How to use Anki if you don’t know the Kanji?

6 comments

1. That’s how you actually “learn” a kanji. By knowing words that use it.

   We have a saying for people who finished RTK or a huge amount of isolated kanji : “now you can start learning Japanese”.

   I suggest that when you encounter a new kanji, you study it the same way than you did before. Maybe check the general sense of it, look up a few other words that use it, write it if that’s your thing etc. That’s how I did and I’m at more than 3000 now. I don’t actually see which way you were doing it until now.

2. Anki is made for review, not for learning. Although people use it for learning, it’s not a pleasant experience. Besides that, the whole point of Wanikani is to give context to kanji and vocab so that you can review and expand on the kanji you learn. You should trust that system if you’re intent on using it. It’s much better structured than a core deck for a reason.

3. Two different ways off the top of my head would be:

   1. Reformat your cards to show you the readings

   2. Use hover-over furigana and hover over the words which have kanji you haven’t gotten to yet

4. Simply suspend all the reading cards: Go to the card browser, select all the _Reading_ cards and suspend them.

   I love Anki… but Anki just doesn’t make for a good Kanji learning tool (for me at least).

   I’m currently using Ringotan instead. It requires you to write Kanji, which technically is not a skill you need, but it’s better for learning, as it forces you to look closely at the Kanji. Not sure if Ringotan is the optimum, but it’s certainly better than Anki.

   That said, I eventually un-suspended the first 200 reading cards as an experiment. It’s significantly easier to learn those cards when you already know the sentence itself because you have seen each card a dozen times. Not sure how effective that is for Kanji specifically, but even if you only figure it out by context, it still feels like success as figuring out the context is a reading exercise in and of itself.

5. I mainly made my own cards when I use Anki. It always helped me when I thought about the card once before it pops up as a flash card. Even if I just copied the sentences from some textbook.

6. Brute force, it will hurt, but you will thank yourself in the long run. The sooner you learn to read kanji, the sooner you can start consuming native content.