How to learn Kanji?

Japanese Language Kanji
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I have a question for everyone who doesn’t use Wanikani / Just Wanikani to learn Kanji. At the moment I’m not in the mood for SRS. After I’ve finished Japanese from Zero Vol. 1-5 and Genki 2 I will concentrate on Kanji for several weeks and would like to know how you learn Kanji / complete words with Kanji.

  • What are your learning methods?
  • Which textbooks / Apps do you use?
  • …
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2

I liked Wanikani for a while but I prefer jpdb to work only through the content I’m interested in. With the “learn kanji” setting active it makes you learn the kanji present in your vocabulary decks cards.

For the early/mid levels of WK though the WK selected kanji are easier to remember so I wouldn’t recommend to stop WK until you feel the need to focus your attention.

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Before I used WaniKani I just used Anki for this, but since you don’t want SRS:

  • Try Tadoku readers? They are all furigana’d but as you go up in level they stop doing it for earlier kanji (at least in the old versions I have access to).
  • There’s also Remember the Kanji but I know nothing about it
  • Any good and reputable textbook (I think the Tobira series especially does this) will come with endless kanji practice for you to do
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It is wanikani style “break kanji into components, assign them all keywords, come up with memorable stories and images to associate the keywords”. It does not teach readings or vocab: its idea is purely to get you to able to write each kanji from an English keyword prompt, as a foundation for later vocab study. The original book does not particularly suggest srs or drills, but almost everybody actually studying RTK these days uses SRS. My impression is that the author had a particularly vivid visual imagination which made the keyword to component keyword mnemonic associations easy for him, but that most people don’t have the same kind of visual memory he did: so we make up for it with SRS.

I find RTK tricky to recommend: it does what it sets out to do but I never found an effective way to tie that keyword-to-write-kanji into my study of the actual language. Plus if you don’t need to hand write Japanese it feels a bit like overkill.

I also did a bit of the traditional “write the kanji a bunch to learn it” study early on. There are various books you can get if you want to try this with rows of blank boxes next to a model written character for you to copy. This method IME works in the beginning but pretty rapidly hits a wall as you learn more complex and easily confused characters. But there’s an argument for starting this way so you know what the problem is that SRS and mnemonics are trying to solve :slight_smile:

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I think using Kanji in exercises is better for my learning Type. There are some in Japanese from Zero Vol. 3 - 5 and I also have the book Kanji from Zero Vol. 2, but These books don’t Cover all of the ~2000 jouyou Kanji.

Has someone used something like these books?

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/4893589733/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_2?smid=A10PEOUUGVDI2H&psc=1

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/4816369996/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_1?smid=A4UWO7U46DGDJ&psc=1

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/B0D1MW6CGL/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_5?smid=A3OJWAJQNSBARP&psc=1

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/B092QJR3CS/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_5?smid=A4UWO7U46DGDJ&psc=1

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/B0CT5WSW19/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_1?smid=A3OJWAJQNSBARP&psc=1

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/4816362053/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_6?smid=A4UWO7U46DGDJ&psc=1

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/4816366970/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_7?smid=A4UWO7U46DGDJ&psc=1

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I bought some of the books and will Tell you what I think about them.

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/4816369996?ref=ppx_pt2_mob_b_prod_image

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/B092QT8ZJ9?ref=ppx_pt2_mob_b_prod_image

https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/B0CT5WSW19?ref=ppx_pt2_mob_b_prod_image

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I read from reddit that this is an awesome book but unfortunately it’s not available in my country

This supplementary website is also useful (I made the ui!)

You can check how common the kanji is so it’s easier for you to quickly gauge its usefulness.
I think it’s more motivating to learn a kanji when you know how relevant it is.

and also it conveniently links to the most popular Kanji Dictionaries online so you can quickly check the most common words that uses a particular kanji. When you associate Kanji with words it helps remembering it better…

kanji-heatmap-usefulness-screenshot
kanji-heatmap-usefulness-screenshot1170×2162 197 KB

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Thanks for the links. Before I buy new books I will use the ones I already have First. But the Kanji Heatmap Looks interesting.

I decided to learn Kanji as vocabulary instead of the on and kun Reading. I’m now at Level 10 of Wanikani but I haven’t learned new Kanji and vocabulary for a Long Time because it got more and more difficult to remember the Kanji and the mnemonics. I Hope that writing and using the books will be a better learning method for me.

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You can also try this

An app that hopefully makes it more fun and convenient to pick up new Japanese vocab and grammar while enjoying your favorite songs.

13 second demo video

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