Radical overhead

Pun intended. Semi interesting kanji related observation:

I learn kanji by breaking them down into their parts and building mnemonics out of those. Since not all kanji are either simple — in which case it’s reasonable to remember the single strokes — or composed only of other kanji, I necessarily have to carry some additional baggage along the way.

I wondered how this turned out for me up until now and created a plot. For learning my first 800 kanji I memorized 97 additional non-kanji characters (12% overhead). For the next 800 it was only 13 (1.6% overhead, 6.8% overall).