[thaumasiotes]

> I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji...

If you didn't know what べんきょう meant, how did you know it was what you wanted to write?

[pm215]

I knew the word (including how it is spoken and what it means), so I would have no difficulty of understanding if it was said to me in conversation, I could read the word whether in kanji or hiragana, I could compose sentences in my head which used it and use it when speaking, I just didn't always remember how to write it in kanji...

(Here べんきょう is just an example: the same issue applies to essentially every word.)

[jimbokun]

The characters you copy pasted are in a phonetic script called hiragana, conceptually similar to the English alphabet as each character denotes a sound.

The kanji are pictographic characters that often have different pronunciations in different contexts. The kanji for べんきょう are 勉強 (meaning "to study").

[thaumasiotes]

I know that.

In your model of the problem, pm215 knows the following things:

1. There is a Japanese word pronounced benkyoo which refers to activities like reading books with the intent to learn something, doing practice exercises with the intent to learn something, preparing to take a test, doing things that a school might ask you to do, and other similar endeavors.

2. There is an English word "study" which corresponds to the Japanese word spelled 勉強.

But he doesn't know this:

3. In English, activities performed with the intent to learn or review something are referred to by the general term "studying".

I find this hard to believe. Anyone who chose to learn mappings from English words to kanji spellings must be familiar with the meanings of basic English words. He shouldn't be able to think of the activities he wants to refer to without the word "study" coming into his mind, but that was the problem he described.

[pm215]

No, the problem I describe is "I am thinking of a Japanese sentence (which I know the meaning of), and I could write it in hiragana but not in kanji".

This is analogous to "I want to write an English sentence, but I can't remember how to spell one of the words", except it's worse because at least English words are spelled vaguely in line with their pronunciation.

I think where I may have stated the problem confusingly was my reference to not having a link between the Japanese word and the English RTK keywords. RTK assigns one unique keyword to each kanji, which (a) doesn't always line up with the meaning of a word in which it's the only kanji and (b) doesn't inherently help with multi kanji words. In this case benkyou is 勉強 which is two kanji with the RTK keywords EXERTION and STRONG. Unless you actively learn and memorise a link between the Japanese word and this pair of keywords, RTK is not going to help you with writing the word.

[thaumasiotes]

> RTK assigns one unique keyword to each kanji, which (a) doesn't always line up with the meaning of a word in which it's the only kanji and (b) doesn't inherently help with multi kanji words. In this case benkyou is 勉強 which is two kanji with the RTK keywords EXERTION and STRONG.

Ah, you're right. I had no idea this was what you had in mind. That is a system that doesn't make sense. You have to learn the spelling of words per word, not hope that the roots make sense.

(By contrast, 勉强 exists in modern Chinese too, where it mostly means "force; coerce; compel", but can also refer to just barely being able to do something. I was amused to see that it means "study" in Japanese - that implies one of the most sharply negative attitudes towards studying that I've ever heard of.)