Just like everyone when I first encountered Kanji it felt hopelessly difficult, after trying so many methods finally caught a break. The things I tried
1. Heisig: Was at 60 or so kanji in 2 months, gave up.
2. Wanikani: Reached level 2.5ish gave up. Felt like playing a game that I hate (Apex Legends anyone?).
3. Rote memorizing in Japanese school curriculum order. Gave up before halfway thorugh Grade 1 (Biggest L so far)
4. Anki: Since WK gave me the most tangible progress in terms of being able to read. Asked on forum for a script to only do vocab. Got ridiculed for it being against the holy scripture and left. Then I discovered Anki. I was so excited to go all in downloaded the 10k deck. It turned out be a chore just like WK within a couple days.
Then finally the lightbulb moment came. I export the deck from Anki to a text file which I post-processed with JavaScript and converted it to JSON. Made a minimal web page and deployed it on Netlify. (I am not sure if I am allowed to share the URL, I also need to credit the author of deck).
It shows all the sentences and If I get stuck on a Kanji. I can click on the sentence and it shows me the original, meaning and furigana that is detached from the sentence (to make myself give my best to recall before I peek), It also shows some motivational stuff like No. of Kanji up until this sentence. 5 most recent kanji encountered.
So far its been a little over 3 months and I am at 450th sentence. Which amounts to 440 kanji. So far no signs of fatigue and slowing down. I frequently go back to old sentences to make sure I have not forgotten anything. I add new sentences every night before going to bed. I add based on feeling, sometimes there is reappearing kanji so I add more if there is a lot of new kanji I add less.
I can read a lot more than one would with 450 kanji thought. Real count I believe is around 700. I listen to a lot of 演歌 with subtitles (perks of WFH) which has netted me a lot of kanji (Yay immersion!). It alone has hammered more than 150 or so kanji into my brain. There are some more I picked up randomly during the whole journey of learning Japanese.
1 comment
It’s interesting that you made your own workflow. I have some other things you may like to look into, but do whatever benefits you the most.
* SRS algorithms like the one Anki implements may benefit you, you should look into that. These help with reviewing things so you don’t forget them.
* A lot of people here favor learning kanji with vocab. Which means, you read a book or something and learn kanji along the way when they come up. This is an alternative approach to yours which is using pre-written sentences.
* Do try and learn the most common kanji first, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of those. Maybe you are already doing this, wasn’t clear from the post.