A few days ago someone made a post about tips for distinguishing kanji. I want to expand on the reply I made on that thread.
Can you tell the difference between the kanji above? If you’re like me, these kanji all look the same and it seems impossible to ever memorize them. Especially since there are thousands of other kanji with the same problem. I felt hopeless.
Until I bought the book Remember the Kanji by James Heisig. After reading that one book I can tell the difference between those kanji. Not only that, I can tell the difference between any jyoyo kanji. They all look like different people to me know.
So if you’re like me and you look at that poster with the 2200 jyoyo kanji on it and you know deep down in your jellies that you are going to learn ever one of them, try this book. It changed my life.
Call to action: what do you guys think? RTK – ye or ne?
P.S. A lot of people hate RTK because you don’t actually learn Japanese with it. It only teaches you how to recognize kanji based on it’s radicals. Also, RTK is EXTREMELY difficult and frankly the most boring study book I’ve ever used. However, it was also the most effective study book I’ve ever used. Finishing RTK could easily take up to a year and to this day, 3 years later, I still review the book daily (5 kanji a day).
P.S.S. 水 – water 永 – eternity 泳 – swimming 冰 – I don’t know this one actually but I can guess that it means ice because of it’s radicals 氷 – ice
7 comments
Yes, RtK is great. Ultimately, you need to learn four things about each kanji (appearance, meaning, reading[s], associated vocabulary), so focussing on learning only two to make the rest easier to learn later is a really smart move.
It’s also very easy if you borrow mnemonics off of [Kanji Koohii](https://kanji.koohii.com/). Thanks to that, I was able to blast through 20 kanji a day and finish the whole thing in just a few months.
I personally just did a quick flashcard deck of all the radicals. RTK was imo too time consuming and I really couldn’t see myself sitting down to study characters for months. For me, hands on reading was the best method for getting used to kanji.
Fyi, 冰 is the Chinese variant of 氷; you’ll pretty much never see it used in Japanese.
RTK is utter trash. It’s like learning without learning anything.
But each their own
In the same way you remember English homographs and homophones. You didn’t memorise them, you know them by heart because you kept using them in your life.
Stop trying to remember everything and make use of them more often instead. Write sentences, essays, read and watch Japanese subs with English subs.
水、永遠の永、水泳のえい、冰=氷(冰 I had to google but apparently it’s just ice too)。Big NO to RTK, it’s the biggest waste of time ever. You don’t need to ever study kanji. You remember them while reading novels for free and without putting any effort into it. Literally just hit the sentence into google translate whenever you can’t read a word, and boom, there is your reading. Might not remember it the next time sure, but after you’ve had to check it 2-5 times you won’t forget it again. And believe me, you get A LOT of repetition on the same kanji while reading novels, there is literally no point learning them 1 by 1 with some weird study method.Oh yeah and checking only takes 2-5 seconds each time, it doesn’t even feel like a bother while reading.
(Edited out a typo)
Learn the radicals. Do a lot of kanji reviews, and I mean I lot. Look up every kanji in Wiktionary. Learn why each kanji is constructed the way it is from Wiktionary or a similar source. Read some native material to get better at remembering kanji on the spot in context. No book needed.