I only made it to about 800 (with wanikani) before I quit for life reasons but the most efficient speed for me was around 20 per week. Thoroughly learning them while revising the previous ones shouldn’t be underestimated. And I can say that now after a year no revisions I’m still pretty good with about 600 reading and meaning.
Don’t rush it! 2 years to learn 2000 kanji is awesome, even more so if you get them deep rooted into your brain
It depends on what else you’re doing. If you’re doing RTK and nothing else I’d probably go faster if possible – RTK by itself gets old, quick. If you’re doing Wanikani then averaging 5/day is about what they’re going for. If you’re using Anki and learning vocabulary etc along with it, then again 5/day is fine.
But go at a speed you can handle. Try 5/day for a bit; if you get overwhelmed, try 3. If you’re doing well and feel like you have the time and the motivation to do more, try 7. You can adjust as you start studying grammar and the like, too.
Wouldn’t do less than 10, 5 a day is 400 days…
The longer the riskier, accidents, pandemics, job problems, the longer it takes you to complete a task the more chances of having to stop by unexpected things. 10 a day is pretty doable. 200 days total.
I would do 10 kanjis and 20ish associated words a day.
I don’t think what I did will be too applicable to you, but here it is for your consideration.
I learned my first 300-500 kanji pretty haphazardly. I just picked up what appeared frequently in what I read over three years without consideration for grades and levels. At that point, I had other classes, so I would have gone for weeks — possibly months — without focusing on Japanese. Granted, my verbal skills did manage to progress to the point where I could watch plenty of things without subtitles as well as get around in Japan as a tourist doing whatever I needed or wanted without referring to a dictionary in the middle of a conversation. This meant I was mostly learning to use in writing what I could already understand verbally most of the time.
Then in the summer of 2020, I went over an elementary school kanji dictionary containing 1,026 characters to fill in whatever gaps I had in my knowledge (and that was a lot after grade 3). There were four characters per page with a list of must-know vocabulary. I drilled eight kanji per day on Anki using the vocabulary as well as sentences I (mostly) came up with myself (which isn’t recommended if you’re not used to outputting). Depending on how familiar I was with the vocabulary, I could end up with anywhere from less than eight to about 20 new cards on Anki.
I did this nearly daily, only giving myself weekends off. At eight kanji per day, I got through the elementary kanji dictionary in roughly three months and was able to read pretty comfortably. Then I stopped going over lists in favour of just mining whatever I came across frequently in my reading. I did go through a junior high school kanji list from Kanshudo to fill in gaps again near the last quarter of 2021 though.
After reading and mining daily for the last six months, I went from 2,136 to just two under 2600 as of today.
TL;DR: No matter how messy the method, just try to be consistent in actually trying to improve, unlike how I was a couple of years ago. If I had learned one kanji with one to three useful words daily, I almost certainly could have learned the remaining jōyō kanji I didn’t already know at a pretty relaxed pace within the couple of years I was slacking off.
Since your a begginer do as much as you can as you advance you’ll find the amount with what you will be ok.
There’s not an exact number that will fit to your learning capabiities, however I’d suggest you to learn basic kanjis first and then brake them down into radicals
Most of it comes down to how much time you have and your own recall ability, so you’ll need to experiment and see what is within your limit. At one time I was learning 10 per day, then life got busy and I dropped it as low as 3 per day for awhile. I can currently sustain 7 per day with good retention, although now beyond just the SRS (Anki) I try to actively find sources to read each kanji I learn in context, which helps a lot.
But, just experiment and find what works for you. It’s good to challenge yourself, but don’t make it too hard or it’ll be harder to stay consistent, which is the most important thing.
I have been learning 5 kanji a day monday- thursday then just playing the games on kanshudo to draw, match their meanings, and type their common words, on the weekends. The kanji then seem to stick. So that’s 20 a week. 1040 a year. 2080 in 2 years when there’s only 2136 kanji taught in school to learn. So that’s my goal in 2 years.
A good way to learn kanji is to learn the meaning along with the most common words that use the kanji, which will help you learn most of the readings of the kanji.
Good known websites for learning kanji are:
* wanikani * kanshudo
If you learn that many Kanji in a day, how many of them will you remember tomorrow? Or next week? Or next month?
8 comments
I only made it to about 800 (with wanikani) before I quit for life reasons but the most efficient speed for me was around 20 per week. Thoroughly learning them while revising the previous ones shouldn’t be underestimated. And I can say that now after a year no revisions I’m still pretty good with about 600 reading and meaning.
Don’t rush it! 2 years to learn 2000 kanji is awesome, even more so if you get them deep rooted into your brain
It depends on what else you’re doing. If you’re doing RTK and nothing else I’d probably go faster if possible – RTK by itself gets old, quick. If you’re doing Wanikani then averaging 5/day is about what they’re going for. If you’re using Anki and learning vocabulary etc along with it, then again 5/day is fine.
But go at a speed you can handle. Try 5/day for a bit; if you get overwhelmed, try 3. If you’re doing well and feel like you have the time and the motivation to do more, try 7. You can adjust as you start studying grammar and the like, too.
Wouldn’t do less than 10, 5 a day is 400 days…
The longer the riskier, accidents, pandemics, job problems, the longer it takes you to complete a task the more chances of having to stop by unexpected things. 10 a day is pretty doable. 200 days total.
I would do 10 kanjis and 20ish associated words a day.
I don’t think what I did will be too applicable to you, but here it is for your consideration.
I learned my first 300-500 kanji pretty haphazardly. I just picked up what appeared frequently in what I read over three years without consideration for grades and levels. At that point, I had other classes, so I would have gone for weeks — possibly months — without focusing on Japanese. Granted, my verbal skills did manage to progress to the point where I could watch plenty of things without subtitles as well as get around in Japan as a tourist doing whatever I needed or wanted without referring to a dictionary in the middle of a conversation. This meant I was mostly learning to use in writing what I could already understand verbally most of the time.
Then in the summer of 2020, I went over an elementary school kanji dictionary containing 1,026 characters to fill in whatever gaps I had in my knowledge (and that was a lot after grade 3). There were four characters per page with a list of must-know vocabulary. I drilled eight kanji per day on Anki using the vocabulary as well as sentences I (mostly) came up with myself (which isn’t recommended if you’re not used to outputting). Depending on how familiar I was with the vocabulary, I could end up with anywhere from less than eight to about 20 new cards on Anki.
I did this nearly daily, only giving myself weekends off. At eight kanji per day, I got through the elementary kanji dictionary in roughly three months and was able to read pretty comfortably. Then I stopped going over lists in favour of just mining whatever I came across frequently in my reading. I did go through a junior high school kanji list from Kanshudo to fill in gaps again near the last quarter of 2021 though.
After reading and mining daily for the last six months, I went from 2,136 to just two under 2600 as of today.
TL;DR: No matter how messy the method, just try to be consistent in actually trying to improve, unlike how I was a couple of years ago. If I had learned one kanji with one to three useful words daily, I almost certainly could have learned the remaining jōyō kanji I didn’t already know at a pretty relaxed pace within the couple of years I was slacking off.
Since your a begginer do as much as you can as you advance you’ll find the amount with what you will be ok.
There’s not an exact number that will fit to your learning capabiities, however I’d suggest you to learn basic kanjis first and then brake them down into radicals
Most of it comes down to how much time you have and your own recall ability, so you’ll need to experiment and see what is within your limit. At one time I was learning 10 per day, then life got busy and I dropped it as low as 3 per day for awhile. I can currently sustain 7 per day with good retention, although now beyond just the SRS (Anki) I try to actively find sources to read each kanji I learn in context, which helps a lot.
But, just experiment and find what works for you. It’s good to challenge yourself, but don’t make it too hard or it’ll be harder to stay consistent, which is the most important thing.
I have been learning 5 kanji a day monday- thursday then just playing the games on kanshudo to draw, match their meanings, and type their common words, on the weekends. The kanji then seem to stick. So that’s 20 a week. 1040 a year. 2080 in 2 years when there’s only 2136 kanji taught in school to learn. So that’s my goal in 2 years.
A good way to learn kanji is to learn the meaning along with the most common words that use the kanji, which will help you learn most of the readings of the kanji.
Good known websites for learning kanji are:
* wanikani
* kanshudo
If you learn that many Kanji in a day, how many of them will you remember tomorrow? Or next week? Or next month?