I know. It’s such an ass thing to say as everyone I know is struggling with kanji or even hates kanji. Even native youtubers I watch hate kanji. But that’s the problem with me and I think I need help.
I never struggled with kanji, I in fact love them and enjoy learning them. I’m currently learning N3 Kanji already and it’s been a smooth sail. It’s even easier to read for me than kana. I’ll finish the core 2000 in no time but the thing is, my vocabulary is stuck on N5. I tried the anki decks, but instead of learning the word my mind seems to be stuck on the colors and pictures that comes with the flashcards. Honestly, I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now as to why I struggle differently from every japanese learning journey I see on the internet. Anybody else like this? Please suggest different ways to learn vocabulary.
In case somebody will ask, [this] is the only resource I use to learn Kanji. I downloaded it from the app store and I’m not sure if its available on other platforms.
4 comments
I haven’t used anki in a long time but I like to learn them through context. I sometimes ask myself “what does this mean in japanese” and look it up. That’s how u normally raise my vocabulary
Read the title and thought this was going to be a post about how Hiragana and Katakana are actually way worse
> I tried the anki decks, but instead of learning the word my mind seems to be stuck on the colors and pictures that comes with the flashcards. Honestly, I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now as to why I struggle differently from every japanese learning journey I see on the internet. Anybody else like this?
That’s normal, I think. At least it is for me. But it doesn’t invalidate Anki as a tool, it just means you need to change your approach to it. If you think you don’t really know the word, stop hitting good/easy, and if you think that issue is going to persist indefinitely, the card is a leech and you should suspend it. If you’re too fixated on the pictures, try a different deck that doesn’t use pictures. I’ve had to make massive changes to my Anki routine a couple times when it seemed like it wasn’t working for me, and that’s probably going to be true for most. Despite my difficulties with Anki I would be so much worse without it
I think you are mixing up simplest and easiest.
Kanji is simple to learn. It’s not easy. Kanji themselves are simple, and there is a system to learning a couple thousand at a go. But it is not easy to use the system.
Speaking Japanese is easy, and many people get functional in a remarkably short amount of time (people who already have an L1 and L2, for example, can be taught to be functional really quickly as they do not fight with the language, and pay attention to vowel sounds). But speaking it well is not simple.
What is your definition of “learning kanji”? recognizing it by some made up keyword and/or Story, or knowing in which words it gets used and what kind of readings it got?
The first one has hardly any practical use other than helping some recognition (its great for learning to recallf or writing tho) in the early stage, it also takes much less effort to just learn recognition, whilst learning usage and reading takes years upon years.
Doing the recognition approach is easy, but it wont “learn” you kanji, it learns you to recognize them, but you still need to know readings and vocabulary, even if you can recognize all 2k Jōyō kanji by heart, you wouldnt be able to read a single page of a novel, as you cant read and comprehend the kanjis words.