I know the title already lends itself to the answer of “It depends on your goals, and plans with the language” But long story short, I went heavily into Japanese probably about 5 years ago and then hit a wall with Kanji, like I know most people do. I’ve picked it back up recently and have gotten to the point where I’ve decided that this is going to be a life long study and not something I just rush though. My New Year’s goal was to learn and be familiar with 250 Kanji by the Years end. Not to know how to pronounce them, or write them, but simply how to recognize and associate meaning to them. I have a lot of hobbies outside of this and can’t really lend more than an hour/30min every day/every other day to learning them. I’m generally interested in what everyone’s opinion is on this. Is only 250 counting myself short? Is this and admirable goal? Is there already a suggested amount to learn in a year as a newcomer?
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If only for a general meaning of the kanji and about an hour each day, you can easily rush through 50 kanji a day using Remembering the Kanji. You can then use the remaining 300 days of the year to use Anki to cement them into memory spending less and less time every day. But it will become boring really fast and the knowledge you gained will be pretty much useless if you just stop there.
I think with your level of motivation getting N5 and N4 kanji would be an ok goal.
I suggest look at kanji and word lists for those levels and you’ll be fine.
Learn like a kanji and couple of words with those kanji per day, but also go through the whole list at least 1-2 times per month. Having an overview of what you intend to learn ahead of time will make stuff stick much easier and you’d probably feel like speeding through much quicker if you stick with it.
This is not a study method I’d suggest usually, but it might be ok for your goal.
This was written with the assumption that your level of kanji is low since you never mentioned how many kanji you already know.
You already said you are studying either 30 min or 1 hour a day. So let’s say you are studying 45 min. But after that you said that you are only studying every other day, so you are actually studying for 22 min a day.
At that rate of studying, you can probably get to the point where you forget as much as you’ve learned very quickly.
If you want to do something as hard as learn kanji, I would see if you can try to study more than 22 min a day. You might have to cut something out.
I have learned around 400 kanji in 6 months. I study japanese around 3 hours per day.
An hour a day is not a lot. But it is what I use myself per day per kanji at the moment.
So my back story is that I just did N4 now in December. Before moving on, I don’t want to ‘fumble’ so much with the Kanji, so I decided to pick up RTK with kohiistory as my tool. I tried to just learn to read the kanji once, but that didn’t really do it for me. Now I am learning to write them and I feel that I really KNOW the kanji. I am currently half-way through learning 25 new kanji per day. I have roughly 250 reviews per day using Anki.
Remember that RTK does not teach you one single word. Even when you know the character for child and cat, you will come across the kanji combining the two as child-cat and you can guess it is a kitten, but you will neither know how to read it nor will you recognise someone saying koneko as in kitten.
The app “kanji” for iOS takes your through some kanji and vocabulary using the kanji you just learned, but it won’t help you with mnemonics etc.
I’ve learned 2300 kanji in less than six months along with approximately the same amount of vocabulary (~2500 words containing ~1000 unique kanji). That was the start before I jumped into reading.
If time spent daily is an issue, you could try using [WaniKani](https://www.wanikani.com/). Going through all of it, you could learn the meanings and common pronunciations of ~2000 kanji and ~6000 words, in a little over a year. And it wouldn’t take more than 30min-1hour per day at worst, the only thing you need is consistency.
Of course you definitely should spend time studying grammar and consuming native content, but looking only at kanji, you can definitely learn much more than 250 in a year without overworking yourself.
Well, for example, third year elementary school students learn 200 kanji in their school year. If you want to learn about 250 kanji a year it will take you about 9 years just to finish jouyou kanji.
don’t, this is silly, number of kanji is irrelevant
learn words, you can read words
if you learn 1000 words and they all use kanji you already know, this is going to be far more helpful than learning 1000 new kanji but no new vocabulary
I’m just going to outright say it. **With your current speed, focusing on learning Kanji is a complete waste of time.** To put things into perspective, even if you memorized every 2100 joyo Kanji in the next year, it would not mean you can read, hear, or speak Japanese at all. That’s not to say your effort would be pointless, but if your goal is to actually use Japanese, then you would still be on the starting line in terms of usability. And that’s because knowing Kanji doesn’t mean you can read Japanese. When you start learning words, you’ll come to realize that a lot of the time, pronunciation of a word doesn’t rely on the Kanji at all. **Kanji study should only be done to help your main studies. It should not be your main way of learning.**
Please, please do not fall for the common trap of Kanji study. So many people give up Japanese because of it. They memorize hundreds of Kanji and get bored because they still can’t understand basic sentences. Focus on vocabulary and grammar study instead. The amount of kanji you know will increase along with your vocabulary.