Fillanzea Wrote:But "learning them as you encounter them" doesn't always mean "put it in Anki" or "make a flash card out of it" or whatever. Sometimes you just glance at it and realize you don't really feel like looking it up, but it still leaves a little bit of a memory trace. And then you see it three times, four times, and you figure out that you'd better look it up after all. Sometimes you look it up and you forget it a little while later but the next time you see it you recognize it and it's kind of on the edge of your memory. Sometimes you learn it partially -- you learn the kun reading for 桐 (because of Kirino Natsuo, in my case!) but not what kind of tree it is. Sometimes you learn it bit by bit over the course of a dozen exposures. Because it's not really binary between "known" kanji and "unknown" kanji -- there are all sorts of shades of sort-of-known kanji, too.

Indeed it is so. I've had several kanji that I have known for some time that I noticed a few months down the road that I hadn't added them to Anki, which is totally fine. But once I encounter a character I think it requires so little effort to make that extra leap to "knowing" it, or reinforcing the "memory trace". I won't go out of my way to learn more and more characters but I like to have the odds of remembering them on my side, instead of leaving it to nature (also as part of the "Edit" statement I made above, to catch up with the amount of exposure natives have gotten).

yudantaiteki Wrote:We're not talking about a single card, but the difference between 2000 and 3000, or 1500 and 3000. If you enjoy anki and RTK and like to study kanji via that method, that's fine, especially if you're doing other things at the same time. But if someone else finds RTK tedious and anki not so fun, then they shouldn't feel bad about working with a 1200-1500 size deck or even smaller.

That basically sums it up.

Or you might rtk or anki (to turn this into a verb at last) only rare kanji that are nevertheless in your specific area of interest, broadly defined. I just love exploring Japanese food, and I love seafood in general. The aforementioned 鯵 is sold as jack mackerel here in Canada and I've seen it on sale in Vancouver at a Chinese store ... no furigana, obviously. Also, the higher the class of the restaurant in Japan, the less likely you'll find furigana on the menu.

I don't worry very much any more about other "rare" kanji, probably because I mostly read quite "dry and pedestrian stuff" like the 日本経済新聞 which sticks to pretty common kanji. By my guess and the Anki stats I would think I know ~1500 kanji very well, including writing, about 500 so-so, and about 300-400 that I would recognize in a compound that I know, but have no idea of their meaning, and sometimes not even their pronunciation. I add perhaps 1-2 words a month to Anki that contain kanji I don't already recognize. Doing just fine with that in newspapers, not so much in novels. I don't read sci-fi or fantasy novels or play computer games in Japanese. But I only got this point through RTK and Anki, and I'm glad I completed it.

However I get the impression that beyond the more common kanji, most seem to have only one reading, and the incidence of a phonetic primitive (in the RTK2 sense) signalling that reading seems to be quite high.

I'm with Yudan on this. You don't "need" to know 3,000 kanji and by know I mean the English meaning and memorized writing. It's useless until you get to the place where you learn a word that uses that kanji in your target language even that's useless until you're in a place to use that word in context. While we can argue the number, there's a point where the kanji and vocabulary you know covers 90% of what you'll randomly encounter. At that point it's fair to ask do you need a systematic (RTK3, Core 10k) or targeted learning of the info beyond that.

The systematic method can get tedious at those last few percentage points. You're learning stuff that might come in handy. You're not getting immediate satisfaction from your efforts that occurred almost every card when you started. It can start to feel like a grind. However, it's minimal effort upfront for Japanese as we've gathered so many useful learning material into one place.

For targeted learning, we have so many great tools that it makes life far easier than what was possible a mere five years ago. I can have one tool scan a book I'm reading to give me both kanji and vocabulary that doesn't match my current study decks. Another tool can sort that list into an easier to learn order (maybe even take out words that appear only once or twice). I can choose to learn the words ahead of time or hold off until they finally show up. If I'm a professional, perhaps there are already existing word lists for that profession. Again, sort, use apps that convert words into useful flashcards, study at my leisure.

Yeah, I always recommend not to delete what you learned. Best to suspend it especially in decks that are collected sources as it makes it easier on the importing and exporting (ok, not too important as you should have an index field). But really, are you hurt if you didn't know that One Piece caught a yellow fin fish in particular because you deleted 50 fish and plant radical kanji? If it became central to the plot, I'm sure you'll see the word more often and decide maybe you should write it down and learn it.

Nukemarine Wrote:But really, are you hurt if you didn't know that One Piece caught a yellow fin fish in particular because you deleted 50 fish and plant radical kanji? If it became central to the plot, I'm sure you'll see the word more often and decide maybe you should write it down and learn it.

For me it's not so much that I'm hurt by not knowing about that yellow fin fish, it's more that when I encounter unknown kanji, it's highly likely that I don't know how to pronounce it (unless it's clear from the sound radical, in which case it's really easy to learn anyway), and that tends to slow me down, or break the immersion. This is, of course, also the case with certain vocab with more common kanji, which is why I like to pay extra attention to 難読 words. A nice side effect that I've noticed, is that it keeps getting easier to both learn new kanji and guess readings. The first 1000 kanji I learned were infinitely harder to remember than the ones I encounter and learn now, so I don't find it to be quite as big a deal as it is being made out to be here.

But, people are different, and the material people read are different, and as such, the needs are different. If you don't find the extra effort to be worth the fruits, then that's fine. Maybe I'm being influenced by the fact that I actually like kanji though...

Why even debate this?

Just suspend whatever Kanji anyone ever so much as suggests isn't needed. If they're wrong, and you end up running into it, the exact number of buttons you need to press to un-suspend it is, you guessed it, one.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying "Don't study these kanji, they're useless, full stop." If you're like erlog and enjoy using anki and keeping track of what kanji you've seen, then add as many as you want. It's certainly not harmful to do so.

But it's clear from this forum that there are some people who find anki boring or tedious, and want to use it in only a limited fashion to help them learn the most common stuff. This doesn't mean that they never want to learn the rarer kanji or that they're "settling" for a lower level of proficiency (if anki/RTK is a measure of proficiency my proficiency is 0). And for these people I think it's OK to tell them they can ignore the rarer kanji for now and learn them later from stuff they're reading.

Then I think we have come to an understanding. I guess people like me and erlog like to take care of things earlier on, while others like to spread it out over much longer periods. And they are both valid methods.

And like several people have been saying, it's not like anki is the only way to learn kanji, it just happens to be a good way to learn in a relatively short time span.

My main problem with erlog's posts is not his positions. I think it's good that people have different positions and that they get discussed, because it lets people see what options are out there and avoids the impression that there's just one way to get good at Japanese.

The problem is that he repeatedly uses two debate "tactics" that I really hate and don't think have any place here: (1) Your method is fine, unless you actually want to be good at Japanese, and (2) You would agree with me if your Japanese were better. He's not the only one guilty of using these, but this isn't the first time I've seen him do it.

[Zgarbas]

I read the "my level is higher than yours" part as a quirk with the black-and-white separation between useless/non-useless kanjis, rather than "if you don't agree then you're low level". ^^'.

That line wasn't meant to denigrate people's level of Japanese. I was agreeing with almost everything Yudantaiteki went on to angrily rant at me about in his reply to my post. This happens quite a lot on this forum where people will nitpick about tone when they start feeling insecure, and then echo back to me something that agrees with what I had posted.

I probably could have worded my original reply better, but I stand by the ideas.

I was saying that for people at a lower level that, indeed, some of those kanji aren't that important. However, they do become more important as your level of Japanese improves. I even said in that post that if people had to prioritize their time that it wasn't worth it to prioritize these rare kanji.

I didn't actually finish RTK until around the time I passed JLPT N1 since it was something I had struggled on and off with for the entire time I was in university. I had nearly finished it a few times, but never had the discipline until recently. I didn't start RTK3 until after I passed JLPT N1 and read a few novels. That's the kind of level I'm talking about when I say it becomes useful later.

A lot of discussions on this forum seem to be framed in such a way where everyone pretends advanced level(past JLPT N1) doesn't exist. That's the kind of mentality that leads to someone calling those kanji useless. I'm not saying those kanji are necessary to being successful or having usable Japanese. You could definitely get by without them for a long while.

I'm saying that at a high level, one of the ways of improving your Japanese is these "useless" kanji. A Japanese college graduate would know those kanji. That's probably a higher level of Japanese literacy than the general population, but most of us here have higher levels of English literacy than the general populations in our respective countries. The fact that so many people here bother to use proper grammar and punctuation puts this community well above the majority of the internet community.

So I don't consider myself really that insane for suggesting that people at some point might want to have their level of understanding in Japanese be of a similar level to that of their existing high level of English. That is the viewpoint I'm working from most of the time. I understand that's different from other people who have more concrete goals like specific TV shows or novels. I passed most of the concrete goals in Japanese that I used to share with a lot of people on this forum, but I continued wanting to go further.

I will add that my post presumes people are wanting to learn these kanji through RTK. That's been the way that's been most effective for me, but I recognize that things might work differently for other people.

I'm not saying it's essential to do RTK for these kanji. I'm saying it's essential eventually to know them. I'm not really concerned about the exact methods people are using.

You have an unusual definition of "essential"; I don't know some of the kanji on that recommended delete list, and I get along fine. From his list, these are the ones that I personally do not think I know (IOW if I saw them in context I'm not sure I would know how to pronounce them or what the word means):
昌亘硝圭沫桟帆幌賓畝啓款庸謄陪紡酪菱劾泰廉楠媒郭逓嗣函蔦塑遵淑允頒殉扶
If it's eventually essential for me to know those, I guess I'm not there yet. On the other hand, there are a bunch of kanji that aren't in RTK1 that *are* essential for me, such as 葵, 鬘, 蜻蛉, and 朧.

Quote:A lot of discussions on this forum seem to be framed in such a way where everyone pretends advanced level(past JLPT N1) doesn't exist.

My position is not that post-JLPT N1 doesn't exist, but that when you're past N1, you're at the level where you no longer need kanji to be dictated to you by an arbitrary list. You can learn them from what you're interested in reading, as you encounter them. (Unless you enjoy studying kanji, in which case definitely go as far as you want.)

Quote:I'm saying it's essential eventually to know them. I'm not really concerned about the exact methods people are using.

It sounds to me like what you're saying here is that the RTK 1 kanji are all (eventually) essential for everybody, and even if they're not seeing them in anything they're reading, they should make the effort to learn them anyway. Is that right?

Anyway, if you don't want people to take issue with your tone, then stop making posts that insult people's language ability. I probably wouldn't have responded if this was the first time you had done it, and maybe I am overreacting because I still remember the thread where you characterized my views as "exceptionally silly" and "profoundly stupid" (among other insults).

yudantaiteki Wrote:You have an unusual definition of "essential"; I don't know some of the kanji on that recommended delete list, and I get along fine. From his list, these are the ones that I personally do not think I know (IOW if I saw them in context I'm not sure I would know how to pronounce them or what the word means):
昌亘硝圭沫桟帆幌賓畝啓款庸謄陪紡酪菱劾泰廉楠媒郭逓嗣函蔦塑遵淑允頒殉扶
If it's eventually essential for me to know those, I guess I'm not there yet. On the other hand, there are a bunch of kanji that aren't in RTK1 that *are* essential for me, such as 葵, 鬘, 蜻蛉, and 朧.

Several of these are commonly used in names, such as 昌　(あきら、しょう)　圭祐　啓介　水帆 or famous places such as 函館　札幌. 輪郭 is also a word I wouldn't want to be without. I'm not saying they're all super useful but some of the characters in there I run into all the time. And yes, most of the one's I quoted are names and not words, but names are pretty common to come across in texts too.

Now that you point out 札幌 and 函館 I recognize those (and those names too). I honestly don't know 輪郭 (I had to look up how to pronounce it too, wow). I'm certainly not claiming I'm the kanji superstar.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Now that you point out 札幌 and 函館 I recognize those (and those names too). I honestly don't know 輪郭 (I had to look up how to pronounce it too, wow). I'm certainly not claiming I'm the kanji superstar.

Really? I see 輪郭 a lot in novels, in scenes describing someones outline in a dark room, or in the distance. I'm surprised you haven't come across it before.

He probably has come across it before. It's just easy to overlook and take for granted kanji you know at a certain point.

True, there are a lot of rather common kanji and vocab that I didn't realize I missed until I learned them.

Taishi Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Now that you point out 札幌 and 函館 I recognize those (and those names too). I honestly don't know 輪郭 (I had to look up how to pronounce it too, wow). I'm certainly not claiming I'm the kanji superstar.

Really? I see 輪郭 a lot in novels, in scenes describing someones outline in a dark room, or in the distance. I'm surprised you haven't come across it before.

I don't read novels (in Japanese), so that could be why. I can't say I've never seen that word in my life, but I don't know it offhand.