Learning Japanese fast - Why not use frequency lists for 80% coverage?

erlog Wrote:You're confusing frequency with importance for understanding meaning. A kanji's frequency of appearing has little do with how important it is for understanding. In fact, you could make the case that frequency and importance have an inverse relationship. The less frequent kanji are probably more important because they are only used when they are necessary. The same goes for words.

Frequency and importance are always taken into account in all language learning materials. Most materials do go in some order of frequency or importance, and so does the JLPT2. They all tend to go roughly by the 常用 kanji list broken down by grade level as written by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

Good point about the inverse relationship, it is probably true in a lot of cases.

I assumed JLPT2 would have a poor kanji list because of its standardized and conventional nature. Maybe I should take another look, perhaps RevTK lite would be equivalent to basically 93% coverage or so.