Just wondering how everyone else has gone about learning the meanings of Kanji???
As when I first started learning Japanese I learnt the Hiragana and Katakana and then just started learning as much vocab as I could remember and sentences that involved that vocab…
However, I have now come to realise how much easier it will be going forward with learning Japanese (especially Kanji words) if I know the meaning of the kanji.
The past few months I have been learning from a few different Kanji courses, and probably got around 300 of them locked in my brain, but with a few of them I have been reviewing them for weeks and weeks and just can’t seem to remember them. I’m also finding it really hard to remember more kanji as they are just looking more and more complicated (more strokes), and I’m just getting confused.
So how did everyone else learn the meanings of Kanji?, or how are you currently learning them?
As of writing this reply I rarely find a kanji I don’t know in any given book / Wikipedia article (took me about 1 year and 3 months). So here’s how I see things (how I learned kanji) :
My first 1200-ish kanji came from words I knew and learned through kana. In fact, I advise you to always learn a word in hiragana then (after a couple of months) in kanji.
Although it’s not a necessity, I’d also advise writing each kanji a couple of times. It builds healthy habits when learning the harder stuff like 憂鬱 and 薔薇.
Don’t learn on’yomi and kun’yomi. Learn words that use those kanji and you’ll have a faster growth.
If you just can’t remember a kanji, it’s probably not relevant enough to your learning. So just don’t worry about it, and when you get more advanced and start reading you might run into it (if not, it was never relevant to begin with)
When you’re done with kanji (and you also have a good grasp on grammar and vocab) start reading right away to reinforce what you know. This ties in to advice #5.
Regardless if you’re doing RTK or not, you still have to always learn the words you know in kanji to make sure you know them properly.
I know I haven’t talked about the meanings of kanji that much, and that’s because rather than that, try giving each kanji a story and a word associated with it. I did a little experiment a couple of months ago where I would learn some RTK kanji with the stories on kanjikoohi and some without any story; although the ones without a story had fewer strokes, the ones that had stories stuck to my brain instantly.
I’ve recently started writing out the Kanji I’ve learnt/learning, as I figured it might help me remember them a bit better, as I found it helped with remembering the hiragana and katakana.
I’ll see about getting the RTK book/s, isn’t there 3 volumes???
With the on’yomi/kun’yomi I was thinking of creating a memrise course where I have 5/10 words for each reading of a kanji, that way I should remember all the on’yomi and kun’yomi easily, hopefully.
At what level do you think I’d need to be to start reading?, as I’ve just finished JLPT N5 vocab and starting to get through N4 vocab.
Any advice on where to find reading material at that level?
There are 3 volumes, yes, but you only need the 1st one (and maybe the 3rd). The 2nd one is just a rehash of the 1st book but you get the readings which you can find online anyway; and the 3rd book only teaches things outside 常用漢字 (regular use kanji), and from my experience you’ll run into a couple dozens of these in years of reading, so it’s not worth the effort to learn most of them using RTK in my opinion.
5/10 words might be a bit too much, one or 2 words/kanji (one for the on reading and the other for the kun reading) should be fine, you don’t have to learn every reading at once. Generally, you might want to avoid learning a lot of words with similar kanji and different readings, because you might get confused.
As for reading (and listening), I’d say focus on N5 and N4 grammar first and then read/listen to anything that’s intended for natives asap. You might find it tedious (and it is for the first months), but you’ll improve much faster this way. Some people recommend easy manga like Doraemon and whatnot, but I found it much more rewarding and entertaining (not to mention way better kanji practice) to start with romance manga and dramas (yes, I like romance, don’t judge me). There’s really no barrier of entry when it comes to content because said content is not meant for learners, it’s for natives, so initially you’ll have a hard time regardless of your JLPT level. But if you take the “Doraemon approach” , just be aware that you won’t get to practice kanji that much whilst reading; but if you read something meant for, say, teens, you’ll have furigana to help you out.
So stuff you enjoy > stuff that is “easy” because you do it more often, and consistency = improvement. At least that’s what worked for me.
