Hello, I finished to study the 1st volume of the book remembering the kanji, and I remember all the 276 janji I learned, .......but now how i should continue to study the 2nd and the 3rd volume ????? there aren't anymore the stories that accompanied the kanjis in the previous volume, and I don't wanna learn in a wrong way, so could anybody tell me how should I continue??? I have to study all the kanji that i find in the 2nd and in the 3rd volume?? .... i feel lost.... please help me... I want to go on with my study. T.T

There's about 2000 not 276.

O_O If it's like this, sorry. LoL

Heisig gives you stories for the first couple of hundred to introduce you to the method and after that he just gives you the components and it's up to you to make up your own stories.

Book 2 is designed to teach you the readings. It's not very popular and hardly anyone uses it, instead they focus on learning readings by learning to read which is a much better way of doing things. Book 3 is optional really and imo it's better to do that when you come to if you even want to. I haven't done it but will do when It comes time to start studying for Kanji Kentei 1.5kyuu as that's when i'll need it.

I’m afraid 276 is only the amount of kanji shown in the sample　pdf　online.　You'll have to buy the book for the rest.

I think Haruhi is referring to Sections 1, 2, 3 of book 1.

Well it does say "vol" 1, 2 & 3. At any rate, I recommend doing RTKlite which covers the 1000 most common kanji and then start learning to read.

The poster is talking about parts 1,2, and 3 of rtk1.
Part 1 is the first 12 chapters, which is 276 kanji in all.

My advice is to just read the book. Everything is in there.

Oh man.. I feel horrible for you Haruhi89

Can you imagine thinking there are ~200 kanji, then learned them all, and then finding out that NEVERMIND; you've got another 1800 to go...

#277 Roadway 道

Thank you everybody ^_^. However I bought the whole book and ..... there are really other 1800 kanji to learn, so I restarted immediately. ......So you're saying that I don't need to study volume 2 and 3.... so how can I learn other 3000 kanji??? Cause I heard that to read the newspaper you have to know almost 5000 kanji .... Waht do you advise me???

To be honest, go for only vol.1 kanji. I did volume 3, and went up to 3007 kanji, those kanji you won't see much.
But the thing is, for newspaper it's around 2042-2500 i think. But that's reading+understanding, not their meanings. So don't go for volume 3, only if you want to.
But one thing at a time, learn their meanings, and i'd recommended learning basic sentences, so you can at least make progress while doing kanji(something i didn't do, but it doesn't really matter, i've made good progress)

So where should I find and learn the other 500???

I think you should worry about the other 500 in a year or two, or more; not now.
Reading a newspaper really only requires knowing about 1600 kanji. Other types of literature require a bit more.

1600 kanji? hmm, that's not as much as i thought. But i yea i agree that, literature novels and such require some high-level kanji(i.e. rare, or almost to 3000)

Haruji89: Do you know about the flashcard system for learning the RTK kanji in the main part of this site? (Click the "Reviewing the Kanji"' link at the top.) People share their own stories for the kanji. You can get ideas from those stories and them review your own flashcards on the site.

btw, I think that one member was creating Polish RTK keywords. If that interests you, try searching the forum or member list.

Have you studied any Japanese? If not, please at least read some explanations of the Japanese writing system. You should be aware that after completing RTK1 (the first book), you will still need to learn how to pronounce the kanji in words. This takes more time than RTK1.

The number of kanji you need to know to read anything depends on (a) your definition of "need", (b) your definition of "read", © your definition of "know", and (d) what exactly you're reading. 5000 is a ridiculous overestimate for anything; newspapers theoretically use around 1950 kanji (and some additional ones with furigana provided), but only certain definitions of "read" and "need" would actually require full mastery of all 1950.

Besides, why would anyone want to read a Japanese newspaper? :-)

Just to test the "literature" idea I checked the kanji count in three of Soseki's novels (Sanshiro, Sore Kara, and Mon, which form sort of a loose trilogy). The three novels combined have a total of a little over 500,000 symbols, around 133,000 of which are kanji. This is about 800-850 pages of bunko-size text.

The three books contain 2450 different kanji, 768 of which are not on the Jouyou list (and thus would get furigana in most printings of Soseki's works -- many older printings of Soseki's works have furigana on every kanji, though). In addition, 847 of those 2450 kanji are used five or fewer times in all three books combined.

If you strip out the non-jouyou kanji and the ones used 5 or fewer times, you're left with 1325 kanji. I looked at the beginning of Sanshiro using this kanji list as a base -- with the Aozora Bunko text, you can read the first 17 pages before coming to a kanji with no furigana that you wouldn't know (if you knew those 1325 and nothing else). The first three chapters (about 60 pages) have 11 unknown kanji in them (each of which only shows up once).

Long story short: Even though you would technically "need" 1800 or so kanji to read Sanshiro, it's clear that you could use it as a learning resource, or even read it for pleasure, with much fewer than that. I think sometimes people are unable to get past the mental block of ignoring kanji frequencies, and thus get stuck on the idea that if a newspaper uses 2000 kanji and you only know 1000, you're only going to understand half of the newspaper.

Thora Wrote:Haruji89: Do you know about the flashcard system for learning the RTK kanji in the main part of this site? (Click the "Reviewing the Kanji"' link at the top.) People share their own stories for the kanji. You can get ideas from those stories and them review your own flashcards on the site.

btw, I think that one member was creating Polish RTK keywords. If that interests you, try searching the forum or member list.

Have you studied any Japanese? If not, please at least read some explanations of the Japanese writing system. You should be aware that after completing RTK1 (the first book), you will still need to learn how to pronounce the kanji in words. This takes more time than RTK1.

Thanks but polish keywords doesn't interest me, I prefer those in english..... i'm more italian than polish...=P

So how can I learn the pronounce?? Is there a method ?? A book?? A site, or something like this??

Arigatou everybody 8D

The method of learning to pronounce them comes after doing RTK. What most people here do is move onto to materials like smart FM or KO2001 which are a collection of sentences (with audio) that they use in conjunction with Anki in order to learn to read whole sentences. Using this approach you learn vocab and in doing so learn to read the kanji at the same time.

It's quite a long process so hang in there!

Domo arigatou gozaimasu. =) Can I ask you one more thing? How many sentences can I learn every day?? Or , how many sentences it's better for me to learn every day??

Start small I'd recommend. Don't over-push yourself. Do what you feel like doing. Whether it be 10-40 sentences or more. As you progress more into Japanese, you'll start to want to increase the load more, because you can handle more.

Thank you ^_^

問題ない(no problem!)
Also, try to add some things you like. Because doing nothing but grammer sentences all day can be boring. So spice it up with sentences, from anime,manga,drama's,etc. Enjoyable stuff. Try to make it enjoyable, it will go a long way for you that way. So you will keep coming back for more japanese, and that will equal a never ending cycle (well at least until you get to you're goal)

Ok , I love anime & manga. ^^