Hi all,
To begin with, I am using Wanikani for Kanji + JFZ accompanied with anki deck with JFZ vocab. I wanted to do Core 2K (or 2.3K) but noticed they are using a lot of kanji. Currently, I only know hiragana + whatever Kanji I learned in Wanikani (level 2 now, so not much yet). Should I use Core2k to learn Kanji for those words then? Or is it better to just wait untill I am more advanced in Wanikani and know the Kanji? Are there any other strats?
5 comments
Just learn words as words – whether or not they are spelled with kanji. Learning kanji in isolation is less helpful than you might imagine. IMO the return on the investment isn’t worth the effort.
So focus on learning words – remember what they look like, how they are pronounced, and what they mean. Language is made up of words, so they are the important things to learn (well, them and grammar).
Search for words with kanji you know in the deck then learn those while continueing to learn more kanji.
You could look into importing the decks into JPDB. They have an option to lock vocabulary if you don’t know the kanji, and then it will teach you the kanji via components automatically in order to unlock the words. So you only learn the kanji you’re about to need to learn your next words.
It’s what I did, and while it’s a bit kanji heavy up front, I feel like it has worked well for me.
I just learn them as words then practice writing them down on a piece of paper to memorize the stroke order. I find that helps a lot with memorization. You can also take a quick look at the meaning of the individual kanjis, but don’t dwell on those.
I started using Core2k right after I learned hiragana+katakana and I just bruteforced it basically in the beginning. I spent some time trying to learn kanji in isolation but it didn’t really get me anywhere besides being able to somewhat estimate what the word was going to be about. Like others said just think of it as words and not just kanji linked together.