Hey everyone,
I'm using Renshuu (not that it matters a lot), and I just finished with its N5 kanji list. So I did some digging and found out that maybe going from N5 to N4… N1 kanji lists isn't the best approach. I found out that they are more of a "guess" as to what the exam expects you to know. I'm not interested in taking the exam so they're not the best suited for me.
Then, I turned into joyo lists. Renshuu has a list that is subdivided into different grades. So elementary school grade I, II… up to middle school. I imagined this is a good way to learn kanji in a good pace, but I found out that, even tho you learn all the joyo kanji in the end, some of the most common kanji are learned further on, while some others you learn earlier aren't thaaat useful.
So, I begun to mess around with frequency based list, that gather the most used kanji in a decreasing manner. So the top 100 kanji appear in 30% of the texts, the top 200 45% of the texts etc (I made these numbers up).
I think I'm going with this approach, it seems to be more aligned with my goals, I want to be able to read manga as soon as I can in a feasible manner.
Have any of you tried a similar resource for learning kanji? How do you feel it impacted your reading and comprehension skills? Would you use a similar resource again if you had to start over?
Also, another thing, kinda unrelated but I still wanted to share and see your takes. It's about learning the kanji itself. My routine rn is seeing a new kanji, writing down the character and pronunciations on my notebook, then writing down different words it appears on (together with pronunciation and meaning). Then renshuu has kinda of flashcard system you can set up to test you. I think I'll improve on this by using one of renshuus features: you can add words to a list and it displays them with context and tests you, so you can get more used to them.
by RemarkableMonk783