I’ve encountered a notably odd problem when dealing with kanji with a higher stroke number. I have trouble reading them, even if I know them. I theorize that it’s because I’m so used to reading the Western alphabet by shape, an approach that falls apart when looking at higher level kanji (more strokes means smaller strokes and a squarer shape). Has anyone else struggled with this? If so, how did you manage to deal with it?
2 comments
Write them, hundreds or thousands of times each.
You’ll recognize them instantly, even in small fonts or at a distance.
Kind of a work around, but train yourself to see radicals within a kanji like you’d see letters within a word. Also, you’re brain doesn’t read individual letters when reading words in latin alphabet either, so it really just comes down to whether you’re used to the words or not.