The order in RTK is the best order to help learn Kanji intuitively (ok, if you learn all the radicals/primitives first, then any order will do) assuming you're trying to learn all the Jouyou Kanji (or subsets of it ala RTK Lite).

The 2001 KO order is the best order to help learn vocabulary intuitively. This is due to not only the common usage but similar themes of the kanji.

The Core 2k list is a great combination of simple sentences to illustrate the vocabulary word, images and professional audio.

What really hurts 2001 KO was not the vocabulary order, but the sentences which used kanji and vocabulary from later on in the example sentences. This downside was fixed when a RTKer wrote a program that would sort sentences based on the kanji in it. In theory, this introduced not just the kanji but the vocabulary for the kanji in the proper order.

Another smaller downside (in my opinion) of 2001 KO is it limited itself to vocabulary derived from its top 1110 Kanji. Words that did not use these kanji were only shown in kana, on top of that common kana only words were not taught. However, Core 2k does do this.

So, if you're just learning vocabulary (like Ice Cream did with Core 6k), then just using 2001 KO order of vocabulary can do. Now, this vocabulary list can come from anywhere such as top words from wikipedia.jp but sorted with the program mentioned to make it intuitive to learn. Just be careful that this will weed out Kana only words, so for those it's best to re-spread those evenly throughout your list.

If you're wanting to use the benefits of the Core 2k or 2001 KO lists (ie the example sentences), sort either the vocabulary list (2001 KO already does this) or sort the sentences. The sorted sentences have had a great reception to people on the forum. Here's my personal advice: Since these sentences are there to teach the vocabulary word, make sure there's a way to reconnect the vocabulary word back to the sorted list.

Oh, on top of ALL THAT, it's probably not important past the first 1000 words. At that point, you can make the call to keep learning systematically or start learning words as you come across them in your readings (ie sentence mining) or a mixture of the two. This is really delving into personal preference areas and the main reason you get 8 different answers to the 'what to do now' question.

Good skills to you,

Here's where I'm out of my depth, but one of the readers here created a program that'll sort sentences based off of a kanji list. Those with rare kanji in them get put farther at the end so at the beginning are sentences with only easy kanji.

What I meant about reconnecting vocabulary back to those sentences is this: The sentence is there to teach you about one of the words in it. If you sorted the sentences, how do you know what words in it are being taught? So what the sorting program does is spit out three columns: Sentences, Number of original order, number of new order. By putting that into a spread sheet you can sort the sentences back to original order, paste in the vocabulary words and kana versions, then resort it back to the KO2001 order. Now, that's mainly important to guys like me that want to train vocabulary using sentences.

After you have a completed spreadsheet, copy those over to a text document, save it as UTF-8 to import it into Anki. It's not too complicated, but there are some tedious steps.

But I can't help with the sorting program. It's a script that I don't have my computer set up to run. However, some guys have a sorted list of 2001KO sentences on the forum.

Nukemarine wrote:

So what the sorting program does is spit out three columns: Sentences, Number of original order, number of new order. By putting that into a spread sheet you can sort the sentences back to original order, paste in the vocabulary words and kana versions, then resort it back to the KO2001 order.

actually those extra number fields mean something else altogether, but you can sort a multiple-field file choosing which field you want to look at for sorting purposes (e.g. you could choose to sort the same file on the vocab field rather than the sentence field), so you don't need any extra steps, just sort the complete file to begin with

Nukemarine wrote:

But I can't help with the sorting program. It's a script that I don't have my computer set up to run. However, some guys have a sorted list of 2001KO sentences on the forum.

yeah if you're using windows you'll need to install perl or cygwin first (I'd go for cygwin cos then you could run shell scripts too or anything else designed for a unix environment)