If I understand right, japanese students study all jouyou kanji between elementary and high school. Those are the same kanji covered from kanji kentei level 10 to level 2.

1) Are those roughly the same covered in RtK 1?

I'm reading that the remaining two levels of the kanji kentei are:

- "Level pre-1 tests the ability to read and write all 2965 kanji in level 1 of JIS X 0208".

- "Level 1 tests the ability to read and write all 6355 kanji in levels 1 and 2 of JIS X 0208".

Even if the jouyou includes some not so common kanji and even if it excludes some common ones, I see that roughly speaking one can say that in general they are all useful kanji to know (if I scroll the list of them I can say that I've seen almost all of them, even the "not so common ones".

I don't see the same thing in the next 900 kanji. So my second question:

2) are those next 900 kanji the ones covered by RtK 3?

3) who did RtK 3 does find it useful?

the 常用漢字 are (according to their name) all very common and useful, and are covered in RTK1. Kenkan 準1 is "unofficial" and not related to RTK3, though there probably is a big overlap since they both focus on frequent characters.

I didn't do RTK3 and I'm not regretting it, instead I just started doing vocab/reading and picked up unknown characters along the way. It's easy to do once you did 2k characters and know the drill. I know a bit over 3400 Kanji now but there are still ca. 150 RTK3 characters that I did not meet so far in thousands of hours of reading.

z1bbo Wrote:the 常用漢字 are (according to their name) all very common and useful, and are covered in RTK1. Kenkan 準1 is "unofficial" and not related to RTK3, though there probably is a big overlap since they both focus on frequent characters.

I didn't do RTK3 and I'm not regretting it, instead I just started doing vocab/reading and picked up unknown characters along the way. It's easy to do once you did 2k characters and know the drill. I know a bit over 3400 Kanji now but there are still ca. 150 RTK3 characters that I did not meet so far in thousands of hours of reading.

Thank you z1bbo for the answer! I do the same as you and I think it's the best approach!

Could I ask you if you do rtk in production or recognition, and if you add rtk cards for the new kanji you study, or if at this point you do only vocabulary/reading?

cophnia61 Wrote:Thank you z1bbo for the answer! I do the same as you and I think it's the best approach!

Could I ask you if you do rtk in production or recognition, and if you add rtk cards for the new kanji you study, or if at this point you do only vocabulary/reading?

my Kanji deck is production and it looks like this:
front: readings　(訓 in ひらがな、音 in かたかな), readings as part of 熟語 (mostly for the 音)
back: Kanji

and I deleted most of the RTK keywords since they confused me and I started to forget them. I don't know if the deck setup is good though, my retention rate dropped a bit since I changed from english keyword to jap. readings, but I feel like I know the characters better.

z1bbo Wrote:

cophnia61 Wrote:Thank you z1bbo for the answer! I do the same as you and I think it's the best approach!

Could I ask you if you do rtk in production or recognition, and if you add rtk cards for the new kanji you study, or if at this point you do only vocabulary/reading?

my Kanji deck is production and it looks like this:
front: readings　(訓 in ひらがな、音 in かたかな), readings as part of 熟語 (mostly for the 音)
back: Kanji

and I deleted most of the RTK keywords since they confused me and I started to forget them. I don't know if the deck setup is good though, my retention rate dropped a bit since I changed from english keyword to jap. readings, but I feel like I know the characters better.

asd you do exactly the same as me, I have multiple japanese words on front, usually one for each common reading (mostly onyomi) but I keep the english keyword as a hint (but I think I will drop it in future).

Considering you're not using english keywords, do you make stories for new kanji?

cophnia61 Wrote:Considering you're not using english keywords, do you make stories for new kanji?

Except for really obvious 形声文字　like 茉莉 where it's easy to connect shape with reading/meaning I still use stories. Instead of the english keywords I just use the readings (and meaning associated).
For similar characters I just add extra readings that distinguish them or 旧字体、異体字　tags, or number them in some way...

z1bbo Wrote:

cophnia61 Wrote:Considering you're not using english keywords, do you make stories for new kanji?

Except for really obvious 形声文字　like 茉莉 where it's easy to connect shape with reading/meaning I still use stories. Instead of the english keywords I just use the readings (and meaning associated).
For similar characters I just add extra readings that distinguish them or 旧字体、異体字　tags, or number them in some way...

All great ideas to steal Thank you z1bbo!!!!

cophnia61 Wrote:I don't see the same thing in the next 900 kanji. So my second question:
2) are those next 900 kanji the ones covered by RtK 3?
3) who did RtK 3 does find it useful?

I did RTK3 and I'd say about half is useful. The over half I have basically never seen, but I'm not a reader.

About your other question, I was looking for a list of the 900 kanji, but the jouyou are 2136 now, so 2965-2136=829, so I'm guessing the list is pretty much the 848 kanji of level 1.5 of the kanken, which you can view on this spreadsheet. As you can see, a lot are in RTK3, but some aren't, while some kanken level 2 are also in RTK3, ie it's messy.

EratiK Wrote:

cophnia61 Wrote:I don't see the same thing in the next 900 kanji. So my second question:
2) are those next 900 kanji the ones covered by RtK 3?
3) who did RtK 3 does find it useful?

I did RTK3 and I'd say about half is useful. The over half I have basically never seen, but I'm not a reader.

About your other question, I was looking for a list of the 900 kanji, but the jouyou are 2136 now, so 2965-2136=829, so I'm guessing the list is pretty much the 848 kanji of level 1.5 of the kanken, which you can view on this spreadsheet. As you can see, a lot are in RTK3, but some aren't, while some kanken level 2 are also in RTK3, ie it's messy.

Thank you eratik for the answer! So in the end it seems it's best to add kanji as you encounter them and I think I will do it (after I finish RtK 1)

[Katsuo]

Looking at the spreadsheet EratiK linked to, I noticed it had the numbers for the older editions of RTK only, so I just updated it and added the new ones (RTK1 6th Edition & RTK3 3rd Ed.).

RTK1 covers the joyo kanji, but the joyo list occasionally gets updated by the Japanese government. The most recent update was in 2010 and the 6th Edition of RTK1 was brought out to include those changes.