Yeah, it would depend on what games you play.

Back to the newspaper frequency list, when I did a script check on a game I've played, 俺 was in the top 10 most frequently used kanji, but it's down at 2271 on that news site frequency list. You wouldn't expect it to appear in the news, but I wouldn't consider it as uncommon in general media as 2271 suggests. If you really want to learn from frequency, try to get the frequency of whatever it is you're wanting to read. (And I know Heisig ordering has that one really high too. I'm just pointing out why the frequency in newspaper isn't always the best guideline.)

(slightly off topic)

Regarding frequency of words: this site is pretty cool:

http://wordcount.org/

Passage from the site:
"WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance."

I'd like to see something like this in Japanese, but I think it is generally relevant to most languages.

For example:

Church: #453 most frequently used
Temple: #4163 most frequently used
telescope: #11676 most frequently used

In Japanese, the equivalent word for "church" is likely "temple", so we can assume that it's probably somewhere between 453 - 4163 most frequently used words. (Most likely in the top 1000).

If anyone has a link to a similar Japanese site, please share.

Dragg Wrote:@nestor, I agree, but at the same time I don't think that learning the kanji from a K.O./Heisig combined method would be hugely damaging for everybody. It might be okay for some people who are in such a rush to get into reading, but I also agree with Mentat that they need to learn ALL the kanji at some point. (I just read your last post and it looks like we are in complete agreement.)

@squintox
No offense, but the reason you don't see a lot of 寺 is probably for the same reason you haven't seen a lot of 本: you haven't had a lot of exposure yet. You yourself admitted that you are playing games that are 99.9 percent hiragana. I have seen the word for temple hundreds of times within the last few years, whereas I have only seen the word for telescope a small handful of times even though I expose myself to a wide variety of media.

I have seen a lot of 本. It was just an example. And the only 99.9% Hiragana game I played was Pokemon, the only kanji being 円.

I'm doing Japanese 4-6 hours a day. Newspapers, manga, dorama, you name it (except anime).

nest0r Wrote:

QuackingShoe Wrote:I'm uncertain how learning vocabulary based on what you're encountering constitutes a short-term focus. I am fairly certain that vocabulary will still exist in the long-term.

If it's still going to exist in the long-term, then why learn it as you encounter it (each encounter being a moment that exists in a shorter time span than the 'long term' that you mentioned above)? Might as well develop a mindset that doesn't depend on moment-to-moment encounters, reducing overhead, combining our motivations and interests with the statistical facts of the standard kanji and efficiency of the assembly-line kind of approach.

Not true. When you see the kanji, chances are it will pop up again in the media you are currently reading/watching/whatever. It sticks in your head better if anything.

@Prettykitty

I would venture to guess that 俺 actually is that uncommon in many forms of written media, particularly articles of any kind. However, video games and novels are going to be way more likely to contain that kanji because they are often based on spoken dialogue between characters that is being conveyed through writing. That being said, I see your point. I don't really have any problem with the idea of learning from specialized kanji/vocab sentences based on specialized interests. But I still think that nearly everybody can benefit from a strong generalized backbone of kanji/vocab as presented in K.O. alongside their specialized interest.

(Btw, 俺 is listed as #1462 in K.O. which I think reflects its usage in widespread print forms a bit better than the frequency newspaper list.)

I think if you want to learn by frequency of use, it would be best to:

1. Learn individual Kanji via Heisig
2. Learn compounds (Jukugo) and vocabulary by frequency of use

stehr Wrote:(slightly off topic)

Regarding frequency of words: this site is pretty cool:

http://wordcount.org/

Passage from the site:
"WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance."

I'd like to see something like this in Japanese, but I think it is generally relevant to most languages.

For example:

Church: #453 most frequently used
Temple: #4163 most frequently used
telescope: #11676 most frequently used

In Japanese, the equivalent word for "church" is likely "temple", so we can assume that it's probably somewhere between 453 - 4163 most frequently used words. (Most likely in the top 1000).

If anyone has a link to a similar Japanese site, please share.

Check out number 76754! It describes a quality I wouldn't want my kid to have!

The reason for not using Heisig order should fluctuate between 2 arguments:

Quote:It may be not needed after all. Some people say that if you remember the ~240 primitives before going for the kanjis, Heisig order doesn't make much difference.

I have not tried this aproach, but I believe it has its share of truth.

Quote:You cannot wait to know all the kanji before studying japanese.

If you are in japan and need imediate use of some kanji, you could try aproches that use a frequency order. It is probably more painful to do that, but if we discuss it, we would be back to the prior argument.

The thing is that you can do a lot for your japanese without reading kanji. If you don't have imediate need for kanji, you can focus on listening raw audio. From anime, radio, music, japanespod101, you chose it.

It takes a lot of work to break up the initial gibberish into words. During that time you could focus in RTK and do it as quickly as possible.

http://pomax.nihongoresources.com/index....1223039457
There's a frequency list based on light novels, if anybody is looking for info from a more contemporary source.

Quote:* up to 90%: 348 more kanji: 1045
* up to 95%: 377 more kanji: 1422
* up to 99%: 768 more kanji: 2190

In my opinion if you plan to be able to understand most of what you're reading you might as well just go through the long haul.

lifeflaw Wrote:Last but not least, if you want to study Heisig's book, you cannot use your knowledge of Kanji characters that you learned using other methods. Meaning that let's say that someone is very comfortable with 500 frequent Kanjis and he wants to use Heisig, he will have to start with Kanji #1 in the book and he *cannot* skip any!

Yes he can
I've done it? (not for 500 though, for roughly 30 or so characters). The character is implanted into your head all you gotta do is tag the heisig keyword on it (if you want to)

I'm pretty sure others have done it too.

Going strictly off the frequency of use for kanji is a bad idea when it comes to learning. Now, if you took the top 500 or the top 1000 kanji, organized in the radical/primitive method that Heisig prescribes, you might have a winning method.

Now, having the primitive/radical method helps speed up breaking down kanji into its parts. The thing that helps speed up the learning is that you learn the kanji in logical bunches. Most logical for most of us is bunch them by primitives (add a primitive, teach all from that primitive). Alyks bunched them by pronunciation (add a pronunciation, tie it to a movie, learn all for that movie). Even KO2001 bunched them in groups of 5 based on a common theme.

By the time you get to 1000, your method of choice becomes more second nature. At 2000 it's a habit.

Now, I think the best sites to get kanji frequency and word frequency should be from a variety of websites (blogs, news, entertainment, aurora bunko). Don't think "I need to get reading as soon as possible" as you still have to learn Japanese for that. This just helps save the hassle of learning kanji as you come across them.

I was thinking of doing something with a frequency list also.

But...
It is best to go through the first book, RTK, to at least get familiar with ALL the kanji. Then study a frequency list.
If you have flash cards, http://www.polarcloud.com you can then review the frequency list by separating them out. The flashcards have a frequency number ranking along with other useful stuff.

Some of the more common kanji are at the end of the RTK list, as I have found out by playing with the Kanji Gold program. http://www.parotto.com That program reviews the Kanji by school grade, which is in the order of frequency.

I would say slow and steady wins the race, but the Heisig method is actually already pretty quick.

Good luck, and buy the book already!

Wisher

I think it really depends on what your goal is. If your goal is speaking japanese I would dispense with Heisig, and start practicing speaking and listening right from the start, using more traditional study materials that come with audio. You should still use an SRS though, to help review key vocabulary and grammar points.

Regarding which kanji to learn, I would then start learning them in grade order (as I understand it, this is also fairly close to the order for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) if you are interested in that). You can then study manga, kanji textbooks etc that are for elementary school students for additional material once you have exhausted traditional textbooks.

This site has a handy list of kanji in grade order, that is cross referenced to many textbooks, further down the page it also some "stories" taken from various books, "on" and "kun" readings etc although this section is complete.
http://nihongonotto.blogspot.com/

Wikipedia also has lists of kanji in grade order as well as lots of other useful information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%8Diku_kanji


Although lots of people have had success with Heisig, and I believe it works well for some people, not everyone likes it, and there isn't much empirical evidence for it's superiority over other techniques. I think if you entered the material from say DeRoo or Bodynaryk (sp?) into an SRS you would have just as much success. Increasingly I am of the belief that different people need different approaches, and what works well for one person might not work as well for others. Personally I would rather use an approach that teaches the readings for the character, and has some sample sentences, when each character is introduced. But then what the hell do I know, my kanji skills suck !!

I thought this article was quite interesting and discusses various approaches and academic theories related to learning kanji.
http://www.kyotogakuen.ac.jp/~o_econ/soc...chmond.pdf

If you're set on doing the more frequent characters first, I would recommend RTK-lite. Nestor mentioned this in passing. It's a script that adapts RevTK and limits the flashcards to about 1100 -- mostly just the characters on the JLPT2 list. It would save you a lot of time that you might otherwise spend trying to figure out a method to learn the kanji by frequency.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...9#pid16019

I started RevTK doing the full option and switched to RevTK lite about 2/3s of the way through. Now I'm done with the lite part and am filling in the rest of the characters. You make progress on reading a lot quicker with the lite version, which is fun, but you don't get as much reinforcement on specific primitives. It feels easier now that I'm just filling in the blanks with primitives I already know.

nest0r Wrote:

Squintox Wrote:Not true. When you see the kanji, chances are it will pop up again in the media you are currently reading/watching/whatever. It sticks in your head better if anything.

I frequently encounter repetitions of things I've already entered into my SRS, and when that happens, instead of re-entering them, I generally skip them and use that extra time and energy to learn another reading, so I can finish learning the standard 2000 and begin engaging with native media on a case by case basis with a solid foundation.

This may be completely off the point; but you need to see the word used in different ways before it enters into your active vocabulary. IMO it's better you don't take the SRS is the be all end all of said word(s).

I finished all of RTK1 last year, and I was very happy that I could 'recognize' a lot of kanji and take a guess at the meaning of some words, but I still couldn't read any Japanese. After all reading Japanese means reading IN Japanese, not guestimating meanings in English.

To read Japanese, recognizing the kanji is only the beginning. For most kanji you'd need to learn several readings and lots of vocab and that takes a lot more time than learning the kanji with Heisig's method. And so, a lot of the 2042 kanji knowledge from RTK1 will go unused for a long time while learning readings and vocab.

For instance I like to learn by sentences and I SRSed over 1800 sentences since RTK1 and learned to read lots of common vocab but still only used 900 kanji out of 2042 in RTK1. IIRC another learner on this forum said that over the past year they did 6000 sentences but still only used ~1300 kanji or so.

Sure someone can find and study vocab specifically to cover all 2042 kanji in a short time, but that is just a wide and shallow approach; ie can read many kanji but can't read many words.

And so my conclusion is that it could be good to learn the first ~1000 using the RTK mini list of kanji.

nest0r, I follow a structured approach; I use KO and of those who popularized KO on this forum I was 2nd after zazen666.

With KO my vocab and reading ability has grown by leaps and bounds; and KO only uses 1110 kanji in both volumes. That is my point. Not all of the 2042 kanji in RTK1 are needed to finish this stage in reading.

With 1110 kanji one has enough material to study for quite a significant period of time. I'm only just finishing Volume 1, so there is still plenty more for me to do and still a long time until I will use 2042 kanji.

Granted some people can learn more in a shorter time, but then again some may have a similar experience.

I believed the same point at the time of doing RTK1. I'm interested in efficiency and going through the whole book seemed like the most efficient way to cover the 2042 kanji included.

Later though I thought that it was maybe not efficient to learn so many in one go, because until they are used they need reviews, or they will be forgotten. This review time & forgetting takes away from that original efficiecy.

On efficiency there's both volume and benefit to consider. For example IMO learning to write & recognize the 2000th most frequent kanji is less beneficial than the 1000th, and much less beneficial than learning the vocab that corresponds to the 1st 1000 kanji.

nest0r Wrote:Your last sentence sounds like you think learning the vocabulary that corresponds to the 1st 1000 is mutually exclusive to continuing on to the 2000, which isn't so.

I don't mean it that way, just I feel that it would be possible to learn ~1000 kanji with Heisig's method, then start learning readings & vocab for those kanji, and then add extra kanji progressively.

These days I find the number of kanji in my deck to be largely meaningless. It may go up by anything from 0 to 30 on one day, but what matters is how much vocab is attached and how useful it is.

Quote:Anyway, I'm about done with this thread. I'm not sure what I'm arguing for/against anymore.

Hehe, me too. Just wanted to add a point of view.

Maybe it's because I'm well-acquainted with the Joyou Kanji List, but I feel like learning by frequency isn't exactly beneficial. Of course some kanji and some words are used more than others, but you can get a feel for which ones those are as long as you're getting enough Japanese language input.

This is a problem that doesn't really need a solution. If you read a Japanese novel, and you look up all the words you don't know then by the end of it you should know well the most common words. The same goes if you read a few newspaper articles everyday.

The truth is that there really is no easier path to proficiency. It always takes hard work, and so you may as well buckle down and do it. RTK is the only "shortcut" I've found in my 5 years of studying Japanese, and even it takes a decent amount of work.

Frequency-ordered lists sound awesome at the beginning, but they end up being not as useful because of the Zipf distribution that kanji and word frequency adhere to. There's about 1000 words used a whole lot, and an equal number that are almost never used. The rest fall somewhere in the middle with almost equal frequency.

So, once you get past the basic of basics. The frequency loses meaning as the lion's share of words or kanji take on roughly similar frequencies.

As well, you're going to need to know about 3000 kanji anyway eventually. Does it make a huge difference at the end of the 2 years it takes to learn them which ones are most frequent? No, because you know them mostly at that point. You may as well trust your drill books, text books, novels, and newspapers and put your nose to the grindstone. All the time spent micromanaging study habits is time that could be spent parsing more Japanese.

The Joyou Kanji list has been produced to answer the question of frequency. There's no reason to break down frequency within the list because the truth is that they're all used quite often as compared to the ones not in the list. There's no use in micromanaging the Joyou list for frequency since they're all of roughly similar frequency when taken against the whole of the 6,000 or 7,000 kanji.

I hope I'm not coming off as someone who can't remember what it was like for me at first. It truly isn't that. I have done my own research on kanji frequency, and it pretty much validated the Joyou List in every way.

Maybe, but I'm not sure there is no benefit to prioritizing even within the Jouyou list. I mean they're all frequently used, but if you only have the time to learn 1000 in lets say 1 year, then I think a prioritized list can be made to get the most bang for that time.

But besides the frequency point, I think there's also a point that not all need to be learned in the same way. In the beginning its hard work learning one by one, but when you get near 1000 then learning from context is much more self sustaining I find, because there are fewer new words/kanji per sentence.

Anyway, I'm not arguing against learning all the Jouyou kanji. I'm arguing in favor of batch learning plenty at first, then topping up as required. Plenty enough for the Heisig method to work, and to have enough to chew on for half a year or more anyway (your mileage may vary).

If you've got the time and dedication to learn and make use of all Jouyou kanji in one year, the might as well learn them upfront; but if it will take a couple of years then its a long time to not use those kanji.

For Kanji, one should just learn all the RTK1 and perhaps RTK3.

If you want to use frequency lists, use it on the 20-30,000 or more? vocabulary built on top of the Kanji - don't sweat the 2,000-3,000 individual Kanji!

Well, I don't think I need to learn some kanji used for fish names in RTK3 before my reading level is much more advanced .

Don't get me wrong, I liked doing RTK1 and I could learn more like collecting pokemon just for kicks - but I think I wouldn't find them useful for a long time yet.

I'd like to thank everyone for their input, you've certainly given me food for thought and I may just stick to the Heisig method after all.

I had a few ideas.

@erlog, I don't know if it's correct to say the jouyou kanji list solves the issue of frequency; the jouyou kanji list is not for infomation only - it's a prescriptive list. Ofcourse the jouyou kanji are by far the most used today - because they're the prescribed kanji for common use. Before the jouyou list was created and imposed on textbooks and public media, I doubt there was such a clear boundary in kanji use frequency.

For me, just because all jouyou kanji plus more must eventually be learned, doesn't mean using a systematic approach to learning them is useless. It also doesn't mean they have to be studied in one continuous block.

According to 2001 Kanji Odyssey, the 1110 kanji it covers would cover 90% of general Japanese documents. That means there's a clear advantage to prioritizing study of those 1110 that make up 90% of uses than the other kanji that make up about 10% of uses. It would allow to read more Japanese sooner, and reading more is very beneficial.

Someone mentioned that they encountered some RTK3 kanji in their reading so therefore studying RTK3 is a good idea. To that I say - there's lots of stuff we read and hear every day but there's limited time to study in a day so being selective about what to learn is important. Unless you've already mastered most of the common use kanji then there are bigger fish to fry than learning more rare kanji or vocab. It's not like there's a shortage of readings and vocab to learn after finishing RTK1 .