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Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - captainporridge - 2012-10-23
I was just wondering if anyone had made some kind of list of kanji not included in the books and decided to fit them into the lessons, so if someone wanted to learn even more kanji than those that are included, but in a way that helped to reinforce lessons as they went through them, they had some kind of list. Ex. "this extra kanji fits in best at lesson 7". Obviously it's not necessary for those who have finished the books, but considering how many more kanji are out there it could be nice for people still going through them...
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - comeauch - 2012-10-23
There's this amazing thread: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3838&page=1
But learning them all in one batch? 3000 is already a whole lot (a "whole lot" like "native Japanese lot"). Almost a thousand more than you're "supposed" to know according to Japan education's ministry lol. I think it would rather be misleading and discouraging for people still going through the books, rather than helpful ;P
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - captainporridge - 2012-10-23
comeauch Wrote:Almost a thousand more than you're "supposed" to know according to Japan education's ministry lol.Hmm, I was under the impression the original 2.000-something is basic knowledge only (especially if you want to do stuff like reading novels), and considering some people are saying they regularly see kanji that exists outside the books, and the amount of kanji leftover in Japanese even after that 3.000.... Not to mention, I doubt all remaining kanji could even be assigned keywords for various reasons, so it's not like you could add absolutely all the kanji anyway.
I just thought, surely people using this book in the first place plan to learn more than it teaches eventually, and if one is just starting out anyway, why not "add more to RTK" by fitting in more kanji in strategic places once you already know the primitives for them? It's not like you can't increase the time you take to learn from the book, if you're adding more characters.
Thanks for the link, very useful!
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - comeauch - 2012-10-24
captainporridge Wrote:Hmm, I was under the impression the original 2.000-something is basic knowledge only (especially if you want to do stuff like reading novels), and considering some people are saying they regularly see kanji that exists outside the books, and the huge amount of kanji leftover in Japanese even after that 3.000....Again, I couldn't speak from my own experience, but there are many threads about how many kanjis you need to know... it seems the jouyou (revised version with ~2100) are enough for almost everything and the cases where you do see a new ones, it's more often than not in a word that you'd usually write in kana, like "spider", which you would write くも, but could also be written in kanji as 蜘蛛 (and those two kanjis virtually always go together). I recently came across the kanji for gong, 銅鑼... but yeah, such rare occurrences won't be a problem. Vocabulary is. Even though it's made up of kanjis you know XD
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - gdaxeman - 2012-10-24
Interestingly enough, this is the exact opposite of the idea behind RTK Lite, which states that there are too many unnecessary kanji for those who are just starting to learn Japanese, so it cuts that number down severely. Anyway, so what would be the cutoff point to stop adding extra kanji to a lesson in this "RTK Heavy"? Not all the ones in Unicode I guess, so perhaps all the 6,355 that are in Kanji Kentei 1?
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - yudantaiteki - 2012-10-24
captainporridge Wrote:I don't think that's accurate unless you have an odd definition of "basic". I would put the "basic" level closer to 1000 or even 700. The problem with learning characters from a list instead of from what you're reading is that the more kanji you study, the less useful each new one is. The rarer a kanji is, the less likely it is for you to see it in something you're reading.comeauch Wrote:Almost a thousand more than you're "supposed" to know according to Japan education's ministry lol.Hmm, I was under the impression the original 2.000-something is basic knowledge only (especially if you want to do stuff like reading novels),
Also don't forget something that I constantly say here (YTT's law?) -- just because a novel has X unique kanji in it does not mean that you must have studied X kanji before you open the book. Some kanji will only appear once in a 300 page book.
Quote:I just thought, surely people using this book in the first place plan to learn more than it teaches eventually, and if one is just starting out anyway, why not "add more to RTK" by fitting in more kanji in strategic places once you already know the primitives for them? It's not like you can't increase the time you take to learn from the book, if you're adding more characters.The problem is that because RTK isn't in frequency order, you can't really start learning Japanese until you finish RTK (unless you're doing RTK + traditional method at the same time).
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - JimmySeal - 2012-10-24
yudantaiteki Wrote:Also don't forget something that I constantly say here (YTT's law?) -- just because a novel has X unique kanji in it does not mean that you must have studied X kanji before you open the book. Some kanji will only appear once in a 300 page book.And let's also not forget that most non-joyo kanji will have furigana.
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - yudantaiteki - 2012-10-24
JimmySeal Wrote:Well, that depends on what you're reading. It's definitely not true for everything.yudantaiteki Wrote:Also don't forget something that I constantly say here (YTT's law?) -- just because a novel has X unique kanji in it does not mean that you must have studied X kanji before you open the book. Some kanji will only appear once in a 300 page book.And let's also not forget that most non-joyo kanji will have furigana.
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - captainporridge - 2012-10-24
yudantaiteki Wrote:Also don't forget something that I constantly say here (YTT's law?) -- just because a novel has X unique kanji in it does not mean that you must have studied X kanji before you open the book. Some kanji will only appear once in a 300 page book.I feel the need to point something out - if you're reading, say, a novel to begin with then you are most likely going to be reading multiple novels in the same genre / by the same author / etc, it's probably not just a one-time thing. So I think the rate of encountering the same unknown kanji is a bit higher. At the risk of being a little off-topic, I read recipes in Icelandic for example, and there's a lot of words that aren't even in an English-Icelandic dictionary let alone that the average textbook would teach you, and maybe they only exist once per recipe. But at the same time, if you read five recipes maybe they exist in five out of the five on a certain category (ex. baking and not cooking) and one out of the five in a second one (cooking and not baking). And cooking is not exactly an advanced or very specialized topic (meaning one you'd typically only be reading if you had, say, Uni studies in it), especially if you are interested in the culture or are living in Japan and wanting to make cheap-ingredient food etc.
Of course the goal isn't to know absolutely all the kanji in the book before you even start, I just mean it would be pretty disappointing to do all of RTK then crack open a book (or like some people have mentioned, turning on the tv) and see a whole lot of random ones you don't know, especially if you go on to read another book and see the same random ones for example. And especially if some of those kanji could easily have been added into the back of a lesson after you learned the primitives for them, and even been a reinforcement lesson for some of the lesser-used primitives. But I guess, depending on how you use Japanese and if you don't intend on reading from different types of text, it's unnecessary.
Quote:The problem is that because RTK isn't in frequency order, you can't really start learning Japanese until you finish RTK (unless you're doing RTK + traditional method at the same time).Yeah, but you can get through RTK really fast already considering the amount you learn. I know some people are taking half a year to do it, but other people are taking two or three weeks, and if you want to know more than what's in the original books from the beginning then chances are you're one of the more motivated people going on the faster route anyway. If someone is like me, they'd go out after every few lessons and glance at some Japanese text to see how many kanji they can already recognize (even if they're not actually attempting to read anything, just a quick "checking my kanji recognition with real Japanese") and they probably have some kind of more advanced stuff they'll to attempt to read as soon as they finish the books, side-by-side with grammar study.
Sorry if that was too long... I've now started looking at the kanji and charts from the other thread and I think, if no one else has done it already, I can mark off at which lessons you have learned all the primitives for each of the kanji in this chart, so someone can study them alongside the book like I described here (these already have readings and keywords and were found by reading stuff after finishing RTK). I thought maybe I should only do it for the non-old ones for example but then someone might be upset later on that they are missing hahaha.... Even if you think it's useless, a couple people found them useful/had already learned some of the same ones themselves. I can also correct some of the stories while I'm at it, some of them struck me as the person maybe didn't quite get what the keyword meant or forgot the usual method of making stories or something, no offense intended.
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - comeauch - 2012-10-24
captainporridge Wrote:Of course the goal isn't to know absolutely all the kanji in the book before you even start, I just mean it would be pretty disappointing to do all of RTK then crack open a book (or like some people have mentioned, turning on the tv) and see a whole lot of random ones you don't know, especially if you go on to read another book and see the same random ones for example.You wouldn't see a whole lot! Especially if you include RTK3 kanjis. But test it yourself! You can try using the "Reading" feature of this website. You can copy/past a text and see the kanji you know highlighted. You just have to temporarily add all of them and try finding some non-highlighted ones.
Opening a book or turning on the TV, you'll probably be frustrated by how little you understand even though you know the individual kanjis... so your efforts would (IMHO) yield much more results if you begin learning vocabulary after RTK1 or 3, instead of learning more kanjis. It would have been a good idea though, if they were more common... Save yourself some kanji fun for later haha!
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - JimmySeal - 2012-10-24
captainporridge Wrote:At the risk of being a little off-topic, I read recipes in Icelandic for example, and there's a lot of words that aren't even in an English-Icelandic dictionary let alone that the average textbook would teach you, and maybe they only exist once per recipe.Having a word occur once in each of five one-page recipies and once in each of five 300-page books are two very different things. Different by a factor of 300, actually. You're comparing apples to oranges here. If you're reading a lot of books by an author who uses a few otherwise uncommon, idiosyncratic words, then go ahead and learn those words. That has nothing to do with expousing learning tons and tons of uncommon kanji before you're near the level to do anything useful with them.
Quote:I know some people are taking half a year to do it, but other people are taking two or three weeks,People who can get through RTK in two or three weeks are an extreme rarity. I'm not sure I've seen such a person on this forum.
Quote:I just mean it would be pretty disappointing to do all of RTK then crack open a book (or like some people have mentioned, turning on the tv) and see a whole lot of random ones you don't know,Ok, but in all likelihood that's not going to happen unless they attempt something unrealistic.
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - captainporridge - 2012-10-24
JimmySeal Wrote:Having a word occur once in each of five one-page recipies and once in each of five 300-page books are two very different things.Yeah, that's true, but it's not quite what I meant... I'm having a difficult time explaining, sorry. I wouldn't count kanji that only occurs a single time in a 300-page book, but ones that can show up even in small pamphlets about the same subject or that show up multiple times throughout the book and again in other books of the same author/genre. And even then, in a genre common for anyone to look at and browse through, like recipes (instead of a degree-specific genre that most people might never read, like engineering). So for example, in English recipes you'd find the word "aspic" but in the "once in 300 pages" sort of frequency and maybe not even an English-speaker knows what it is, but on the other hand "garnish", while not a word that the average person uses daily and not something you would expect an English-second-language person to learn, shows up much more commonly and you do use/see it on occasion even if you haven't read a recipe in your life. The latter is the type of thing I think could still be useful.
JimmySeal Wrote:People who can get through RTK in two or three weeks are an extreme rarity. I'm not sure I've seen such a person on this forum.http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3493
Here's one that finished volume 1 in 15 days, in the same thread someone else says they also finished it by doing 100+ per day on average and just never mentioned it before (which would mean, finishing 3.000 in about four weeks). I dunno if there is more, but it certainly seems possible as I've been able to do 120 in one day and not fail any more than normal on the reviews. I think, considering the timeframe Heisig himself sets as possible in the first book, these people taking a half year or a year to do it (three times as long or more!) are a bit more abnormal than the ones doing it just a week faster.
Anyway, you could theoretically add ALL the remaining kanji and learn them all in a Heisig-type order and it doesn't matter, maybe someone really wants to do that and it tugs at their heartstrings to learn even one single kanji later than they could : P Of course you still have to "learn Japanese" after these books, but why not attempt to memorize more kanji while Heisig's memorization method is fresh in your head, even if you may be learning 500 completely useless kanji for yourself? After all, Japanese is a multi-year commitment to becoming native-level-or-better in anyway, for most people, so if you take longer in the beginning to give yourself an unnecessarily-large base, does it really matter?
I think everyone will end up using different kanji anyway, maybe if you decide to randomly dive into a different reading topic one day then you notice a thousand very useful kanji you thought were worthless before (I've seen it in threads here too, "I've never even seen this kanji" "Really? I see it every day and I'm in the same level/situation as you"). And I don't know about you, but once I learn a new word I like to find excuses to use it and I pick out more subjects to read that will have the same new word in there (and possibly more new ones too!), so an uncommon kanji for you could end up being very common for me just because I decided to "pursue" it more.
It's not just that, but everyone has different goals for Japanese. If you want to speak aloud or watch anime and never read or write a thing, I'm pretty sure light mode is the one for you if anything. If you want to be so fluent you can read absolutely any topic in Japanese and not need to look any kanji up, or impress/educate your Japanese girlfriend by daily writing to her with kanji she's never seen, then let's start out on heavy mode! (Ignoring the plausibility of those two examples)
Well, what I mean is, none of this stuff actually matters, you can of course choose to use a "lite" mode, normal mode, or thick/heavy mode based on your own preferences - but if someone already set out a plan for a thick mode, that makes it easier if you want to go that route then doesn't it? That's all I meant.
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - comeauch - 2012-10-24
captainporridge Wrote:It's not just that, but everyone has different goals for Japanese. If you want to speak aloud or watch anime and never read or write a thing, I'm pretty sure light mode is the one for you if anything. If you want to be so fluent you can read absolutely any topic in Japanese and not need to look any kanji up, or impress/educate your Japanese girlfriend by daily writing to her with kanji she's never seen, then let's start out on heavy mode! (Ignoring the plausibility of those two examples)LOL. What are you talking about? 3000 kanjis make up hundred of thousands of words. Are you confusing kanjis and words? Knowing individual kanjis would make you a Chinese expert. The RTK method helps you remember and recognize the kanji, but give you little information about real words! It surely helps, but not always and I'm pretttty sure most Japanese girls would be much more impressed by someone who actually knows 60,000 words than someone who knows all the individual kanjis' "meanings".
Not that you can't do it, but the rarer ones appear less often to the point where it'd be more useful to learn them directly with the word(s) they're part of! My point is: Growing a large vocabulary is a much bigger and longer challenge! Using your (great!) motivation toward this goal would achieve results quicker with no downside at all... (uh, except for that thing with Japanese girls... ~~I know 8000 kanjis, so call me maybe!~~ ;P)
Edit: Sorry, I just noticed you were actually just beginning RTK1! Sorry if what I said was a bit harsh lol... But it remains true though, complicated words are often written with usual kanjis. For example, "garnish" (in the context of food) would probably be つま. According to edict, it's usually written in kana, but you may also see it in kanji, which would be 具. In this case, that's already a jouyou kanji, one you probably already met. If you take the general verb "to garnish", then it could be (again, according to edict, not me x.x) 添える or 副える Both pronounced the same way, it's only a kanji difference... but both RTK1 kanjis. But concerning "副", it can be found in "副詞 = adverb", "副作用 = side effect", "副題 = subtitle" etc. It can't hurt to know many of them, but it's probably not as useful as you think it is, not even for specialized subjects. The wikipedia page for Triceratops for example has one non-RTK kanji (窩) but always within the word 眼窩 (eye socket). And we've been talking about 周飾頭亜目 (Marginocephalia. All RTK1 kanjis!)
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - yudantaiteki - 2012-10-24
I've learned 0 kanji by the Heisig method, so I guess I must be totally illiterate.
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - JimmySeal - 2012-10-24
captainporridge Wrote:All of them? You mean all 50,000 of them?JimmySeal Wrote:Having a word occur once in each of five one-page recipies and once in each of five 300-page books are two very different things.Anyway, you could theoretically add ALL the remaining kanji and learn them all in a Heisig-type order
Quote:why not attempt to memorize more kanji while Heisig's memorization method is fresh in your head, even if you may be learning 500 completely useless kanji for yourself?I dunno about you, but for me, continuing with any more Heisig after RTK1 would have been a total drag and a big waste of mental effort at that point. Maybe some people have a higher tolerance for that; I don't know. But those SRS reviews really pile up.
Placement of studying extra kanji not included in the books? - Katsuo - 2012-10-24
captainporridge Wrote:I was just wondering if anyone had made some kind of list of kanji not included in the books and decided to fit them into the lessons, so if someone wanted to learn even more kanji than those that are included, but in a way that helped to reinforce lessons as they went through them, they had some kind of list. Ex. "this extra kanji fits in best at lesson 7".Which edition of RTK1 are you using? If it is five or earlier then there is a list of supplementary kanji prepared by Heisig himself that you can add.
The supplement contains 157 kanji that were among those added to the joyo list a couple of years ago. They are given numbers like "632A" that tell you at which point they should be learnt.
The supplement can be downloaded from Heisig's RTK1 page. (Don't bother if you have the 6th Edition because they are already included in the book.)