I am struggling to decide on a direction to stick with for learning kanji and it’s put a block on my learning because I hate the idea of spending an enormous amount of time in a direction that ultimately won’t work for me. RTK for example, I spent months doing, only reached chapter 17 or so. I liked the idea of learning the meanings to help you recall the kanji for the purpose of writing but I don’t like how much effort is required for being ultimately unable to actually read Japanese by the end of it. I have been trying out the free levels with Wanikani which I like well enough, but I don’t want to be forced into a subscription anytime I want to review/refresh my memory, and $200-300 for the lifetime membership is a steep asking price next to alternatives like KKLC/Anki.
I see it recommended often enough to simply “just learn words” which I have tried, plugging in words into Anki with kanji that I encounter “organically” as suggested by resources like Cure Dolly. I like this approach well enough, but I am worried I won’t be able to retain the readings of kanji/words when my Anki deck grows large since so many kanji that look similar or are complex. **Is mere repetition enough for long-term retention, or are you supposed to be learning the radicals that make up each kanji, referencing them in something like KKLC?**
The thing I don’t really like about a lot of these kanji learning methods is that it just feels like you’re cramming a bunch of kanji or words in a predetermined order that you won’t actually be using or seeing often enough in context. So I thought it would be better to learn kanji from the vocabulary in my textbook (Japanese for Everybody) and ones I encounter out in the wild, putting them in Anki and learning the radicals that make them up, which I’m hoping would help with retention in the long-term.
There seems to be so many different ways to learn kanji. Not every method works for everyone, but it makes it hard to determine ahead of time if it’s going to work for me without wasting time on it, stunting my progress due to that fear and indecision, so I am looking for thoughts and insight on this to help me decide on a direction to pursue, if this kind of approach worked for you, or if there is a better way you found.
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It wasn’t for me. “Just learning words” led to me constantly confusing kanji that looked similar, being able to identify them in isolation completely solved the issue.
I didn’t even do RTK with all the handwriting. I just went through an Anki deck with the kanji on the front and a Japanese word on the back, so I didn’t even have to think about learning readings or radicals or any of that complicated stuff. I finished the entire Jouyou list in like 7-8 months.
You’re right in that in the end these are all just different methods to achieve the same goal.
I will need to say that I learned Japanese in university, so I did have kanji classes that introduced readings, vocabulary and stroke order. Out of these however, I only ever really focused on how the kanji was used in vocabulary. That approach got me up to N2 and let me read all the novels and manga I wanted to read.
It’s only now that I’ve subscribed to wanikani and I’m going through the levels really fast. I’m gaining a new foundation to understanding Kanji and it’s been worth it so far. I’m planning on using it until I sit the N1 in 2023 and then cancel my subscription.
Ok so I only read 11 books so far, I’m not some kanji master but I am getting better every day with vocab.
What I do is, if I am reading a book and I find a word with a kanji I never saw before, I put that into notepad.
Every day I add words into anki. Some of these words have a “new” kanji and some of them don’t.
Today here are the words I wanna learn:
* 水際
* 感覚
* 演奏
* 最初から
* 陽気（な）
* 記号
* きつね色
Now I have seen all these kanji before, no problem. Except for 演奏. I didn’t really use the 奏 kanji before, though I saw 演. This makes this word perfect for me. It’s all about finding that N+1 right?
Usually with a new kanji, I try and add like 3 words which contain that kanji into Anki. As you see today I didn’t, I only added that one word.
Besides vocab, I can also add a “kanji recognize” card with an RTK story on the back. But this part probably isn’t necessary, but I find it helps me as well.
Anyway that’s my way. Before I could read books, there was a prior step. That was, get through Genki. It has kanji too, about 315. I just also put those into anki with their vocab. That’s kinda all I did so far.
I swapped to just learning words fairly early. But I also do reverse sides, and I write out the kanji when doing the reverse side on anki. This is definitely good enough and what I still use to learn any new kanji, like I learnt 擢 yesterday for example
The worst mistake you can make is to become paralyzed by the decision and not start somewhere. If you spend a few months on a certain path and decide its not for you, you’re not starting over. You will carry your knowledge on to the next path you choose.
Nothing you choose will be perfect. You will almost certainly change your method of study down the road. Just make a decision and start.
>Is mere repetition enough for long-term retention
Yes
Stop overthinking it and just stick with something (anything)
I mine words from textbooks, novels, and shows and put them into Anki cards. The first few times I encounter a new word through Anki I write the word out by hand in a notebook.
I’m not necessarily trying to remember how to write the kanji, it’s just the act of writing helps me remember the words and their kanji better.
I have terrible memory and this has been the best method for me by far.
> Is mere repetition enough for long-term retention, or are you supposed to be learning the radicals that make up each kanji, referencing them in something like KKLC?
It is definitely possible. I have almost 3000 unique kanji in anki, if you asked me the radical of almost any of them, or some other components in it, I’d probably struggle. I’m happy with the way I learned it and wouldn’t want to have done it any other way.
Your mind is really good at making connections, you can quickly recognize that a word you learn has a kanji you know from another word, and you end up, before you realise, knowing what a kanji alone roughly means and how its read and can start understanding unknown words with kanji you already know.
People often say they struggle to distinguish similar kanji with this method, but you don’t need to rebuild a house if you have one broken window – just guess by context (what word its in), keep seeing them in repetition, or put then side by side and it immediately obvious.
My way of learning Japanese or Kanji specifically goes way back and I had a lot of trial and error in the process. I’m following a path at the moment but to be honest I don’t know if it is like the best way. I feel comfortable with it though for the time being.
I started learning Japanese in classyears ago, We followed a textbook pretty similar to Minna no Nihongo or Genki. In the first year the teachers told us not to worry about Kanji so much and just learn the words. So by the end of the first year, I knew the ~80 N5 Kanji and a lot of words I could only read with furigana. In my second year we upped the Kanji game a lot. We learned RTKs Kanji building blocks to give us the ability to talk about Kanji in class, make up mnemonics together, etc. But aside from that we were pretty much left alone in terms of actually learning Kanji. As a result I felt quite bad in my third year. I felt like grammar and vocabulary were okay, but reading ability was not were I wanted it to be.
I went to reddit and heard about sentence mining. So I started reading and just put every word I didn’t know into Anki. As a result I was learning maybe 20 new words with 50 new Kanji a day. Obviously that didn’t do it because at some point it was just like “Okay, when this wiggly thing is paired with that blocky thing it becomes word xyz” -> No way to recognize this word in a wild text outside of Anki. So I got the feeling that just putting random Kanji without a structure didn’t do it and tryed RTK next. I finised the book and was able to write maybe 80% of the Kanji but I also realised that this helped me for production but almost not at all for recognition.
I then attended a language school in Japan and they just slammed a JLPT Kanji book into our faces and went like “This is Kanji x, it has kunyomi y and z and onyomi k. Here are example words for every reading.” This was actually a very simple but structured approach to combining learning Kanji and learning words. I realised that while the Kanji Master N? books provide a lot of common readings for Kanji, some of the examples are super rare or almost not used at all but they include the example because it is a valid reading after all.
And now comes my current approach: At some point I will need to learn the Core10k anyway. I don’t want to see random Kanji all the time while following the Core10k deck by order of “importance”. So I just take the Kanji Master Books and go through it Kanji by Kanji, look up all the words in the Core10k deck containing the current Kanji and put the cards in the order of the book (mostly going with an N+1 approach). That way I am seeing all important words for a Kanji at once. I can visualize the Kanji’s concept (that Heisig talked about) by seeing all the common vocabulary for a Kanji right after another. If a Kanji has to many words in the Core10k deck I just choose about 10 of them to progress a little faster though.
I hope that by the time I finished the Kanij Master N1 book I will have simultanously learned about 8k to 9k of the most common Japanese words. And doing so in a structured way to help me not be overwhelmed with random Kanji all over the place. I get the feeling that this is just the sweet spot between structured Kanji learning and “Just learn vocabs, don’t learn kanji” that may work for me.
To be honest: It may even be a better approach to not do it in JLPT order, but in RTK order to also get the benefit of seeing all visually similar Kanji together and learning to distinguish them early on.
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EDIT:
TLDR: Learn Core10k deck in RTK or JLPT Kanji order.
I did and [went a long way](https://i.postimg.cc/nVwjKXVQ/111.png). Started Core10k at the very beginning and never learned kanji separately. Then proceeded with my own deck (barebones vocab cards).
Although I have to admit, I recommended this to several people and gave them the same core10k version, and it didn’t work for some of them. So you will have to try yourself.