I’m a beginner. I was feeling conflicted (and still kinda am) on how to start learning kanji.
What I’m currently doing is: learning kanji as I learn vocabulary. I downloaded an app to make japanese friends, they’ve been super nice to me and a lot of them offered to help me with japanese, so besides using some other apps (mostly benkyō and memrise) to learn kanji and vocabulary, I also started talking to some native speakers in japanese and as we have conversations I write down the new vocabulary in my notebook.
For example yesterday I was talking to a guy and I wanted to say that I was happy, so I looked it up and learned about 嬉しい and 幸せ, I wrote down in my notebook their meaning, stroke order, radicals/parts and an exemple of how they can be used in a sentence.
It does work as I memorize them but I feel like it’s a slow method cause I see some people say they can learn tons of kanji in a day?!! Which I don’t with this method.
So am I wasting my time by doing this?
5 comments
I’ve been really liking WaniKani. It makes the process of learning intuitive and sort of mindless. I don’t have to figure out what to study, it’s all laid out for me. They focus on radicals and the most common definitions of the kanji.
One thing to consider. Are you planning on writing japanese a lot? I am not, so I am not bothering learning stroke order or even practicing writing at all. 98% of my native language written communication is on a computer. I barely every write anything by hand. I imagine in a second language it would be even moreso the case. Cutting out trying to memorize stroke order and practicing writing might be something you want to consider if you aren’t planning on writing a lot.
What app are you using to communicate with others? I used Hellotalk for a while. But I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with it.
If you do RTK use [https://kanji.koohii.com/](https://kanji.koohii.com/) It is the best way to learn the kanji by associating a keyword to the symbol. You learn how they are made up, so you recognize differences. Wanikani is an alternative that is popular, but I have never used it – same concept different teaching method.
Yes you can learn even 50 Kanji a day, but you will not learn all the vocab – even though most of them are obvious compounds. RTK breaks it into a visual recognition stage and then a pronunciation phase (RTK2) which I recommend skipping for learning vocab on a Core 2k deck before going off on your own.
Being able to write Kanji is not a necessary thing – but writing them down does help with retention. Production of Kanji is very different from visual recognition – I can maybe only write 1500 Kanji but I can read over 2600 Kanji at this point. Kind of a weird feeling – I know it when I see it, but I cannot write it or pronounce it otherwise.
> It does work as I memorize them but I feel like it’s a slow method cause I see some people say they can learn tons of kanji in a day?!! Which I don’t with this method.
“Learning kanji” is an ambiguous and not well defined thing so it’s hard/impossible to say if those people use the word the same way as you do. What I can tell you with 100% certainty is that a non-insignificant amount of learners (quoting from memory I’d say around 40% but I’m too lazy to go check it up again) studies kanji by picking up vocab instead of studying individual kanji (this is what I did too) and it’s totally fine. Some people feel the need to individually learn new kanji using mnemonics or English keywords or various other kanji-focused approaches (RTK, KKLC, Wanikani, etc) but it’s not a necessity. If you feel like you don’t need it, then don’t worry about it, you’re not alone.
On the other hand, once you get more advanced (At like upper intermediate+ level maybe) you might look into more kanji-focused studies like Japanese natives do in school too (for example I studied [this kanji deck](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1833474130) 3 years into my studies just to reinforce some gaps in my knowledge), but also again… it’s not **necessary**.
If you think what you’re doing right now is fine for yourself and you’re slowly progressing through your vocab/grammar and starting to read (simple) native media, then you’ll be fine. You don’t need to overthink it.
At the early stages of learning Japanese it’s usually far more important to learn vocab and grammar to get some basics down. This allows simple conversations and some understanding. Textbooks will be largely in kana and sometimes even romaji so reading kanji isn’t really necessary. I’ve been studying for 30 years and even now if I learn a new word I jot it down in hiragana or romaji for speed and look it up later.
It’s up to you of course but I feel time is better spent on learning some functional basics before hitting the kanji seriously. I didn’t bother for nearly 20 years!
Everyone has their own way of remembering things…what works for one person does not necesarily work for the next. I happened to really like kanji so I focused a lot of time (about a year and a couple of months) doing about 4 hours of kanji a day…the kanji by themselves….their 訓 (kun) and 音 (on) readings, meanings and writing them by hand countless times….people cant just “learn” a bunch of kanji a day….its not how memory works..people see it, then they forget it….then see it again, and forget less…and so on…until it just sticks
learning kanji from vocab I personally think while it may be a slower process, if you feel like it works for you by all means keep going at it. I’ve met a couple people that just read and thats how they learn kanji among other things…and that seems to work for them..
But if you think what youre doing is a waste of time, maybe try different approaches to learning kanji that were already mentioned in this thread…maybe wanikani, maybe just punch it into your brain like I did with constant repetition and writing and so on…one’s own personal language learning methods are always changing to adapt to what best works for us, you just have to find what works for you best 🙂