As the title says, I’m looking for a less time consuming way to memorize multiple (2 or more) kanji pronunciations. So far I’ve been learning them using Anki and trying to memorize one the most used pronunciation for both on’yomi and kun’yomi but there are a lot of identical ones and I always mixing them up. I have heard that memorizing vocabulary that using specific kanji with different pronunciations would be better than just trying to remember said kanji all by itself, but I haven’t try it yet. Ive been at it for about two months and do far I have Iearned about 200 kanji, 1000 words and all the grammar points that was covered in genki 1 (still requires work, but I think I got the gist and of course the conjugations). Can anyone give any advice for a more efficient way to memorize kanji?
7 comments
Context is key. Trying to “memorise” kanji or vocab in isolation is really difficult and inefficient. You need context, because that is what modifies meaning, and therefore how kanji is read. (Also readings when used in names).
You don’t want to look at 生 and be racking your brains trying to guess which of the 20 or 30 readings it is. You wanna see it in the context of even something simple like 生ビール and know it’s **なま** or 赤ちゃんが生まれた and know it’s **うまれた**.
you are going to get much more mileage out of learning the readings for kanji as you learn individual words rather than trying to learn every reading of every kanji. the plus side of this is as you learn more words, you will recognize more kanji and their common readings and be more able to guess the pronunciation of words you don’t know. memorizing kanji themselves is going to be tedious and isn’t really that useful (unless you just find it interesting or want to pass a kanji proficiency test or something! which is totally up to you. this comment is just written from the perspective of effectively engaging with everyday japanese-language content)
Don’t bother trying to remember pronounciations, they differ a from word to word. Focus on the vocabulary, you don’t need to know all the ways the kanji is pronounced to pronounce a word with that kanji. The pronounciations come by themselves.
If you with to learn a kanji, you would be better off searching Jisho for words that contain that kanji (Search for *光* for example) and learning several words that sound useful, thereby accidentally memorizing the pronunciations that actually are useful. It’s way too hard to just memorize pronunciations and it’s not really even that useful. No matter how many pronunciations you know for a kanji, you won’t be able to tell how to pronounce it in the wild unless you happen to know the word it’s appearing in. Which begs the question of why not just learn the word in the first place.
Learn readings only in the context of words.
Not in a vacuum. Ever.
Memorizing the pronunciation of individual characters is a waste of time honestly and won’t serve one in any way learning Japanese.
Memorize the pronunciation of entire words that use them. Some are written with one character in which case that can be remembered but most are written with multiple characters and in many cases such as “明日” or “今日” it makes no sense in modern Japanese to try to figure out what the pronunciation of the individual characters would be though it made sense in earlier stages of the language. The word “きょう” means “today” and is spelled with the characters “今日”.
Of course, the word “こんにち” that also means “today” is also spelled with the characters “今日”. That this is quite common already creates problems for trying to assign pronunciations to characters rather than to words. The reality about Japanese is:
– Words exist and they have a pronunciation. Japanese native speakers learn to speak long before they learn to write. The script is a recording of the spoken language, not the other way around.
– Like in English, some words have multiple pronunciations, such as “either” which has two commonly accepted pronunciations
– Words are spelled with characters
– Some unrelated words may be spelled with the same characters, such as in English “wind” for instance in “The wind was blowing.” and “I will wind up the clock.” are pronounced differently but spelled the same though to proficient speakers this poses no particular problem, and Japanese is no different.
Over time, it will become more and more obvious when two unrelated words are spelled with the same characters which it is because one sounds like it makes sense and the other does not. Sometimes both sound like they could make sense, in which case Japanese writers are typically kind enough to provide ruby text, or they’re not either due to technical limitations or because they feel that either interpretation is fine.
I like kanji’s learners course.
It’s very good. 11 books long though.