[Rant] I’m frustrated with similar looking kanji

21 comments

1. Learn to write them. That way you get a deeper understanding of their form.

2. Are you 侍ってる for better tools?

   This is exactly what RTK is for.

3. This right here is why you gotta either learn to either handwrite very basic kanji or pay lip service to learning and learning basic radicals and components.

   When I look at these, the first things I’m automatically drawn to are 宀 vs 丷 at the top and 人 vs 丨at the bottom. As a result, I have no problem differentiating them apart.

4. > 実 美 羊

   ok you got me. whats a context where you would confuse those? i really wanna know.

5. So, since you’ve tried all those methods, and you’re confusing some, frankly, very different looking kanji, the only thing I can recommend is writing them.

   That said, you also mention that you’ve been on this for *years*, so I wonder how much actual exposure you’re getting to the language. In my experience, more time spent reading (and pushing yourself to read at pace) will improve your overall recognition.

   So, my general advice is “read”; my advice to you is “write, and also read”

6. Focus on differences. Focus on context. That is all there is.

   If you keep focusing on cards alone, progress will come slowly and feel painful.

   And like others suggested: writing might help a lot!

7. You’re just not used to it yet. You need to read more and practice more.

8. I can’t offer any advice, but if it’s any consolation, these similar katakana still frustrate me when telling them apart. (シ ツ , ン ソ ).

9. [learn radicals/components](https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/)

   write them

   the similarities get worse 😛

   実差業美羊半关夫天夭干千⽲末未来夹耒失矢牛午乍⽸年

   EDIT to clarify: some of the above are radicals used in other kanji rather than kanji on their own, at least in Japanese

10. Use RRTK with Anki or regular RTK with kanji koohii and install Yomichan whenever you try to read something, no matter what it is. Yomichan will help you out a lot by parsing the words and telling you how to read the word in kana.

11. Writing is really the only way. I do jpdb reviews and write everything. It takes a while but differences like these become a lot easier to remember

12. pen and paper always works for me in that case

13. Aside from learning a bit more about how things are written by hand, have you spent much time learning about the radicals that make up each character? For example, it’s not surprising that 美 and 羊 look similar to you, since 美 is 羊+大. Even though 実 is 宀+三+人, it’s reasonable to have trouble interpreting a pile of horizontal lines, especially if you’re focusing on the wrong visual cues or haven’t learned how these parts fit together when you’re writing.

14. I have a similar problem, but with ones like these, where everything is the same save for whatevers added around them (i swear the little 木 言 宀 忄艹 氵亻, etc. are gonna be the death of me):

    祭 察 際 擦

    階 混 皆 昆 楷 諧

    Always mix them up, when i see them in familiar words i have no problem reading the word as a whole, but if i have to write them by hand im like yeah soooo the general shape is this… and thats it, thats as far as i get.

15. Jpdb is a bit better than rtk

16. This problem is exacerbated when the font size is too small or when you are reading printed material (which you can’t zoom).

    I follow the Kodansha Kanji Learners’ Course (KKLC) which has a nice appendix for these similar-looking Kanji, as well as an explanation in the context of similar-looking Kanjis. In my experience, the tutors don’t really help with this stuff. YMMV.

    Basically, there is a certain radical or sub-Kanji which is at the same place or position in the set of Kanji characters, and you need to focus on what the differing radical is.

    Take these as an example: 水 氷 永 泳 求. The first basic Kanji looks a bit like the building block for the rest, right? One of the differing radicals is 丶. The next time you look at one of these, you should look closely at the radicals and form your understanding.

    There are certainly many exceptions to this, such as: 未 末 夫 天. Here you have to notice the stroke lengths more closely.

    However, if you are learning vocabulary in Kanji (compounds, not individual Kanji), this may not be a problem as you can gather some meaning from the context. Example: it will always be 週末 and not 週未.

    Hope this helped and not confused you further 🙂

17. Read more

18. Are you focusing on learning radicals? When you break the kanjis down by radical is much easier to see tje differences and remember which Is which.

    For wanikani, you can brunt force memorization, but it’s much better practice to read the stories they create for you for each kanji which is at the radical level.

19. Have you tried… **reading**? You’re not realistically going to mix up these kanji in actual words.

    美人 is 美人, you’re not going to mix it up with 実人.

    現実 is not going to be mixed up with 現美.

    ​

    It sounds to me like you’re focusing way too much on grinding the language instead of immersing in the language.

    There’s a man who read the entire French dictionary so he could compete in a French Scrabble tournament. He won the tournament, which would indicate that he remembered the words. He cannot speak French. You’re going to end up like that.

20. I disagree that writing is the only way to fix your problem. My approach is that any time I encounter words / kanji that my brain tries to lump together, I write them all out, pick apart the differences, and come up with pneumonics to remember them. Ex) 結婚、結構、格好 are very similar to me, but I always remember the sound of “marriage” so I start from there. I know the kanji for ground 土 and I see that in the first kanji of two of them. I remember that my brother’s wedding was outside in the mud, and boom: I can tell the difference between 結婚、格好. Now for the first two, women love marriage, and 女 is only in the word for marriage, so now I can tell 結婚、結構 apart.

    Do this for every cognate you find, and you’ll be golden every time. It takes work, and this is a repeated process. I’m sure there’s plenty of two syllable words that match the descriptions above and don’t mean “marriage”, but when I find them, I’ll run through this process again. As long as the characters are different AT ALL this approach will always work. Also writing is a lot of work for little payoff in the modern world. Sorry, 書くvangelists but it’s true.

21. So I’ll give you my very unconventional of absorbing kanji. It might help perhaps?

    I didn’t necessarily intend to study specifically, I just wanted to know the meaning of words in the stories I am reading. I learned just enough to push myself into some elementary level of reading. After that I learned about radicals and used radical look ups to find the kanji on printed/image based material, since there was no easy way to copy and paste the character to look it up. I relied heavily on radical look ups.

    Like you, this frustrated me greatly, but over a long period of time I became proficient with radical look ups and knowing all the radicals which lead me to acquiring an intuitive sense for kanji and how they’re constructed.

    This is what I did: If you go to a site like [jisho.org](https://jisho.org) in the top left hand side you’ll see 3 buttons. Draw, Radicals, Voice. Click on the radicals button and you’ll see a drop down GUI pop up with a large number of radicals in order. For each radical you click on, it’ll narrow down the kanji available until you find the one you’re looking for.

    For example 鷹, if I didn’t know this kanji I would need to find a way to look it up and I would need to start by seeing which radicals I recognize: 广 (cliff radical), second is person radical ⺅, third is bird radical 鳥, optionally there is the old/small bird radical there too 隹. If we look at it like a pictogram it kinda makes sense. A person with a big bird, small birds, on a cliff. So it somewhat narrows it down to being a type of bird that lives on cliff-sides.

    By the third radical I’ve already isolated the kanji and can look up it’s meaning and potential related words. I was very slow at this at first, taking up to 5-15 minutes per kanji, so getting through a single page of dialogue in manga or written work was a big task. Over time though that changed as I started to break things down more rapidly and look them up very quickly. This deconstruction process has lead me to be able to recognize kanji for their constituent parts and distinguish them clearly.

    Perhaps you could try this process out with something you genuinely want to read so it keeps your interest.