Last spring, the bar was raised for kanji learners aiming to attain literacy in Japanese through mastery of the general-use (jōyō) kanji, when the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology announced the addition of 196 characters to the original list of 1,945 official jōyō kanji approved three decades ago.
Many kanji learners who view memorizing kanji as a dreaded chore — including my 15-year-old native Japanese-speaking son — groaned at news of the additions and resolved to procrastinate as long as possible before tackling them.
Devotees of James Heisig's three-volume self-instructional system, "Remembering the Kanji" (RTK), however, are already diving into the additions with a learning supplement recently made available as a free PDF download.