Eminem2 Wrote:In my own experience though, knowing all of the RTK1 Kanji isn't that much help when starting with Japanese grammar. Sure, it can feel like a feather in your cap when you immediately recognize the Kanji that are used in the grammar examples, but this shouldn't be exaggerated. (Perhaps I encountered about a 100 or 150 Kanji in the 250+ pages of the basic grammar book I used. So going through all of the 2,200 RTK1 Kanji before starting on basic grammar would have been overkill.)I think I'm actually in agreement with you here. I am just starting out with RTK and I am already fairly far along in my Japanese studies. It's always hard to self-assess a language, but for reference I am planning on taking (and passing!) the JLPT N4 this year, and I just doing some public speaking in Japanese.
The emphasis on JLPT N4 is mostly on demonstrating proficiency with the basics: basic grammer, vocabulary and so on. The kanji that I already know (I can recognize about 500) is already overkill for the exam. I know that there are lots of people here who are very skilled, but I'll tell you that I just took a practice N4 exam and was surprised at how much vocabulary and grammer I just didn't know. And the vocabulary is largely written in kana, so you don't need much kanji for that.
The problem that I'm hoping RTK can help with is that as I have more and more written correspondence with Japanese the amount of vocabulary they write to me - in kanji - is overwhelming. My textbooks make a point point of introducing, as you say, just a handful of kanji a lesson. But my colleagues and friends introduce a lot of new kanji and vocabulary to me seemingly with every email. That combination makes learning feel overwhelming.
My hope is that RTK can make all the kanji I'll likely wind up using familiar to me now, so that learning new vocabulary doesn't feel so overwhelming. When it's all just a bunch of squiggles that you've seen for the first time, it's hard to keep it apart. In contrast, learning new katakana words is easy.