I've started to leisurely add some RKTIII kanji to my workload (decided to wait for the database reset for readings before starting those), but I noticed that nobody so far has shared any stories. Well, I've (arrogantly perhaps) decided in that case I will enter a story for every kanji that hasn't got one (so far all of them), but I could surely use some help.

It has been mentioned in other threads, it's very possible to do the kanji writing part of RTKIII without the book. The first chapter, which I've gone through now, introduced a few suggestions for primitives, but some of them were already encountered in RKTI kanji. In some cases I already made my own primitives, so I stuck to those. I've also mentioned the new primitives Heisig gives in italics before my story, so you can make up your own mind.

Anyway, we can use some variety in that part. If you feel like doing more kanji, don't be shy and join me, even if you don't have the book. If you don't have a book and still are unsure about a primitive, just post here and I'll look up the official Heisig meaning for you.

Arguably, it only makes sense to touch RTK III once you're fully proficient on the 'newspaper level' and have started reading massive amounts of prose and are being constantly exposed to 'unusual' kanji... Even then, non-Jouyou kanji in books typically come with furigana so you can read them once, get over the sentence and safely forget...

Or if you're studying for a high level of KanjiKen but then you would be exposed to all of the above anyway...

Under any other circumstances, RTK III remains a purely academic pursuit, nietwaar?

I guess I just like studying kanji. I'm learning Japanese for hobby purposes, so I don't see anything wrong with expanding my written kanji database a bit beyond the ones that were deemed worthy by the Japanese government. There is no time pressure on me to start performing in Japanese asap. Besides, I've only studied a little vocabulary, but even then I've already encountered several kanji that weren't in RTK1. For instance I was rather surprised that the kanji for 闇、[kana]yami[/kana], darkness, which I knew even before I started Heisig was not in RTK1. And in the first 100 entrances for JPT4 vocabulary at kanjicafe, I encountered 椅子、[kana]isu[/kana], chair, of which the first kanji isn't in the list either.

I concluded that the RTK3 still contains a number of kanji that are a lot more common than some that were included in RTK1, like 匁, [kana]monme[/kana], monme.

I am like you astrid, learning japanese for a hobby. Right now it is on hiatus due to me finishing a dissertation. But Ill agree with serge. If you want the hobby long term, get those jouyou kanji drilled. Start using your language. Save RTK3 for later, else you keep doing kanji because it is easy, and neglect the important part of using your language skills to read and build up your vocabulary, your understanding of grammar.

I also love studying kanji, but I think you should balance it carefully with the rest.

Let me add my 2 cents. After I finished RTKI I took a little while to figure out what would be the next best step to further my Japanese language studies. I'm also learning it as a hobby, coming from interest in manga and anime, but I'd also like to take it a bit further and do an internship program in Japan after I finish my main study. http://www.jpp-japan.nl/en/index.html

So I did consider doing RTK2 or even more kanji with RTK3 but decided no to for the moment. I thought it was better to get some reading practice in and start building vocabulary, since mine was still pretty small. I also started delving into grammar more, mainly by means of this great site: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/. My point is that while kanji learning is fun, my goal is to learn Japanese - reading, listening, speaking and riting. Also, I'm learning and building readings while studying vocabulary. While this isn't as systematic as the RTK2 approach, it does have advantages. For one, you also learn kunyomi readings, for which there is no real system anyway. Also, you learn which reading is used in which word, which you cannot do with just learning onyomis plus an exemplary compound. And of course learning vocab has immediate benefits for reading and understanding. Note that I'm not simply memorising lists, I'm reading texts (games ) and adding all new words as I go along. It works great because the reading itself is also a practice drill. Apart from that I use mnemosyne to drill and keep track of vocab as well.

Hmm.. it sounds like I'm discouraging people to do RTK2, but that's not really the case. There's certainly benefits to be had from it, especially when it comes to remembering uncommon or rare readings or words. It's just that for me personally at the moment, the added value of doing RTK2 doesn't seem high enough for the effort invested in it.

On another note, while reading, I do frequently encounter kanji that are not in RTK1. Almost all of those do appear in RTK3. What I'm doing now is to simply make a small story and learn these new kanji as I go along. It's not hard, since most of them are built up from familiar primitives.

Piitaa Wrote:Also, I'm learning and building readings while studying vocabulary. While this isn't as systematic as the RTK2 approach, it does have advantages. For one, you also learn kunyomi readings, for which there is no real system anyway. Also, you learn which reading is used in which word, which you cannot do with just learning onyomis plus an exemplary compound. And of course learning vocab has immediate benefits for reading and understanding. Note that I'm not simply memorising lists, I'm reading texts (games ) and adding all new words as I go along. It works great because the reading itself is also a practice drill. Apart from that I use mnemosyne to drill and keep track of vocab as well.

Sugoi! Somebody who's doing the same thing as me (except I'm using supermemo instead of mnemosyne). I was so worried about what to do after book 1, but now the answer (for me) is really clear - learn to read my own vocabulary, and continue to use the RTK1 method when I encounter a new kanji. No further kanji study needed.

Piitaa Wrote:Hmm.. it sounds like I'm discouraging people to do RTK2, but that's not really the case. There's certainly benefits to be had from it, especially when it comes to remembering uncommon or rare readings or words. It's just that for me personally at the moment, the added value of doing RTK2 doesn't seem high enough for the effort invested in it.

Same here. I will do RTK2 some day, and maybe RTK3, but only after I am much more well rounded. My kanji knowledge is way ahead of every other aspect right now, although I love it and practice has made it so easy.

Piitaa Wrote:On another note, while reading, I do frequently encounter kanji that are not in RTK1. Almost all of those do appear in RTK3. What I'm doing now is to simply make a small story and learn these new kanji as I go along. It's not hard, since most of them are built up from familiar primitives.

I wait till I get 20 new characters, then apply RTK1 and RTK2 to them, and load them into supermemo. Works like a charm. I need to get RTK3 just to see if my new kanji are in it; I'm very curious.

Anyway, IMO there's nothing wrong with doing RTK3 early on; just depends on what your goals are. Sounds like you're having fun, so ganbate kudasai!

I'm only just approaching part 3 of book 1, but I don't think I'm going to do RTK3 when I'm finished. I think I'll practice reading to see which characters are useful and learn those instead of all 965.

leosmith: Of course you can see which characters are in RTK3 on this site, but that would require you to click about a thousand times. There's an other way though: the Heisig indices are included in KANJIDIC! Look for L2043 until L3007 and you'll have yourself a list of the RTK3 kanji.

astridtops: I also already know 闇 and 椅. Well, I couldn't write them myself, but when seeing them I remember what they mean. Other characters from RTK3 I can already recognize are: 龍 (it's on all t-shirts and caps), 蘭 (the ran in 阿蘭陀 oranda!), 俺, 萬, 宋, 頃 and 藍 and 蓮 from 藍蓮花 (blue lotus). I don't think any of these characters are rare. Like you said, some in RTK1 are less useful.

jhuijts2 Wrote:leosmith: Of course you can see which characters are in RTK3 on this site, but that would require you to click about a thousand times. There's an other way though: the Heisig indices are included in KANJIDIC! Look for L2043 until L3007 and you'll have yourself a list of the RTK3 kanji.

jhuijts2, thanks for the tip. But I couldn't figure this out. Could you provide a link? Thanks!

[ファブリス]

astridtops I think there's nothing wrong learning all the RTK III kanji after RTK I, as long as you don't frustrate yourself over it. If you're in a good swing, and you really enjoy it, go for it. I found that the remembering and concentration was a lot easier those days where I sat with the book and some paper, and I was actually looking forward to creating funny stories. It depends on the primitives, how easy they are to work with or how inspiring they can be. But if the study is enjoyable, with RTK, it becomes almost ridiculously easy (at least in retrospect).

By the way, John "kurojohn" Vold, one of the earliest users of the website, completed RTK III after RTK I as well. When he moved to RTK III he compiled a list of all the keywords from RTK III so I could add them to the website He is not reviewing anymore but he's still at the top of the members list as you can see with 3007 kanji and ~15000 reviews.

With that said, keep in mind that when you finish RTK III you will have 3007 kanji to review. If you plan on doing RTK III in a month or two, why not. If you spend more time on it, hobby or not, I think you would be better of practicing kanji chains, or starting to learn some grammar etc as suggested.

As for the onyomi area in development, it's basic but if you use it only to keep track of which ON groups you learned and which you didnt, it's already quite helpful. For this all you need is to enter a few words in the ON description (tag) and it will be "checked" on the main onyomi page. I don't recommend writing down complete stories anyway, you can enter just a few hints so you remember what "location" it was. The chains stick really well, with very little review. Because I havent had time to think long and hard about the database structure for this new section ath the moment, I dont want to promise anything, but it's unlikely that I will need to reset the data. I would just recommend you not to spend too much time entering compounds at this stage; and simply "check" which groups you learned, and use the random onyomi review feature for testing yourself (plus reading books etc, if it has furigana you can hide it with a card and check if you were right..).

leosmith Wrote:jhuijts2, thanks for the tip. But I couldn't figure this out. Could you provide a link? Thanks!

You must know EDICT and KANJIDIC, right? If not, they are great free resources used by lots of websites and tools. EDICT is a Japanese-English dictionary and KANJIDIC is a list of kanji with their meaning, readings and lots of reference numbers. You can find out more about them on Jim Breen's website and you can use WWWJDIC to search these files online. (You can also look up example sentences in which a certain word is used. You can download that data too. The only thing you can't download are the stroke order diagrams, since they are copyrighted by Halpern.)

KANJIDIC is a simple text file with 1 kanji per line. The indices in Heisig's RTK books are prefixed by L, so all lines with L2043 until L3007 are the kanji in RTK3. In Linux you can use the GNU utilities to easily extract and manipulate textual data. You could extract the needed lines with grep L[23][0-9][0-9][0-9] kanjidic, order them with sort and then maby prune the data you don't need with sed. I've sent you an e-mail in case you don't want to do this yourself and copy the list.

Another option is to use JWPce, this is what I'm using myself. It's a basically a wordprocessor for Japanese text (doesn't even need IME), but it also comes with the EDICT dictionary built in and several lookup methods for Kanji. I find it very convenient, because it's faster than using the WWWJDIC webserver, and can be used offline obviously.

You can get it here: http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/jwpce.html

ファブリス Wrote:With that said, keep in mind that when you finish RTK III you will have 3007 kanji to review. If you plan on doing RTK III in a month or two, why not. If you spend more time on it, hobby or not, I think you would be better of practicing kanji chains, or starting to learn some grammar etc as suggested.

Actually, reviewing doesn't cost me much time. If I have to think too long, I obviously don't know the kanji well enough and I fail it. Sometimes I have to search a bit ("wasn't that one of the bird kanji"?), but that way I can review 200 kanji in half an hour a day, and fail less than 10% of the ones I know well. I save time by writing down only the more complicated kanji. I mean, I don't see the point of writing 山 every time I review that kanji for instance. But I will write down 選, probably, to continue to get a feel for placing the elements correctly in proportion to one another. So, even if I have 3007 kanji in my database, once I am at an average reviewing time of a month, my review load will already have dwindled to a mere 100 kanji a day on average, if most of them will be in the last stack.

But I'm not only doing kanji at this point. I do a joined reading/grammar evening once a week with two other students, and in september my classes start again once a week. The only thing I need to reserve extra study time for at some point are the onmyoji chains. I chose to do the extra kanji first because once I've finished these in 2 months or so, I can make more complete chains. Changing or adding to stories doesn't work well for me. so if I had to make a story for a chain of, say, 10 kanji now, and change the story later to incorporate another 3 kanji from RTKIII, I would have more trouble than making one story of 13 kanji at once. That eventually was the tie-breaker between doing readings first or doing another 1000 kanji first.

Astridtops I think it is great that you are enjoying doing RTK III. As long as we are building up an kanji "alphabet" of English keywords, who's to say whether 2,042 or 3,007 kanji is the better base. I've read in several places that college educated Japanese know at least 3,000+ kanji. (The Joyo list only gets you out of Junior High school.) I like to read Japanese blogs--one place (among many) where the readings of non-Joyo kanji aren't given! Besides, I imagine you get quite a bit of built-in review of RTK I while you are going through RTK III.

Actually this is my second time around. I finished RTK I 13 years ago and passed Ikkyu. I've used Japanese very little the past 6 years and so I've forgotten much of my kanji. I hope to get back to where I used to be and go beyond. If I were starting all over again I would still go immediately to RTK III to get that large base of understanding. I remember taking Ikkyu and being shocked at the poor Japanese of the Chinese people taking the exam with me. (For every 1 caucasion there were 50 Chinese.) The only reason they could even sit for the exam was the extra clues their native understanding of the characters provided them! So I'm all for having my "native" base as large as possible. And an extra 1000 characters doesn't seem excessive.

I'm also keeping track of Jack Halpern's frequency rankings for kanji usage in Asahi Shimbun in 1998: A + B rank cover 95%, C rank brings that up to 99%, and D rank up to 99.8%. When I review my kanji I will make sure I have A + B rank kanji down cold. Then I'll do the same for C rank kanji. But I won't sweat the D rank kanji the same way, I'll give myself more time with them.

I'm expanding Heisig's keywords to include the core meanings used by Halpern. A unique set of meanings attached to each character should work as well as a single key word. Why not include all major meanings--especially where Heisig has gone for a minor (or old) one. I will let you know if this succeeds or fails for me.

Everyone learns differently. The trick is finding/knowing what works best for you and having a good time. So as long as you are enjoying RTK III, I say go for it! I hope I will enjoy it too.