Should I focus on learning Kanji to learn words or focus on using Kana first?

4 comments

1. Once you know a couple thousand Kanji, learning new words, especially complicate Chinese compound words, gets simple. Someone says hanki, and you have no idea what it means, but you see something halfway and then run through the various KI reading Kanji in your head, and you understand.

   Before then trying to learn two things at once works about as well as trying to learn two things at once often does.

2. do what you think is best no correct answer, you should also look how genki is structures, if you are doing it with that book kanji is only intro in chap 3

3. You’ll need to know kana as not everything in Japanese is written in kanji. It won’t take long. Just get it out of the way.

4. So what I did as part of my school curriculum is we have a vocabulary list of every chapter and we learn those words as just Kana. But every week we memorise 10-20 kanji and then when we learn kanji for words we have previously learnt, we use the kanji instead. I think it would take a lot of time and frustration to memorise the kanji for each word used in each chapter (although we do use Minna No Nihongo and not Genki but it’s probably the same).

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   Therefore, for you using Genki I would recommend trying to memorise the lesson’s vocabulary for each chapter as well as using some sort of kanji list or SRS software (Anki decks or Wanikani) that let you learn kanji gradually.