Hey all, I’m a bit stuck and I’m hoping somebody can talk it out with me. I’ve been trying to learn Japanese for years, and I’m pretty good at learning the meanings of words, grammar, and speaking stuff…but learning Kanji has been such a struggle and it’s slowing me down. I’ve finished the grammar and vocab sections of Genki 1 and know them *super* well, but because I struggle with grammar so much, I can’t move on to Genki 2 yet. With how long I’ve been studying, and how much I’ve put into it…if I were learning a language like Korean (which has a similarly difficult grammar structure, but a much easier writing system), I imagine I’d be at their equivalent of end-of-Tobira. I know that’s not a perfect example, but I hope you at least understand what I’m trying to say with it – I feel like I would have made a lot more progress if I wasn’t struggling with the writing system.
Can anybody offer me some tips/insight as to how I should proceed? Or even some sort of encouragement? Should I buckle down and really try to catch up on Kanji and learn it as I go? Or should I blaze through using hiragana and katakana to learn vocab and grammar to a point where I can actually use it in conversation, and just add kanji later? Any other suggestions?
edit: I want to clarify, by “slowing me down” I don’t mean that I’m trying to rush through it, just that I know Genki 1 vocab and grammar super well, and would like to move on to the next book to keep learning more vocab and grammar, but I’m still struggling with kanji from earlier in the book. I’ve re-worded a few things to make it more accurate to what I really mean.
edit 2: Honestly, I think I just need to try all of the various methods at the same time, and actually stick with it. I’ve made progress, but since it doesn’t come as easily to me as learning the meanings of words and grammar, I get discouraged. I’m going to try to get organized and give it another go. Thanks all!
edit 3: So what I’ve been doing is making an anki deck with Kanji as the front, hiragana as a hidden but revealable hint (I don’t want the kana on the translation page because I like doing flashcards in both directions), and the translated meaning as the answer. I have one deck for each Genki chapter, and another deck for random other words I encounter. I’ve learned to recognize a decent amount of Kanji this way, but I can’t easily recognize them out of context. For example, I can recognize 市民病院, but if I just see 病 I won’t know what it means on its own, nor will I know the reading, the stroke order, or how to write it. I feel like that’s information I should know, but it seems like some of you may disagree?
edit 4: WaniKani seems like a good fit, I actually avoided it because it’s paid and doesn’t have an actual app, but I’m not going to let that stand in the way of learning, so I’ll give it a shot. I was also looking into the Kanji Look and Learn textbook, which seems pretty good, so I’d like to give it a shot as well.
35 comments
>and just add kanji later?
Honestly — and I mean no offense by this — it sounds like you’ve put off kanji long enough, to the point that you’ve developed a kind of defeatist attitude about it. Unfortunately, it’s not going to get any easier to “add kanji” as you go along. The longer you wait, the more you’re going to remain convinced that kanji is your kryptonite, and it’s just going to mean that your reading ability is going to be seriously lagging behind your level.
You don’t mention how you’ve been trying to learn kanji, but I would just suggest trying out all the various possible methods, finding whatever you feel works best for you, and just buckling down and doing it. I’m personally not a fan of the WaniKani/RTK mnemonic approach, but a lot of people swear by it and you might as well give it a try if you haven’t already.
If you prefer a combination of learning the kanji in context and the brute force method (i.e. writing them out a lot in words), which was my preferred method, then I suggest starting out with something like the Bonjinsha [Basic Kanji Book](https://www.bonjinsha.com/goods/detail?id=12070) series.
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The way to get better at the thing is to do the thing. If you’re going for any sort of writing or reading fluency, you will need to conquer kanji.
For the most part, IMO, you need to learn about 500 characters for writing by hand and the rest pretty much for recognition in reading/typing. The Basic Kanji books are a pretty good example for what to cover with handwriting. The Intermediate Kanji books start becoming more about recognition.
I don’t think kanji is slowing you down, I think you’re overestimating your ability. I know people learn differently so I can’t comment on that. But just getting through genki 1 and thinking you’d be already finished tobira seems a bit quick to jump to that conclusion.
Just my opinion and experience. The further I got, the slower learning got because the more there was to remember and the more complex it was to tie all the parts together. Not to mention for example more grammar and vocab means less available time to revise each. Know 20 grammar points revise all of them, know 399 revise some.
But I mean this as encouragement. I got discouraged when I felt like I stalled and wasn’t making fast progress anymore. And Kanji was one of those things, I’d find I just kept relearning them and never increasing the number I knew. That’s when I took it slow and started not focusing on speed but rather enjoyment. Now I read and use textbooks less and don’t focus on learning much outside of context.
That’s my experience.
Theres only 150 kanji in genki 1. If you learned one a day thats only 5 months and youve been trying for years. Thats not even considering that half the kanji used are things like numerals or day/night with very little complexity to the writing.
I buckled down and knocked it out. It worked for me but it was intensive and required a lot of discipline and time. I used Heisig’s RTK in conjunction with [kanji.koohii.com](https://kanji.koohii.com), but that won’t work for everyone.
It took me 99 days to learn all the joyo kanji from start to finish. I consider learning to be just knowing what a given kanji means – the readings can always just be figured out as you learn more vocab.
Kanji is not slowing you down, you are skipping almost half of the language, therefore you have the illusion of being “fast”.
So yes, I would advice you to learn kanji, there are a bunch of posts about the different kanji methods on this sub already, so browse a little bit and look for a method that sounds fitting for you.
Also learning a language is a journey, not an any% Speedrun. So relax, enjoy and most importantly take your time, as this ride will never end, there is no point in rushing towards the non existing “end”.
Kanji is something we all struggle with.
You can do it.
I was afraid of Kanji when I started and put it off for months. After learning hiragana and katakana I didn’t see the use of Kanji. However I decided I wanted to immerse by reading, rather than listening because I could absorb the content at a slower pace.
I tried Wanikani then a website called Kanshudo. The scary hieroglyphics aren’t as difficult as they seem. I stopped using Wanikani after level 2 and use Kanshudo exclusively now. I was learning 20 a week and now 35 a week. The website has lessons including games which take you through the kanji’s meanings, readings, stroke order and common words. It also has flashcards to help keep them in your memory. I’m surprised I’m remembering them all and I’m on the lower side of intelligence for a human.
I put around 60 mins into learning kanji and 30 mins into reviewing them a day. 20 kanji a week is 1040 a year… or 35 a week (5 a day) is 1820 kanji in a year. There’s only 2000 or so Joyo Kanji that that teach in Japanese school that allows you to read most things. So in 1-2 years of study you could be reading most Japanese texts. Doesn’t seem that scary anymore. Of course this doesn’t include all the grammar and vocabulary you would need to learn additionally, although the kanji lessons do contain some grammar and vocabulary.
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How are you approaching studying kanji?
You’re making it sound like kanji and vocab are a different thing. They’re not. Assuming you don’t want to write kanji, I suggest learning vocab with the core2k deck like another commenter suggested. So the process will be:
You see a symbol: 言葉
You try to recall: The reading (ことば) and meaning (words, speech, language)
Try to recognize the shape of the word. How does 言葉 *feel* when you look at it? No need to sweat details like “葉 is made up of grass, world, tree” or whatever if you don’t intend to handwrite (or if you do intend, I would postpone that for a while). Just try to draw a direct connection from word to meaning.
Okay, next word.
You see: 言う. You recall: いう, say.
And then you might realize “Hey, 言葉 and 言う use the same symbol! They’re perhaps related in some way?”
Do you see what I mean when I say words and kanji are not two different things? Please don’t “learn vocab” by learning their kana versions (learning “ことば -> word”), that makes it much harder long term.
Why do you want to learn kanji? Do you want to read a Japanese menu when you visit? Signs? A novel? When I hear you say lack of motivation it sounds to me like you don’t have a strong reason to learn kanji.
Here’s my worst case scenario for you. You get convinced to buckle down and knock out kanji. You try to get through it but it sucks and over time you stop studying Japanese altogether. And maybe that’s for the best. Maybe Korean or whatever is a better choice for you.
But here’s a secret. If you don’t want to learn kanji there’s no kanji demon that’s going to burrow out of the earth and take your soul. If you want to focus on vocabulary and conversation, no one has the right to tell you to do otherwise, especially if you’re studying the language as a hobby and your primary motivations don’t involve reading and writing. You can have a conversation without knowing a single kanji. With the help of dictionaries and translators you can text people in Japanese without having memorized kanji (though it will be slower and more painful and you’re much more prone to mistakes).
There’s no one exclusive path to fluency. Anyone who claims that the only way to become fluent in a language is to study x or do y is lying or ignorant. Hell some people become fluent in a language by watching TV. Other people really benefit from mastering everything in a textbook before moving on to the next level. But some people are best served by simply following their curiosity, and that’s fine too.
On the other hand studying kanji IS necessary to do some things. There is absolutely a cost to giving up on it and coming back to it later (if you come back at all). I just want you to know that you actually dont 100%, foundation of the earth law, have to study kanji.
Just do lots of reading. Read articles, books, comics. Keep reading each and every day.
I’ve only been learning for a little while so I don’t have much to offer but maybe you’d find it more enjoyable to learn kanji though books or video games? It would probably be helpful to have the context they’d give as well
I’m surprised how much people avoid kanji and act like they don’t need it. I’ve heard people say that. I mean that could be true if you just listen to raw audio but it’s super important to read. Kanji and hard at first but once you get decent and not even good. It becomes fun and satisfying when you can read long stringed together kanji. 5 a day is enough
I also suck at it, but I keep working at it from time to time. I do spaced repetition flashcards and write them out on paper. Wished I’d kept all my pages of it, I’d frame it, looks like the scrawling of a crazy person.
I also have gotten some workbooks and I will write out all the exercises using Kanji. Like I’ve even gone back to workbooks before they didn’t expect me to do use Kanji and write those out as well. I’ve even gotten old Spanish workbooks and written those sentences out using Kanji, just to have more sentences to practice with. No way to check them but still provides some more practice at basic grammar concepts.
I can’t imagine learning Japanese without kanji. Honestly, I feel like I would be seriously struggling learning the language without it. Kanji has helped me retain so much vocab and has allowed me to make a lot of progress through reading. I’m sure plenty of others would agree.
The thing about learning kanji is that it’s a skill you need to exercise like any other. Personally I have used WaniKani since I started and I’ve loved it, but there are other options. When I started with WaniKani I relied on mnemonics at first but as time went on I’ve been able to build up my memorization skills in other ways, some of which intuitively came to me after enough time doing it. But you really need to find some sort of method and stick with it. Once you get used to it I think you’ll be surprised at how much it reinforces all the other elements of Japanese you’ve learned so far. Good luck.
Aren’t Kanji and vocabulary the same? How can you learn vocabulary without learning the Kanji along with it? I feel like you make it more difficult for yourself this way. Unless you never intend to ever read something in Japanese?
I would consider myself quite good when it comes to learning Kanji, at least I usually tend to remember them quite easily, what I do is:
– I don’t learn Kanji on their own; I don’t learn what radicals a Kanji is made of, at least for me personally that is kind of a waste of time and does not help me at all to remember the Kanji.
I have 2 Anki decks; one for Kanji/Vocab only and one for sentences/phrases:
– When I learn a new word, I learn it immediately with Kanji. So in my Anki Deck the first side will simply show the Kanji, like 漢字, the solution will then show the reading かんじ and the meaning „Kanji“. When I learn a new word, I write it down with pen on a paper about 10 times, 5 times as Kanji and 5 times as Hiragana.
– I have a second Anki deck for sentences/phrases. It’s sentences that I have picked up by reading anything basically; the news, blog articles of my favorite restaurant, etc. Usually when I add a sentence it has ~1 new word; sometimes 2. But I only add sentences when I have seen that new word already a couple of times or I have a feeling that it is easy to remember for me based on the context or Kanji. The first side of the Anki card shows the sentences without furigana. The second side shows the reading + meaning of the Kanji & grammar explanation. I also tend to delete words from my Kanji/Vocab only deck as soon as I have a sentence/phrase in the second deck containing that word.
– And most important: read read read. You will not remember them if you see them once in Anki then never again. I think it doesn’t matter to much what you read. It shouldn’t be too difficult, but the most important thing is, that it is something that you are interested in.
Now this is what works for me. It does not mean it will work for you, but you definitely have to try something else if you struggle this much. After all learning and remembering what you have learned becomes so much easier if you do it in a way that is fun and with a goal in mind 🙂
Try Wanikani. It really helped me.
When I was learning Chinese. I stick post-it papers with characters on them around my desk and besides my bed. After sometimes I just sort of remember it. Of course I have to practice writing too.
Wanikani has helped me immensely with kanji. I don’t even think about it to much. It’s simple and you can get an app on your phone to set reminders. Honestly my favorite Japanese learning tool I’ve come across.
You could know 2000+ Kanji by August 1st, and never have to think about Kanji as anything but how the language is written ever again.
RTK (The book)+Kanji.koohii.com+concentration=2000+ Kanji by August 1st.
Nothing will make as much difference to your language study as spending the next 6 weeks changing Kanji from a weakness to a strength.
Kanji and vocabs man. Really slowing me down too. I don’t have problems with grammar but the most important thing especially in jlpt is vocabs and kanji. So sad lol
Do you guys practice writing Kanji? I would be surprised if I know how to write more than 200. And that’s comes from a guy with N1 and a degree in Interpretation in en-jp.
I used to practice for the weekly mini tests in Japan when I studied in Language school, but to be honest, I could never bother that much with it. It was easy to remember because of the radicals, but lack of practice and constant new kanjis makes me think that I don’t know how to write them at all.
Anyway, reading is quite important. If there wasn’t kanji …we all would be fucked. Try to learn a language with no similarities to your mother tongue. It would be much harder, but thanks to kanji, we can understand that 削除 is similar to 消す.
Try wanikani.com
It’s fun and easy to use
Bit late to the party, but i’m not sure if anybody has mentioned migaku yet? I learnt my first 800 kanji using their anki program for it, and now it’ll just scan any new anki cards I import for unknown kanji, and automatically make a kanji card for it (rrtk styled with mnemonics and stroke order). Been super helpful for me personally!
I had lots of fun with RTK.
You’re currently at the hardest stage. It gets easier later on, as your brain gets more accustomed to kanji. Soon you will be cruising down hill.
I can read 病院. I could not read 病. Looking it up on Jisho, that makes sense as it’s listed as an N1 kanji and my kanji knowledge is about N3. Genki 1 takes you to N5 and thus you should definetly not worry abou 病 at this stage.
Honestly, from what I’ve read here I’m not so sure you have more of a kanji problem than the average learner.
Can you read the later texts in Genki 1 without getting overwhelmed by looking up words? Then you’re fine, get going with Genki 2. If you can’t, that’s a bit odd, as all those words should be in your Anki decks, right?
Don’t get hang up on stroke order, hand writing, or stuff like that. As long as you can follow along the pace in Genki you’re fine. If you find out you can’t, make a brief pause and review.
Trying to learn a writing system with only your eyes is not the way.
Just commit to wani kani three times a day for 10 minutes each. Literally 30 – 45 minutes of your day for a year and you’ll learn over 1000 kanji
I think you’ll find that more you learn, the easier it will get. One of the things I’ve found to be helpful, when looking up/learning kanji, is to pay close attention to the radicals used. Radicals are important, not only because they are the mini-kanji making up the kanji you’re looking at, but because a lot of dictionary lookup tools let you look things up by radical, so it’s super helpful to know which bits _are_ radicals—this helps you look up unknown kanji. I feel like radicals are almost like a more finite (though still a lot bigger than I’d like it to be) alphabet of kanji that make up other kanji.
For example, 語, which generally you’ll see as “go” at the end of languages, like 日本語/英語, is made of of 言 (to say) 吾 (one’s own).. “One’s own (way of) saying” is a very logical way to think of that kanji, iMO. It gets murkier (for me, at least), when I dive into 吾, which is made up of 五 (5.. ) and 口 (mouth)..but it still helps me to think of it as five-mouth, rather than just memorizing lines.
Anyway, there’s a whole fascinating etymology there that hopefully gets more interesting, the more you know. It hopefully makes acquisition the easier part (because it will become a more “cumulative” exercise of knowledge acquisition), and the new “hard” part will be figuring out the more etymological angles.
A quick comment on the notion that you’re skipping “half the language” by not learning Kanji: it’s pragmatic, but it’s not 100% accurate. Obviously, nobody reading this is illiterate in English, and I highly doubt anyone has a goal of learning how to be illiterate in a second language. It’s out of the question. But still: literacy and fluency are separate. There are illiterate Japanese people. If not now, then certainly in the past, when literacy was not a given anywhere in the world. It’s actually fantastic that literacy levels are high enough now that we’re taking it for granted and treating it as part of the language itself! However, most writing systems only exist as ways to record spoken language, and they’re often pretty decent at recording their non-target languages, too. There’s multiple ways you can read/write Japanese: Kanji + kana, all kana, romaji, etc. Japanese is a little bit harder on account of their native way being more complicated than many other systems, like Korean. That’s just how it is. They might institute a giant writing system reform (like when China introduced Simplified, or the more minor German Writing Reform), or it might evolve to be easier over time. For now, it is what it is. You _could_ learn only the spoken language, using a system like romaji, but if you want to function _in_ Japan or with people from Japan as a literate person, you will need to learn the writing system they use.
I’m saying that, because I don’t want you to feel like you’re “not really learning the language” or have some idea that you’re pursuing an ignorant path. As long as it’s on your learning roadmap, I think you are good to focus on what you feel you need to focus on. If you languish on written language long enough, you’ll start feeling the pain as you become increasingly frustrated that you can’t read anything. As long your overall goals for learning the language remain steady, you’ll adapt as needed to pursue them.
Try Wanikani. The first few levels are free. For me it’s helped a lot more than basic Anki flashcards because they also include mnemonics, example sentences, and (most importantly for how I learn) where the kanji components are actually _used_ in common vocabulary words, which makes them much easier to remember than trying to memorize on and kun readings for every kanji on their own.
Remember the one general rule: the more you know, the easier it gets.
* certain combinations and patterns arise. e.g. lots of kanji include 各, so expect to see a lot of 夂(ふゆがしら) on top of 口(くち), and not the other way around
* just try to remember, and if you give up look them up. it will become second nature, and you’ll eventually get them down. there are lots of tools available to make input as painless as possible (pop-up dictionaries, search by radical, OCR, handwriting input, websites offering lists of kanji built from simpler kanji, keeping a text file with similar-looking kanji so you can look up, say, 侍 via searching for 持)
* use all tools at your disposal: use radicals to help you jog your memory (it has 氵(さんずい)? chances are it’s related to water), take advantage of similar kanji with shared readings (粗, 祖, and anything with 且 most likely has the reading ソ), look up etymologies, make themed lists (e.g. 費用, 電気代, 無料, etc. for kanji involving costs/fees), make silly associations (trouble remembering 労る is read いたわる? think of 板(を)割る. 承る is too hard? think of 受け賜る(the word it comes from))
* don’t look too closely into kanji. They can get a bit cryptic, and sometimes it’s not too easy to make out the meaning from their parts. fyi the same thing happens in English: bureau? Oh, it means office, but it’s both desk and office in French. Board? It can be a lot closer to ‘table’ than a literal board (you know, people who sit around a table, like members of a company’s board of directors, or a board of education), connoisseur? I thought it was spelled connaisseur (not in English though), concerto? It doesn’t mean concert in English but it does in Italian, oops.
I use bunpro and wanikani. They allow me to study efficiently while amusing my rat brain