Question about learning kanji

[homa]

I’ve tried quite a few methods of learning kanji, and learning radicals isn’t something that I fill gave me an advantage.

It makes sense to learn them if you are going to use RTK, but I don’t know if RTK has any sense, at least at a start (before N3). You learn 2200 kanji but the century will pass before it takes you less than a second to recall it. Though I believe there are some ways you can make it work, I believe more into mastering more used kanji and than going forward.

What definitely will help is if you take this deck, and learn components it offers: Kanji Phonetics - TheMoeWay (ok, I’m writing it and I can see that @casual bas already dropped this link)

Anyhow, talking about this deck, it features 120 kanji components, that give sounds to other kanji, so by learning these 120 you’ll unlock the reading for 500~600 kanji, a lot of which are the most used ones. I fully switched to writing, because my brain, and I can imagine, any brain, cannot really understand the difference clearly before it actually writes it.

Also, you’ll encounter this 120 components on daily basics in different kanji, so even if you give up this deck, it will give you a good boost, you don’t have to stick to this deck forever to get a lot of profit.

Also, it will you a good understanding of how sound components work so you’ll be able to notice those connections that you couldn’t before in kanji from the words you already know. If you setup “sounds + meaning” of the component on the front, and just write the card, you notice that you immediately can read all the kanji with that component.

I used it and it’s one of those things that I’m really think gave me a lot of long term profit

[appogiatura]

+1, AI is an invaluable assistant and can help explain sentences, recommend Anki deck settings, etc. You should definitely supplement it with real, human-curated material so you can smooth out any mistakes AI might have, but AI is invaluable as a learning tool nowadays.

[jrmr50]

Also did a year of WK. Some times the radicals really help, if its a kanji with fewer strokes especially. Sometimes there is a simple, direct correlation between the radicals and the meaning of the kanij. But as you get to higher levels, WK needs you to remember a particular narrative to then make a leap to the meaning. I found that frustrating.

I’ve tried lots of methods but honestly just seeing them over and over again used in context is what eventually succeeds. And yet I forgot them all the time still しょうがいない🤷‍♂️

[burgerkingler]

for me, radicals are extremely helpful for remembering kanji

specifically in cases like 埋まる and 増す

[cafelatte]

@Viki

For this AI is good, summarizing options with explanations, so you have them in one place to review and decide for yourself.

I think reviewing multiple sources is just better for your own thinking processes in general, and when such information is readily available, there’s no need to get AI to do your research for you. IMO using AI is better suited to when you can’t easily access the information (you don’t know the correct search terms etc) because it can help you find the words/starting point to access the information and research on your own. Just my 2 cents tho as a teacher who constantly sees kids using AI for everything.

[ErLouwer]

@cafelatte

I think reviewing multiple sources is just better for your own thinking processes in general, and when such information is readily available, there’s no need to get AI to do your research for you.

But no one here is “reviewing multiple sources”. OP is asking a forum of people about a relatively subjective opinion. If we were talking about peer-reviewed studies of incredibly nuanced topics then yes, your argument would make sense. You shouldnt trust AI blindly. But thats not really whats happening here. You will probably generally get a more intellectual (and personalized) response from AI than looking through the comments here. I dont mean that the responses are bad, its just that most of them boil down to “I recommend it” and “I dont recommend it”.

If you care, this is the response an AI (gemini) would have given to the exact question OP asked. Since I thought it is pretty good I will also paste it here for OP because maybe it will help him:

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Learning the most frequent radicals is a very effective strategy in Japanese. It is the difference between trying to memorize thousands of random squiggles and learning how to snap together a few dozen Legos.

Since you only need to learn about 50 to 60 to cover the vast majority of the Jōyō (daily use) Kanji, the return on your time investment is massive.

Here is why it works so well, along with a few things you should watch out for.

Why Learning Radicals is a Recommended

1. It destroys “stroke overload”

When you first look at a complex Kanji like 語 (language), your brain sees 14 random, terrifying strokes. But once you know your radicals, your brain stops seeing strokes and starts seeing three familiar chunks:

• 言 (words) + 五 (five) + 口 (mouth)

Instead of memorizing 14 pen movements, you are memorizing one tiny “recipe.”

2. They give you instant meaning clues (Semantic Radicals)

Radicals often dictate the broad category of a character. If you are taking a test or reading a menu and spot a Kanji you don’t know, the radical can often save you. For example, once you know that 氵 means “water,” you can instantly guess that all of these have something to do with liquid:

• 海 (Sea)
• 泳 (Swim)
• 泣 (Cry)
• 汁 (Soup/Juice)

3. They create visual stories (Mnemonics)

Radicals allow you to use mnemonic memory tricks, which is how popular systems like WaniKani or Remembering the Kanji work.

• 休 (Rest) = 亻 (Person) + 木 (Tree). A person resting against a tree.
• 鳴 (Chirp) = 口 (Mouth) + 鳥 (Bird). A bird using its mouth.

The High-Frequency Radicals

To give you an idea of how foundational these are, here are just a few of the top most frequent radicals that appear everywhere:

Radical	Meaning	Position	Example Kanji
亻	Person	Left	体 (Body), 休 (Rest), 作 (Make)
扌	Hand	Left	打 (Hit), 持 (Hold), 指 (Finger)
心 / 忄	Heart / Mind	Bottom / Left	思 (Think), 悲 (Sad), 情 (Emotion)
木	Tree / Wood	Left / Bottom	林 (Woods), 森 (Forest), 机 (Desk)
言	Words / Speak	Left	話 (Talk), 語 (Language), 読 (Read)

You can explore a wider set of these high-frequency building blocks here:

The Catch: What Radicals Won’t Do

While learning that list of 52 is highly recommended, you should know the limitations of this strategy so you don’t get frustrated later.

• They don’t teach you the readings: A radical will tell you that 海 means “sea”, but it won’t tell you to pronounce it umi or kai.
• Historical drift: Some Kanji have evolved so much over thousands of years that the radical no longer makes logical sense. For example, 崎 (cape/peninsula) uses the mountain radical (山), but 埼 (also cape/peninsula) uses the earth radical (土). Sometimes you just have to accept that “it is what it is.”
• Don’t memorize all 214: The traditional Chinese Kangxi dictionary lists 214 official radicals. Do not memorize all of them. Many of them are incredibly rare (like the radical for “flute” or “toad”). Sticking to the top 50–75 is exactly the right move.

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What I really dont like about AI though is how sensationalizing/polarizing it can be. AI is also horrible in basic logic/rationale and must rely on trained data. This makes AI basically the ultimate Empiricist with all its up- and downsides. However, AI will definitelly be here to stay, and kids will 100% be using it on a daily basis in the future so we will have to adapt sooner or later.

[cafelatte]

@ErLouwer

“reviewing multiple sources”.

humans are sources of information too. I’m not talking about it in a strictly academic sense. I’m just talking about using your own brain power as much as possible.

[ErLouwer]

@cafelatte

humans are sources of information too. I’m not talking about it in a strictly academic sense. I’m just talking about using your own brain power as much as possible.

If I want correct (or complex) information, I personally try to rely on academic resources. Thats why I also usually ask AI to give me academic sources to explore and evaluate. But of course there are also people who just enjoy the community-feel in which case AI will not be able to replace that for sure. Its not even remotely a human after all.

[KonSopko]

Thank you all for the massive amounts of responses. It really helped me think about how I want to learn kanji. I don’t know if you guys care or not, but I decided to learn the most common ones like @ErLouwer AI prompt, and anki deck @homa recommended to have a mix of different methos to see which one ultimately works the best.

[genjibear]

To the first question, my thought is it’s worth knowing some of them, but it’s not particularly necessary. I mean, my way to remember 誰 is “say and that weird 8-stroke kanji that was hard to write”, which works well for me.

For real, though, it’s worth knowing things like water, hand, heart, and some of the basic ones. Knowing tree on the left side of a kanji means it’s related to wood or trees can be helpful if I’m puzzling out something I don’t know. But I find that memorizing larger chunks helps me more than relying on each individual radical. I was practicing these earlier: 憶 and 憧 and it’s easier for me to think of those as “heart and meaning” and “heart and child” than it is by each individual piece. Some people swear by radicals and if it works for you, fine, but you don’t have to learn them.

As for the AI conversation, my thought is that I don’t like using it to tell you how to learn something because different people learn different ways. I know a lot of people swear by Wanikani, but I tried it and I hate it.

My way of learning kanji involves learning ones that look very similar (寺、侍、持、待、特 and so on) together regardless of how common they are or how difficult they are. That works really well for me, and when I try to learn them separately, I find myself just mixing them up. This way, I learn the difference between them and that helps me remember. Thing is, most people I’ve talked to HATE the concept of doing it this way and it is too overwhelming for them. Similarly, a lot of people use pneumonics. They don’t work for me.

Saying, “I’m struggling with this, give me tips on other ways to try” might be fine, but don’t treat AI like it’s going to give you the “best” way to do it or the most effective way because at the end of the day, that’s going to change depending on the person. The best thing to do is try different methods yourself and see what you like best. Find out what works and what doesn’t, and once you know that, you can apply it to different things in your life. There is no “right” answer to things like “how should I learn kanji” because the answer is the right way is what works for you.

[Viki]

It is interesting to see so many different views on the topic, kanji learning and AI use as well. I think we all have our styles and opinions and that makes interacting with each other worth it.
I am sharing my views as a life long adult learner, who also trains other adults on various topics.
What worked for me is trying different learning styles and methods (including for the same topic, like learning kanji), and I can only encourage everyone to do the same. The reason for this is that using various methods makes things less boring for me, and they reinforce different apescts of the same topic (kanji recognition, exact reading, active recall and writing require different effort).
Knowing different methods, knowing myself, and what I want to learn gives a good starting point to decide what can work best for a certain topic or field. From there on with constant effort, I can make progress.

[KonSopko]

yea! i was surprised to how many responses i got. it is interesting to see that many people have completely different methods of learning

[tankenka]

Hmm… well, yes and no. They will benefit you in terms of having an idea of what a newly seen kanji might mean by understanding the parts. Mainly though, they help in trying to look up kanji you don’t have any clue of the reading of by going by way of the radicals.

Think of them as similar (but not identical) to affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in English. We have almost exactly the same number (a little fewer than 300 overall, but we generally only learn about 30 to 60), which is how we can get a rough idea of the word (eg, a base verb plus er means a person or thing that does the action (swim+(m)er = a person or thing that swims, dance+r, sing+er, run+(n)er, and so on, or “un” being to do the opposite (tie – untie, do – undo, lock – unlock, or “ology” being the study of something, biology, physiology, psychology, methodology, etc).

It does help for speed of memorization as you remember parts at a glance of a kanji you may have just learned… and even if you forget most of the kanji, if you catch at least one or two of the radicals, you can go find it later.

In general, you wouldn’t need to learn them in the same way a second language learner of English rarely learns affixes… all native learners are taught them, and it is a big part of why we can understand certain words that might be difficult. Yes, they can be skipped. But also, yes they help a bit.

[YonaSazela]

I’m trying to build a DB around a similar problem.

I could brute force around 300 kanji without trying, but once i’ve reached a treshold, the kanji immediately started to look more complex and became insanely harder to distinguish for some of them.

It doesn’t help that they have multiple readings.

So, i pulled all kanji up to grade 6 ( 学年別漢字配当表 ) which is around 1000~ of them, and crossed sources between Jisho and JPDB to find the most “dominant” reading as well as the radical and components.

My goal is simply to make an Anki deck where i group kanji by grades but also similar structure.
Kanshudo search for example :

The kanji 青 i’ve looked up is JLPT N4, means “blue” and is read “あお (ao)” in 60% of cases JPDB found. Which itself is composed of two kanji (plus a trait) : 月 and 土 (+ extra line) which are both part of the JLPT N5 AND grade 1.
So technically, you learn “moon” and “earth” then you don’t actually need to remember most of this new kanji.

But I need to finish building my kanji deck, which may not be what someone else want to use. And it requires you to already have learned a “foundation” of kanji that are simple enough before “adding” them together.

So if i was to be in the shoes of a complete beginner, i would use an anki deck or an app to start learning the 80 first kanji (JLPT N5, and grade 1).
Don’t learn to write them, and take a single reading. Focus on mapping the character to its meaning : 月, つき (tsuki) = moon.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll probably spend time learning vocabulary, and that’s where you’ll encounter readings : D
Such as : 月曜日 (げつ よう び / getsu you bi) “Monday” → 月 as げつ / getsu
Hence, any reading you could have learned before may never show up in the vocabulary list. A vocabulary deck may contains a kanji if it’s also a noun.

Example pulled from JPDB :
つき は もう あがっている
月 は もう 上がっている-> The moon is already up.

Up until you hit the “need a way to remember” wall, just do that.
You’ll have a great foundation to do any method you want to try. As others have mentioned above, past this wall, it’s a trial and errors phase until you find the right method for you.

[homa]

@genjibear

I mean, my way to remember 誰 is “say and that weird 8-stroke kanji that was hard to write”

Considering specifically this kanji, it’s really quite frequent. I think I have it as a component in 10-15 kanji from 250 in my deck.

It also really helps me to know it’s a bird, because for example in 携帯’a 携 it probably etymologically comes from grabbing a bird and holding it.
Taking about holding a bird I have another kanji with that in my deck which is 獲得の獲 (and I think there are a few similar wines) where it’s literally that (the little 又 is a hand I’m most cases)
Something like 網羅の羅 where it’s a net to catch birds.
I’ve got 稚、贋、難 and some more, here I’m not really getting much help from natural etymology, I think, but it’s good to know it’s one component (and brain kind of knows it when it writes it, I mean it doesn’t confuse it with for example 無).

Then it’s often used as a part of another component, the one on the left of this kanji 観.

But ye, it’s not something to learn, rather, something that you look up when you notice that it’s a component in a few kanji you know, and it remains there in brain forever.