I saw a few popular posts about the kanji struggle, so I made this post to explain my ways of learning and why I like them now.

As a starter, the few posts that I saw have some common struggle

* They are so hard to memorize!
* There is 50k Kanji, how am I supposed to be able to memorize them all?
* How many kanjis should I memorize?

Let’s first talk about why I like Kanji. Someone sent me the sentence below earlier and I had trouble reading them at the beginning.

>かんじ を うつ の さえ めんどう だから いま は ぜん かな で いこう

When I started reading it, I was like

>\[感じ\](#fg “かんじ”)をうつ の さえ。。。
>
>What?

Eventually, I realized it was supposed to be `漢字` instead. This is the reason why I like Kanji, it makes things easier to read.

Now, let’s talk about the problems.

>Kanji is hard to memorize. There’s too much kanji to memorize. I’m not sure how many kanji should I memorize.

My personal solution is I don’t memorize them at all. I don’t even care how many kanji should I memorize. I just focus on exposing myself to as many media as possible, and eventually, I will be exposed to as many kanji that are commonly used as possible. At the same time, when the same kanji are exposed to me after several times, I automatically remember them. Here’s what I personally do to exposed myself to them.

1. Through videos **with** Japanese subtitles (Jdrama, anime, YouTube videos, etc)
1. In the videos, they will use a lot of words, and the subtitles will have the corresponding kanji for the words that they happened to use. After it appears a few times, I just automatically remember them.
2. Reading long text (news, novels, articles, books, etc)
1. If you are new to learning the language, you might not know that there is a tool called Yomichan. I used it to help me to search for the pronunciation of the kanji. If you are reading text forms that are longer than news, the same kanji will appear several times, and eventually, after a few times, you will just remember them.

The important thing here is not to go overboard and stress about memorizing them. Focus on what you like and find ways to optimize for kanji exposure. The rest is just time issues. However, if you are taking an exam I guess that would be a different story.

Learning Kanji is hard at first and gets easy after some time. So try to not stress yourself too much, especially during the beginning periods when it’s the hardest. I hope this helps you to eventually like Kanji as well.