http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%.....2%E5%AD%97

Considering this it’s not so crazy. That first 漢字、亜 is used in quite a few names. In fact, I don’t have any students that haven’t proclaimed this as not a list only used for naming children.

That considered, it is of no used to J-2nd language learners. Let’s just ignore it. It appears to be for what 漢字 you can use for naming Japanese children, and that’s about it. Nothing more, nothing less.

I do stand in agreement with you that this is a practically useless way to learn kanji, and that many of them that I have learned through the book I have never seen in writing. I didn’t know this at the time I bought the book however, and I got quite far through before I realized there wasn’t much stock to be put in it.

The main thing that it did benefit me in was in learning new vocabulary. My reading/writing skills are way ahead of my speaking/listening skills and it’s safe for me to say that I knew way too much kanji before I started getting into vocab. Since I already knew all the readings for the kanji, memorizing was a snap. It also was a way to keep my memorizing skills sharp by memorizing random things I would never need to know. This sounds silly, I know, but in the long run it wasn’t so bad. Granted, I do have 500 more kanji to go, and I have a habit of making studying harder on myself than most people do.

The characters that jouyou doesn’t cover like 俺 I simply picked up along the way. In my opinion, no one’s going to get it completely right when the inconsistency of a language is involved.

BTW, the KANJIDICT dictionary, which is accessible through Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC server, includes frequency rankings for individual kanji. From the documentation: “The data is based on an analysis of word frequencies in the Mainichi Shimbun over 4 years by Alexandre Girardi.” (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/.....c_doc.html). You can find the analysis at this site (http://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/00INDEX.html) if you grep for Alexandre Girardi.

Oh good, it makes the Japanese language easier to learn because it gets rid of hard words…

Just joking. I’m finding Japanese is a very rich and expressive language, although admittedly its broad vocabulary makes it harder to learn.

I think you do make some valid points.

“an analysis of a large collection of works and solid statistical data on the frequency of each kanji”

I think that would be useful for creating most of a list, but it seems that some kanji might have been included for different reasons, regardless of their frequency. Unless we know what those reasons were, we can’t say they are invalid, so it’s hard to argue either way.