever garbage number you want to throw out.