I was shocked when none of my Japanese friends knew ladle (勺). Since RTK limits itself to jouyou kanji I thought that Japanese people would know all of them. But several of them were like ???? when they saw it. (Interesting side note: all my Chinese friends call it "spoon" in a milisecond).

I looked online and wikipedia's list of joyou kanji (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C...5%8D_kanji) not only doesn't have it, it specifically lists it as having been removed.

I have the 6th edition of the book, which says that it has the extra characters added in 2010. I'm just unclear when this character was removed (was it after the 2010 changes?). I'm also genuinely surprised that several of my Japanese friends looked at the character and genuinely didn't know it. How often do people have that happen for characters in RTK?

釣, 酌, 約, and 的 are the 4 reasons why, and if you ask your friends about those, I'm sure they'll know them.

You'll find that a lot of the basic building blocks, are legitimate kanji that are almost exclusively unused, 圥 [きのこ, ロク] for instance. You'll also find that ease of writing doesn't necessarily translate to native understanding. In my personal experience, most of the Japanese I meet, unless they are aiming for the kanken aren't overly familiar with radicals, or the primitives that aren't radicals. My guess is that in school the student learn words based on easy of meaning with brute force rote memorization.　Based on relative easy of writing you might guess that many more people would be able to read 蜚蠊 over 鬱病, however, While the first one pretty much no one can read, the second one most people don't write but they can read it.

Heisig's method requires him to introduce kanji that are rare or nonexistent in modern Japanese, because they are used as parts of other kanji. Just because Heisig assigns a certain English keyword to a kanji doesn't mean that kanji is actually used to express that English word in modern Japanese.

Thanks guys!

jimeux Wrote:釣, 酌, 約, and 的 are the 4 reasons why, and if you ask your friends about those, I'm sure they'll know them.

Let me see if I can recall the Heisig keywords of those four just from memory:

angling
bartending
promise
bull's eye

Now let me look up the answers: Yes!! I still remember!

I'd actually be more surprised if it wasn't. You have to learn it as a primitive, so why not as a kanji? Many of these are in RTK3 anyway.

Some of Heisig's primitives are also not legitimate kanji on their own, but they usually do have Japanese names. Don't trust anything native speakers tell you about kanji. They don't have a broad understanding of kanji usage because they don't really think about it.

This forum has a much better grasp of kanji, their usage, and learning them since we've actually done it in a short period of time as adults.

erlog Wrote:Some of Heisig's primitives are also not legitimate kanji on their own, but they usually do have Japanese names. Don't trust anything native speakers tell you about kanji. They don't have a broad understanding of kanji usage because they don't really think about it.

This forum has a much better grasp of kanji, their usage, and learning them since we've actually done it in a short period of time as adults.

So true. My fiancé quite often doesn't know some of the kanji in RTK1. And on the flip side, she sometimes asks me about English grammar, and I can't answer. (What the hell is a 'past perfect'???) I tell her that's just the way we speak.

It demonstrates the stark difference of learning the reasoning behind what you are studying, and picking it up randomly/learning by rote, which is what education systems are based on.

On the other hand, I think it's worth asking whether the piece of information is worth learning, if it's something that a college-educated native speaker does not know. (Sometimes the answer is "yes")

(With respect to kanji, it's not uncommon for a native speaker to be unable to read or say the meaning of a rare kanji in isolation, when they have no problem reading that kanji in context. Most native speakers don't really "study kanji" after high school or so, and so their knowledge of kanji tends to be a lot more passive and geared towards their use in actual reading and writing, not identification in the abstract.)

knowing this kanji as ladle made those 4 stories so easy, you can relate it to the meanings easily: a rarity as I have found

Imagine if you didn't have the meaning assigned to ladle... "bound up drop" just doesnt flow as well, and you'D have to make up a mnemonic to remember it anyways probably, so might as well do it with the actual meaning (noun primitives for the win!!)

side note:　I was talking to my co-worker here in the inaka and she said this kanji means one of those deep wooden ladles that you use at shrines to scoop up water, in her opinion. here's a picture.

http://youimg1.c-ctrip.com/target/tg/059...2759f5.jpg