In RtK 1 and even more in RtK 3 there some useless kanji. This is a fact.
Ok, you can argue that some people would find them useful for their particular interests, but I think this is a border line case.

How do you deal with these kanji?

I have been studying them until now because I feel that deleting a card is a step behind, but kanji about plants, fishes and some old ones (there are some that have only one entry in dictionaries) are really annoying after some time.

Would you consider their deletion or you are like me and you can not stand this solution because you feel it is a kind of loss after all?

Here's one approach:

http://japaneselevelup.com/2011/08/03/fi...aws-1-500/

Personally I just keep them in. I quite enjoy reviewing them so that's a benefit in itself. If you see it as wasted effort at the moment, you could just suspend them, or move to a "future" deck, leaving you free to focus on other things at the moment, but have the potential to pick them up in the future.

amillerchip Wrote:Here's one approach:

http://japaneselevelup.com/2011/08/03/fi...aws-1-500/

Personally I just keep them in. I quite enjoy reviewing them so that's a benefit in itself. If you see it as wasted effort at the moment, you could just suspend them, or move to a "future" deck, leaving you free to focus on other things at the moment, but have the potential to pick them up in the future.

At least half of the kanji that he lists in that first post are indispensable for understanding normal Japanese. :\\
I get the point- you'll eventually see them and learn the word they appear in etc etc. But I don't see the problem with leaving them in. I actually haven't used my RTK deck in a year or two, though, so I guess that's the same thing as deleting every card in the deck..? haha. Either way I wouldn't say it's *bad* to keep them in unless you consider the few seconds they take out of your day to be worth deleting them.

drdunlap Wrote:At least half of the kanji that he lists in that first post are indispensable for understanding normal Japanese. :\\

I guess that's debatable. The article provides 5 pretty strong reasons for why he thinks they are dispensable, and he doesn't seem to be having many problems without them.

I'm a beginner and I prefer to keep them in, as it's not costing me anything. But if years down the line they feel like they're dragging me down when I know I never use them (as that article states), then I'll delete.

Max.89 Wrote:but kanji about plants, fishes and some old ones (there are some that have only one entry in dictionaries) are really annoying after some time.

I don't know your level, but keep in mind that while the kanji might not be much use on it's own - it may be useful as part of a compound. Here are some lists of compound kanji, according to kanjidamage:

http://kanjidamage.com/tags/2
http://kanjidamage.com/tags/21

drdunlap Wrote:At least half of the kanji that he lists in that first post are indispensable for understanding normal Japanese. :\\

I don't think so. Personally I agree with every kanji on that list except maybe 曇. I know some of them from specialist writings I read for my research but not a single one of those kanji can be fairly called "indispensable." I checked his other two lists and I think it's a very well thought list. As he says, of course you will run across some of these kanji, but indispensable? No.

If your argument is "you might see these sometimes" or "some people see these in their specialist stuff" then your anki deck should be 6000 kanji.

Are kanji like 鯛 or 鯖 specialist stuff? I just saw both in a supermarket the other day.

Honestly in rk3 you could of mentioned a few "useless" kanji but you went with fish and plants that's hardly useless.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

drdunlap Wrote:At least half of the kanji that he lists in that first post are indispensable for understanding normal Japanese. :\\

I don't think so. Personally I agree with every kanji on that list except maybe 曇. I know some of them from specialist writings I read for my research but not a single one of those kanji can be fairly called "indispensable." I checked his other two lists and I think it's a very well thought list. As he says, of course you will run across some of these kanji, but indispensable? No.

If your argument is "you might see these sometimes" or "some people see these in their specialist stuff" then your anki deck should be 6000 kanji.

I like exaggeration.
But really I just can't see them being that much of a bother and I hate thinking so hard in my language learning endeavors.

I may just be slow. This is a possibility.

[Zgarbas]

I actually saw a few of the kanjis on the list quite recently. 2 were used as a name though (to be fair, half the reason I noticed one was because I wondered if I'll ever encounter Japanese Judas Tree IRL). Some are even stand-alone common words (like 霜, 酢, etc）。And why delete the primitives 竜 and 斤?
墨, 琴, 碁, 禅, 酉 I think is likely to be encountered by Japanese culture geeks.
I just skimmed it, but it feels kind of silly. I guess it works for him given his reasons, but since everyone is exposed to different things(and has different goals) there's a good chance of missing out by following his advice.

Also I noticed some kanjis which I considered not-so-important popping up in anime, though they're nice about it and usually explain it and/or are just details (A countdown from 陸　to 壱 in Natsume Yuujinchou comes to mind).

By the way, I don't really know how they calculate common words on those dictionaries, but almost every time I picked up a native text an uncommon word was within the first few sentences. Just saying.

As a vegetarian, I basically know zero of the fish kanji. You mostly see them in restaurants, and since the "fish" radical tells me it's probably something I don't eat, I don't have to worry about them too much.

As for plants, I think they're mostly nonessential. Not that you're never going to come across them, but you can read perfectly happily without knowing whether the trees along the path are elms or poplars. Heck, even in English, I know what a maple or an oak or a pine or a birch are, but I can't tell a fir from a spruce -- so why would I have to know all the Japanese plant names?

[Zgarbas]

To know if someone is leaning against a pillar as opposed to against a tree, or that someone got bitten by a shark, rather than a crab?

There is a big difference between being able to distinguish a birch from an oak in the wild, and not knowing what they are in the first place. They can also be used quite frequently in names. Zgarbas also makes a good point. There are similar cases like 鱗 which isn't a fish, but the scales of one.

In the end I think it comes down to at which level of Japanese you're satisfied with. Sure you can do fine without a lot of kanji, but I don't see why one should limit oneself. Then again, personally I find learning kanji quite easy.

柱　is a kyouiku kanji and super common, so I don't think it's that relevant when it comes to not knowing the uncommon plant names that are in RTK3.

I see it like this: I could spend a lot of time memorizing all the rare kanji because I'm going to need them someday, and keep on forgetting them because I never see them, or I could just get on with reading and studying and doing stuff that I want to do and if I see a kanji I don't know and want to know what it is, I'll look it up. That'll take about 30 seconds, and maybe I'll remember it and maybe I won't, but I'll just look it up next time if I have to.

(And yes, there are names, but I'm perfectly capable of learning the pronunciation for 楓 without having to memorize what kind of tree it is.)

Yes, I am satisfied with my level of Japanese, by the way. I can read novels fairly quickly for pleasure; I can watch TV and understand what people are saying; I prefer being satisfied with that than to keep chasing after some ideal of perfect mastery.

Taishi Wrote:but I don't see why one should limit oneself.

Not learning a kanji from RTK does not mean that you will never know that kanji. If your argument is that you should RTK/anki every kanji you might potentially ever see, then you should start with a 6000-8000 kanji anki deck. There's nothing magic about RTK1's 2040 kanji. It's too small to represent every kanji you might potentially ever see, and it's too large to represent a pool of common, general-use kanji that everyone should know no matter what.

It's especially relevant because most people use RTK first, or at least very early on in their studies. There's no reason why beginners should be learning to write and recall hundreds of rare kanji before they can read things containing the common ones.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Not learning a kanji from RTK does not mean that you will never know that kanji. If your argument is that you should RTK/anki every kanji you might potentially ever see, then you should start with a 6000-8000 kanji anki deck. There's nothing magic about RTK1's 2040 kanji. It's too small to represent every kanji you might potentially ever see, and it's too large to represent a pool of common, general-use kanji that everyone should know no matter what.

It's especially relevant because most people use RTK first, or at least very early on in their studies. There's no reason why beginners should be learning to write and recall hundreds of rare kanji before they can read things containing the common ones.

I realize now that what I said can be (or even very likely to be) interpreted in a way I didn't mean. I sometimes confuse what RTK is for most people and what it is to me. For most people RTK is a starting point in the studying of Japanese where you learn most of the characters you're going to need. But to me it is the method itself, in other words, learning characters by giving them stories to remember them by and naming the primitives. Meaning the Heisig order and selection of characters, or the likely point in your studies you are when doing RTK isn't included in 'what RTK is to me'.

Having that said, what I meant with the statement you quoted is along the lines of "I don't see why you should skip learning a character because it may or may not be very useful". What that usually means for me is, if I encounter a character I don't know, I usually add it, just like I do with vocab I don't know.

Now if we speak about the normal RTK (the one I SHOULD have been talking about), I have to agree with you. I think if you use RTK early on and the way it's made to be used, I think RTK Lite is a good idea. Otherwise you're going to spend a lot of time to learn a lot of characters that you're not going to find a use of for a long time. I guess if you call a character 'learned' when you know vocab with that character, then you'd have a bunch of 'unlearned' characters sitting around taking up study time without contributing to your Japanese.

But when you get past that early stage, I don't see why you should decide to NOT learn a character you encountered, unless it's like only used in the name of an ancient Chinese poet or something.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Not learning a kanji from RTK does not mean that you will never know that kanji.

Very true, but adding an extra character to your RTK deck does not necessarily equal a lot of extra work.

Sorry for the messed up state of this post, I don't usually talk to people so I'm not adept at delivering my thoughts in an easily digestible form.

To the original question, what helped for me was putting photos of the plant, animal or flower, or object in the question field. Wasn't too hard as all I had to do was paste the kanji into image search. Sort of like how RTK helped expand some people's vocabulary, RTK3 can help expand your biology knowledge.

As for which kanji are 'indispensible', I'm pretty sure that debate has been had on here many times in the past. I just approach it as diminishing returns on time investment. Learning advanced kanji, grammar and vocabulary just hedges your bets on using them when needed outside a study environment. However, if you invested time learning them, seems a waste that you don't want to spend a percentage of that time to help retain what you learned.

I put fishes and plants because I do not know most of them in my native language.
I am not referring to things like 鮫, 鯨, 蛸 that are very useful.
I do not know for example this fish: 鯵.
Searching with google I can see the image, memorize it and then probably forget it.
Maybe it is just my ignorance on those 2 domains (fishes and plants).
I had started some time ago to add images, maybe I should continue.

[Zgarbas]

Isn't that more "fish with which I've had no contact with since they're not really eaten in my area"? If so, you could consider how in your native tongue you don't know it since it is not relevant, whereas in Japanese it is relevant since it's actually used. I have that issue with food terms in general (goes for English too; can't read recipes for the life of me). Maybe find a Japanese restaurant and have some sushi? ^^ getting the taste of it might leave a better impact than having a picture of a fish (all fish look alike anyway). Mackerel should be pretty common in most areas though =/.

Plant and animal names are often katakana anyway; I've hardly ever seen the fish kanji (without furigana) even in restaurants in Japan. It's happened a few times but I was able to ask someone what the kanji were.

I think it's weird how people advocate not deleting Kanji. I know I'm not deleting any of mine, but I also know that if I ever did get even the slightest inclination to delete one, maybe because I don't like the way it's used or I didn't like the look of it, the stroke order rubbed me in the wrong way or it looked at my mom funny, I'd delete it.

As I said, it hasn't happened to me for Kanji, but my cloze deleted Tae Kim deck had a lot more sentences deleted than I'd wager most people on here would be comfortable with.

Zgarbas Wrote:(goes for English too; can't read recipes for the life of me)..

That's so like me too! I study in England, but my kitchen vocabulary has large, monstrous gaps. :p

I have deleted almost 100 kanji that have been bothering me for no good reason, stuff like "cocoon", etc.

It's better to spend the time focusing on important non-RtK1 kanji.

I've done quite the opposite with my RTK deck, and have added new kanji I've come across in native sources. These are usually animal names or things that used to have kanji, but don't really anymore.

I'm up to about 3,060, and I still come across kanji I don't know when reading from native sources. I'm sure there are handful of truly "useless" kanji in the set, but I really can't be bothered to figure out which ones they are.

People talking about how you may as well have a 6,000-8,000 card deck if you want to be a completionist or something are making ridiculous slippery slope arguments. There's a big difference between the most common 3,000 kanji and ALL of the kanji.

I come across a lot of these so-called "useless" kanji in things a lot of people here would probably be interested in such as video games and interesting fantasy novels. Learning kanji through RTK really isn't that big of a deal. A single card really doesn't take up too much time in reviewing, and you're going to waste more time trying to optimize your deck than if you'd just let it be.

I don't understand the bizarre focus on efficiency people have here. If you just want to be able to read and experience the most dry and pedestrian Japanese imaginable then yeah you might want to use some of this advice. If you actually want to do interesting fun things with your Japanese then you'll probably need a lot of this "useless" stuff. The more the merrier.

I'm not saying it should be a huge priority in your studies, but there's no reason to make big sweeping decisions about it. Eventually when your Japanese does become better you might see value in some of these things. If the choice is between doing yet more RTK and learning to read more from native sources then I'd have to say going for more reading is better.

However, calling these useless is basically just admitting your level is too low for them to be important. They do become important later. You don't have to do them now, but you probably will want to do them at some point. A lot of the flavor of written text comes through via these kanji. 大体分かる is only satisfying for a little while. Eventually you will want to go deeper than that, toward more what a native speaker would understand, and in that case these kanji are quite useful.

erlog Wrote:People talking about how you may as well have a 6,000-8,000 card deck if you want to be a completionist or something are making ridiculous slippery slope arguments. There's a big difference between the most common 3,000 kanji and ALL of the kanji.

Not that much. By the time you get to 3000 you've already hit the point where each new kanji is rare enough that you may not ever see it. I'm sure I see kanji in stuff I read that you never do, and vice versa.

This is particularly important for RTK because so many people try to complete it before they start learning real Japanese at all, or at least very early in their studies. I have no problem saying that a beginner should not be worrying about kanji like 桐 or 抄 even though I see them constantly, more often than some of the elementary school kanji.

The link posted above, despite using the provocative word "useless", was pretty clear about what he meant:
"- If there is a word that uses the kanji that you want to learn, that is fine, put a sentence in. There is nothing wrong with learning words with these kanji in them."

"- You may say “Wait! I know a word with that kanji.” Yes this is true. Obviously there are words with these kanji. But please trust me on this. I’ve read 100s of Japanese books over the years. These aren’t worth going out of your way to learning, especially in the beginning of your studies. You will eventually learn some of the words that have these kanji through natural reading. No reason to force the process on early in RTK."

Quote:Learning kanji through RTK really isn't that big of a deal. A single card really doesn't take up too much time in reviewing

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.

Quote:If you just want to be able to read and experience the most dry and pedestrian Japanese imaginable then yeah you might want to use some of this advice. If you actually want to do interesting fun things with your Japanese then you'll probably need a lot of this "useless" stuff. The more the merrier.

However, calling these useless is basically just admitting your level is too low for them to be important.

You really need to stop insulting people's Japanese ability when you participate in these discussions. It's exceptionally rude on a forum devoted to Japanese language study.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

Quote:Learning kanji through RTK really isn't that big of a deal. A single card really doesn't take up too much time in reviewing

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.

For me that boost from 2000 to 3000+ feels worthwhile for the few extra percent of understanding, and the feeling of not having to encounter unknown kanji on a daily basis, and I'm sure others feel the same (and others not). Sure a lot of the extra characters you've learned you maybe won't encounter again in quite some time, but it's impossible to know which beforehand. Maybe you only encounter 200 out of a set of 1000 characters in a said month, it means you spent the effort of learning a 1000 characters while only getting a use of 200, which can sound like wasted effort. But the way I see it I just prevented myself from encountering 200 unknown characters in a month, which is a decent amount.

However the same argument could be made for 500 characters out of a set of 6000. It just depends where you want to draw the line, which can be different for each individual.

And like yudantaiteki has been stating quite audibly, it's probably not something you want to spend time on when you're just starting out.

(Just to make it clear, I'm not saying learning unusual kanji through lists is a good idea, just that learning them as you encounter them can be useful)

Edit: I also see it as a way to emulate the 20+ years of exposure that natives have, by forcing myself to see them more often than I normally would

I definitely dispute the idea that I must be reading "pedestrian" stuff because I don't think one needs to know 3000 kanji. Currently I'm reading Morimi Tomohiko's "Penguin Highway," which is a science fiction/magical realism kind of thing about the theory of relativity and the sudden appearance of penguins in a small town; it won the Seiun award a couple years ago and is just recently out in paperback. It has blue whales, too; that's written in katakana, like most animal names are. (Morimi does use some WEIRD kanji in "Yoru wa mijikashi, aruke yo otome," but they're furigana'ed, at least the first time they show up.) Did I read a lot of low-level stuff when I was not as advanced as I am now? Sure. That's how I got to be better.

Quote:(Just to make it clear, I'm not saying learning unusual kanji through lists is a good idea, just that learning them as you encounter them can be useful)

Precisely.

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.