Stansfield123 Wrote:The way I see it, there are two good options here (and in general, with Kanji that don't have a very useful keyword):
1. learn it as it is, with the useless keyword (after all learning the Kanji is what's important, not the meaning)
2. suspend it and forget about it; people get by in Japanese without learning any Kanji keywords, you'll be fine with learning only 1900 or 2000 instead of 2042.
The other option, of spending 10-20 times more time than you do on other Kanji, to try and find the perfect keyword (making sure it doesn't overlap with other keywords), with the perfect story for it, is the worst thing you could do. Power through RtK as fast as you can, don't waste your time dwelling on insignificant details.
I think I see the point of what you're saying: there's nothing magical about the Ministry of Education's jouyou list; you can reach advanced levels without some RTK1 kanji while needing kanji outside RTK1 & RTK3. And your kanji learning odyssey won't be over while you're alive. In my RTK file, I have a few fields indicating the "importance" of each kanji, viz., its kanji kentei (kanken) level and newspaper frequency (from Nukemarine's spreadsheet), as well as its appearance in
A Frequency Dictionary of Japanese by Tono, et al. (from Nayr's Core5000 deck). These could be used to do what you suggest: just skip rare kanji with bad keywords.
But I really don't want to add another decision when it comes to finishing RTK, "is this keyword dumb enough for me to suspend this card and move on", with its concomitant worry "Oh shit, have I suspended too many kanji?".
Even beyond that, there are going to be kanji that one wants to learn that have poor Heisig keywords. E.g., 俺 (おれ, very informal first-person masculine pronoun), while rated kanken 1.5 (very advanced), is somewhat common in terms of newspaper frequency and is word #363 (out of 5000) in Tono et al.'s frequency dictionary. Most importantly, it is used in my favorite film's Japanese subtitles. Heisig gives it the keyword "myself". I don't want to suspend this kanji (your option #2), I don't want to learn it as is and confuse it with "I", "oneself", "me" (ぼく), your option #1. I do want to annotate the keyword with 「おれ」, make a story that involves the reading, and get on with RTK. It doesn't take much longer than any other kanji, since I annotate most of them with extra "keywords" after glancing at Tangorin. The extra keywords by themselves give lots of discrimination between what may have been closely-related keywords, so as a bonus, I don't worry about the synonymous keyword problem any more.
(I also use the "Kendo method", which I read about on AJATT: stop being stoic, put the damn story on the
front of the card, and get on with your life. I have it in small, gray text so I really have to focus on it to read it---and when I do need to read it, I invariably only need to see the first three words of the story to recall the entire story, and thus the kanji. This, along with freely modifying keywords, made Anki reviews fun again.)
Stansfield123 Wrote:The other option, of spending 10-20 times more time than you do on other Kanji, to try and find the perfect keyword (making sure it doesn't overlap with other keywords), with the perfect story for it, is the worst thing you could do. Power through RtK as fast as you can, don't waste your time dwelling on insignificant details.
I think you're hinting at something that's very important to understand for 日本語 beginners, even those with a lot of RTK done (e.g., me). I understand that the purpose of RTK isn't these keywords, some of which are chosen near-randomly. But, practically and operationally, what is the purpose of RTK? Here's my guess and you all can correct me: the purpose of RTK is (1) to recognize a large number of kanji, (2) to get a sense of the general rules of writing/composing kanji from components, and most importantly, and (3) to learn how to learn new kanji that you don't know: decompose them into primitives and fix them in your memory (using context, using willpower, or manually, by inventing a funny story).
Going thru RTK as quickly as you can, with the minimum work needed to maintain a reasonable pass/fail rate, gives you all three of these. With systems like RTK Lite, which I'm using a modified version of, one will probably get #2 (a feel for how to put kanji together) and #3 (learn to learn), but #1 might be difficult. In fact, #1 is probably difficult even with vanilla RTK: you see a kanji, you recognize all its components, now decide whether it's one you know or one that's totally new to you. This is hard for me now. Does it get easier once you start associating real Japanese phrases & sentences with kanji (instead of just Heisig keywords)?
). It seems most of his edits happen in RTK3 and the later sections of RTK1. As usual, nothing beats editing it yourself.