Hi there,

While I was showing my japanese friend my rtk anki deck he would often point out characters that were "Chinese" and normally written in kana in everyday Japanese. He said there were many he hadn't learned to write himself. Is there a list of these select kanji anywhere as I want my writing to be like any other japanese person's! It seems silly to use more archaic kanji when hiragana is a much better option.

Cheers,

Louise

Unfortunately there's no list, and this isn't an easy question because there's a lot of variation between native speakers and sources. Especially now that computers have made it much easier to use kanji you can't write, kanji use can actually be higher on the Internet than in real life. It's just something you have to get through experience. (The Joyo Kanji List is a decent guide but it doesn't 100% reflect actual usage. Also that's just a list of kanji and not necessarily how the kanji are used.)

You should be very careful about trusting Japanese people when they say "we don't use this" or "I don't know this" -- sometimes they just say that as a way of praising your Japanese ability, or they think they're trying to help you out by lessening your workload.

The thing is, every kanji on the Joyo list is required to be learnt and known by every Japanese person, regardless of if that kanji is used very much or not. Heisig includes some rarer kanji only because they make up parts of other kanji on the Joyo list, so he felt like knowing them would be useful, or at least, not detrimental to studying via his method.

While I second the other 2 posts, if you're worried that you're learning "unnecessary" kanji, there is an RTK-lite deck out there, which cuts down a lot of kanji (I think roughly half the book) that some people feel are a waste of time.

I personally didn't use it (I did the entire book) so I can't comment on it for you. You may want to check it out though.

Marble101 Wrote:While I second the other 2 posts, if you're worried that you're learning "unnecessary" kanji, there is an RTK-lite deck out there, which cuts down a lot of kanji (I think roughly half the book) that some people feel are a waste of time.

I don't think that's what the original poster is asking about -- it was how to know if you should write a word in kanji or kana, not which kanji to study with RTK.

(Also, the proponents of RTK Lite are not saying the other 1000 kanji are unnecessary or a "waste of time", just that some people may prefer to get to actual Japanese earlier and learn the rest of the kanji later, or even through a different method.)

Generally, I figure out what's normal usage by checking the 和英 dictionary at yahoo, http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/ and looking at the examples (there are codes to tell you if the kanji are joyo or not, but that's not helpful for this question.)

Of course, not every word has an example, but some have many. Some words are written in kanji for some meanings but not others, or written with different kanji for different meanings, etc.

Of course, if you have access to, say, Kenkyuusha's 大和英辞典 that's even better.

When the dictionary fails, I look at examples on space alc, weblio, and tatoeba; sometimes they have odd or obscure examples mixed in, but the spelling that gets more hits is probably the more common usage.

This kind of research only matters for initial study though, and isn't really that important. Words that you come to really know and use regularly, you'll simply see how others are writing them and can mimic that.

A lot of the time I won't make my cards by what the dictionary or example sites say anyway, but by how the word is used in the original context I found it in.

Extracted from EDICT, limited to joyo & "common words" only: http://pastebin.com/XiFUbwgs

yudantaiteki Wrote:You should be very careful about trusting Japanese people when they say "we don't use this" or "I don't know this" -- sometimes they just say that as a way of praising your Japanese ability, or they think they're trying to help you out by lessening your workload.

And some are simply just not particularly literate.

you can decide for yourself by seeing what's written in kanji in the stuff you encounter in the japanaese things you enjoy... it's all up to you what you want to learn.