Aphantasia - how to study kanji?

Japanese
#1

Hi! I’ve been struggling with kanji for a long time, but I figured that the wise people of bunpro might be able to give me some advice or maybe relate to my issue.
tldr: I have aphantasia and this makes recognizing kanji basically hard mode. How can I study kanji in a way that doesn’t rely primarily on visual cues? Writing and breaking them down into radicals have helped me in the past.

I know I’m far from alone in finding kanji difficult and I’m familiar with the usual advice: learn it as part of vocab, then it’ll stick and you will learn it in a helpful context. However… I’m around 2 years into learning Japanese, halfway through the N4 content here on bunpro, and the kanji are just not sticking. I mainly struggle with recognizing kanji and discerning similar ones, while memorizing meanings and readings haven’t been particularly problematic for me.

However, I think that the reason why I don’t seem to learn kanji very easily is that I have aphantasia - I don’t have the ability to visualize things inside my head. Remember that thing a few years ago with the apples on a scale from 1-5? That’s me. My visual memory is terrible and I can’t recall the image of any specific kanji inside my head (including ones I know!). The sets of kanji that differ by just one radical are especially brutal! This also means that I tend to skim over kanji and only really get a vague feel for the overall shape of it.

The one thing that really did help me was back when I tried out RTK. Which I feel weird about, because everyone seems to have very strong feelings about that method, lol! It’s not perfect, I would prefer to skip some of the less common kanji, and it became extremely tedious. At one point I stopped doing it daily, probably because an exam season came up, and once the ball stopped rolling with RTK, I found it extremely difficult to get back into without restarting from the beginning. But something about it just worked so well with my brain. I think breaking each kanji down into components and then using muscle memory (by writing the kanji down during reviews) allowed me to remember the kanji without relying primarily on visual information.

I want to start focusing more on bringing my kanji up to speed. Do I go back to RTK? Maybe limiting it to the 500 or 1k most frequent kanji? Would it be beneficial to start studying radicals? Writing down the kanji I encounter when I do my bunpro reviews? Or maybe wanikani is the way?

I’m open to advice and especially curious if there are others like me, who have no visual memory to rely on. Have you tried any of the things I just mentioned or maybe something entirely different that worked for you?

It got a little long in the end, but thank you for taking the time to read!

#2

I have a relatively mild case of aphantasia (more precisely I spent my 20 first year at “no apple” and trained myself a bit and now I can see a veryyyyyyyyy low resolution of an apple if I focus really hard on it). For what it’s worth I do not focus at all on writing. I’ll learn to write the few kanjis I’ll need in daily life when I get there.

I did RRTK for the 1000 first kanjis during 2 years (RRTK as in, kanji and meaning, recalling what concept is associated to which kanji, never in the reverse) , but then stopped completely and only restarted kanji a year later.
I highly recommend radicals are/were very useful as it transforms a kanji from an image to a set/assembly from a smaller set of components. Don’t over focus on them, it’s more important to have a vague sense than being able to say “oh yeah 海, so it’s water no 2. lid (1) and mother”, but to know where the line is drawn.

This helped a lot but the real way I learned kanjis for real is: read read read read read read read read. I think I did not really fix any kanjis with Anki itself, but having seen the kanji once and having a vague sense of familiarity and then stumbling upon it in nature, and going “ahaah that’s where you use it”. I have 裁 from 裁判 in my leeches, suspended, yet I have no issue reading it in the wild since you encounter most of the words that will use it if you play Ace Attorney 1 in japanese (逆転勝利). It is much harder than simply doing anki cards and I had quite a hard time at first but I progressed more in one year of reading an hour a day with barely any anki (>30 review per day, 5-7 mins) than when I did 3 hours a day anki sessions. RRTK was much less wasted than I feared in the end, but I recommend mixing sources. In my case one way of studying kanjis did not work.

#3

Seems like the RTK method is something that works for you. I’d give it a shot again.

As long as you have a good understanding of the fundamentals on how the Heisig method breaks down the radicals and primitives, you can approach kanji in any order you want. Feel free to just focus on the most frequent 500 or 1,000 kanji. Also the RTK website has hundreds of example stories available for each kanji if you are looking for inspirations for coming up with your own. Though I do have to warn that many of the community stories are quite crude (sexist, etc).

I recommend finding learning pace that works for you and allows you to be consistent over time. Learning Japanese is not a race. It’s too easy in the language study world to start out too strong out of the gate and find yourself overwhelmed and discouraged a few weeks/months later.

You could also experiment with wanikani.

I personally picked up wanikani after learning around 2,000 kanji via the RTK system. I basically ignored wanikani’s own mnemonic system because I already developed my own system via RTK and used Wanikani as pure reinforcement of reading and vocabulary.

#4

I’m getting tired of Anki in like 1 week every time, but if you like it and can be consistent the best of what I’ve tired is this:

Find a word you know but cannot read. Add that word to Anki deck with audio or hiragana on the front. Now when you see the front of the card you try to recall it.

I don’t know though if it’ll work with this.

If you find rtk helpful I’d incorporate it into this framework, as learning kanji for words you don’t know is so much less pleasant in my opinion, not only not pleasant but also they don’t really stay there.

Also, have you tired just reading? If you do that, you are getting better at reading kanji?

I also advise this thing for kanji every time
https://learnjapanese.moe/kanjiphonetics/

If you do RTK you definetly should include braking kanji down by phonetic/meaning components when you can, took my kanji skills to another level at some point (outlier dictionary is good for that)