Kanjis’ order

Hello,

When I asked advices from Japanese people about learning kanjis, they suggested me to learn them in the order of how Japanese students study them during their schooling. Does anybody have an idea of where can I find this order ?

11 comments
  1. Japanese people usually don’t know other orders to learn kanji, myself included. What you should do instead is to look up this about how to learn kanji. Start at the sidebar.

  2. You can look up kyoiku kanji, which are the kanji Japanese elementary school students learn. They’re split by grade.

  3. Japanese people don’t have good advice for foreigners to learn kanji (or anything in Japanese, for that matter). When Japanese people start to learn kanji, they already have a huge vocabulary and have mastered the basic grammar of the language. All they are learning is how to connect symbols to words they already know. This puts them in a very different position from most foreign learners (especially self-studiers not living in Japan). They also go very slow — they learn 80 kanji in the first year, and by three years they’ve learned 440, although they can probably recognize others just from exposure.

    Native speakers are a good source for input, for conversation practice, and asking if a sentence sounds natural/correct. They are not a good source for advice on how to learn, grammar explanations, or more difficult questions about fine points of usage that they do without thinking.

  4. If you learn kanji the way Japanese people do, you’ll never get through it. I recommend either Heisig order, by frequency order, or simply through the vocabulary you learn.

  5. The 常用 kanji list contains 2136 kanji and is the official list of kanji set by the Ministry of Education in Japan that are to be taught in schools. The first 1026 of these kanji (also termed the 教育 kanji) are taught in the first 6 grades of primary school; a list of these kanji organized by grade level can be found [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%8Diku_kanji) (wiktionary also gives the grade level of any kanji you look up). The rest of the non-教育 常用 kanji are taught in secondary school and can be found [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji).

    That said, I would caution you against this method, and I’ll defer to the other excellent responses you’ve received here as to why.

  6. the app KanjiStudy has them in different orders you can choose from (unlocking the kanji is rather cheap)

  7. i’m not sure, but if you go on wanikani.com, it sorts kanji by level so presumably it follows an order (first levels are mostly radicals then it gets harder)

  8. School order is a bad idea…

    I order them by their radicals, mostly kanji’s right side, easier to learn cause they share the same form and to differenciate as you learn them the same day, an example of one of my lessons:

    延 誕 涎 投 没 股 設 撃 殻 役 穀 殺 疫 殿 暖 援 緩 毅

    Then I learn 2-4 words of each kanji depending the amount of readings they have.

  9. Japanese people don’t have good advice on Japanese, use something like RTK, i used RTK and managed to memorize around 900 kanji in a little over 2 months

  10. I wouldn’t recommend following that advice. Although it’s not a bad idea except you’d be giving yourself the short end of the stick because a japanese kid is already fluent by the time they learn their first kanji or even grammar point.

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