I’ve decided that I want to learn how to write the 2100 kanji that Japanese kids learn in school. I know that it’s not necessary, but I enjoy practicing, and I think it would be a great challenge. I have a book for elementary school children, and I’m starting at the first grade.
Today I wrote twenty kanji ten times each. I’m not sure how much practicing I should do every day. 20*10=200 doesn’t seem like nearly enough to ever make any real progress.
I would appreciate any suggestions. I chose a book because I can’t use my phone, tablet, or laptop while studying. I get sidetracked way too easily.
Get one of those little white boards, and write each kanji until you`re sick of it. Japanese kids end up writting kanji so many times in repetition, and then again normally when writting anything.
You need to write them so many times it feels like a waste to use paper!
+1 to the whiteboard suggestion! If you go that route, I’d suggest trying to get one of the ones with a grid on it, so you can mimic the effect of the big kanji-writing boxes that students have on their practice pages (maybe some washi tape as a border to help with that?). I also use an app for elementary school students called Kanji Toon - it’s definitely childish, but it’s been a big help for me!
learning to write the basic parts that make up kanji in the right order and neatly. This is mostly practice, and working on one kanji helps with all the others. My main suggestion here is to make sure you have a decent pen that can write thin lines in an easy free flowing way (i.e. not a biro); I like the uniball micro pens personally.
being able to recall from memory the kanji you need to write a word, plus the exact components in that kanji and their arrangement. The traditional native speaker approach here is a lot of drill and repetition, which will be the approach your book is aiming at. Most second language learners find that this doesn’t scale well to 2000 kanji, so a spaced repetition system and mnemonics like WK uses are more effective – except you want to practice from kanji keyword to “write the character” and from word hiragana + meaning to “write the word”. Unfortunately WK seems to like to use the same component name sometimes for bits of the character that are written differently, so you’ll need to watch out for that.
Instead of doing 1 set of writing each kanji 10 times, I recommend doing 3 sets of writing each kanji 2-4 times instead, maybe switching to a different sheet of paper for your last set to test your recall. It works out to roughly the same amount of time spent, but it’s just higher quality study imo - when I practice the same kanji over and over, I find my brain starts to switch off.
When I first started writing practice, I did it in conjunction with my wanikani reviews by just writing each kanji review I got a few times. There’s a userscript which adds the stroke order to the information under the kanji for convenience.
As for stationary, the kuru toga 0.5 mechanical pencil and kokuyo b5 grid paper combination has treated me so well and just makes for an incredibly satisfying writing experience. I highly recommend!
Here’s what it looks like for reference. Good luck with your studies
The white board is a must imo. I personally don’t really like writing the same kanji time and time again, because I feel like I’m fooling myself into thinking that I’m learning, when in reality my brain decided to restart windows and I don’t retain any info. whatsoever :')
What I like to do, is to analyze carefully the radicals in the new kanji, and then when I’m doing SRS I write the kanji on the white board before seeing the right answer, and then look for any mistakes. If there are mistakes, I just try to analyze why the mistake happened, which radical I should have put instead, and so on. If the mistakes persist, I try using different color markers or something to tell my brain that it has to be different, but normally I don’t need it. I don’t study like this with WK, because it’s training recognition, nor recall. I think it may work with KW. I also did study like that in the past with memrise and anki decks, and now I’m doing it with the “Your name” deck on jpdb.
So far, it’s what worked the best for me.
Also, you’ll definitely have to practice writing kanji alot, but I’ve found that after getting the early kanji down pat, stroke order becomes pretty intuitive. I went through Genki 1/2 and Tobira in college, which means I had to learn to write all of those kanji by memory. At the point I’m at in Wanikani now, pretty much all of my kanji lessons are characters I never learned in college, but because I know the stroke order for similar kanji or the same radicals, 9 times out of 10 I can intuit the stroke order. (I still use the stroke order script mentioned above for the other 1 out of 10 times)
I’d recommend the whiteboard, not sure why, but I’m convinced writing so much kanji on a whiteboard somehow improved my handwriting in a way I wouldn’t have accomplished on paper (maybe that’s total nonsense).
Also, I’d recommend writing short sentences that use the kanji so you can practice writing the kanji in context rather than just being able to write it after having written it ten times previously.
Use an anki deck. Otherwise you will just forget them without enough exposure. (But you will forget them anyway unless you write everyday). This is the best one I’ve found: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/759825185
I recommend using Heisig’s remembering the kanji and pair it with kanji koohi website which is free to use.
Reason 1:
Heisig gives you the basic rules and builds up from simple to most complicated kanji. The most important thing is he gives you the method to understand the logic behind writing kanji. After 700-800 kanji you will own the intuition to write correctly any kanji without having to fill in pages and pages of writing practice. He claims that you don’t need to write a kanji more than ten times and from my own experience I can say that it worked perfect for me.
Reason 2:
You can use the SRS of kanji koohi website for writing practice and this way you will practice more the kanjis that give you trouble.
This method worked really well for me. After I reached 60 level in wanikani I started Heisig/kanji koohi and focused on writing. I can now read & write all 2100 kanji fluently.
They have add-ons, one of which is SRS. So I have been studying the WK kanji and set the SRS to quiz me on stroke order (I get readings, then if I’m stuck I tao the screen to get meaning and if I’m really stuck there is an option that shows the greyd out kanji so you can write on top of it). So the system rates you between 1 and 5 (1 meaning you completely forgot it and 5 you got it right) to get the correct SRS level.
I bought a galaxy tab to use it, the thing is: writing the actual kanji with a normal size requires finer motor coordination so although I think the app helps memorize stroke order, you’ll still need to practice on paper depending on your goal
