brose Wrote:For example, Jim Breen often has several English meanings for each kanji. You could take the first meaning that isn't already a keyword and probably get 2000 kanji added immediately.

I agree, it's how I theorized on doing it, at least in first approximation. Btw, if you link between kanji by kanji character instead of index number or keyword (which is completely acceptable on computer), you can rearrange kanji after keywords were assigned and released as flashcards and for adding stories. Wiki is exactly for arranging and resolving little quirks.

I still think it would be useful to systematize them to avoid keyword collisions. And even if we took a year to get all the keywords together, I don't think anyone is in that much of a hurry to get started on the remaining 3000.

I feel like people are kind of missing the point of the RTK stuff. For the most part it seems to be a training method for learning kanji. After 3000 kanji you should have a pretty good handle on what sort of approach to take to figure out new kanji. At that point you pretty much know all of the primitives.

While it seems like a very logical thing to do to try and RTK-ize more kanji and give people a path to follow, I feel like for the people who are actually serious about learning kanji it will be unnecessary.

So, it's a catch-22. Anyone actually learning kanji in a real way won't need to be given a path to follow after being led down the path for 3,000 of them already. The only people it would really help are people who don't get the process.

What would be kind of useful to people is just the ability for people to input stories on this site for non-RTK kanji.

Well, I actually feel that even for kanji after first 500 there are things to add. This site's study area is great, but still you have to select stories. It takes time, several times more then it'd take if reasonable story was already selected for me. I think logical move will be to extract complete edited story collection, maybe in half a year from now - there's still space for story improvement, but it's near enough.

For those kanji outside RtK there is no preparation done at all.

So you'll have to struggle with (1) keyword selection, (2) primitive selection (you don't know without special research if given not-so-primitive part of given kanji is contained in other 2 or 3 kanji), (3) story invention completely on your own, (4) fixing inevitable clashes down the way, (5) struggling during reviews with bad stories since you are not prolific enough to come up with good ones or it's just no luck for some kanji.

How much more time will that take than by using Heisig's ready-made stories? I'd say maybe 3 times, taking into account not-that-slowing-down review time. Given that it takes months to learn it all, 3 times is catastrophic slowdown.

And finally any partial work done by that plan will not be shareable, because you can't interface it with any other part of such work by anyone else - you don't have convention for keywords and primitives.

erlog Wrote:I feel like people are kind of missing the point of the RTK stuff. For the most part it seems to be a training method for learning kanji. After 3000 kanji you should have a pretty good handle on what sort of approach to take to figure out new kanji. At that point you pretty much know all of the primitives.

While it seems like a very logical thing to do to try and RTK-ize more kanji and give people a path to follow, I feel like for the people who are actually serious about learning kanji it will be unnecessary.

So, it's a catch-22. Anyone actually learning kanji in a real way won't need to be given a path to follow after being led down the path for 3,000 of them already. The only people it would really help are people who don't get the process.

What would be kind of useful to people is just the ability for people to input stories on this site for non-RTK kanji.

This would be true for anyone looking to learn one or two new kanji every once in a while after reaching 3000, but for anyone looking to reach the ~6000 mark (though there may not be many people like that), learning the next 3000 is a gargantuan task, bigger in volume than RTK 1 & 3 combined, so I don't think such an endeavor can be approached haphazardly.

And an organization effort like some of us are thinking of undertaking would help others by unearthing which kanji had similar meanings to the Heisig kanji and to each other, and come up with keywords with them. I think it's worth a shot.

Important consideration about all this is that no single person is required to make much of a contribution to make it work - it can be done gradually and it can ultimately help even those who won't learn all of it, so it's a win-win.

I still would rather not wait a year or whatever until someone sorts through 3000 kanji, most of which I don't care about. How about putting all the non-RTK kanji on a separate tab and users choose their own keywords. Everyone could put their keyword in ## inside their stories to make it clear what they chose. In the study window you might have to enter the kanji itself rather than a keyword to bring up that card. If enough people put in stories, it would give a good sample of keywords for others to use on the wiki.

[ファブリス]

brose Wrote:....... For example, Jim Breen often has several English meanings for each kanji. You could take the first meaning that isn't already a keyword and probably get 2000 kanji added immediately. You could even use kun yomi-- after all, only advanced students of Japanese are going to bother learning these kanji. ......... People could share hints on primitives within the stories. My guess is that a lot of people would learn non-RTK kanji one at a time as they come up in reading rather than in order like RTK1 anyway.

Of course all of this depends on Fabrice's willingness to put non-RTK kanji on the site. It probably isn't a priority for most of the people using the site. I could make flashcards to store the non-RTK kanji myself but it would be much more convenient to have them on this site.

That's pretty much what I had in mind.

A dropdown can be displayed with the available KANJIDIC database keywords, with the exception of those that would double up with RTK1/ RTK3.

Hopefully most people would stick to the first one that appears as default. Even otherwise, with a limited number of keywords, stories can be shared effectively.

This can be further customized by community effort, for example by selectively removing keywords which are thought too close to RTK ones.

As for the ordering, I doubt people would want to learn the extra kanji in a systematic fashion, so the frame numbers are less important. I think the kanji can be ordered on their main radical without much trouble, because it is indicated in the KANJIDIC database. These radicals don't necessarily correspond directly to a Heisig primitive but that's a minor issue. Another ordering possiblity is on the unicode indexes, chances are those are already sorted on radicals (I'm not sure haven't checked recently).

The frame numbers for the extra kanji can be derived from the unicode numbers, they shouldn't collide with the rtk1/rtk3 range (1-3007).

I don't expect people would browse and study those non-RTK kanji with forward/backward, but instead the search functionality would be prominent and may need improvements. Search by kanji works now, perhaps a search by unicode would help, but that has to be seen in practice.

Probably most useful will be a list of the non-RTK kanji that the user added or recently browsed, because they have otherwise no way to know it (since the non-RTK kanji does not have to be added in sequential order).

It would be great if you could do it. Among the 4000 or so non-RTK1 kanji, the RTK3 are obviously more common than average, but I still find only about half of the non-RTK1 kanji I'm looking up are in RTK3.

As an aside, I decided to make studying RTK3 into a game like a treasure hunt or collecting baseball cards. Starting with all of the kanji in the failed stack, I "Learned" only the ones I see in reading, on signs, etc. I'll try to get them all eventually... 899 to go as of today, but I guess it will start to get really tough when there are just 100 or so left!

Well the Kanji Kentei Shiken(Kanken) Level 1 exam tests 6000 Kanji.
So you could just sort through all the books and sort out the RTK and non-RTK kanji.

As for radicals, I think the first thing we need is a way to define and reference radicals for the RTK kanji (since I'm sure many of these will be reused in the remaining 3000+ Kanji.

ファブリス Wrote:Hopefully most people would stick to the first one that appears as default. Even otherwise, with a limited number of keywords, stories can be shared effectively.

This seems a good way at start. If by chance someone with a better feel for the particular kanji notes this at some point, shouldn't it be possible to rename the character as you noted 3rd/4th edition keyword changes?

ファブリス Wrote:As for the ordering, I doubt people would want to learn the extra kanji in a systematic fashion, so the frame numbers are less important.

I'm not sure about this. For example, today I getting into RTK3 when I paused to lookup the "mountain table" (豈) primitive with JWPce. There were 8 total kanji with that combination (豈皚鎧榿磑凱覬剴), but only two (鎧&凱) of them were listed there in RTK3. With such an evocative phrase like "hill of beans", it seems such a waste to omit kanji sharing the primitive when they would be learned in short time if they were presented in total. Repetition of the same primitive would make the resulting stories cohesive, and less likely to be "overlooked" on review (here when H introduces a primitive and then immediately proceeds to use it... twice!). The sad thing is that kanji like this wind up being searched out, and found haphazardly, and (in my case) likely soon forgotten. We have a method to learning kanji that makes memorizing meaning/writing faster for us than *natives*. This combined with the story-sharing potential of this site (and boy did it help me glide through book 1) we owe it to ourselves to proceed - once the 2000 are done - in an order which does not waste our collective potential.

ファブリス Wrote:I think the kanji can be ordered on their main radical without much trouble, because it is indicated in the KANJIDIC database. These radicals don't necessarily correspond directly to a Heisig primitive but that's a minor issue.

I hope you are right. It seems silly to leave out 皚 until you are 3000+ kanji past 鎧.

ファブリス Wrote:I don't expect people would browse and study those non-RTK kanji with forward/backward,

Lacking a textbook (as I do with RTK3), I would certainly approach the kanji in a forward/backward manner, as it appears to me a path out of the dark to the light. A systematic approach, even if flawed (and Heisig's ordering is certainly not perfect) gives the student a clear measure of how far they have progressed. While I did a lot of jumping around going back to and reviewing the RTK1 keywords, it was only because I used the site as a supplement to the book.

-ikmys

軋
Here's a non-RTK kanji I just learned from a video game(Grim Grimoire
for PS2).

It means to sqeak, jar, or to crate. It was used in a
sentence to say that the bed squeaks a little.

I'd be all up for this non-RTK project. I'm sure as RTKers start
reading more things in Japanese, they're gonna increasingly come
across non-RTK kanji.

We could start off with the 3000+ extra kanji on the level 1 of the
Kanji Kentei, especially since the books are packed with info on these
kanji(especially sentences that describe the meaning of the kanji).

I would love to see this made into a separate thread for suggestions.

Like the others, I think organization is key. Here's a suggestion:

We can have some sort of colloboration where we run through the list
of 3000+ kanji and look to see if they already contain primitives from RTK1 and RTK3
and mark those down(maybe create a separate discussion for each kanji). This would be the end of phase one. It's simple. So we could take our time with this and it wouldn't take so long.

Phase two would be deciding if we should make new primitives, which would probably involve a more thorough discussion and take longer.

Phase three would be finally deciding what the order of the kanji will be. I'm sure there would be many arguments, but I think in the end, we'd end up with something comparable to Heisig.

You can also have the colloboration tool give site members the ability to add a new kanji, presumably because they just say it used somewhere. I guess you might need a moderator to approve these posts(to avoid spam).

Anyway, I'd really love to see this idea pushed forward more.
I'd be willing to help out.

Thanks.

I'm starting to doubt the necessity for anything beyond RTK1 (see this thread), but at the very least it would be a fun project to work on "RTK4." I too have seen 軋む in a book somewhere. I'd be interested in making a website to work on this project, but I've been putting it off for a while. If others are into it that would motivate me to work on it. I might start soon. I'll keep you posted.

JimmySeal Wrote:I'm starting to doubt the necessity for anything beyond RTK1 (see this thread), but at the very least it would be a fun project to work on "RTK4." I too have seen 軋む in a book somewhere. I'd be interested in making a website to work on this project, but I've been putting it off for a while. If others are into it that would motivate me to work on it. I might start soon. I'll keep you posted.

Does this not qualify? Though I doubt the necessity too.
http://kanji.editthis.info