I’m relatively new to learning kanji, and I’ve been using Wanikani for a few weeks now. While I’m making progress, I find myself struggling to retain some of the more complex characters and their readings. I’m curious to know what strategies and techniques you all have found most effective in your kanji learning journey.
Specifically, I’m interested in any tips on memorization techniques, mnemonic devices, or perhaps even certain patterns or mnemonics that have helped you remember particularly tricky kanji. Additionally, I’d love to hear about any supplementary resources or study methods you’ve found beneficial in conjunction with Wanikani.
I used the one called “Basic Kanji Book” - it introduces Kanji details and study.
As a lower intermediate 日本語生徒 (Japanese student), Kanji are still a massive struggle but
I understand several hundred. As you will read in other posts, reading is both the goal and main learning method.
I recommend using a book or other web resources / Youtube to learn 30+ of the easiest Kanji,
and then take it from there.
Hiragani are necessary and Katakana too.
in my opinion mnemonics is wanikanis biggest selling point and the thing that makes wanikani work for me more than any other way of kanji study I tried until now.
My advice is to carefully read the radical mnemonics wanikani gives you because these will be used to form little stories and reoccurring jokes.
For a lot of kanji I look what radicals they are made of and if they remind me of the mnemonic for the kanji.
I’ll second this, but I want to add that in my experience the Wanikani mnemonics aren’t always the best so I recommend making your own mnemonics based on the radical breakdown WK has provided if you find that their mnemonics don’t suit you for whatever reason.
As now I got why Kanji is so popular as Kanji provides a means of representing complex and abstract concepts in a concise and easily understandable way. Many Japanese words have multiple meanings depending on the context, meaning kanji is necessary to clarify and differentiate between these meanings in a way unseen in phonetic scripts.
I became an early riser last year. Turns out I just have to uninstall all mobile games, Facebook, instagram, snapchat, youtube app.
Set auto shutdown for all computer games at 22:00, setup blocking for youtube, news sites, Wikipedia after a certain time, freedom.to is what I use for this.
My sleep Cycle is way better once I stopped doing fun stuff at 3am, then trying to catcup all the sleep during the weekend. Who would have thunk it.