A New Way To Learn Kanji: Visual Patterns Only, No Mnemonics

Hi guys. A few weeks ago I completed this behemoth of a project, which is free to use. It’s a method of learning kanji that uses no mnemonics, no meanings, no prior knowledge of Japanese, yet still gives you skills to visually comprehend any kanji you encounter: [The Kanji Visual Language Project](https://kvlp.org/)

This snapshot of the main spreadsheet file shows [what you can expect](https://i.imgur.com/BJ5VNnU.png).

A big principle of the project is this: if all the kanji in any group are shuffled, it is possible to envision what the whole group still is and sense putting the kanji back in their rightful places based on their looks alone. The looks of some groups make the answers self-evident, but the project contains a guide that helps train your visual and artistic skills to sense the best possible groups, and even hypothetical groups.

Why did I make this? Two things:

First, I wasn’t happy with how mnemonic techniques were working for me. I had begun to get serious about learning Japanese and I felt like every time I saw a kanji I had a mnemonic for, another mnemonic would intrude in my mind that shared a same primitive, because it was a more attractive mnemonic than the former. It kept happening. The images were “cross-contaminated” in my mind and I kept feeling as if I were pushing a boulder uphill. I was also getting the impression that the given techniques were at odds with what I already knew about mnemonics (more “formal” techniques such as how to decode the order of a deck of cards for magic tricks). In fact, the project was first made to try and fix the cross-contamination problem, but I had to scrap that direction in the end because things were getting so bad.

And second, I watched Matt vs Japan’s old videos that got my gears turning about what actually makes a kanji “learned” or not (now taken down: both his video advocating RTK, and why he changed his mind). Was there a better way than RTK to solve the “paradox” as he had described it, of being able to properly learn kanji without first knowing Japanese in the first place? It became an interesting puzzle.

And I wondered: since Chinese students of Japanese (and vice versa) have a better time taking to kanji than Western learners do, there has to be *something*, because the languages are completely different with both readings and meanings not mirroring between the two languages on any level that deserves consistent trust.

I had to do away with all my old assumptions I had about kanji if I were to get to the bottom of what actually made kanji “acquirable”. Lots of things started falling away from me after a bit of Socratic reasoning: readings had a hopeless number of exceptions; meanings were being bent and outright dropped as they adjusted to real Japanese over time; the pacing to read Japanese fluently gave zero seconds to do any realistic real-time mnemonic decoding. The only real conclusion I had left to draw about any kanji was that the bare bones – merely “lines on paper” with no meanings we as humans attach to them – were the only things about them that could be trusted. And the study of lines on paper inevitably leads to the field of study that is art. Specifically, concepts such as lines of rhythm, volume, perspective, composition etc. And thankfully, no one needs to output art to still build on these senses as a form of acquisitional input. The big giant of an assumption that fell away from me and allowed the final thing to work was the “one-to-one” philosophy of RTK-style thinking (one kanji, one meaning, or X or whatever it is) – I mean, was there any reason not to use a single kanji more than once to achieve a purpose, other than we “just can’t”? That was the big turning point that gave me all the power in the world to repeat the same kanji and get the best looking groups you see in the spreadsheet now.

So what this project is is an experiment: how to learn kanji with artistic senses (which don’t even need to be that sophisticated). It’s the Occam’s Razor method of cutting through everything about kanji and focusing only on the very thing in front of your nose. It’s the simplest explanation because it deals only with the artistic traits of kanji themselves, no more and no less. Overcomplication with the bending of meanings, giant rulesets of readings, previous Japanese knowledge are all done away with because they must be put aside for another time. I can only speak for my own experience, but now I have kanji “fluency”, and can finally focus on Japanese itself. I’m able to read a Japanese word and imagine how multiple groups can “join” together, and even see face-value flows in the whole word without these groups if I choose. See [this](https://i.imgur.com/3GArufA.png) screenshot to know what I mean.

I can now learn vocabulary in their full words without issue, because the steep learning curve of taking in multiple kanji at once to learn those full words is now well and truly flattened.

I wanted this project to do what RTK and KKLC tried to do for me but failed: let me learn kanji as standalone entities independent from the Japanese (or Chinese) language.

All that said, I’d like to know what you all think, criticisms ‘n all. In any case, I’m happy with what I’ve done and now I’m gliding over Japanese text like it’s no big deal😊