Normally its mostly similar to the order that Japanese children learn them in. Some textbooks or curriculum may have a slightly different order, but its usually similar.
This site has some tables showing the order Japanese children use: http://www.learn-japanese.info/indexw.html
I think this is based on frequency or something.

At most universities it's

Kana
Super easy kanji
Additional kanji based on frequency

Short answer: they don't.

Longer answer:

Genki series textbooks (and others I assume) introduce kanji slowly according to the vocabulary words in the lessons, so theoretically you would be able to recognise/write the vocab words that you know. In REALITY, all my non-Chinese classmates (which cuts out most of the class) always tried to cram them for before the weekly kanji test, and would then forget them the next day. The would constantly complain about how hard it is to learn kanji and give me dirty looks when I said I like kanji...

Kana in a weekend, then kanji somewhat in order of frequency, but with no explanation whatsoever of radicals or primitives or etymology. Also with an expectation that readings would be learned along with meanings.

We had Japanese instructors who told us that the only way to learn kanji was to write them thousands of times. Those of us who didn't drop out of the class over the first two years (about 75% dropped out) kept doing that. Needless to say nobody ever got past an uncertain knowledge of 500 kanji or so, except for:

- a few students who had taken Chinese before and who had been taught characters based on individual radicals, their etymology, and then assembled hanzi from those pieces,

- one girl who years later told me she had read RTK1 ... and not told me about it even though she was hitting on me all throughout first year! Damn! Dating her would possibly have saved me hundreds or thousands of hours of study.

My university had a kanji test every fortnight which was based on the kanji we were supposed to learn for the chapter of genki we were doing. These quizzes were separate from grammar and reading quizzes. The format was simply that we were either given the kanji and had to write the hiragana or given the hiragana and had to write the kanji (they were in sentences so that they were in context).

However in grammar and reading quizzes the kanji that we had been tested on in previous weeks was used freely and without furigana as it was expected that we now knew it.

This would obviously vary from institution to institution.

Also, obviously the way you actually want to learn the kanji and their readings is entirely up to you. The university only provides you with a list they expect you to learn and that they will test you on.

dizmox wrote:

I don't think RtK is that special though. Don't get me wrong, I just think that high paced rote memorisation (identifying characters as collections of radicals, of course) when combined with Anki and strong motivation is as efficient as you can get. I certainly would struggle to come up with and remember 50+ mnemonics a day.

It's not "special" per se, but, for me at least, I find it makes learning kanji a lot simpler. I've studied Japanese formally for 3 years so far, 2 at high school and 1 at university, and it's like they just randomly toss kanji at you and say "here, learn this and the readings". There is no apparent order. Hence the ordering of RtK and the fact that he gives names for the different parts of the kanji means I can be lazier and expend less brain power in trying to sort all the different kanji in my head. He's already done most of the work for me

You don't necessarily need to go at a speed of 50+ a day. Even if I was doing only 10 a day I feel that this would be more efficient than the method I was attempting to use before. ^^

Yes, because it's only "logical" if you isolate the kanji and learn them by themselves, apart from the Japanese language -- RTK is the only book that takes this approach.

dizmox wrote:

Well, I assume most kanji focused books would put them in an order of increasing complexity at the very least.

Not necessarily.  Even on the official kanji education lists, 飲 is taught a year before 欠, and 曜 is a 2nd year kanji.  I once saw a kanji textbook that introduced 曜 somewhere in the first 15 characters it covered.  Breaking kanji down the way RTK does is pretty intuitive, but so many people fail to do this.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2012 May 31, 10:54 am)

yudantaiteki wrote:

I see this idea again and again, that before RTK, everyone had no choice but to write kanji over and over again out of context in a notebook, but this is BS.  I never used heisig but I also did not write kanji over and over again in a notebook.  I used BKB, IKB, and Kanji in Context, which introduced the kanji along with words in example sentences and longer readings.

While you may not have written kanji over and over many people did because this is how you're generally told to learn kanji. I know at my university the teachers told us to do exactly that. While it seems rather dumb now, I (and probably many others) just assumed that this was the way you learn kanji and didn't really bother looking too hard for a different method.

Inny Jan wrote:

If you fail to see that for the most part kanji are composed of reusable components then you are bound to have problems. However, if you do notice that 日  is used over and over again, then you naturally start braking down the complex characters into their components and from there there is only one step to come up with mnemonics. Once you start doing that, I'm sure you would appreciate that you need to get to know 斤 before learning 新、近 or 所.

I believe you guys are talking about something different.  I think yudantaiteki is talking about knowing the readings and the meaning.  I believe for what you are talking about, just knowing 斤 as a radical would suffice.  I don't think you two are necessarily disagreeing.

yudantaiteki wrote:

The only reason learning 斤 before 新 in Heisig is a good idea is that Heisig has you associate specific keywords with the simpler characters and then use them in the stories for the more complex characters.  If you're using a more traditional method where you're learning the kanji in context along with readings and their actual "meanings", learning 斤 does not help you learn 新. 

Now, a number of simple component characters are fairly common and also contribute some meaning when they appear as part of another character (木, 日, 手, etc.) and there's no problem learning these first in a traditional system as well.

Gotta agree, but also need to add something (the "you's" are not aimed at you, yudan.). Heisig ssumes you learn 斤 as a kanji unto itself in addition to the primitive meaning he assigns it. What he demonstrated though in other cases, is that you can just teach it as a primitive by itself then leave the learning it as a kanji for later.

Anyway, learning just the kanji's writing and (very basic) english meaning can be done without context. When you start learning on and kun, it's truly best to learn using words in context of sentences. There's maybe an exception with Onyomi in relation to movie method, but even that won't teach you when to use the correct pronunciation while learning  vocabulary will.

yudantaiteki wrote:

The only reason learning 斤 before 新 in Heisig is a good idea is that Heisig has you associate specific keywords with the simpler characters and then use them in the stories for the more complex characters.

Exactly.

yudantaiteki wrote:

If you're using a more traditional method where you're learning the kanji in context along with readings and their actual "meanings", learning 斤 does not help you learn 新.

I can't really relate to the "using a more traditional method" because some ten years ago, when I didn't have much interest in learning Japanese, I was introduced to kanji through Heisig (at that time I did some 100 first characters from his book). My copy of RtK was collecting dust for quite some time... but his method made so much sense that I would never think of any other way of studding kanji.

(It might be useful at this point to be more specific on what the "traditional method" is - I assume that you mean 1) not using mnemonics, 2) rote memorizing characters by writing drills and reading, and 3) order of learning the characters is loosely governed by their frequency/usefulness.)

These days, I do study Japanese and my approach is a mixture of Heisig and the traditional method (I use the mnemonics system from the former and the ordering and reading/writing studies from the latter). I don't see Heisig and the traditional method as contradicting approaches, rather as complementing ones.

So, you still can learn kanji in context (with their readings, "meanings" and writing) and, at the same time, learning (as in Heisig learning) 斤 could help you not to forget 新.

Last edited by Inny Jan (2012 June 01, 6:10 pm)