Seeking advice on learning Kanji

Japanese
#1

Hi, I’m a new Bunpro user. I’ve been really enjoying it so far. I’m not exactly a new Japanese learner however, which is why I’ve come here for advice.

In the past I’ve gone through the entire N5 vocab list in a vacuum. I engage in a lot of Japanese media and remember quite a bit of the words. I’ve started at the N5 level on Bunpro to help reinforce the words and become more familiar with the grammar. So far it is working well for me.

Now I’m wondering how I can tackle Kanji. I’m not new to characters - I took Chinese in highschool/university for about 5 years. I don’t remember how to speak or read much, but I do remember stroke order and some basic Kanji that are the same in Japanese and Chinese. The way I used to study was to write the characters over and over and over again until they stuck. I don’t mind doing this and actually find it somewhat relaxing.

With that in mind, I am trying to figure out the best way for me to tackle Kanji with Bunpro. I want to make sure I am learning all the required readings for each Kanji. I tried out Wanikani and wasn’t thrilled with the start. I’m also not sure I want to do two apps at the same time. Mnemonics have also never been my thing. I own the Kanji’s Learners Course blue book, along with the green workbook and the red dictionary. I also own the yellow basic Japanese grammar book. Has anyone had success when pairing these up with Bunpro? My thought was to look up and learn the Kanjis as Bunpro introduces vocab with them. I could also try out Anki. I tried it once about ten years ago and it intimidated me extremely, but if there is a deck to go along with Bunpro Kanji, I could see that being what I’m looking for (I just need to learn how to use Anki…)

I’m open to hearing any suggestions and what has worked for people here! This includes trying to sell me on Wanikani, lol.

Tldr: Wanting to know a good way to pair up Kanji learning with Bunpro. Not a complete beginner; have a background in studying Chinese. Open to any suggestions.

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#2

First, I need to make it clear that “learning kanji” is a very nebulous concept, poorly defined, and may not be worth the effort to try either. Even if you know all the readings of a kanji, it’s not rare to mix them up when reading words, so it’s better to learn the actual words instead. If you want to find them in the dictionary, it may be a better idea to learn the ~200 radicals instead. There’s quite a lot of debate on this, so I’ll not go further.

With that out of the way, I think the best thing to do if you want to is probably this:

TLDR, you make a Anki+writing combo, recite every kanji reading and meaning a bunch of times. If you persevere, you incur a lot of benefits, but it’s also a colossal amount of work.

It comes down to how much effort and rewards you want. I did the above for 8 months, but I recognized I didn’t needed to do it to reach my actual goals. Doing that is overkill for practically everyone, I would say, but you knowing your goals, strive towards them as you like the best!

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#3

I think if you have a kanji background RTK2 with anki might be what you need. Heisig sorts them based on radicals which give reading to a kanji.

If you know on reading for one kanji precisely, it’s kun reading should stick in no time.

And now my opinion is that learning kanji in isolation is awesome and underrated. Learning kanji and then word with it should be the best.

#4

That’s a good question, isn’t it? And it seems there are a lot different learning cultures around kanji. I would say this also depends on your goals and if habe a set time for them. Do you want to recognize them in context, just know their meaning, their reading, thr vocab, how to write them, etc? Do you want to live or work in Japan, want to pass a certain JLPT test in a given time frame?

There is no “one size fits all” for kanji, which is a very good thing! Some love thise stories that wanikani or RTK presents, some hate them. Personally, I can easily come up with stories myself and stories by others always confuse me. In the end, seeing how the kanji are used a lot and using them yourself will help them stick the best. But what does that mean for you? Will it be in reading native materials, in written exercise, in recognizing them in your surrounding? In which order will you tackle them? Following a textbook, the JLPT, a course like wanikani, the order japanese kids learn them?

I think the discussion if you want to use anki, or bunpro or wanikani is pretty secondary. Those are just tools and you should use the tools you like best, if you don’t like anki, you won’t use anki for long.

I’m also on my kanji learning journey and I tried wanikani (hated it), RTK (hated it), anki (hated it),… I then tried to use bunpro by just deactivated a few furiganas every day of words I know well, that actually helped a lot and without actively learning kanji, the sheer repetition of them during reviews (I have read and translate) made them stick. But i can only recognize them, not write them. I now decided to learn the kanji in the order they are taught in school and read graded readers for school children. And honestly for that purpose I just did some old school, hand-written vocabulary cards, cause I really like using those.

Since you saif you would love to use bunpro, you can try to make your own deck. If you haven’t opted into beta, you might not see this feature yet, but it’s a simple click in your settings and then you can start right away. There are already community decks that focus on kanji, so you can also look into them, maybe kne clicks with you? :slight_smile:

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#5

As others have said, there’s a lot of opinions on this, so I’ll only speak for myself. I don’t profess to “have the answer”.

Learning kanji, in and of itself, is probably one of my greatest regrets in my Japanese learning journey. If I could go back in time, I would slap myself and tell myself to knock it off. This is not to say I don’t study kanji - I absolutely do every now and again. However - nowadays it is all in service of learning proper words/vocabulary. If I have difficulty with a word, I might look up the kanji in jisho, or especially in the Kanji Study app (android) where I can see etymologies of the kanji (though that feature is a paid add on) and practice the strokes for radicals that look odd to me. But this is all in service of learning actual words. For instance, I remember I was conflating 列島 and 諸島 continuously. Looking at the individual kanji meanings helped me remember these words. You will never catch me drilling kun-yomi and on-yomi and writing them 100 times though. I balk at the Heisig Remembering the Kanji approach.

I agree with everything Kaname says in his video here:

In my opinion, so long as you understand stroke order and radicals acceptably well, i.e. ‘you can guess stroke order usually’ and ‘the radicals of most kanji are obvious to you’, then there is little to be gained in studying kanji. This level is attained with a pretty low time investment and everything after that is, IMHO, rapidly diminishing returns on investment.

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#6

I have found Wanikani to really help with learning kanji, I know it can be a hefty financial investment but believe me its worth it, once you pass the level 20-30 mark you can just start reading stuff like books and articles, and its great for just getting a better feel for Japanese as a language!

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#7

I’m using wanikani too, I’m still at the beginning of the journey but I feel like it’s a very good compromise between the different points people are saying here: it’s a learning app focused on kanji specifically, but you do learn some vocabulary that use the kanji you learn (a few words per kanji, and a lot of words that use multiple kanji) and you don’t uselessly learn all the readings of every kanji.

Each level has three parts:

  • first you learn some radicals (not official ones, just some parts that often appear in kanjis). Wanikani makes you associate them with a word that they later use to build a mini story to help you recognize each kanji;
  • then you learn to recognize a set of kanjis (once again associating them with a word that should help you later guess and remember the meaning of the actual vocabulary that use that kanji). You also learn no more than one or two readings of each kanji at that point (the most common ones), no point in learning them all in a vacuum;
  • finally, you learn a set of vocabulary words (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.) that use the kanjis you just learn or those from previous levels. It’s only at that point that you learn the readings you didn’t know about yet, and only if needed;
  • (bonus, sometimes you get some kana-only vocab, but that’s rare and I don’t think you should rely on wanikani alone to build your vocabulary);
  • level up, rinse and repeat.

I do not have enough perspective to know if this is actually a good way of fulfilling the “need to learn kanji” feeling, but I enjoy it this far (WK lvl 7 + bunpro 70% through N5 vocab deck), it’s really satisfying to see a word in bunpro example sentence, thinking “hey I recognize those kanjis, I can read that now!” and deactivate the furigana for that word (I like to do it manually but there is a bunpro-wanikani integration that does it automatically).

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#8

Me personally, I use Wanikani

Wanikani has been great for Kanji.
I started using BunPro because I need grammar using both of these have really helped me a lot so far.

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#9

Yeah, WaniKani is a good option imo. But I’d suggest using it with some Userscripts (like Doublecheck or even Anki mode if you don’t want to input answers at all), since Tofugu doesn’t have an undo function by default (goes against their principles)).

You can test the first 3 levels for free and see, if you like their style (with or without Userscripts).

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#10

This seems to be where I’m at now as well. Recently I’ve stopped bothering “learning” new Kanji for new words. I just add the word to reviews and eventually I seem to be able to recognise and read the Kanji (though it always takes a bit longer than learning the word itself ). Will I remember those particular Kanji as well as others I’ve learned in the past through more intensive methods? Maybe not. Do I care much? Not really because at the moment I’m more focusing on speaking than reading and I can always refine that later anyway :man_shrugging:

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#11

I also did wanikani for a while and found it wasn’t for me.

There have been some great points on this thread, and I agree that it’s probably better to prioritize vocabulary study over kanji. That said, I felt my ability to recognize kanji was lagging a bit farther behind than my vocabulary for my liking, so I started searching for another option.

Recently I’ve been using kanji garden. What I like about it compared to wanikani:

  • they have something like a daily goal, but you can study beyond it, or say that you already know the kanji the lesson is about (so you don’t get stuck until its time to review stuff you already know before you can progress)

  • they have their own order, but you can pick specific kanji you want to “learn ahead”

  • they tell you which radicals/components give the kanji its meaning and reading (or if none of them do), as well as the etymology of the kanji

  • when reviewing readings they give you a word and ask how the kanji is read in that word (that means you won’t test all the readings each study session, but they do show all of them after each review so you can self-examine if you want)

  • at the end of the review you can change the result (to correct if you knew the answer and just mistyped or misclicked, or to wrong if you decide you are not so sure about the kanji after all)

Overall I’m pretty satisfied with it so far. It’s not really a companion to bunpro, but if you find nothing else that works for you it may be worth a try.

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#12

We don’t know much about Bunpro’s own plans for kanji study, so it seems like using an additional tool is inevitable for now :sweat_smile:

You already have a headstart knowing the words, so remembering kanji used in those words first sounds like an efficient approach.

I try to focus on phonetic components first. That helps with reading, if not with writing. To take an example from the beginning of N5 deck, if you remember that 険 剣 検 験 all share a けん component, and you remember that there’s a word きけん, then you can read/guess 危険 even without specifically identifying the second kanji - that sort of idea.

Personally I SRS in two directions (using JPDB): reading words, and mentally writing kanji based on prompts like “ケン けわしい”. I’m not using anything as grand as WK mnemonics, just bare-bones associations with phonetic components that are not even a complete sentence.

You could quiz yourself on writing kanji with a variety of apps, or skip it altogether, whichever works better. I liked a mobile app that prompts you to write a kanji based on words where it is used, just didn’t want to use a second app.

#13

My preference would also be to use something in Bunpro just to keep things simple, but until then I guess it’s either don’t bother or use something else as a companion app/method. Kanji Garden, which was posted above, seems interesting. I’m always open to new ways of learning :rofl:

#14

There are many ways to do it, but if you want to make headway with japanese you need to find some way of tackling Kanji that works for you. You can study kanji meanings first, then to vocabulary, you can study each kanji with readings individually, you can study vocabulary and analyze relevant kanji from there, you can go wanikani (which is a mix) or just learn them as you encounter them.

Personally I finished wanikani a couple years ago and for me that helped immensely in reaching reading proficiency. It has its flaws and costs a lot of time, but I feel like there is no way to reaching reading proficiency without investing a lot of time in the first place, so you’ll just have to pick your poison.

Writing I studied initially, but I gave up on it once I felt comfortable enough in understanding stroke orders. You’ll just never do it, even in Japan (except writing an address), so unless you enjoy doing it and don’t mind the time investment I would not bother

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#15

Hi! I’m a beginner too, so I’ll speak only from my experience. I found that WaniKani was frustrating at first and a bit overwhelming, but once I started “trusting the process” it became much easier. It was also easier for me to learn max 10 a day because it would start to get overwhelming, unless there were words that used the same reading like 米国 and 全国 then it made sense to easily add those to my bag. Oh and don’t skip out on the sample sentences on the last step of each Kanji… This really helped me understand the Kanji and Vocabulary better. I also highlighted the sentence and had Google “read outloud”, which was nice to re-enforce.

Overall, WaniKani so far has been one of my better investments and something I look forward to every day.

I also recommend maybe learning the most common Kanji you can use to write sentences. Things like he, she, I, you, we, days of the week, some common verbs, and some animals and objects. This was instrumental for me in “getting” how it all came together.

Then I just took 30 minutes each day writing sentences in ChatGPT and asked it to tell me in English what I wrote. It is the next best thing to having a real person read your sentences. This will help re-enforce the Kanji in your mind, the reading and vocabulary all at once. For me, it works anyway…

That’s been helping me so far with Kanji!

Good luck.

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#16

Thank you to everyone who replied! This community is very helpful and I enjoyed reading what everyone said worked for them.

After thinking about my current goals, I have decided I will try out making my own Anki cards. I’ve made a deck with a few cards and can add more as I feel like I learn those ones to study at my own pace. I think that if that doesn’t work out for me, I will try Kanji Garden or WaniKani.

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#17

I personally started with WaniKani but I realized it’s not really working out for me, because it’s “read only” and I ended up mixing similar kanjis and forgetting details easily (and I’m too lazy to bother with setting up user scripts).

I ended up using Kanji Study app for Android (I bought access to all kanji and SRS) for writing practice, with 5 new kanjis a day as a goal. I set it up to only give me meanings and readings during review tests, so I always have to just write a kanji. I also decided that if I get 10+ kanjis wrong, I’m not learning any new kanjis that day to not overdo it.

So now I’m basically learning kanji meaning, supported by reading (but I’m not really trying to learn reading). Then I just learn kanji reading when I encounter it in vocab elsewhere. So far so good.

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#18

That’s a hunch from my limited experience, but I hardly see any point in “learning” kanji on a per-character basis, unless you find genuine interest in the process, have a specific need for handwriting, or want to add some “linguistic flair” to your studies. But assuming goals lean toward efficiency and practical use of Japanese (be it input or output), learning vocab and picking up recurring readings on the fly as I encounter new words has proved to be a much better and reasonable approach for me. That assumes you’ve built decent recognition skills to spot radicals and phonetic compounds, or at least you can confidently rely on your visual memory (RTK did wonders in that regard for me, but since you seem to have some exposure with Chinese characters you maybe don’t really need it, esp if mnemonics aren’t your thing).

By the very nature of kanji, compound words can possess quite a handful of possible readings, and there are thousands of words AND kanji. Not to mention some readings are context-dependent. That’s where I see how pointless individual kanji “learning” is. Personally, I’m better off avoiding this headache and just “learn” kanji in native context.

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