Should I be studying individual kanji?

4 comments

1. Learning kanji in isolation isn’t really necessary, but it *can* help with retention later on as long as you’re consistent. Most people here will say to just focus on vocab though and I’m inclined to agree unless you have specific goals/reasons for studying the kanji in isolation

2. I don’t see why not. Studying kanji individually made it much easier for me to pick up new words from text. The “just learn words” mantra actively hampered me when I was a beginner.

3. The time you spent learning kanji will not have been wasted if you stop studying it specifically. It will only be wasted if you stop reading. It’s also worth knowing that even if you finish the deck, you’ll likely still have to look up kanji pretty frequently anyways.

   At any rate, depending on your priorities, I’d say it’s generally about what you can tolerate. If you enjoy kanji study but find not knowing tons of kanji while doing other stuff unbearable, I’d say just keep going.

4. Yes. And on top of that, don’t learn like 10 different words with the same kanji. Learn like 1-5 common words with that kanji and move on (just cover the common on and kun readings and the words associated with those readings).

   If the deck does that it’s bad if it’s supposed to be a deck for learning kanji. Kanji carry the vast majority of the meaning in Japanese sentences, and knowing their meanings well lets you guess meanings of tens of thousands of words you havent seen before in context with very good accuracy.

   Japanese and Chinese are setup in a way that if your goal is reading comprehension, “just learn by word frequency” is stupid, as another person here already commented. The whole complaining about kanji thing is mostly perpetuated by the people who “just try to learn words”.

   Source: guy who studied Japanese vocab by going through the joyo kanji list by frequency instead of one of those core decks and could read way more than people who had similar anki vocab deck sizes