Hi All,

My two questions are mostly asked in hopes to be pointed to the threads where I imagine these topics must have already been discussed (but I can't find them).

1) Is there a list of kanji that have one or at most two readings (on/kun combined)? It seems like tackling these kanji first, if there is a sizable number, might be useful in terms of working out readings of other kanji later on.

2) I've finished RtK1 and, if anything, it has enabled me to identify all the kanji I see which I DON'T know. This is a point of confusion for me, as it seems to be a never-ending question of "how many kanji does one -really- need to know?" People say that 96% or whatever high percentage is covered in ~1700 kanji, so WHY GO FOR ANOTHER 1000? That's mostly a rhetorical question, as I am encountering kanji every day not covered in RtK1 (living in Japan currently), but I mostly ask this question to try and get a clear answer to the necessity of learning more kanji (i.e. RtK3).

Thanks!

I can't answer the first question, but as to the second, I think most people agree that after RTK1, you have enough of a basis between existing primitives, or the ability to create new ones yourself, to just learn new kanji as you encounter them.　Obviously not everything is covered in RTK1, including several very common kanji like 誰. I haven't really looked through RTK3 yet, but a lot of posts here about it basically say tackle it if you're interested in trees, flowers and minerals as that's what a large portion of the book seems to cover.

I'd suggest using the search function but the only things it's good for is getting lost.

I have a spreadsheet with kanjis and their readings somewhere on my harddrive. If no one points to the list I'll upload it when I find it.

Edit: Ear she goze

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wnkboa

Oh wait you said at most two....

Thank you both for your prompt replies. Much appreciated. The summary of RtK3 as being geared towards flowers, trees and minerals is.... Not very appealing But, with a slow and steady approach it really is quite effortless to learn kanji, and I'm sure those characters crop up in compound kanji vocabulary.

Quite hilarious that you noted the 誰 kanji as I saw it yesterday on a billboard and was like "wtf! I SHOULD know that ... it looks SO familiar... I guess I forgot it" and I scribbled it on the back of my hand. hehehe...

[Katsuo]

The Joyo kanji list specifies 1945 kanji and their more common readings.

It also marks some of those readings as not-so-common. By ignoring those (for now), you can reduce the load. The majority of characters have only one or two readings (though there are plenty that have more).

This spreadsheet includes that information (the uncommon readings are starred*). Also included are the proposed changes to the Joyo kanji coming next year (2010). Many of the non-RTK1 kanji you are seeing should be covered by the proposed additions.


Knowing all the Joyo readings is extremely useful, but learning them is a lot of work even if you have an efficient mnemonic technique.

RTK2, the companion to RTK1, is designed to help you learn the readings. However, whereas RTK1 is a course designed to be worked through from beginning to end, RTK2 is more like a reference manual to be dipped into. Perhaps the most useful part is the grouping of kanji that share both similar ON-readings and primitives, allowing you to learn several readings at once.
E.g. 組,租,祖,阻,粗: If the right side of a kanji is "且", then its ON-reading is "そ".
(Unfortunately this kind of thing works for only a minority of the kanji.)

Thanks for the awesome spreadsheet and further comments.

At this point I'm just learning sentences and SRSing my way through readings, and it's working pretty well (now that I've finished RtK1 it's quite fun to see the kanji for logical vocabulary!). I am -slightly- concerned that I will suffer from some sampling bias, that is ... I don't have a systematic way of procuring a few sentences for each kanji, let alone guaranteeing I have at least one sentence for every Joyo kanji. I've glanced at the Kanji Odyssey texts, but even those become a reference only after ~1100 or so kanji.

This is a long-term commitment goal, obviously, but I'd rather not go about it in a completely haphazard fashion...

Cheers!

kodorakun Wrote:I am -slightly- concerned that I will suffer from some sampling bias, that is ... I don't have a systematic way of procuring a few sentences for each kanji, let alone guaranteeing I have at least one sentence for every Joyo kanji. I've glanced at the Kanji Odyssey texts, but even those become a reference only after ~1100 or so kanji.

Why don't you try using Tanuki? Someone made an Anki deck that has ~7000 sentences with simple Japanese definitions. It covers all the joyo.

Holy smokes, haven't heard of tanuki! Sounds great. Will look it up now. I do think there is worth in creating your own deck slowly over time, but I think it takes skill to learn how to select sentences and what not. In my experience mining my Japanese textbooks for sentences there is the additional context of having read the book that makes the sentences stick a little bit better. But this sounds great. Thanks!

Regarding RTK3.
If you enjoyed doing RTK1 and are quick and efficient in making stories and learning kanji, I don't see why you shouldn't do it. However I think it's not necessary. I haven't done it and I'm getting along just fine.
Just as a reference, until now I've read (only, yet ) around a dozen books, half of which are light novels but the rest are normal books meant for a grown up readership. I've encountered (and consequently learned) around 300 RTK3 kanji, and another 100 non-Heisig ones. For me this means that you don't need to learn 1000 new characters in a short time and, even if you do, you'll have to learn a whole other bunch of them just through reading. So why not learn them all (RTK3 and non-Heisig) when they come up?
Again, if you love to study from the book, go ahead and do RTK3 and you'll save yourself a lot of work for later while having fun.

kodorakun Wrote:People say that 96% or whatever high percentage is covered in ~1700 kanji, so WHY GO FOR ANOTHER 1000?

I know it's a rethorical question, but I couldn't resist: 96% is very very bad!
It means that 1 every 25 words contains a kanji that you don't know. That's more than 1 new kanji every two lines of a novel!
So unfortunately (fortunately!) going beyond RTK1 is a must

I'm in a similar situation as nac_est. I finished RtK1, was kind of bored of the intense kanji studies, so I stopped there. Looking into RtK3, I didn't see all that many interesting kanji anyway. Instead, I learn new kanji as I'm exposed to them, and until now, it hasn't even been 100. It's simply not true that that RtK3 is needed. I mean, I'm not even a beginner, I can't see how any newbie who started their Japanese studies with RtK will benefit by doing RtK3 as well. It will take ages until they regularly run into RtK3 kanji.

The point being, you run into most jouyou kanji regularly. If you expose yourself to Japanese daily, you'll probably see most of them at least once each week. This simply isn't true for RtK3 kanji. Some of them are decently common, but it's not a big amount, not big enough to warrant going through RtK3 like one went through RtK1. (If you ENJOY the kanji training however, go ahead. Just don't expect even close to the benefit you got from RtK1.)

Listen to the guys here, but making it short:

RTK1, then + 1000 kanji: YES

RTK1 + RTK3: NO

There are much more useful kanji to learn than RTK3 kanji.

There's probably stuff you will never encounter in both RTK 1 and 3 (I'm looking in the general direction of 匁) and there's stuff that's essential in both of them. Speaking from my Anki deck: 1883 Jouyou Kanji vs. 104 "New Jouyou", 92 reg. Jinmeiyou, ３ var. Jinmeiyou　(應藝龍) and 54 non Jouyou. Some of the sentences contain names (慶應義塾、東京藝術大学 etc.) but most of my sentences are from books, movies, TV, manga,... That's more than 250 Kanji I encountered often enough to consider them important (all of them being in RTK 3 iirc). I'm not finished yet but to me it's worth the "effort".

nac_est Wrote:

kodorakun Wrote:People say that 96% or whatever high percentage is covered in ~1700 kanji, so WHY GO FOR ANOTHER 1000?

I know it's a rethorical question, but I couldn't resist: 96% is very very bad!
It means that 1 every 25 words contains a kanji that you don't know. That's more than 1 new kanji every two lines of a novel!
So unfortunately (fortunately!) going beyond RTK1 is a must

This is a bit overstated, don't you think? Sort of assumes that all the kanji are equally common. Y'know?

Logically, if there was 1 new kanji every two lines of a book, if the book is 1,470 lines you've covered the entirety of RTK3, and that would be a pretty damn small book since there's a good 60,000+ words in the average book. So, if we were to assume that the RTK3 kanji were all used several times for the average length book... Well, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and guess that you're some sort of botanist.