Antonio Frecentese
Time for a question about #Japanese: how to study #kanji.
My question is about the order: would it be better to study #kyōiku kanji first, then the remaining #jōyō, or better to follow #JLPT?
I ask this because I saw that kyōiku kanji also include rarely used kanji, according to various “lists” I discovered. On the other side, JLPT lists are prepared with old exams and are not official (they’re discouraged).
Personally I think that following the kyōiku list, as Japanese children, could be ->
Feb 4 at 8:28pmWeb
Show threadAntonio FrecenteseFeb 4

-> fine because it would lead to a general knowledge useful for basic, general content, we would have more or less the same ability of Japanese children. Later, we could learn the other kanji based on frequency, or on what we find.
But JLPT seems to be better for more practical communication needs, for us non-Japanese speaking people.

What do you think?

Show threadAesdeefFeb 4

@chakuari I would suggest simply following a textbook and learning the characters as they are introduced in specific words, plus any vocabulary that you find interesting and useful (e.g. 囲碁 if you're interested in the game of go)

Using materials for children at the beginning is generally not a great idea - an average 9-year-old doesn't care about words like "health insurance" or "job interview", but could talk at length about dinosaurs or bugs or plants or stuff

I'd also stay clear from anything that claims that kanji are pictures, since that's nonsense and it won't get you far

Show threadAntonio FrecenteseFeb 4
@aesdeef In fact I was tempted by the “Basic kanji book” series. And yes, I play go.😜
Show threadEvan Feb 4
@chakuari you need a large enough number of kanji to read that I would say not to worry a great deal about the order as developing a learning method that works for you is (imo) more important. Heisig's Remembering The Kanji is the book I used, and it teaches groups of characters roughly organized by components. Wanikani is popular like the other reply mentioned. I would say it's likely less efficient and more importantly, harder, to work through a frequency list just because it's helpful to learn e.g. the most common kanji containing 月 (or whatever) around the same time. My two cents.
Show threadAntonio FrecenteseFeb 4
@mllsc I see. I tried RTK, but I don’t like it very much as it “teaches” kanji without context, which I find a bit odd, and because there are quite rare kanji in the jōyō list it follows that are found only in really peculiar texts, so I wonder if I should concentrate on others, before takling them.
Show threadEvan Feb 4
@chakuari that's fair. There's also auxiliary resources like this kanji synonym guide which I'm a huge fan of personally. I didn't get it until later but maybe there'd be a good way to incorporate it.
If you like the list idea, I don't see any reason you couldn't take a list of jouyou and skip the ones that seemed rare, then come back to them later on. Skipping one you needed will be easy to spot if you keep running into it.