I am currently doing user research for my graduation project at school and my project involves the experience of learning kanji and how to overcome the learning curve.
I want to ask people a few questions who are in the process of learning kanji (or have reached fluency) about their experiences. If you are a teacher or tutor, feel free to share your experiences in teaching kanji to your students as well!
1. How difficult did you find the process?
2. Were there any pains or mental barriers during the process? if so, what were they?
3. Were there anything that helped the process? What were they?
4. If you could do it again, what would you change in your process?
5. What is your general experience in learning Kanji? (Open question)
Answer as many questions as you want! Thank you in advance!
Feel free to DM me if you have questions
11 comments
1) For me, it was fun and not too hard. I liked it a lot.
2) I think the sheer volume of them is a lot, and I don’t recommend studying them in a vacuum. Study them from a book you’re reading, your textbook or something else where you’ll have constant exposure.
3) Writing them out a lot and using them, both in writing and while reading.
4) I might have maybe been more selective with some materials.
5) Good.
Not fluent. I know I am above a thousand but not sure if 2000 (dont really bother counting, just trying to put hours in).
At first seemed impossible, way to many.
Learned to see the different parts of a Kanji, and it started to become “easier”. Seeing the different parts of it made it easy to understand/remember. Have in mind some of it might be “made up”, or “this is what it actually means”. But any correlation between words and kanji/radicals helps.
If I had to start over I would definitively do radicals and components, then jump straight into vocabulary. I feel like learning to many kanjis without vocabulary sometimes throws me off because I think I know the meaning… when really it was more of a “I misunderstood the meaning”.
For example: time, times (of doing something), times (as in ages).
I wouldn’t say its difficult, but very time consuming.
I dont like to compare languages but to explain: when I was learning English. If I didnt have a word that would help me by giving me a hint as to what it means, it was hard to remember. Kanji at least gives you a hint.
1) Not hard, but obviously extremely time-consuming. It’s taken me over one and half years to learn all 常用漢字, with kanji study being a main focus.
2) Probably just feeling like they’re falling out of your head. It’s unavoidable, in my opinion, to have an imperfect memory of at least some of thousands of characters, but it feels bad when you’re putting so much effort into learning them.
3) SRS. It’s obviously possible to learn kanji without SRS, but I can’t imagine it for myself. Learning vocab with kanji also felt critical to me. Writing them is helpful, but I learned more than half just fine without writing.
4) Probably start writing & reading earlier. I might focus less on 常用漢字 and just study kanji in general, as there are plenty of non-included kanji that I see more frequently than many of the included kanji.
5) I enjoy it. Kanji study was what convinced me to attempt learning Japanese. I’m not a kanji scholar or anything, but I enjoy learning new kanji. It’s also allowed me to “punch above my weight” in terms of reading, which was nice especially earlier on.
For context on my process and background, I’ve been learning to write kanji that show up in vocabulary that I’m learning/books I’m reading. I can write roughly 2300 kanji, although I might forget which kanji is in which word if I were to write sentences, since I haven’t focused on writing out full sentences by hand much.
1) I feel like the difficulty of learning kanji is just being consistent and doing it. It’s not hard or easy. There’s just a lot of them.
2) Taking breaks and forgetting how to read/write a bunch of characters was frustrating, and a bit of a mental barrier, but I realized after a while that characters I had learned before came back quicker when relearning them. Also the sheer number of kanji that you need to learn to read is intimidating.
3) Focusing on learning kanji that occurred in the vocabulary I was learning was a huge improvement. Originally I had been using the grade levels to structure my kanji learning, but I realized that there were too many characters that I wasn’t really encountering in vocabulary that way, and also that I wasn’t learning the characters that I was encountering. Also consistently learning a few new kanji per day has also been an improvement. Instead of learning 10-20/week as I did originally in my Japanese classes, I learned 5/day at the start before dropping down to 4 and then 3/day as reviews started to mount. Even 3 per day is 21 new characters/week though, so it’s still more than I was learning in my Japanese classes, and it also felt more effective and like less work doing it daily compared to weekly.
4) If I started over I’m not sure what I’d change. To some extent I’d use more or less my current learning strategy from the start, but if I were restarting, I wouldn’t know the radicals, common components, phonetic components etc., so I’m not sure if my current method would be as effective.
5) My experience has been that yes there are a lot of kanji, but ultimately there are a finite number of them, and there’s a lot of other stuff to learn in the language. It’s best (at least in my personal experience) to just do some small amount of practice daily, focusing on characters that are relevant to you, and not let kanji study occupy too much of your time. After all, 3 characters/day for one year is 1,095 characters, and 5 per day is 1,825 characters. If you’re studying casually, even 1,000 characters is plenty of characters to be learning in your first year, and if you have more time to study daily, then you can up the number of characters per day. Of course if you’re starting off at the beginning it’s harder to learn characters, so idk if that’s actually feasible to do when starting out, since that’s not what I did. But it certainly works well for going from a few hundred characters to knowing most characters you see day to day.
Not fluent but learning
1. Not exactly “difficult” but very time consuming.
2. Nope
3. SRS such as Anki
4. Not that much. I spent too much focusing on writing them, I don’t really want to write them right now. I may do that later in life though, since it sounds interesting.
5. Hm, in general it takes a while.
I JUST finished KKLC a couple weeks ago. Just the rough English meanings of each of the 2300 kanji, it took three months with me doing very little studying outside of keeping up with reviews during the 2nd month. So I’ll report on that experience.
1. With the mnemonics it was much easier than I thought to retain them. I’m always paranoid that I can’t remember things well but I picked up the kanji pretty well so I guess I’m wrong.
2. If I accidentally guessed a similar but wrong English keyword for a kanji multiple times in a row, it was a large effort to undo. Like saying “matter” instead of “method” for 法. That kanji still has the most reviews out of all of them for me just because of that lol.
3. Anki of course helped a ton. I want to say I was helped a little bit by watching TV shows with subtitles just so I got exposed to “kanji in the wild” and my brain was applying meanings to each one. But I don’t know how much that actually mattered. Definitely didn’t matter for more obscure kanji.
4. Honestly I think I did pretty good. Maybe I would have done less immersion (since its debatable how helpful that is at this stage anyways. I was just hoping for some increased phoneme detection lol) and focused entirely on the kanji. But I was already being pretty aggressive, introducing 40-60 a day quite often, and introducing up to 120 on a few Saturdays. I have started learning to write kanji, just a tiny number every day as sort of a “background task” while I do the main learning tasks. Perhaps I should have started doing writing earlier, though this is something that is on the scale of multiple years so I don’t know how much being 3 months ahead would matter. But writing is fun.
5. What I have done so far was fun and has made me excited to learn more! It is really cool to see how differently my brain perceives kanji now. They are no longer a bunch of shapes and lines, but very clear distinct patterns. So far the **real** frustration for me, I am discovering, is learning readings. As I study vocab, I can almost always get the meaning but my brain seems rather opposed to retaining sounds. Hopefully it will get easier with time, just as kanji did.
Learning curve in Kanji is quite interesting. Basically at the very beginning we don’t know any kanji at all, but first 200 kanji cover 50% and 1000 cover 90%. In several weeks-months people suddenly are able to recognize majority of it in any Japanese text.
It wasn’t very hard, but overall I’ve spent around 4-6 months to learn general meaning for ~2k kanji and the problem is that even if you know kanji, at the end it’s rather something like an alphabet. Doesn’t have much practical usefulness without knowing actual words, at best we can try to roughly guess based on context. At the same time when you check the meaning of unknown word, it looks very reasonable to use such kanji. Like it’s hard to say what will be 手 (hand) + 話 (talk) mean, there are at least several possibilities like gestures, but if you know that 手話 means sign language, then it’s completely reasonable to use such combination. So it’s rather easy to learn such compounds and despite it takes quite a long time to learn kanji, at the same time it partially helps to memorize a lot of written words. It’s actually quite fascinating how language can be completely reasonable using a kind of pictures alone. The only problem is that in Japanese written and spoken sides are almost completely separate, so it takes more time to learn comparing to other languages where based on alphabet we can quite decently predict how it’s going to be pronounced.
From my personal experience people usually use only 2 methods to learn kanji. Some people learn kanji in isolation, for example, we can learn the most common meaning for it and quite often it involves different kinds of mnemonics. This method doesn’t give much practical ability, but it saves a lot of time in the future. People don’t need to learn kanji anymore and sometimes it helps like I said before, something like 電話 (electricity+talk) is just logical by itself. Sometimes it also has side advantage, such approach often aims to split kanji on components, so quite often people remember it not as some general shape, but actually remember different elements and it’s useful for writing. Another approach is to learn kanji with vocabulary at the same time, it gives practical advantage from the very beginning.
In my opinion it doesn’t matter much which approach people use, at the end it probably takes around the same amount of time, because we learn the same amount of information. If we talk about advanced/fluent degree, then people know it all, how kanji looks, what it means, how it’s pronounced and where it’s used. So it’s simply the difference if we focus on something specific or learn it all at once.
**How difficult did you find the process?**
At first IMPOSSIBLY HARD. Now? Ridiculously easy.
**Were there any pains or mental barriers during the process? if so, what were they?**
In the beginning I just could not internalize them at all. It didn’t matter what I did or what method I used. No regular drills, or flash cards, or this chrome extension I had that turned the first letter of every word into Kanji. I don’t know how often I saw “読ead” but absolutely would have never recognized it if I saw it in any other context…. which I did… regularly. It was so frustrating and upsetting.
The other thing was, popular sources pushed memorizing ALL the onyomi and kunyomi for each symbol. That just made the whole thing seem even more out of reach for me. That’s between 2 and 6 readings per character on average. HOW?! When I couldn’t even learn the symbols in the first place?!
If I had known people push stroke order as one of those things you HAVE to learn when you learn Kanji I think I would have tossed the whole idea out right then and cried. (Before I hear about it… I do know the basic rules of stroke order now…)
**Were there anything that helped the process? What were they?**
RTK (and actually I ended up using Kanji Damage) was the thing that really made the difference for me. Starting with simple kanji and then building up to more complex ones… making stories and mnemonics for their meanings, really went a long way in helping me learn kanji.
I didn’t stay on Kanji Damage for very long, once the concept sort of clicked for me I was able to move off of it fairly quickly.
I then started learning Kanji alongside vocabulary, which cut out the middleman of having to learn readings.
I could learn things like:
* Son = Musuko = 息子
* Chair = Isu = 椅子
* Hat = Boushi = 帽子
And also not really acknowledge that in all 3 of these 子 was making a different sound.
**If you could do it again, what would you change in your process?**
I think I would have pushed to get an RTK book as soon as my cousin showed it to me, as opposed to trying to bulldoze ahead in any other method. It would have made that process go a lot quicker.
**What is your general experience in learning Kanji? (Open question)**
After that first hump, kanji has really been smooth going. It takes me several repetitions to learn one, but anymore I just learn it as (Shape) = (Japanese word) = (meaning). It’s really smooth going and really easy.
Reading in Japanese was something I actively avoided and put off, and now it’s my highest skill. So even if you’re struggling now, it’s no indication of how it will end up being.
I’m about 800-900 kanji in, so not fluent by any means but certainly in the process!
1. It’s not hard at all, it just takes some serious time, and there’s no way around that.
2. None that I can think of, except the realization at the beginning that it was going to take a very, very long time to learn enough kanji to be able to read reasonably quickly without looking up many words.
3. Oh, absolutely – I’ve been using Wanikani (got the lifetime membership on sale) and I’m super happy with it!
4. If I were to restart, I’d be curious to see if anki would have worked better for me. I’m not going to start it while only being about halfway through Wanikani, but in the beginning I downloaded anki and couldn’t figure out how to work the program and gave up with it. I think if I had free reign over my practice schedule I honestly would have burned out by trying to learn too much too quickly, but it would be interesting to know if it would have worked better for me!
5. I think kanji are great. Even only knowing 800-900 kanji is enough where there are tons of words in the wild I see and can pretty easily guess the meanings and readings of and it’s really satisfying when you get it right. As for the learning process, in the very very beginning when I was just using Duolingo, I would see kanji and assume that by having it in the lessons I would eventually memorize it, but I found pretty quickly that I wasn’t retaining it at all. Then, when I first started Wanikani, I thought that learning the kanji by itself was a waste of time and not practical, but after a while I found that knowing what the kanji in general means and the common readings for it made me far, far better at guessing meanings and readings of new vocabulary when I’m reading things. Knowing kanji and vocab even make learning grammar easier (and more fun), since you don’t have to spend as much time translating example sentences and can focus on the new grammar points.
never tried learning kanji
>1. How difficult did you find the process?
It was hell at first. Why? No one explains how to tackle them (textbooks don’t help much). It gets easier at some point though.
>2. Were there any pains or mental barriers during the process?
Feeling completely lost and not knowing how to tackle things at first. There’s so much useless information floating around. Moreover, stuff just doesn’t make sense at first, and the deeper you dive, the more things you find out about, and the more confused you feel (until you start getting the hang of things). For example, textbooks neglect mentioning the existence of stuff like ateji (kanji used for their readings only) and jukujikun (basically special readings). And even when you do see them they’re glossed over, and they avoid namedropping them.
Thankfully, past a certain point, the more you learn, the easier it gets.
* Textbooks don’t tell you about the 4 (technically 6) ways in which kanji are classified. In particular, in the case of keisei moji, 音符(components that “relay (on) readings”) and 意符(components that “relay meaning”) are rarely acknowledged despite how useful they turn out to be
* Sometimes a word’s etymology and looking up a character’s naritachi (i.e. the way it came to be) can be eye-opening and help cement it in your brain.
>3. Were there anything that helped the process? What were they?
A ton of things. Learning the radicals (and their Japanese names) helped
* The names tell you a lot about the radicals (e.g. 氵 is sanzui (i.e. 三水 3 water). It obviously has to do with water. 門 is kado (one of the character’s readings); it’s called kadogamae when it acts as an enclosure, as in 聞, 問, etc.; ~kamae refers to kanji enclosures.).
* it gets a lot easier once you realize there are ~250 unique shapes (including stuff that isn’t a radical per se, like 鼠’s bottom part, 睫’s weird 彐+疋 weird-looking hybrid, etc.). Stroke orders are extremely easy to figure out in, say, 97% of cases once you get the basic rules down and learn the patterns (e.g. if you see anything with 必, like 秘, you can rest assured it will follow the same order). And learning radicals helps you stop seeing them as monolithic blobs and enables you to easily tell similar-looking kanji apart.
* I also keep a text file with similar-looking kanji so I can easily look up a similar, more common kanji to find more obscure ones. e.g. I have a line with characters that include 今: 捻る, 貪る, 頷く, 唸る. If I wanna look up one of those, I just type 今 and I can see them all (and copy paste any of them for quick lookups, etc.).
* Associating kanji and words to certain contexts also helps. Imagining scenarios and situations in which you’re highly apt to hear a word helps.
* Making up silly rhymes and mnemonics also helped: e.g. need to remember 挨拶(greeting)? think of TMY (i.e. **t**ehen(扌) **m**u(ム) **y**a(矢); **t**ehen(扌) **m**agekawa(巛) **y**uube(夕)).
* I also keep one with (near) synonyms and antonyms, and context/nuances: e.g. 削除 and 消去 for delete/erase (as in computers).
>4. If you could do it again, what would you change in your process?
Nothing I guess. Not much you can do when there’s very little guidance and you have to stumble your way until you either get the knack of things or give up. You can thank today’s culture of “don’t give an overview to avoid overwhelming newbies, let them dip their toes gradually even if it takes eons” for that.
>5. What is your general experience in learning Kanji?
Painful at first (everything is new to you, you feel overwhelmed as you have to continually make pauses to look up stuff), then a lot more bearable once you stop having to constantly interrupt what you’re doing, and even then, you can quickly type things, and even if you fall back on handwriting, you can write a lot faster and neater)