Here are my Anki stats as of this morning:
The 7062 seen cards in this deck contain:
1227 total unique kanji.
Jouyou: 1142 of 1945 (58.7%).
Jinmeiyou: 18 of 287 (6.3%).
67 non-jouyou kanji.
Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 76 of 80 (95.0%).
Grade 2: 154 of 160 (96.2%).
Grade 3: 182 of 200 (91.0%).
Grade 4: 165 of 200 (82.5%).
Grade 5: 140 of 185 (75.7%).
Grade 6: 124 of 181 (68.5%).
JuniorHS: 301 of 939 (32.1%).
What does this lead me to think?
First, the 7062 seen cards represent only 3531 unique *facts*, since I have front and back.
So... first thought is that, even though each card has at least one, if not two, new vocabulary, I'm only adding a unique kanji every third fact, on average. That means most of my new words are now being made either with known kanji, or are hiragana/katakana words. To me this lends credence to using RTK lite as a beginning step, since so many of the everyday words are based on those first 1,000 or so kanji.
Notice, though, that I also have 67 non-jouyou kanji in my deck, while I still have more than 700 jouyou kanji not in anki yet. Hmmmm.... a step back here:
I have gathered most of my sentences from, at first, simple texts like Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns, All About Particles and the first bit of KO (though I got bored of that), and phrase books. Now I add from anime, movie, manga, go books and sentences from conversations ... "How do you say x?" or "Sorry, what does that mean?" I have no system except putting in sentences I find either useful or interesting. Yet by this somewhat random accumulation of words, almost 5 per cent of my kanji are non-jouyou, and I'm not even close to 10,000+ sentences. Since the number of jouyou is limited, this percentage can only increase, and to me shows the importance of learning non-jouyou kanji, even early on in your studies - especially the 50-100 that are so basic everyone wonders why they're not in the jouyou list.
And interestingly enough, though I have 1,227 unique kanji, I'm still missing four from Grade 1 level and six from Grade 2. At first this suggests that random gathering of sentences leaves holes in your learning. Sometimes people suggest on forums that you might miss out on some simple words if you're not systematic. Yet I've seen the list of Grade 1-2 kanji, and I know them all - I guess there's a few I've never seen in a sentence interesting enough to keep. On the other hand, just by randomly collecting sentences, eventually all the basic ones will get included, in one sentence or another. Random acquisition seems to work as effectively in the long run as systematic accumulation.
Just some thoughts...
The 7062 seen cards in this deck contain:
1227 total unique kanji.
Jouyou: 1142 of 1945 (58.7%).
Jinmeiyou: 18 of 287 (6.3%).
67 non-jouyou kanji.
Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 76 of 80 (95.0%).
Grade 2: 154 of 160 (96.2%).
Grade 3: 182 of 200 (91.0%).
Grade 4: 165 of 200 (82.5%).
Grade 5: 140 of 185 (75.7%).
Grade 6: 124 of 181 (68.5%).
JuniorHS: 301 of 939 (32.1%).
What does this lead me to think?
First, the 7062 seen cards represent only 3531 unique *facts*, since I have front and back.
So... first thought is that, even though each card has at least one, if not two, new vocabulary, I'm only adding a unique kanji every third fact, on average. That means most of my new words are now being made either with known kanji, or are hiragana/katakana words. To me this lends credence to using RTK lite as a beginning step, since so many of the everyday words are based on those first 1,000 or so kanji.
Notice, though, that I also have 67 non-jouyou kanji in my deck, while I still have more than 700 jouyou kanji not in anki yet. Hmmmm.... a step back here:
I have gathered most of my sentences from, at first, simple texts like Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns, All About Particles and the first bit of KO (though I got bored of that), and phrase books. Now I add from anime, movie, manga, go books and sentences from conversations ... "How do you say x?" or "Sorry, what does that mean?" I have no system except putting in sentences I find either useful or interesting. Yet by this somewhat random accumulation of words, almost 5 per cent of my kanji are non-jouyou, and I'm not even close to 10,000+ sentences. Since the number of jouyou is limited, this percentage can only increase, and to me shows the importance of learning non-jouyou kanji, even early on in your studies - especially the 50-100 that are so basic everyone wonders why they're not in the jouyou list.
And interestingly enough, though I have 1,227 unique kanji, I'm still missing four from Grade 1 level and six from Grade 2. At first this suggests that random gathering of sentences leaves holes in your learning. Sometimes people suggest on forums that you might miss out on some simple words if you're not systematic. Yet I've seen the list of Grade 1-2 kanji, and I know them all - I guess there's a few I've never seen in a sentence interesting enough to keep. On the other hand, just by randomly collecting sentences, eventually all the basic ones will get included, in one sentence or another. Random acquisition seems to work as effectively in the long run as systematic accumulation.
Just some thoughts...
