It's funny because I've been wondering if RTK 3 is really necessary even at all.

When you've gotten through RTK I really think you don't need anything else. At that point all you really need to do is learn from context. If you run into any non RTK kanji, it doesn't make too much of a difference, as you probably won't ever need to write it out. And if you do, the knowlege of primitives make it easy to learn the kanji without Heisig. Not only that, but do you really want to take another 1000 kanji's time before you get started with Japanese?

Yeah, the A man is right. Once you've completed RTK1 things change. The new kanji come easy. If it doesn't come easy, you know exactly what to do to it.

If you want to become a kanji freak, go ahead. If you want to learn Japanese, do and enjoy things in Japanese.

The important thing to take into account is whether your objective is learning kanji, or learning Japanese. Besides, IMHO you need a balance between cold knowledge and communication skills. It doesn't make much sense knowing a gazillion kanji if you can't enjoy things and show off IN Japanese.

That's my 2 cents.

That 2 cents...is worth a f***ing dollar man

I don't know how important the last thousand are. I stopped after I finished RtK 1. Now I live in Japan and see kanji everywhere every day, and there are still tons of kanji from the first 2,000 that I've never seen in context. If I ever see a kanji that isn't from the first book, I'm downright shocked. It's almost always some obscure or specific situation, like the name of a place or a person. Many times it's a word that's almost always written in hiragana or katakana anyway because it's such an obscure kanji that even most Japanese people don't know it. And finally, I've seen a lot of kanji that aren't even in the 3rd book, so it's not like it will even guarantee that you won't encounter unknown kanji. I say that, unless you really like learning kanji and want to continue with the system for fun, it's not necessary.

Esgrove, really? 'cause I'm reaching toward 1000 kanji 'officially seen in the wild' around this point, and of those, I've picked up approaching 100 non-RTK1. 10% may not seem like much, but it's not really anything to shake a stick at. They're mostly from entertainment too, so I actually haven't picked up any place name stuff, just all pretty genuinely useful stuff like 惚 or 繋.

Not that I see the point in RTK3 either, since I'd rather learn them as I go. Just surprised at the comment that you haven't seen that many. Then again, I have a habit of finding words in kana and converting them into Kanji for the SRS (whether jouyou or not), so I don't actually have accurate numbers on how many I've actually 'seen' vs 'gone out of my way to learn,' I guess.

A lot of the RTK 3 kanji are common in literature, especially if you get into anything premodern or even just a few decades old.  But, if you want to read literature, you've got to learn the language, not just the kanji.  The Japanese language is so beautiful and rich and deep, it would be a shame to stop at the kanji and not learn the poetry and music of it.  There are over a thousand years of poetry and prose and plays waiting for you.

If you know kana and some basic grammar, you might enjoy reading books for children, which often have phonetic glosses by each kanji.  I believe there are some lists of resources on other threads.

I concur, by the time you finish RTK and start your Japanese studies, it's no hassle to do 30 new kanji a week. After 30 weeks, you're basically done with book 3. Of course, you have to remind yourself to do this. I keep failing to do it, letting week after week pass with only 220 from RTK3 done so far.

PS: You'll see a few kanji from 3 pop up in your studies. Grape, Strawberry, Giraffe, Soy Sauce, Chirp, Throat, and Rose come to mind. Ok, Rose isn't in RTK3 but it's easy to add to Anki anyway.

I'm going to do it just because I like Kanji and have to become Kanji Master.

Yeah I mean I have to make my own, just using the same system. I never used the RTK stories, so I just use it to mean this flash routine.

esgrove wrote:

I just meant that I rarely see non-RtK 1 kanji in everyday situations. When I look up hiragana words in the dictionary, there's usally some out of use kanji associated with it, but I don't consider that context. Even sometimes RtK kanji are attached to words that are usually written in hiragana.

You must not be looking very hard I see them everywhere in daily life, not even literature.

Thanks for all the replies.

Looks like I'm going to do RTK3 while throwing sentences in Anki.  Even now at 947 I'm seeing all these kanji I know and am so tempted to copy and paste(actually I probably will do this when I need a break from reviewing and what not).

Anyway, thanks for all the help.