Learning spoken Japanese feels very much doable. But for kanji, even if I had started as a kid in Japan and was taught them as I grew up, rather than trying to learn them in a couple years like now, even with hours and hours of practice, I have no idea how I could ever remember 2,000+ characters. I’ve learn hiragana and katakana, and that was already pretty tough. And kanji seems… Impossible. Truly impossible. There’s just such a crazy number of them. I have no idea how everybody does it. I’ve had difficulty memorizing just hiragana and katakana. I guess I’m just an idiot with stunted memorization skill, because I don’t see how I could ever remember that many characters. I know there’s no convenient trick to it or anything like that, but calling it incredibly daunting is an understatement. I am truly not trying to whine in any way here, I truly do not believe my brain has the ability/capacity to retain 2,000+. As I practice them now, I forget old ones as soon as I learn new ones.
Anyone have any advice? Details about their experiences learning kanji? A dramatic motivational success story in learning them all works too, lol.
18 comments
Well Japan has a 99% literacy rate so more than likely you’d have figured it out.
it’s not really the 2000 number that makes it hard, you can remember 2000 things. If you did kana already, that’s about 92 already! So 2000 is more than that sure, but that would just be like learning kana about 20 times again, it’s still not an insane problem.
It’s more like, how they are actually used in vocabulary, and the *amount* of vocabulary, that makes it a harder problem. It’s way harder than the 2000 different characters. There is just so much more than 2000 vocabulary.
Plus they have different readings, they appear in all kinds of words which it seems they sometimes shouldn’t, words can use different kanji to have different nuance but still be the same word, some kanji look similar, and it goes on and on, there are many complications with kanji.
Consider that to be ok-ish at reading without a dictionary you might need 15,000 vocab words, probably over half of those will use kanji, and the kanji will be all over the place. Some of those words will have a kanji reading which is probably only in that word or only in a few rare words. Others will use some kanji that no other word even uses.
But also consider that you can enjoy reading with way, way, way less words than that, if you use a dictionary.
Best advice I can think of is just learn a bit at a time and don’t give up, if these guys can do it so can you, but only if you don’t give up.
Unless you are an exceptional case, then your capacity to learn is no different to anyone else’s. It doesn’t make sense to think that you can’t do something despite someone else having done it already. At that point, it’s likely your lack of self confidence or ability to learn independently holding you back, not your being an “idiot with stunted memorisation skill”.
Seeing and using them all day everyday helps. I’ll be honest and say that I often slacked on kanji through my years of self-study and university. We had numerous essay and translation projects, and I wouldn’t say the kanji troubled me as such, but the higher level, less common kanji definitely require more focussed study to memorize.
But nowadays I work in Japan, in Japanese, and through writing emails and communicating with clients everyday you just pick up and remember kanji. You obviously see them outside of work too. I don’t really study anymore, but my Japanese has improved massively since I graduated and came to Japan.
Just do what you can for now. Try something like Wanikani or Anki if you want to try and nail the kanji into your brain through repetition. But if you’re struggling to immerse yourself enough to memorize endless lists of characters, just work on other areas for now. Personally, I always found that my ability to retain new vocab/kanji improved as my overall Japanese level did.
It’s a lot, sure. That’s why SRS options like Anki and Wani Kani are so popular for kanji learning. Structure and repetition.
This is how I felt. In fact I didn’t try learning to read at all for my first 2 years of study. I was perfectly happy being romaji only and learning to just listen and speak.
Eventually I got confident enough to start to learn to read… but Kanji felt impossible. It just wouldn’t stick. I tried all sorts of things including a plugin that changed the first letter of every english word to its respective Kanji. No dice.
Eventually I moved to Kanji Damage…. it was pretty much the only free RTK analog I could find at the time… wanikani is fine too.
I found the little stories and mnemonics were helping things stick.
After a while something clicked, and I started being able to pick up kanji without needing mnemonics anymore.
Ironically, reading ended up my best skill. I had listening problems I just couldn’t overcome until Japanese subtitles became easy access. Now I pick up new kanji like candy.
It seems hard, but once your brain clicks with it it’s no problem at all. 🙂 don’t let it scare you, but don’t feel rushed into it either. Build your confidence and just play around in apps like Wanikani first.
What is your study method like? Really sounds like you’re trying to learn them in a vacuum without reading practice or anything else to support your kanji acquisition.
Kanji is not really a short term goal, it will take years of practice to get them down, no matter your method. After all, what matters is not knowing the kanji, but the vocab that uses them, I can recite every reading 生 has, tell you very specific nuances, even write it from memory, doesn’t mean I can read every word that uses that kanji, or that I can get the meaning of every word that uses it. Kanji is not a one and done thing, it’s constant expansion, every day you get a bit more knowledge that allows your guesses to be a bit more accurate, which is only perceivable after weeks or months of daily practice.
>I have no idea how I could ever remember 2,000+ characters
Literally a billion people have learned Chinese characters to reading fluency. You will be fine.
>I have no idea how everybody does it.
Slowly but steadily.
>I truly do not believe my brain has the ability/capacity to retain 2,000+
You know about 10,000-20,000 English words for reference.
>As I practice them now, I forget old ones as soon as I learn new ones.
Are you using a spaced repetition system?
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Don’t study kanji just as vocabulary to memorize. Study as part of progressing through developing your fully formed language skills. Study in context. Otherwise you simply won’t retain them.
1. Learn what proper stroke order is. It’s a must. It’s necessary to understand how kanji are put together and how to look them up on your own, and how to write them accurately.
2. Learn about radicals and how they help to indicate sound and meaning. You may not retain anything from those underlying nuances but visually recognizing the library of component parts of kanji will make a world of difference in studying them. Cause it’s not 2000+ kanji, it’s a smaller set of component pieces stuck together. Once you recognize the parts it’s easier to build something whole from them.
3. Most importantly – don’t just try to bang out learning a bunch of kanji as a goal to try to reach 2000. Study kanji that are relevant to your learning level. For instance, beginning students should learn kanji for numbers, days, household things, left right and so on, basic stuff.
In my case, my own motivational success story is that I’m a huge music lover so when I started studying Japanese, I learned and practiced all three writing systems through song lyrics. That gave me a great foundation because I was passionate about what I was studying.
I could read roomaji lyrics online and then rewrite into hiragana and katakana, then sing from my Japanese song booklets and pick up kanji along the way. For certain types of music lyrics are all very repetitive (“I wanna be by your side, hold me in your arms again, I miss your smile” etc type stuff lol). At the same time I was studying grammar. Got me far and I even won a karaoke competition as a teenager for it.
A last note: HANDWRITE TO PRACTICE. There are certainly people who can learn kanji without doing so but I highly recommend you write any new kanji at least 25 times in the right stroke order. Just do it like a meditative technique. It makes a huge difference in building a physical and visual memory.
You absolutely can go far with Japanese if you can put a lot of time and dedication into it. I’m rooting for you.
“There is no convenient trick to it”
Yes there is and many of us use it! It’s called Anki if you aren’t using it already. Some main kanji decks come with little stories for you to remember the characters by. So many look alike, but once you stick a story to it you’ll notice the differences.
Good luck!
I am someone who knows roughly 3000 kanji (Anki kanjigrid addon lists about 2,500 for Japanese plus 450 new Chinese characters because I am studying Mandarin on the side, plus a few kanji I learned without using anki) and I will say the vast majority of people way overthink kanji.
If you were a German student and you saw a German word you didn’t know, you would look it up, and then maybe make a flashcard to remember it. If you saw a Japanese word in kana that you didn’t know, you would look it up and then maybe make a flashcard to remember it. If you see a word in kanji that you do not know, look up the word and then maybe make a flashcard to remember it.
This solves the vast majority of the issues that you and other people complain about here when they talk about kanji:
* *I have no idea how I could ever remember 2,000+ characters.* Well, there are over 10,000 words you will need to learn to reach basic adult fluency either way, learning kanji along with the words kills two birds with one stone and makes everything more efficient and manageable.
* *I’ve had difficulty memorizing just hiragana and katakana. I guess I’m just an idiot with stunted memorization skill, because I don’t see how I could ever remember that many characters.* Our brain remembers new information much easier [when we can connect it with other information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_education)) we already know. By learning Japanese top-down (i.e. by reading first and looking new things up as you find them), you build much stronger connections between all of the different parts of Japanese you are studying, and remembering things gets much easier overall. Alternatively, we can say that when people study primarily by siloing everything off and studying it separately (like doing 15 minutes of vocab, and then doing grammar study, and then doing listening, and then doing kanji etc), they are **making things** **harder on themselves.** A little bit of targeted study on the side helps every now and then, but as the core of a study plan, it just doesn’t work. Some people jump into Japanese media immediately, while some people prefer to use graded stuff. Either way, as soon as you can start reading and listening, you can get the benefits of this. An episode of anime with JP subs has, on average, about 2,300 words in it. That might sound daunting, but remember that the first 1000 words you learn (out of 10,000 for basic fluency) will be about 2/3rds of all the words in everything you consume, and the next 4,000 will make up 80%, etc, so you go from being in over your head to drilling hundreds/thousands of words in 22 minutes just sitting on your butt pretty quickly. It can start hard, but it gets ***EXPONENTIALLY*** easier to remember things by reading and doing lookups the more you do it.
* *I know there’s no convenient trick to it or anything like that…As I practice them now, I forget old ones as soon as I learn new ones.* This is a great insight! People attempt to do all sorts of weird stuff to learn kanji and just end up adding extra steps to the process, only to forget a lot of them anyway. Are you going to forget some kanji here and there doing things my way? Yes. Are you going to forget those kanji if you connect each kanji in your head with a 5-chapter story filled with special, expert-chosen keywords for each component in the kanji? Also yes.
***(Below are some other things I am predicting from other people in the thread)***
* *But if you learn all the radicals then–* You will know more radicals faster by reading and doing lookups than you will by forcing yourself to memorize each radical separately on top of the kanji. Kanji have radicals in them.
* *But then I have to learn to write each kanji.* You can skip learning to write about half of the kanji if you learn to read first. Most kanji are just one common component added to another common component. If you can write 寺, you can write 侍, 待, 持, 時, 痔 and 峙. You can probably write 守、村 and 寸 too. With the other half of the kanji, they will also be relatively easier, because you will usually know which parts of each kanji you can’t write, which will make things much faster as well. It will not take 0 effort to learn to write, but it will be so much easier it will feel that way.
* *But there are so many different ways to read each one and there’s on’yomi and kun’yomi and–* yeah, so read first and learn kanji with the vocab you look up.
TL;DR just read and look them up/put them in an SRS app like anki as you go. Don’t overthink it, don’t learn stuff separately when you can learn stuff together, it gets way easier as you learn more.
Read lots.
Once you read lots of kanji, you find patterns between them easily.
That was how I graduated school as a native Chinese speaker.
They recommend ~2500 kanji…but by the time you get there you wont even notice you have already learned even more than that you will honestly lose count…..2500 are only the common ones….but in just regular reading you find so many more not in the jlpt…
If you look at it as a whole…it is daunting….and looks impossible…..but trust me just reading on a regular basis is practice of its own…dont worry so much about kanji and look at it by level…focus on learning 80 kanji for n5…worry about the rest later….i know even 80 sounds like a lot, but there are more kana (standard kana there are 46 in both systems so that would be 92 total) if you learned that, 80 kanji should be a breeze 😆
The book Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig changed the way my brain processes kanji after I worked at it for a while. What you say is natural, the brain is not really wired to memorize vast amounts of arcane visual images that have no obvious connection to their meaning. The book teaches you the kanji, but around halfway through, I realized it was teaching me how to LEARN the kanji. Nowadays, if I’m out and about and encounter a kanji I’ve never seen I’m able to remember how to write it when I get home hours later to check it. I was amazed when I realized I could do this.
You need to know 20,000 words. Idk why 2k kanji sounds scary. I’d just learn them as you go. But if you really want a base level, I’d recommend doing “remembering the kanji”, and finding an anki deck to go with it. I did that through like 700 kanji until I got bored and decided to learn vocab instead.
Some people benefit by learning radicals and treating them as component “letters.” It won’t help you to actually sightread new ones or anything, but having them broken into recognizable pieces can make it easier to remember them as a combination of simpler patterns rather than one individual complex pattern each time.
Start with radicals + genki look+learn.
Its easier to memorise a story about single kanji, based on radicals or on a look-a-like image.