Hey y’all! I’ve been noticing that as I level up, I’ve been sometimes forgetting previous kanji. Sometimes I’ll see a kanji with a lot (like 3, or 4) of radicals and remember it by those. Then when I learn larger, encompassing “radicals” for sections of the kanji (allowing me to break it down to maybe 2 “radicals”), I’d immediately try figuring out the kanji via the larger bits, and somehow manage to forget my original mnemonic and recall of the kanji. My most recent example of this was 院 and 完. Does anyone else have this issue? Is there a way to mitigate it?
Thanks
Been there, done that!
It gets especially hard for me when I have to distinguish words where one kanji is the same and another only differs by one radical, like 陽気 and 湯気
However, it does get better with practice
May these problems not discourage you from continuing!
Best of luck with your studies!
Yeah it’s absolutely normal, I think the neurological reason is that with tools like WaniKani we teach ourselves to remember kanji in a very specific, unique and somewhat artificial way. We train ourselves to recognize a shape in one specific context.
A few points in no particular order:
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Knowledge of kanji is not a binary thing, it’s not you know it or you don’t, it’s many shades of knowledge from “I think I’ve seen this before somewhere or maybe something vaguely like it” to “I instantly know what this character means and how it’s pronounced without even having to think about it”. As such it’s not like you will be “done” with kanji like 院 any time soon, it will take a lot of practice and a lot of reading to really familiarize yourself with it.
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The knowledge you gain form tools like WaniKani is always going to be a bit artificial and you have to actually start reading real Japanese to turn this theoretical knowledge into a practical one. It’s like the difference between memorizing a cooking recipe and actually cooking. Your brain will have to start associating these symbols with real-world usage, not just clinical drills on a website. WaniKani is the first step, not the whole story.
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Forgetting or mixing up internal components of a kanji is normal, especially if you don’t practice writing the kanji. Eventually you start having a sort of photographic memory of the character as a whole and sometimes with accompanying kanji/hiragana in words. So the fact that you forget that a sub-part of a kanji happens to be shared with another kanji is actually normal, you don’t actually need to remember that to read Japanese.
“To understand”, in English, is made up of “under” and “stand” but you never actually think about that. The decomposition may only be somewhat useful to someone learning the word for the first time. Similarly the relationship between 院 and 完 is not really something that matters in the long run, it’s more useful to be able to quickly scan and identify common collocations like 病院 and 完璧 (i.e. zooming out, not in). -
If you really want to “fix” this issue, start handwriting the kanji. Then you’ll have to remember all the tiny details. Many (most?) people don’t bother doing that, and it can become a massive time investment, but if you like it it can be good practice.
I built an anki deck with all WaniKani kanji (and a few hundreds more now) that I use for this specific purpose: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/610839770
But again, there’s really no need to do that if you want to focus purely on recognition.