Hello everyone,

I've been seriously studying Japanese for about a year and a half and I can say confidently that I have a solid N3 level. I'll be studying at Kwansei Gakuin University near Osaka next year and I want to make the most of the two months I have ahead before I go.

So far, and following the Kanjidamage method I know the most common on and kun readings of nearly all jouyou Kanji (I'm still completing KD with quite a few kanjis it lacks from KD, no one has made a list for this before?) and I don't have any difficulty going through textbooks of my level of japanese (recently finished an integrated approach to intermediate japanese and jbridge to intermediate japanese).

The problem I have is native materials, which have a LOT of Kanjis I don't know of, and I would like to have a standarized approach to learning the most common set of characters after jouyou Kanji. Most of all, because it takes confidence out of me, because I think I'd be forgetting a Kanji I already know when I stumble upon a new one (How do you guys cope with this?? Am I the only one with kanji paranoia?).

I have heard of the Jinmeiyō kanji list, but I'd like to know if these are really common or just used for names. If it's the latter, I'd like to know if someone has elaborated a proper list of the most common and widely used non-jouyou kanji.

Is this the right approach? I don't like the perspective of going through books and having to stop every two words, so far knowing all the kun and on readings has proven to be a wise decision, I'd like to follow this path.

How do you feel about doing Remembering the Kanji 3?

You don't need to keep studying every new kanji you come across. Just put new words you see into Anki and get used to identifying them through visual memory. You can learn to write them too at that point if you want.

You're never going to remember every kanji in existence, stop worrying. If you try to preempt things and learn kanji in advance, likely due to the heavy tailed distribution of vocabulary, it'll be a long time before you see most of them.

Indeed learning from lists after going through all the jouyou kanji serves little purpose. I am personally "one of those people" who make an attempt to learn just about every kanji I come across (in proper texts, not actually EVERY kanji I see, that would go out of control). The biggest reason I don't have problems with it is because I am familiar with all the words the kanji are used in, so it's more like trying to remember "what kanji goes with that word" rather than trying to simply recall "a character". Every time I try to learn a new kanji without actually coming across it myself, I struggle a LOT more than normal. If I know the word, often I can simply guess the radical from the meaning, and the rest of the character from knowing the pronunciation. Giving up that edge is a huge deal.

If you absolutely want to keep track and learn the kanji you come across, just write them down in notepad or something as you come across them, and don't let it get in the way when you're doing the actual reading. Also include the word you encountered it with, because remember, knowing a kanji without knowing any words with that kanji is kind of an unpractical knowledge.

I think that the most important thing is that you do what you want to do. Don't want to spend time to learn that kanji you just saw? Just leave it, you'll be fine without, and if you won't, you will know soon enough, as you'll see it again. Don't want to rely on remembering the kanji you just saw, by the next time you see it? Go ahead, learn it, noone is stopping you.

I feel your pain! It seems everyone is saying RTK3 is an overkill, but even after having done it, I still stumble across a lot of new ones... Last week, while playing a visual novel (ha! no comment on its nature!): 頷く, 疼く, 杞憂...

Judging from the ehm.... script sophistication and depth *cough* *cough*, I'm amazed that kind of kanji pops out. Of course I'm not saying every Japanese person could write them from memory (though those are quite simple I guess...), but I assume they're familiar enough to read them. I know, I know, nobody said you'd never stumble on a new kanji, but it seems to happen a lot...

Good news is, almost every "new" kanji I meet (which isn't clearly an old form or something that truly seems obscure) is on the "thecite" RTK4 list. It feels good to know that some other people have marked them as useful to learn... That's the way I cope with it haha (plus thecite's RTK4 is only about 700 kanjis, so not too discouraging).

I would suggest doing RTK3 (~900-1000 kanji I think), since you're looking for a systematic approach. I don't even read that much (yet), but I've come across quite a lot of them. Some are much more common that other jouyou kanjis... However, as other have said, you could also learn them as they come up: that way you can learn them in actual words... Generally speaking, the rarer the kanji, the less compounds it forms (and the less useful it is to give it a keyword).

But yeah, non-RTK3 kanjis are not common of course, just more than I was led to believe haha... but I think they're often easy to spot. @your kanji paranoia. Like, for example, "Breaking Into Japanese Literature" has one story with the mind blowing 鬣 (たてがみ) = mane. No way I've seen this black spot before lol! Or even simpler ones like 杞... I thought: "huh... tree self? Naaaah!" Or 疼 "sickness.... in winter? Cool, but that's clearly new!"

Good luck!

You can forget jinmei-you kanji. Natives can't read names half the time. It's up to you if you learn additional kanji used in words. There's not much value in it unless you want to write novels by hand though. I saw 淵 a few times, and I can read it now and type it if I need to. That's enough for most purposes. The words are more important than the characters.

comeauch Wrote:頷く, 疼く, 杞憂...

For what it's worth, I think 頷く is quite commonly written in kanji and easily recognized. I think it appears, and without furigana, in a great many novels and light novels. It's an incredibly common word with a not difficult kanj even if for some bizarre reason it isn't on any lists. (probably because those lists are more newspaper-focused than literature-focused.)
I'm not so sure about 疼く, although I -may- have seen it before perhaps with furigana. 杞憂, being a name -and- a vocabulary word with the same reading is probably easily read by many native speakers (although who would name their child that, I'm not quite sure... )

I'm pretty sure I've seen 鬣(たてがみ) in both light novels and manga ... but always with furigana and I haven't bothered learning it explicitly. It's certainly usually straight kana, but it's such a simple yet poetic noun, and again shares the same reading between name and word, so I suppose many native speakers know it enough to read it.

I don't have any intention of doing RTK3. RTK1 + learning as words are encountered works for me.
I do make it a point to include kanji recognition with most new vocabulary I learn. With really obscure cases that I don't particularly expect to encounter in actual reading, I just put the kanji on the back side of a kana vocabulary card to encourage a little familiarity without quizzing on it.

They're all reasonably common

I don't think 杞憂 is a name though... are you thinking of ゆうき？

majime_na_dansei Wrote:(I'm still completing KD with quite a few kanjis it lacks from KD, no one has made a list for this before?)

There's the KanjiDamage+ Anki deck, if you had a KD deck in Anki already it would only import the remainder. It still seems to lack a hundred or so of Joyo kanji, so there's this list too - http://pastebin.com/w30tZWPX - which lists the Joyo kanji not present in Kanjidamage, but sadly KD+ kanji are there too.

If you know the radicals, the vast majority of kanji you are going to come across won't seems like foreign blobs. Hell, even with RtK, which uses a set of radicals the author created for the process, most kanji don't seem all that unreasonable. It's not like you're going to come across a lot of kanji which contains entirely new "bits".

Does Kanji Damage present kanji as irreducibly complex entities, or does it show people how to handle kanji as "parts"?

Compared to reading Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji seem all reasonable common and neat.

The whole point of Kanji Damage is to construct kanji from previously learned radicals and bits. The author did throw in a fair amount of his own pseudo-radicals, too.

Artemiy Wrote:The whole point of Kanji Damage is to construct kanji from previously learned radicals and bits. The author did throw in a fair amount of his own pseudo-radicals, too.

Interesting. Wasn't aware of this. If it is anything like RtK, I'm finding it difficult to empathise with the OP becoming frustrated with non-常用漢字. *shrugs*

Artemiy Wrote:

majime_na_dansei Wrote:(I'm still completing KD with quite a few kanjis it lacks from KD, no one has made a list for this before?)

There's the KanjiDamage+ Anki deck, if you had a KD deck in Anki already it would only import the remainder. It still seems to lack a hundred or so of Joyo kanji, so there's this list too - http://pastebin.com/w30tZWPX - which lists the Joyo kanji not present in Kanjidamage, but sadly KD+ kanji are there too.

I have come across people talking about this deck before, but I've never been able to get it, I believe it was taken down from the anki site and now it's nowhere to be found. This would be actually quite helpul for me in order to merge my still partial non-KD joyo kanji deck with it. Would you still have that deck going around by chance? And thank you so much for that list too!

Javizy Wrote:You can forget jinmei-you kanji. Natives can't read names half the time. It's up to you if you learn additional kanji used in words. There's not much value in it unless you want to write novels by hand though. I saw 淵 a few times, and I can read it now and type it if I need to. That's enough for most purposes. The words are more important than the characters.

Ok so it's not worth the time, I see! (that's quite a relief because half the time I can't read japanese names neither)

uisukii Wrote:

Artemiy Wrote:The whole point of Kanji Damage is to construct kanji from previously learned radicals and bits. The author did throw in a fair amount of his own pseudo-radicals, too.

Interesting. Wasn't aware of this. If it is anything like RtK, I'm finding it difficult to empathise with the OP becoming frustrated with non-常用漢字. *shrugs*

Well that would be because I lack confidence and I have a terrible memory, so sometimes I'd forget a mnemotechnic and think it's a new Kanji and sometimes I'd see a new Kanji I think I have forgotten it haha.

But yeah the radical approach is quite useful for new characters.

I will look into RTK 3, at least to make a full fledged list of what I lack and then mark them / make up my own mnemotechnics / add jukugo when I stumble upon them on my lectures. And

You guys are such a great help!

[Katsuo]

I made a kanji spreadsheet with names from KanjiDamage, the Wikipedia joyo list and others. You can compare columns to see which joyo kanji are omitted in KanjiDamage.

dizmox Wrote:They're all reasonably common

I don't think 杞憂 is a name though... are you thinking of ゆうき？

No, 杞憂 is listed in ENAMDICT as a female given name. It may not be very common.

i'm sure somebody their name child that but it's not common. 99% of the time people are using the word kiyuu not as a name.