What is the “minimal” Kana to know to continue to Kanji?

3 comments

1. I would recommend nailing stoke order of kana before you move on to kanji, since that involves stroke order that is much harder.

2. :/ I wouldn’t really worry about stroke order too much… especially with Kana.

   IMO people really overplay the importance of stroke order in Japanese. Every language has stroke order, even English, and I guarantee you write some letters in the “wrong stroke order”

   Japanese people themselves don’t even perfectly remember stroke order of Kanji.

   There’s a basic set of rules that can help you if you need to look up kanji via radicals… and it helps a bit with handwriting… but I absolutely wouldn’t waste time and energy trying to memorize perfect stroke order along with EVERYTHING ELSE you have to learn.

   Basic rules (or as far as I have them remembered) are:

   * Top left to bottom right
   * horizontal lines before vertical
   * tops of boxes, and right sides are 1 stroke

   So like… 言 is 7 strokes

   馬 is 10 strokes

   隹 is 8 strokes

   There’s some kanji/radicals that will be above or below your counted amount of strokes… but with just the rules I listed you’ll get close.

   山 for instance is 3, ム (or the kanji equivalent, I just wrote “mu” here) is 2….

   I have to look up A LOT of Kanji, so the off ones you kind of learn, but again this gets you in the ballpark range.

   Please don’t stress yourself out over it. There’s already enough to have to learn without this miniscule nonsense.

3. If you want to handwrite then stroke order is pretty important, but kana has the same rules for stroke order as kanji (hiragana is just cursive kanji in the first place, and katakana comes from parts of kanji). And if you start learning kanji now, it doesn’t mean you can’t still practice hiragana. So I would say go for it, and good luck 🙂