riogray Wrote:

andikaze Wrote:Yea, I heard that already, some important primitives such as 門 are yet to come. I know I should force myself through the rest It's just so boring ^^

Couldn't agree more. I am at 1800 and it really is a pain to finish the book. I always think "I'll take a brake" and then vocab in my core deck pop up with a kanji I haven't covered yet. So irritating.

Hate to break it to you, but even if you go all the way to 2042, that still doesn't mean you're finished with the Kanji. You still have thousands more to go. And many of those thousands that aren't in RtK1, are in the Core sentences.

So, whether you stop now, or at 2042, that irritation will still be there to some extent: you'll still have unknown Kanji in your Core deck (or any other deck, really), which you'll have to look up, choose a story for, and learn.

I would suggest you stop adding to your Kanji deck, and from now on, only add a new Kanji when you encounter it in the Core deck (to be more exact, suspend all the Kanji you haven't added, and unsuspend them individually when you need to). Here are the reasons why:

1. you avoid having to learn quite a few Kanji that you don't need right away

2. even with the Kanji you'll end up adding anyway, it's much easier to learn them if you're seeing them in two different decks.

The one downside is that it will be irritating to have to interrupt what you're doing (learning vocab), just to find a story for and learn this one Kanji. But it's not that big a deal, once you get into the groove of doing it.

No, it's "Heisigs RTK 6th with stories". I worked on it as I went along. Added a "Japanese" field, decided on one of the two stories, made the kanji keyword bold and the primitive keywords italic/underlined. I sometimes deleted both stories and wrote one myself.

I strongly doubt there are "thousands" of new Kanji. The ones in RTK6 are the 常用. While there do exist some hundred used for names, the ones in circulation used for normal words can be learned in one fell swoop in a single day.
This is Japan, not China. I know what I'm seeing when I walk the streets, and it's not thousands of new Kanji.

Maybe 源氏物語-style stuff uses outdated stuff, but I'm not interested in that. There are also some in use in my special field, but those are Kanji no normal Japanese can read either, so it hardly matters.

I have no idea where you even got that idea from, but I think you can relax there, it's a gross exaggeration

Well, sure they do get you that 95% coverage but I've definitely found plenty of kanji in normal (children's even) materials that are not in RTK1 or 3. The vast majority of them are however in thecite's excellent supplemental list: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7157

The 700-something? Well yea, there's a point where I think that perfectionism only gets me so far.. there are diminishing returns after the 常用 (actually, earlier, after roughly 1700 or so of the most frequent, but I still think that the list is important), and when a Kanji only pops up once in a blue moon, the only way to keep it alive is to SRS it, right?
I know quite some Kanji only few native speakers here know, like 匁, and this is only one example. OTOH, there are some that do keep popping up from time to time, but IMHO, it's not high enough priority to learn them, and if they really become important for you, you'll remember them when you see them. Just like I remember 副鼻腔, because I'm a 接骨師 and anatomy and body functions are required for my job.

And yet, I only did 1600 of the Kanji in RTK. I should be ashamed, seriously, because it's really not that much work to just finish it, but right now I can't. I feel like my head would explode if I drilled any new Kanji, thus I'm reading a lot lately to at least solidify the ones I know and to connect them to real vocab. I do my ANKI reps tho, and I'm sure that at one point I'll finish. I'm not in a hurry anymore. I'm here to stay and "the Kanji problem" won't run from me.

andikaze Wrote:The 700-something? Well yea, there's a point where I think that perfectionism only gets me so far.. there are diminishing returns after the 常用 (actually, earlier, after roughly 1700 or so of the most frequent, but I still think that the list is important), and when a Kanji only pops up once in a blue moon, the only way to keep it alive is to SRS it, right?

Yeah, that or really extensive reading, and even then you're likely to only wind up like the natives where you know when you see it but are hopeless trying to remember how to write it. You're probably correct that it's not worth the time for efficient Japanese learning purposes, as opposed to Kanji for Kanj's sake, which is entirely different.

I found that list to be helpful in part because it has a large overlap with the non-RTK kanji in that list of 3300 yojijukugo floating around. Still even there the majority of those 'phrases' are so obscure as to be pointless but I don't expect 効果覿面...

andikaze Wrote:I strongly doubt there are "thousands" of new Kanji. The ones in RTK6 are the 常用. While there do exist some hundred used for names, the ones in circulation used for normal words can be learned in one fell swoop in a single day.
This is Japan, not China. I know what I'm seeing when I walk the streets, and it's not thousands of new Kanji.

Maybe 源氏物語-style stuff uses outdated stuff, but I'm not interested in that. There are also some in use in my special field, but those are Kanji no normal Japanese can read either, so it hardly matters.

I have no idea where you even got that idea from, but I think you can relax there, it's a gross exaggeration

Well, the general idea I got from recently running some popular Japanese books through cb's Japanese analysis tool, to see how many unique Kanji they have (I'm looking for something relatively easy to read).

But, after a quick search, there are others who have done actual statistical research on the subject, and looked at unique Kanji in the most frequent words in MODERN (not classical, just modern) Japanese novels, aimed at the average, contemporary consumer of Japanese literature. Here are the results, I'm gonna round the numbers, because I don't feel like copy/pasting them exactly:

The most popular 37,000 words in those novels are composed of 3,500 Kanji. By knowing those 37,000 words, a reader is able to understand 99% of the content. That's a lower limit of proficiency in reading. Not knowing a Kanji in every 100th word would be the equivalent of someone taking a sharpie to your favorite English novel and blanking out a key word in every other paragraph. That's about the level of discomfort one would feel reading Japanese literature after learning 3,500 Kanji, even if the knew all the words they're in. If you also add a bunch of unknown words, it's even worse.

On the other hand, knowing 3,900 Kanji will make 50,000 words at least readable (even if you don't know what they all mean), and give you 99,5%. At that point, things start becoming comfortable, so that would be the point where one learned the amount of Kanji they absolutely need to read Japanese. It still leaves a couple of blank spots on each page, but that's fine. Source: http://pomax.nihongoresources.com/index....1223045359

I know all this silly math about fancy literature is not quite as reliable as "walking the streets" and counting all the Kanji in the underwear and shampoo ads, but it's gotta be worth something.

To answer some questions about how many kanji. I have a kanji readings deck where I add most new kanji I encounter when I'm not too lazy. I've been doing this for about the last 5 light novels I've read and am at around 2800 kanji in my deck. I started out with a 2200 jouyou kanji deck though.

I can easily add another 50 or so new kanji per light novel at the moment, so my guess is the real number of kanji used in modern (light) novels is somewhere between 3500 and 4000 maybe, just a guess though. Maybe it will slow down considerably once I read a few more.

apirx Wrote:To answer some questions about how many kanji. I have a kanji readings deck where I add most new kanji I encounter when I'm not too lazy. I've been doing this for about the last 5 light novels I've read and am at around 2800 kanji in my deck. I started out with a 2200 jouyou kanji deck though.

I can easily add another 50 or so new kanji per light novel at the moment, so my guess is the real number of kanji used in modern (light) novels is somewhere between 3500 and 4000 maybe, just a guess though. Maybe it will slow down considerably once I read a few more.

Well I have something similar since I started studying and have read about 20 light novels. I am at about 2700 kanji but I may be missing kanji from RTK1. There are a good 300 from RTK3 and about 200 not in either book. I have not added any kanji found in a name.

Well I pretty much add any kanji that shows up in any way which is probably why I have so many while still meeting a new one every few pages. I'm still missing 500 kanji from RTK3 in my deck, but I'm pretty sure I have the useful ones covered.

Aspirx, you should consider running the book (if you have it in e-form) through an analysis tool to list all the Kanji in it by frequency, and add the new ones (at least the ones that show up more than once) to Anki ahead of time. That way you don't have to interrupt your reading as much.

[RawToast]

andikaze Wrote:No, it's "Heisigs RTK 6th with stories". I worked on it as I went along. Added a "Japanese" field, decided on one of the two stories, made the kanji keyword bold and the primitive keywords italic/underlined. I sometimes deleted both stories and wrote one myself.

If it's this one:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2756278936

Then feel free to upload an updated version to Ankiweb if you've made changes. For a deck that only took a few moments to make it sure has come in useful The more 6th edition decks the merrier.