Best Method to Learn Kanjis

5 comments

1. For me the best way until now has been reviewing (I mean writing them) kanjis every now and then. At least once a week. If you can review more often the better. There’re times when you forget 50 or more kanjis you barely use, so what I do is dosing the kanjis by blocks and review each block once at a time.

   I’m constantly forgetting kanjis because I’m busy and not very consistent with reviewing, but when I had more time, this method worksed just as fine for me.

2. Flashcard programs (Anki etc) help with remembering things. Start by reading the manual if you are interested and then you can post questions about the software here and someone will probably help you.

   The community is somewhat split on the best way to deal with kanji, so I’ll show you both ways and you can pick what you like

   ## first approach: kanji card with vocab

   Let’s say you like to learn kanji with vocab. Maybe you learned 水 which is みず which is “water”

   On the front of the card you put 水 and on the back you put “water” and play the sound of someone saying “みず”.

   Then when the card comes up you see 水 and you say “みず” and you think in your head “water” and if you did all that correctly you get the card right, otherwise you get it wrong.

   ## second approach: kanji card with English keyword

   Other way to make cards is to learn kanji without vocab. In that case the front of the card says 水 and the back says “water” in English and you’re done. This is more like a pure RTK approach.

3. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t like learning kanji through vocab or mnemonics as through vocab you are only learning one reading and mnemonics just weren’t effective (at least for me)

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   so…

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   Back when I was studying kanji I used to use iKanji (ios app) which has an SRS….I also used to put each kanji in anki. The point of using 2 SRSs for me was that using iKanji I would practice just the kanji’s readings and meanins for which its SRS would have me practice, but using anki (readings, definitions and a word that uses that kanji written in kana in front and the kanji by stroke order on the back, picture taken from jisho.org) I would practice writing it…every time I would add a new kanji , I would write it 20 times (in a [原稿用紙 (げんこうようし)](https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Vaytino-Art/dp/B09KN62VDJ/ref=sr_1_32?keywords=japanese+writing+practice+book&qid=1682349368&sprefix=japanese+writing+%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-32)) while repeating its meanings and readings each time I wrote it, then when reviewing if I get anything on that kanji wrong (stroke order or just the completely wrong kanji) I would treat it as a new kanji and write it 20 times again.

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   I would review through Anki 50 kanji daily.

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   Doing both SRSs daily + new kanji (started with 5 daily, and by the time I reached N1 kanji I was already doing 10 new kanji daily) would take 4 hours daily….of only kanji reviewing. At that pace, I went through all jlpt kanji and some 常用 that apparently wasnt in the jlpt in about a year and 2 months….I understand most people dont have that kind of time daily….but I cant argue with the results, so I thought it was worth a mention 🙂

4. Remembering the Kanji by Heisig changed my life.

5. I used [kanjidamage](http://www.kanjidamage.com/) with anki and was very happy with it. It uses mnemonics for the both the meaning and useful onyomis if the kanji has them. The cards do have stroke order on them, but I didn’t do writing.