Hi all!
After I’d learned Hiragana and Katakana, I remembered- wasn’t there a third character script, called… Kanji? I looked it up in my curiosity, and saw that it was an essential part of fluently learning Japanese, but soon discovered that it contained over 2,000 (general use) characters.
Yeah.
So after a few hours of crying, I regained hope and went to search for a method to learn all these characters.
Remembering the Kanji by Heisig has allowed me to get a foundation of how Kanji is written, and has gotten me started on actually learning the characters. It includes all the basic-use Kanji with mnemonics on how to remember them. So if any of you want to start tackling Kanji, I strongly recommend RTK as your launchpad.
It’s proven very helpful to me so far, and I hope it’ll help some of you as well.
Thanks for reading through this, and good luck with your language learning journey!!
ありがとう！！
they are more than 2,000; more than 10,000 even, but there is that governmental list with all the kanji in use and that is 2834 or something (although I think that is very little and does not take into account various specialised parts of the Japanese language)
and if you want to learn Kanji (and Heisig makes no sense to you, because you’re not US-American), leanr Hanzi and traditional - many Kanji followed the simplification of Chinese character made in mainland China, but some are Hanzi in their older form
Thank you! That seems to be an awesome supplement. Tonbo, you just reminded me:
If anyone is studying this and uses Anki, I’m using this deck as a learning supplement: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1862058740
I might start using both of these simultaneously to really cement them, and it’s not a bad idea for other learners. Thanks again @Tonbo!
Here’s a Memrise course I created that’s optimized by presenting the 555 kanji from 2001.Kanji.Odyssey book series in RTK order. Remembering the Kanji Optimized pt 01. Idea is you spend 1/4 the time to learn 1/4 the kanji in the book that accounts for 75% of kanji frequency in Japanese text, then learn basic grammar and vocabulary using these kanji before going back for more.
+1 to Nukemarine guide, the kanji course is sorted better in terms of usefulness and in easy to manage chunks, if I were to start over I would certainly follow Nukemarine’s guidance as well.
Also I frequently use this: https://hochanh.github.io/rtk/rtk1-v6/index.html
Whenever I forget a Kanji I go there and refresh the whole (set) with this particular radical element (as in the Kanji that comes immediately after or before the one I forgot)
Agreed. For new learners (like me), who are using the RTK, there is also another RTK course, which is a nice, well done course, but stops at about RTK Kanji #200. Being able to go on to #2000+ is clearly better (as as far as I can see.lol) I wonder if the iamwillow person found the other RTK V1 course and decided to concentrate his/her efforts elsewhere.
iamwillow went MIA in October I see, too bad.
You can continue on another course (by ignoring all words in the levels up to the point you reached on the previous course).
RTK part of SGJL material is already completed, since SGJL has been around for so many years, and Nukemarine has been around the Japanese scene longer than Heisig himself. I would go ahead and continue with SGJL 03 - Remembering the Kanji + KO2k1 pt 1.
