Yup, stop at 2042 and there is a list somewhere. Worst case you could possibly look at the list of additions to the jouyou and look them up on this website? At the very least the RTK3 ones will show up.

I think there may also be a list of the alterations in the main RTK website? I'm not sure on that though. Or at least the ability to add them.

My personal advice would be to learn about 3000 "really well" and then write down new kanji as you see them and flip through these notes once in a while. There are a lot more than 2500 kanji in Japanese.

It may not be a comedy answer, but I think it's a little too simplistic -- of course there aren't only 2500 kanji in Japanese and you will never "stop" learning kanji, but there does need to be a point where you move from RTK to learning actual Japanese.  Everyone will differ on their speed, but I think there are much more productive things you could be doing than learning and reviewing the 1000 extra kanji in RTK 3, especially if you are doing the "recommended" method of completing RTK before doing anything else.

I've said this in other threads, but one of the main things RTK is supposed to do is teach you how to learn kanji, not just to teach you a list of kanji.  If you are using RTK correctly, it really shouldn't matter whether you learned 2000 or 2200 kanji.

The more kanji you learn, the less useful each new one is.  There is a set of kanji that is common to any writing (maybe 800-1200) and then the rest of the kanji will vary widely in frequency depending on what you are reading.  There comes a point where it's much more efficient to learn new kanji from reading something that interests you than to learn them from a list.

Although newspapers are a particular kind of writing and the kanji common there won't necessarily be common in what you want to read.  RTK Lite is my favored approach but even if you decide to do the whole RTK, don't worry about the lack of the new Joyo kanji or whether you should do RTK 3.

Oh, I never considered that people would do RTK on it's own separate from studying Japanese or put off their Japanese study in order to do RTK. I realize that Heisig talks about that in the preface, but it seemed like bad advice that few people here end up taking.

If the question were phrased as, "when should I start studying real Japanese instead of just Heisig," then I would say as soon as possible. Since the question was phrased as a kind of "when should I quit?" my stock answer was "never." I probably should have read more carefully.

I agree that you shouldn't put off studying real Japanese in order to finish RTK3. I studied both at the same time. There were some weird holes in my knowledge that didn't get plugged until kind of late, but I think as long as someone doesn't copy me in taking like 6 years to finish RTK then they should be alright.

I would start Heisig and Genki at the same time, and prioritize the kanji that come up in Genki out of their usual order in Heisig. By the time you hit the chapters in Genki where kanji start showing up I think you'd have a few hundred Heisig kanji under your belt. Some of those would cross over with Genki, and so they would kind of reinforce each other.

I really think doing RTK on it's own without studying Japanese is asking for trouble. RTK gets so much easier when you start developing your own sense for and relationship with the kanji in the context of the actual language. There's too many synonyms in RTK1 for me to keep straight without using Japanese keywords and adding more English keywords for certain kanji.

Last edited by erlog (2012 April 12, 8:08 am)