Why Kanji Isn’t That Bad (And My Learning Techniques)
Be sure to click on all the underlined sentences, they all have links to some super cool sources explaining different things further!
Kanji: the worst part of the Japanese language. Or at least, you are led to believe that. Today, I’m here to show you an easier way (or multiple) to remember Kanji.
Before I get started, I would like to explain what Kanji is, and why people find it frustrating to learn.
Kanji are ideograms, meaning each character has it’s own meaning and corresponds to a word (and they used to closer resemble the words they represented). They originated in Chinese, and today in the Japanese language uses them along with two other (much simpler) scripts, Hiragana and Katakana.
The reason they are hard to learn is simply because there are thousands of them, and being ideograms, that’s to be expected. How is someone ever supposed to remember all 2,136 of the “necessary” Kanji (the others being uncommon ones that not every Native knows)? There are a few techniques I have used but the main two are these: Remembering the radicals and making stories with them.
For example, let’s take the word 休 (やす). It is made of two parts, or two “radicals”. The line on the left with the slanty bit above it is the left position of 人, meaning person. The one on the right is a squished version of 木, meaning tree. The kanji 休 has the person radical leaning against the tree radical, almost like a person resting up against a tree. Fun fact: the Kanji 休 means “to rest”.
Another example: 好 (す) has two radicals, a squished version of 女 (meaning woman), and 子 (meaning child). And let’s say a mother (the woman radical) seems to be hugging the child radical… and what kind of people do you hug? People you like! The Kanji 好 means “like”
If you know the radicals ahead of time (and make a little story to go with it), it makes learning Kanji much easier and a much quicker process than before. Now you can blast through your Kanji learning (and here is a pdf from JapanesePod101 that covers how to learn Kanji using the radical method, which they provide for free on their site… and under the PDF download is some other Kanji related resources from them)
Here are a few more methods to learning Kanji:
Flashcards: Your best friend. Use whatever app(s) you like, but flashcards will help to build a memory of the Kanji in your brain.
Writing Them: Writing out every Kanji you learn multiple times will also help to cement it in your brain. Remember Stroke orders are important!
“Gameified” Sites and Apps: There are sites/apps that teach you Kanji, but one way to make them easier to remember is through more gamified apps, like Memrise (especially the “Ultimate Kanji Course” via the website, as well as the official Japanese Course), Kanji Tree, and Infinite Japanese. By making learning more fun, it actually make Kanji (and vocabulary words) easier to remember.
I put off Kanji for the longest time and wish I hadn’t. They are honestly fun to learn (I know about 50 I can read without trouble now).
Do Kanji still seem complicated? Here’s an article quickly explaining why we need Kanji, thanks to Tofugu, one of my favorite resources for learning Japanese.
Anyway, thank you so much for reading! Feel free to send me an ask if you have any questions about Japanese, this post in particular, or anything else! If you have any ideas for future posts, I would love to hear them too!
