I’ve been skipping out on a lot of things I’d like to do lately, such as readthekanji.com, memrise, and so on, and it’s all because of this RTK2 project. I’m convinced it’ll be worth it though, not only for myself but for everyone else who has ever looked at Heisig’s second volume and said something like “well that’s nice but what does one DO with this?” Honestly this project would be a great deal quicker if I actually enjoyed making the deck, but if anyone cares to explain how to enjoy copying a book into flashcards I’d be much obliged.

Here’s a sample of the cards:

So as you can see, the target kanji is highlighted in red. For sets of cards with more than one reading (the “semi-pure” and “mixed” groups), the highlighting is green for secondary readings, and occasionally purple for tertiary readings. Then below that, there is the word again with the non-target characters replaced by their hiragana readings. Remember, only one piece of information per card! Below that, there is the signal primitive, for cards that use them. The answer has just the reading, word again, and a brief English definition. At first I was using Japanese definitions, but looking them up was adding a tremendous amount of time to an already slow process, and wasn’t likely to be terribly helpful anyway.

There is a another field as well, called “ReadingOnly”, which is used to match to what you are to type in to answer the card.

Right now I have 1182 cards made, which is a little less than halfway it looks like. I’m at the beginning of the “mixed” groups and that will be slow(er) going because a lot of frames have more than one word, requiring two cards per frame. Also, finding signal primitives can occasionally be time-consuming, though I don’t waste a great deal of time on that anymore. Often a signal primitive will be a Japanese character on its own, though sometimes a very rare one. Sometimes it will not be a Japanese character, but will be a Chinese one. If those two options fail I just indicate it as “right side of such a character” or something like that.

I don’t think I’m alone in considering learning the writing and meaning of the characters the easy part. The readings each have such a long and convoluted history that they seem random at first glance, and impossibly confusing. This should help. Onwards then we plod.