For you, personally, how long did it take to learn kanji?

9 comments

1. Depending on the character and its usage, anywhere from a few minutes to several months or years

   I very much doubt you have ever “fully understood/memorized” anything except the most simple words with a direct equivalent in English in 15 minutes (and words like that are relatively rare unless you’re already fairly advanced). It takes a lot more exposure (with context) than that to grasp all possible nuances

2. It entirely depends on the Kanji. Some I see once and never forget them. And some I’ve quizzed myself on hundreds of times and still go blank when they comes up. In general though I would say it takes a week to a month for me to remember a kanji as long as I’m actively keeping up with studying.

3. Five years of half-assing plus a year of actually trying.

   For the former, I internalized what I kept seeing without necessarily reviewing or trying to find and learn purposefully what I didn’t already know. I learned about 500 kanji doing this.

   Then when the pandemic hit, I actually got around to using Anki and it took about a year to go through the rest of the jōyō kanji in the context of vocabulary at a rate of 5 to 8 new kanji and 5 to 20 new words per day, depending on how well I remember encountering a given kanji before. Making the flashcards took longer than the reviews themselves at 30 minutes to 2 hours. Reviews were more like 15 minutes.

4. I think I know like 800-900 kanji and I have been studying for over 1800 hours

   I feel overall my progress is pretty slow compared to other people

   but that’s what I got

   EDIT:

   According to Kanji grid, I know more than I thought…? According to that plug-in I know these kanji:

   Grade 1: all

   Grade 2: all

   Grade 3: 97%

   Grade 4: 89%

   Grade 5: 88%

   Grade 6: 79%

   JuniorHS+: 44.14% 🙁

   JuniorHS+ is where I’m missing the most, like 620 kanji from that bracket

5. It depends on the kanji entirely. For me, if a kanji is tough in my Anki reviews, its mostly because I actually have not seen or heard the word being used in context, outside of that deck. Usually, at some point I do hear it while watching anime and then it sort of solidifies in my memory.

6. I tried to learn the on and kun readings of every kanji a few months ago and learning the kanjis through different words a few months later, gave me a better understanding

7. Played a couple of games in Japanese off and on for about 2 years, watched attack on titan seasons 1+2 (season 3 wasn’t out at the time) over a span of about a month and used RTK to go through 2200 kanji in just a month

   I didn’t start to memorize most of them until after reading 3 novels in Japanese
   They were insanely hard but after the 3rd one was done, I got down to not knowing 2-3 words per page but have a terrible habit of guessing through context

   All in all
   3 ish years

8. Too many comments to thank individually but thank you all very much for your responses!

9. Learned 1200 in 2 years while living in Japan. Forgot 1149.