The Kanji Thread (How do *you* study kanji?)

Japanese
#1

Hello!

As Bunpro users are mostly here to learn grammar, we spend a lot of time chatting about grammar and how to learn it. But when I started learning Japanese I was waaayyy more interested in kanji than things like “direct objects” and “the genitive case”, so here is a thread to talk all about kanji. What are they? Which ones do you like? How do you study them? And more!

In the future I’m planning on posting a kanji (or kanji related thing) of the week, to keep the ball rolling and maybe share some info you may not already know. For the moment, I am going to just kick the thread off with a general question:

How do you study kanji?

In my case, I mainly focused on vocabulary SRS and generally getting input so learnt to read kanji via exposure. I could never get on well with mnemonics and couldn’t click with popular systems like making up components or using English keywords. I’ve done writing practice on and off and I am currently and playing around with wiritng practice again, can’t say it is my favourite but it has its place. These days I am happy to rely on exposure when reading to pick up new kanji, and I will occasionally dip into my favourite kanji dictionary for further reference (新字源 from 角川).

If you’d like to see someone being succesful using a method that is completely different to the one I used then check out @Asher 's amazing old thread on his heroic kanji writing journey here.

Anyway, enough rambling. How do you study kanji? What works for you? Any regrets? Any tips? Has how you study changed over time?

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#2

This is a totally valid approach, but as someone who studies kanji in terms of their radicals (on WaniKani), I’ve always wondered: if you don’t incorporate knowledge of radicals into your kanji study, how do you deal with encountering unknown kanji during immersion? In my experience, having knowledge of radicals can help me make educated guesses about how a new-to-me kanji might be read, or at least help me figure out how to look it up on WaniKani or in a radical-aware dictionary. If I were learning kanji without learning radicals, I suppose I could just draw every unknown kanji I encountered on the sci.lang.japan website, but that would be fairly inefficient.

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#3

Good question. If you know enough kanji then your brain sort of automatically breaks them down into components without trying past a certain point. It is just a form of pattern recognition. So if I see a kanji which is new to me then I instantly know if it is made up of things I already recognise or not. It is fairly rare to come across kanji where I don’t recognise the components, unless it is archaic. Generally kanji I am meeting for the first time will have furigana on so it’s safe to say even natives wouldn’t be sure of it either. If the kanji is especially interesting and I can’t immediately work out why it means what it means or why it is pronounced the way it is pronounced then I may look it up in a dictionary to see how to was formed; a lot of the time it is relatively clear though.

For me this just never worked nor appealed to me since the breakdowns are made up for the sake of the mnemonics, as are the names given to the parts. I believe Wanikani also splits kanji up into many pieces when they would naturally be broken into, say, two parts. The idea of learning all the extra mnemonic information like that felt more like a barrier than a shortcut. Having said that, I know it works well for many many people so I think it is a personality thing. I think I would have been more open to a system that uses the “real” components of kanji to teach it via that sort of method.

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#4

My kanji learning has been all over the place since my work has required me to learn a fair amount of hanja and Literary Sinitic, and my background is in linguistics so I’ve been more interested in learning about specific etymologies and the general evolution of orthographies. So, when I got down to learning kanji a lot of it was just trying to find equivalencies between what I already knew and the modern Japanese versions/the nuances between the two, and then filling in the gaps through Wani Kani and sites like https://www.kakimashou.com/

I’m also super interested in learning more kanji that have fallen out of use/antiquated stylings of Japanese (spec. 1900~1950ish), so if anyone has any resources I’d greatly appreciate it!

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#5

At first, I studied them mostly at university, the basics of stroke order, the first 50-100

My 2nd year of university when I was studying abroad in Japan was when we really picked up the pace and knowledge.

Now that I live in Japan, I do daily WaniKani (nearly level 34) , reading manga and handouts that land on my desk. I also focus way less on writing kanji outside of when I’m writing example sentences for Bunpro.

I kinda regret letting my writing ability slip so much and now it’s limited to writing my girlfriend’s name, basic common kanji and also my address and work address. (AKA the important stuff :wink: )

Outside of WK, I know how to read lots of other kanji purely from living in Japan

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#6

I use Wanikani, currently level 31. I do it every day. I figured if I threw 20-30 minutes at the kanji problem for a couple of years I’d get pretty far. Just over the halfway mark now which is motivating. I hardly ever use the mnemonics though, like other have said before me in this thread, they kinda suck. Wanikani without a redo button is also just unusable, so I use an addon to get one.

I also just read a lot (about an hour every day). Currently I read books with furigana, but when my sentence parsing is at a higher level then I will start on books without furigana. Currently reading books with furigana but with relatively difficult grammar (currently 君の膵臓を食べたい). I already have a big list of books that don’t have furigana like that that I purchased for my kindle which I want to read. Even reading with furigana solidifies known kanji decently, though obviously not as well as reading without it.

The idea of dropping furigana scares me shitless though. I come across so many kanji I don’t know while reading already in furigana books. I tried reading a page of an easy furigana-less book (level 26 on learnnatively) and ran into a lot of issues already. I even miss a lot of kanji that I’m supposed to “know” already. I feel like I’ll have to read like 5 books without being able to enjoy them before I
can properly read books without stumbling over every kanji.
I’m willing to put in time and effort to learn kanji but man will I be happy when I can just read.

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#7

The idea of learning all the extra mnemonic information like that felt more like a barrier than a shortcut

I’m on the same boat as you. It is useful sometimes, but (in the context of WaniKani) I found myself struggling more to remember the mnemonic and which part of the several words sentence was the actual meaning. Other times I’d confuse mnemonics from two different kanji, so I felt that memorizing the thing itself was less of a hassle. I realize we can create our own mnemonics, but then that’s another step to something I’m already struggling with :sweat_smile:

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#8

Drawing Kanji has always been a self-care type of relaxing activity for me. It was my favorite part of my time learning Chinese.

I spent years learning Chinese but I remember nearly nothing.

I took 4 years of Chinese, two full year HS classes online and 4 semesters in University. In HS I wasn’t the best student, and instead I would draw characters into a dictonary to look them up for tests and stuff. In Uni I couldnt shortcut my way through anymore, so I refined my jank knowledge of stroke order and radicals and ended up being known as the person who could draw characters the best in class. By Chinese 202, our teacher was just passing us all along (he just wanted us to show up, learn something, and he was happy) so I never got more than like 200 characters in. The knowledge has been extremely helpful when leadning Kanji, I know common radicals and have a good rough idea of stroke order.

I am a strong visual learner, mneomics do nothing for me. WaniKani and I just do not vibe together. I prefer to draw Kanji to memorize.

In contrast, I am very weak at ordering vowels correctly. I was like this as a kid learning how to spell (freind or friend? neighbor or neabour?) and it carried into Chinese (ai? ia? ou? uo???) and of course Japanese as I honestly can’t tell you which words have the extra u’s in them or not, I just guess.

SO, knowing my strengths and weakness, this is how I do Kanji:

  1. Using the Kanji Study app on Andriod, I added almost all N4 Kanji, 3 a day using the SRS. Skipped nearly all N5, Kanji of which I knew the English meaning + at least one Japanese reading. This step is just for recognizing the Kanji.

  2. Having finished adding all desired N4 and N5 Kanji with the SRS, I have now gone back and begun writing them in pairs. I use the app study function to test myself on writing. The system lets me know immediately when I get a stroke wrong. When I’m short on time or just starting a batch, I’ll run through each Kanji once and see what I know. When I have more time, I’ll check the “add quizzes for missed items” box and draw every Kanji until I get them right. My goal is not actually to be able to draw them from memory on pen and paper; instead, I use drawing as a way to get familiar with recognizing Kanji really fast in the wild and making sure I can differentiate them from similar characters.

  3. Bringing it all together. My brain has a really big disconnect when it comes to actually seeing a Kanji and reading it with its correct sound, especially (ironically) on-readings. My solution to this is … I’m just going to need to read a lot, lol. Learning the readings through flash cards and tests doesn’t seem to work for me. Maybe after the 50th lookup I’ll finally remember that 映画 means “えいが” and not “movie”, as an example.

This is what I’ve found works best for me after much trial and error. I only spend about 10-15 minutes on Kanji Study a day and feel like I’ve made great progress since I started 80 days ago.

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#9

Simplicity is king. I get all of my words from immersion that are split into two decks: vocab and kanji. So whenever I get a new word, I see if the kanji has/hasn’t been harvested, then I add them into my kanji deck.

I used to have a goal of 10 new kanji per day and would immerse until I reached my goal but stopped once I hit 2000, as it gets a lot harder to add newer kanji using that method.

But for reviewing them, I guess the general meaning of the kanji, I don’t bother with on’yomi/kun’yomi as that’s given from the context of the vocab word that was harvested. Finally if I get it right or wrong, I write it out the kanji three times.

From my experience, just writing it down helps a lot in pointing out small differences between kanji and you can see relationships where you otherwise wouldn’t have done so easily.

In terms of how long this takes per session can range from 30-45 minutes per day when you’re in the thick of it. But once you hit that 2000 kanji threshold, it’s more like 10-15 minutes as I get probably 3-5 new kanji per day via immersion.

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#10

When I started learning japanese, I used a radical and then a kanji deck on anki. Whenever I finished the radicals and was looking at kanji only, I would write them in a math notebook, but I wouldn’t pay much attention at the stroke order, I was learning its meanings, but writing them down helped them stick for some reason.
Right now I’m being a bit more strict with it and started all over (of course I skip the ones I’ve seen a million times) using a 漢字検定 deck. I’m slowly going through it everyday.
Honestly if you don’t like kanji, I think it could be a waste of time. I enjoy writing them and I find it relaxing so I just keep doing it everyday.

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#11

I do my daily dose of words in the vocab deck, write their kanji in AnkiDroid, then practice them alongside the kana. then rinse and repeat

What helps remembering them? Definitely not SRS. Okay, SRS is important but SRS itself won’t be of use if the kanji isn’t ANCHORED to something that already exists in my memory, because then you will need extra efforts just to try remember something

How I proceed is making sure to understand the meaning of the components + doing mental associations. :smirk: The more stupid the association, the better (お皿. :grin:…)

おさら
おさら768×576 125 KB

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#12

Last time I put a lot of effort into studying kanji, I’d SRS them in the direction “reading + meaning” → “mentally draw it / trace with a finger in the air”.
Example prompts would be “カイ break こわす”, or “ソウ search”. For me it worked better than trying to remember which of several similar English keywords correspond to which of several kanji with similar meanings.
The main focus is on the phonetic component, if there’s one.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationships with mnemonics. I’d rather remember etymologies and not have any weird mnemonics in my long term memory, but especially for kanji with a very abstract etymology, a weird vivid unrelated image can work better.

Anyways, not actively studying or maintaining kanji now, hoping that once I start reading more, they will just all fall into place.

edit: reflecting on it more, my residual kanji knowledge seems to be quite context-dependent.
For example, reading a sentence about a book with a word 参考 in it, I don’t remember what 参 means specifically, but context immediately suggests さんこう, and that cross-checks with the same kanji used in some shrine visit-related words as さん, and also in まいる, and also, belatedly, there was a mnemonic that linked those three lines at the bottom to 三 さん.
This might not be the state to attempt a kanji test in, but good enough for reading.

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#13

Started by learning to draw kanji from english keyword for first 400-500. Then realized I was probably wasting time and switched to lazy kanji. All of this was in anki. My lazy kanji method rn is just having the kanji on the front of the card and stroke diagram/readings/words/meaning on the back. If I recognize the kanji (keyword/meaning) then I pass the card. I dont bother tracing or memorizing the readings (unless its part of the keyword, which ive been slowly changing from japanese to english for all cards). Never used mnemonics, wanikani, radical study, or memorizing readings. Readings and radicals come naturally with time, and memorizing the readings is pointless. I have like 2200 kanji in my anki, I just add them as I see them in vocab while I immerse (if Im not lazy)

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#14

  1. kanji damage ex Q: roll over, EN, TEN ころ＊がる
    A: 転 ころ＊がる something tumbles 自転車 bicycle

  2. no furigana on my vocab. I noticed my kanji got worse when I swithed to bunpro. For months I would hover over words in anki when I went back
    EX: EX Q 寿命が尽きるまで待っている
    A:寿命(じゅみょう)が尽(つ)きるまで待(ま)っている
    寿命：人生の長さ。

I read a blog post that said furigana on hover is OK for N5, and after that disable it. but it’s such a pain to set up innitially, and painful to give it up when starting N4 if your used to having it… I’m glad I never had furigana.

1 year after I ‘learned’ all the kanji. I switched to go the otherway. So I see 転 and if I say Ah that’s 転んだ it’s correct.

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