Trying to Find the Most Effective Way to Learn Kanji
Tags: Learning Japanese, Studying, Language Learning, Kanji, Japanese

Trying to Find the Most Effective Way to Learn Kanji Will Aug 3·3 min read

One aspect of the Japanese language that I regret not focusing on sooner is Kanji. For anyone new to Japanese, the writing system consists of 3 alphabets which are hiragana, katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and katakana are both phonetic alphabets, where each kana represents a syllable that consists of a vowel and a consonant (with the exception of ん). When I first started studying Japanese about 5 years ago I decided to focus exclusively on my speaking and listening ability. I learned Hiragana and Katakana after studying Japanese for about 6 months, but it wasn’t until I’d been studying Japanese for almost a year that I decided to learn some Kanji. Up until that point I had only learned around 100 kanji via the vocabulary I was studying, but even after extensively studying kanji for months, I still only knew about 250 kanji causing me to give up on kanji for a long time and refocus my efforts towards vocabulary and grammar. This worked for a while, but after a few years I reached a point where all of the new learning materials I wanted to try that matched my speaking level had tons of kanji that I didn’t understand. This led me to question my methods of learning when it comes to kanji. I had previously focused entirely on recognition by what the character looks like alongside its most common reading.

This became problematic though, as I did not understand the difference between on-yomi and kun-yomi, which determines which reading for a kanji character is used in a given context, and I didn’t know the overall meanings of the Kanji characters since I focused entirely on the readings. In June of this year I started using a book called Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig. This book focuses on teaching kanji by having its reader create stories through the smaller symbols within the kanji, known as “primitives” to help the reader remember the Kanji’s keyword. Every day I would learn about 30 characters and put all of the characters from the previous day into Anki, a flashcard review software. The problem with this book is that it doesn’t teach kanji in the order of how commonly they are used, which led to me learning keywords for characters that were almost never used. In addition, I could finish the entire book and still wouldn’t have learned any new readings for the characters. This is not to say that Remembering the Kanji is not useful, I just think using it in isolation is a slow and monotonous way to learn the characters. In my experience, the best way to use remembering the kanji is to read about half of it and skip any characters that don’t have any commonly used words (you can check if this is the case for any particular character at kanji.koohii.com). After you’ve reached the halfway point you can start looking up readings that include the characters you’ve learned in Remembering the Kanji. I started out by only learning the readings for words I knew, and once I felt I knew the kanji readings for most of the words I already knew I started using a Kanji dictionary to learn the on-yomi and kun-yomi readings for the most commonly used characters, and as I learn them the characters will become increasing obscure. The final tool I’ve used is reading practice. I highly recommend NHK’s website as they are constantly publishing new articles and since they’re online you can use the Yomichan extension, which allows you to see a word’s meaning and kanji readings by holding Shift and hovering the mouse over the word you want to look up. This makes looking up words far less tedious which means that you can look up more words without losing a lot of energy. This also works if you have Japanese subs on while using the “Language Learning With Netflix” extension, so you can use this method while immersing through video media as well. This is where I started learning Kanji alongside vocabulary, but unlike when I first tried to learn kanji, this time I learned the words within the context of full sentences, making the words (and the kanji) easier to remember. Hopefully I can balance these 3 resources more and more effectively as I continue to learn new kanji characters.