I’ve been studying Japanese for several months now. I’ve really enjoyed learning the language, and I’ve been studying by using Duolingo, translating songs, and keeping a kanji journal (I add three new words a day). Still, I feel like I’m not retaining everything I’m learning. If I flip to a page in my journal and look at a character, I can’t immediately say what that kanji means or how to pronounce it.
Is this normal, or is there a more effective way to learn?
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I make up stories to help.
Do you have a textbook that incorporates the new kanji into the material and allows you to practice. Then of course you have keep drilling them yourself by just keeping to write them down and practice.
Anki is only thing that worked for me to make anything stick.
I download the JLPT level decks for it and just grind whenever have free moment.
An impending JLPT test helps make then stick.
I previously tried the “remembering the kanji” method that uses stories based on radicals to bulk remember them, but wouldn’t stick.
I’m not convinced of Duolingo’s effectiveness when it comes to non-romance languages.
Anki is a very popular SRS app that lets you create or download flash card decks. This seems to be the standard way here on Reddit.
I’ve personally flip flopped between Memrise (which also has premade and user-generated decks) and the Renzo Japanese dictionary app, which has their own built in SRS system.
Aside from that, reading kanji in the context of a sentence is extremely useful. Creating your own sentences too.
I recommend buying an actual textbook and going through it exercise by exercise. Genki is the standard, Reddit-approved one. It’s not as sexy as any of these programs or apps, but I think you just have to kind of buckle down and do the stuff that feels like work. Because it is! Learning another language is a lot of work!
But also, you’ve only been learning for several months. The scale of the road to Japanese proficiency is not one of months, but years. You’ll get there.
I normally learn through vocabulary
I learn kanji with flashcards and have two types of those:
Kanji-flashcards where I just try to recognise what the kanji means and stroke order (but not pronunciation); and Vocab-flashcards where I put vocabulary with that kanjis and try to remember how the whole word is read. (make sure to have at least one word with each reading)
Keep in mind, in reality one will never just “say all ways to read a kanji”, but rather read the kanji in a word.
You dont, at least for a few months learner.
If you dont remember the kanji then just look it up again, again and again. Dont be sad for doing this, because it is the easier way to get start, you dont want to force yourself to memorize some random kanji at this point. You may have to force yourself to memorize some hard kanji it if you are taking the exam later on, but just not for now. 🙂
At this point, You are going to learn a lot of basic words like “eat”, “run”, “apple,”open”, “face”, if you are forcing yourself to memorize those basic word now, it would be very painful. Just take it easy!
I like using “Remembering the Kanji” from Heisig to actually remember the kanji and its meaning. You don’t learn how to say them doing this, but it is really easy to connect the two (meaning and writing). My mind always has had an easier time with Kanji if I’m writing little stupid stories or sentences that contain the parts of the kanji. A lot of the time I will just make up a little story in the Heisig fashion on the spot and just remember that. An example is the kanji for White: 白.
The example in Heisig is essentially that a **single drop of sunlight** is like white light that can be split into a bunch of other colours with a prism. The symbol is just the symbol for the sun with a little “drop”/check mark at the top. The story is a bit more in depth than that, but I remember it like “A single drop of sunlight is white” more or less and the prism idea sticks in my head because it just engages that visual part of my mind. After learning it this way and then writing it out or using anki with that story, it will stick in your mind really powerfully and you won’t need the story to visualize it anymore.. it’s just that you’ve engaged more of your brain in remembering the kanji and that make it easier for it to stick.. Later you can make little stories for combinations of kanji or other meanings for that kanji, like “The food was **unseasoned** like plain **white** rice.” Suddenly it’s easy to remember that 白 can mean white or unseasoned. You get the point.
Wanikani. It’s been the best tool in my experience!