How do I learn properly kanji radicals?

7 comments

1. Yes there are many readings for many Kanji, and some are much more common than others. Learning readings for 2000 characters by itself is a massive waste of time in my opinion.

   I’m going to be a bit lazy and just link you to a couple of posts I made replying to someone else on the subject. Basically, don’t study Kanji individually, learn *words* instead.

   https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/vfh47i/kanji_is_slowing_me_down/id0acv9/

   I also highly recommend this:

   https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/

   EDIT – Just to add on the subject of readings, it’s not like there is 1 reading for onyomi and 1 for kunyomi and that’s it. The character 生 has like 20 odd different readings:

   https://www.kanshudo.com/kanji/生

2. Radicals don’t have pronunciations. Those are not the pronunciations, but, rather, the *names* of the radicals. And, honestly, knowing their names isn’t very important.

   As for kanji, the various “readings” (which, as you’ve said, are generally classified into *onyomi* and *kunyomi*, although there are other classes as well) are not “pronunciations”, strictly speaking. The kanji are primarily semantic (each kanji corresponds to an idea) and are just a way of putting the spoken words into writing. Maybe some examples would help:

   – Water is pronounced *mizu* and is written using the 水 kanji. So in the sentence お水を 飲みます “I drink the water”, or 水の中を泳ぎます “I swim in the water”, then the reading of 水 is みず.

   – The planet Mercury is pronounced *suisei* and written 水星. And Wednesday is pronounced *suiyoubi* and is written 水曜日. So in these words, 水’s reading is *sui*.

   It’s **not** that 水 has two pronunciations: *mizu* and *sui*. It is **not** that *mizu* was arbitrarily chosen as the reading for お水 and 水 while *sui* was arbitrarily chosen for 水星 and 水曜日. It’s the opposite. Before these words were ever written, there were various spoken words, *omizu*, *mizu*, *suisei*, and *suiyoubi*. Then these kanji were chosen in order to put these words into writing. The reason the same kanji appears in all these words is because all these words have some connection to the *idea* of water. (お水 and 水 are water, 水星 is the planet Mercury but its name literally means “Water Star” (the five planets were named after the five Chinese elements), and 水曜日 gets its name from the planet Mercury (the same as in the Romance languages, Spanish *miércoles* for example))

   This distinction might sound nitpicky, but if you see what I’m saying then the whole system makes a lot more sense. This is also why you should learn the kanji within the context of learning vocabulary. It’s a lot easier to learn that the word for water is pronounced *mizu* and is written 水, and to learn that the word Wednesday is pronounced *suiyoubi* and written 水曜日, than it is to learn the 水 kanji on its own (and then you have no idea when it should be *mizu* and when it should be *sui*).

3. don’t memorize kanji, it’s a waste of time and it’s backwards for how japanese works. one does not learn a character in order to read; one learns a word, complete with both spelling (kanji) and pronunciation and meaning and usage. sometimes the pronunciations of the kanji align with the same kanji in other words, sometimes they don’t. but kanji don’t serve a direct purpose in the language. you can’t “read” kanji. they’re not words. you’ll have wasted a year or two of time that will leave you unable to even say hello or read hello.

   learn as you go. learn words. use words. those words will occasionally have new characters, absorb them as you go.

   learning radicals as a help for recognizing and remembering new kanji is fine, but don’t go off the deep end and try to memorize all of them, either. learn as you go. here’s a good book: [https://smile.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268](https://smile.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268)

4. >since a couple of weeks im memorizing the radicals first. […] Just now I found out there is on’yomi and kun’yomi.

   In order to avoid surprises like this I highly recommend reading a guide to learning Japanese first. It takes around 30 min and is well worth your time. Any reasonable Japanese study guide is going to answer your question regarding kanji radicals/kanji learning systems and much more. A few good ones are here:

   [https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/how-to-learn-japanese-guide](https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/how-to-learn-japanese-guide)

   [https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html](https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html)

   [https://learnjapanese.moe](https://learnjapanese.moe)

5. >I got really confused when I found out about the multiple readings of one single kanji.

   Yeah that’s normal when you’re starting, just study them without caring too much about the “they’re too much readings”.

   I’d suggest you to learn kanjis alone without learning radicals first, after some time of practicing them you’ll start to remember radicals automatically and then you’ll start to notice that certain radicals carries either the meaning or the sound of the kanji.

   For now just learn basic words along with kanji, remember, word before kanji. Kanji is only the written reference to the spoken word.

6. Okay, forget the haters and do Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji with an accompanying Anki deck. Some of his treatment of radicals is non-standard but that only really matters if you want to become a scholar of Japanese. To get you started with reading it’s 100% the way to go IMHO

7. There are few Japanese people who know the name of every kanji radical. However, there are some key radicals of which names are often used in daily life (e.g. in the case when the speaker on the phone wants to tell the other side of line which kanji is used for his/her name) including さんずい, うかんむり, くさかんむり, にんべん, てへん, くにがまえ, しんにょう, etc. I remember that I learned the names for those key radicals in Japanese class when I was the third or fourth grader in elementary school and that it helped me learn more complex kanji after having learned very basic ones.

   Edit: Corrected the last line.