I’ve been learning kanji with my anki for awhile now, and I’m at around 800 words and 200 kanji known. I was wondering if this is a good ratio for Words:Kanji. Part of me feels like I should know more words than kanji, but another part of me feels like the ratio is too wide and that I should start completely releasing the beast that is Kanji entirely. Currently what I do is I only add kanji for my words in anki if it fits in the N5/N4 category (I am N4), and I go back later on and add N3/N2/N1 kanji in for words that use higher level kanji later on once I reach that point. I generally get my words from Genki but I write down words I see elsewhere too. But I’m not sure if it would be overwhelming to release them all on me at once and ive been hesitating to add so many in at once. Would it be too overwhelming to add every single kanji I see for all of my words?? I feel like it can be rough not having the kanji at times anyway since I can read the kanji to guess the word if im not 100% there with the memorization yet.
FYI, I only have about 30 kanji left to learn for N4
2 comments
From the learning optimization standpoint, you should prioritize words with kanji in in order to achieve kanji fluency as soon as possible.
Personally, I just learned the most frequent words in their kanji form (except those which are almost always written in kana and those which don’t have a kanji form, obviously). As far as I remember several of milestones, the number of words and corresponding unique kanji were the following:
* 2500 words – 1000 kanji
* 5000 words – 1500 kanji
* 10000 words – 2000 kanji
* 15000 words – 2500 kanji
I’m at like 500 Kanji / 1500 Words from only my Wanikani statistics. I think your ratios are good.