I’ve been studying for about two years and have gotten the basics down. I can carry simple conversations. I mostly don’t get confused when reading hiragana and katakana. But Kanji kills me. Not recognizing the kanji. But actually knowing which pronunciation to use when. How am I supposed to be able to recognize and correctly use which pronunciation? It’s so bad that it even bleeds over into chatting white a lot. “Which version of ‘one’ am I supposed to use here?”
Is there a trick? I’ve tried the rote memorization? I’ve tried flashcards. I am making progress but it’s agonizingly slow since literally every new kanji I run into I have this problem.
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This is a problem that stems from learning kanji in isolation. Don’t do that.
Learn words. You will naturally learn the kanji that are contained in those words as an extension of that. Over time, after learning multiple words containing a kanji, you will understand which reading to use where.
If you give a few examples of words that have recently given you trouble, I could try to suggest some ways to remember them and words like them, but as Wizard-San, this problem is mostly avoided if you just learn complete words from the start. It *can* even then still be an issue when you encounter new words that use kanji you’ve seen before, but still, prioritizing words over kanji will make this happen much less often.
Wanikani maybe? For me works like a charm.
Otherwise after 2 years that’s… interesting. Maybe this language is just not for you, maybe you are not studying enough to memorize stuff, but ofc I can recommend just reading/listening etc a looot. Satori Reader and other graded materials are your friends. Good luck.
For what it’s worth, you’re not alone. This likely won’t help or address your problem directly but I can share what I’m doing to get through it – I’ve been learning the kanji then, when I read some practice sentences out loud from Renshuu or Todai or whatever, I try using either / both pronunciations and see if there’s one that sounds familiar and/or rings a bell. Tap it, check it, see if I was close or right or whatever.
I try not to let it get me down and try to get some pride in knowing the concept at all and any kind of recall for that Kanji, whether radicals or connecting what it looks like to something else I’ve seen somewhere.
I’ve been going for about a year and half and I gotta remind myself of those times when everything looked like squiggles and audio sounded like absolute gibberish. I’m not going to have high tea in Kyoto anytime soon but any progress is progress. Keep going!
To elaborate on “learn words instead of kanji”, one way I approached this was to think of it as, the underlying thing to learn is the spoken word or idiomatic expression, and kanji is a way to “recover” it, i.e. when we read, the kanji helps us recover the sound values (which were in the writer’s mind), or when we write, we distill the utterance in our mind, the sound values, into kanji.
So, when I run into familiar words/phrases containing kanji, I read/pronounce them with confidence. When I see “old” kanji in new environments, I can make a guess, but I really don’t “know” that word/expression. And I think of it as, ah I need to look up this one, or at least I need to commit this to memory (e.g. if I obtain the reading from furigana or accompanying audio, and the meaning seems clear from context).
Over time, as you encounter them, you just become familiar with the common words/expressions and their associated kanji. I guess the obscure stuff always needs looking up. For particular values of “common” and “obscure”, of course (depending on how widely you read I guess).
Why do you need to know kanji pronunciations in a vacuum? I’m confused on how this “bleeds over into chatting”. Chatting just uses words, why does kanji come into it at all?
May I ask how you’ve been learning the kanji so far?
Do you use RTK or WaniKani?
If your willing to spend money, I personally use wanikani.com. It’s $9.00/month, $89/year, and $300 for a lifetime subscription ($200 if you get an email for a discount during Christmas-New Years). It’s pretty pricey, but it has pretty much all the kanji you’ll need to become fluent, plus radicals to make those kanji easier and vocabulary words using the kanji. It’s designed in a way that almost feels like a game, making it entertaining and effective. It uses spaced repetition between reviews to help promote long-term memory and mnemonics stories to make the kanji readings and meanings easier to remember. It even has a community of users in the forum talking about different topics. It is in my opinion the BEST Kanji learning resource out there.
Now if your strapped for cash and/or don’t want to spend, there are free kanji sources out there, but try to utilize the spaced repitition and mnemonics when you study.
I don’t have great advice but don’t give up!!!!
Like the rest have said, learn them through words