If you’re new to Japanese, through out all your impressions of Kanji before you read this post. Kanji comes off as massively intimidating but I promise you – it is not quite as it seems. Kanji is one of the harder things you will learn but it is not so impossible as it is hyped up to be. If you have the patience, you will learn Kanji eventually.
My advice is to **handwrite.** You can actually make Kanji fun by handwriting. There is no satisfaction in typing out the reading and then pressing a button or a key to make it the Kanji you want. Handwriting however is satisfying and will make you think more consciously about your writing. This is an extremely powerful memorization tool. Writing in a new script is the **fun** part of learning Japanese, and since it is a good way to study, do it lots! If for some reason you don’t already have a notebook, go buy one.
Next, learn the Kanji that you care about. You can force yourself through some Anki deck full of words you rarely think about which won’t interest you, or learn ones you will remember immediately. Are you a Uni Student? then learn 大学 (Daigaku). And then you’ll learn that 大 means “big, great” and 学 means “learn”. That’s 3 words, 2 kanji learnt easily. Another example – all of us eat and drink food all the time, so learn 食べる (tabe) and 飲む (nomu) early on. Then you can learn one more Kanji, 物 (stuff – not exactly but it’s complicated) to learn food and drinks, 食べ物 and 飲み物
Lastly, learn kanji **in context**. What this basically means is to learn words instead of a billion individual Kanji. Then you can learn the Kanji in that word to learn more Kanji. Take for example, 音楽 (Music). 音 means “sound” and 楽 means “fun”. What is fun sound? it’s music. If you only learnt these Kanji by themselves, you wouldn’t know that. Another example is 結婚式 (Wedding).
I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I have about \~100 Kanji solid. At this pace it would theoretically take me seven years to master the Jōyō Kanji, however my pace will increase when I finish my grammar resources, and this pace is fine really. It takes Japanese students themselves years in school to learn the 2136 Kanji
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You have a really good point regarding learning words, and especially words you use often… Definitely better than my idea of trying to learn the 100 most commonly used kanji. (Lots of which seem boring to me, or I have no context regarding where they’re used.) …I’ll be changing my technique;;
Learn words instead of individual kanji.
Don’t bother learning handwriting.
>started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I have about ~100 Kanji
And I have +3500 after a year of learning. You should try another method if you ever want to make it.
Handwriting has to be the most inefficient way to learn
> I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I have about ~100 Kanji solid.
Please don’t take this the wrong way but you’re absolutely not qualified to give advice on how to learn kanji after just 4 months of learning and only 100 (that’s like less than 5% of the kanji you need to learn to be considered even barely literate) kanji under your belt. Come back in a few months/years and re-read this post and we’ll see if your opinion will have changed (if you’re still learning Japanese). At least I appreciate the honesty.
As others have said, learning new kanji by learning new words is probably the way to go. It doesnt make much sense to learn isolated kanji with a bunch of several isolated readings.
Personally i too memorize them by writting them down several times, the stroke order is easy and intuitive once youve practiced enough but if people can memorize them just by looking at them thats perfectly fine too, most stuff nowadays is written through computers and devices so unless you find yourself living in Japan, youll never need to write anything by hand really.
That said, i couldnt agree more, writting them down is SO satisfying.
Wait I thought this was more about handwriting the individual words?
Learning Kanji individually by each character isn’t really worth it because it’ll get confusing (at least in the beginning) because there are so many different ways of reading it, or maybe has a different nuance.
Ive studied both Chinese and Japanese and the only time writing individual characters are more helpful is in Chinese because the characters will almost always stay the same with the same pronunciation. Once you get one character down, it’s time to learn another, and by then you’ll open up your possibility of learning new words by reading, not the meaning. If you get what I mean.
Handwriting has its benefits, but even for me, it can get kind of tedious, but it helps so I’m sticking to it. I’d never learn each one individually though. I personally feel you’ll get a lot farther a lot quicker that way.
I started by learning ~1.5k to write and forgot them in a few months from lack of use. Now I learn through words, and I think this is much more efficient because memorizing readings is useless if you don’t know where they are read in which way, which isn’t always obvious despite the existence of some helpful patterns.
Me who studies Chinese in college so I don’t have to study as much 😎
I will try to make this comment short:
Trying to give general advice to people that is about something specific that did or did not work for you is a difficult thing to do – and people here might actually not be happy about it or just use it as a place to brag about how good they are themselves.
If you want to give general advice, try to think about why you are qualified to do so:
#1 teaching experience?
#2 extraordinary success?
#3 what makes you especially qualified?
Language learners all over the globe are as different as it can get, in terms of methods that work for them, in terms of goals and in terms of motivation.
Anyway, if you feel like your methods work for you and you do enjoy your success, that is all that counts. If someone tells you how bad you are because the person did learn like 3500+ individual Kanji, guess that tells you that this person isn’t qualified to give any reasonable advice as well. If the person really does know that much words after such a short time – that is quiet an achievement. But only few people will be able to replicate this kind of “success”, thus any advice like “learn my way” will hardly work for many other individuals.
Honestly, 100 kanji in 4 months is nothing to write home about. As Japanese major students we were doing like 20-30 per week and even that probably isn’t that much for some language nerds
However, I DO agree that handwriting is a good method to learn (and yes, I’m completely aware you ain’t gonna handwrite shit in real life). My teachers used to say that ”the hand remembers” and it’s actually true, by now I’ve had countless situations where I initially didn’t remember the proper kanji but managed to recall it by ”writing” it out in the air or even in my mind.