The best way to learn kanji is not online

This post is not about a particular world, but I often see people on various forums and such asking about some killer software app or website where they can learn, and memorize, kanji characters.

In my opinion, no such site or app exists, because the best, or only, way to learn kanji properly is to write each character out physically many, many, many times.

Before you scoff at the old fashioned concept of putting pencil to paper. let me explain. Kanji characters depend a lot on the stroke direction of each swash or line. (For that matter, some katakana characters do also: can you tell the difference between ソ　and ン?) Stroke order is not as important for reading comprehension, but can make a difference when you are writing kanji by hand. And I don't really know of a better way to learn these things than by writing out the characters repeatedly until you develop a muscle memory for how the characters should be written. You can't do that by typing.

If you live in an area near a Japanese bookstore, go and look for a 漢字練習帳　(かんじれんしゅうちょう　kanji renshuuchou) - a kanji practice notebook. These have pages with large grids that are perfect for practicing your kanji by hand. They're used by kids in elementary school in Japan. Of course you can always practice on any old piece of paper, but the notebooks are nice to write in.

You can use an online resource to organize your kanji study, but for practice and memorization? Do it by hand.

More than 1000 kanji required to read a newspaper

This page on Wikipedia Japan has listings by grades 1 through 6 of the kanji characters that are taught. The list has changed over time, but basically it's a total of more than 1000 characters (1016 for that list). To read a newspaper, you should know all of these characters. Even for manga you should know most of these characters. Here is another list, which also includes the kanji taught in junior high (grades 7 through 9 in US terms), organized by the number of strokes per character. I don't know how to write out a lot of these off the top of my head, but I can read them.

I haven't written a lot of Japanese (or any other language for that matter) out by hand recently, unless I'm writing an address on an envelope or something. I do most of my writing online, where I can easily look up kanji if needed. I am positive that's lead to a deterioration in internal kanji database. I know I'm not alone in this, because I often see Japanese people writing some very strange kanji online.

So, if you want to learn properly, write it out!

How I learned

In case you are thinking, "She's Japanese, how can she understand how it is for a non-Japanese to learn kanji", let me tell you how to learned all the kanji required to be learned by the 5th grade in a few months, when I was about 10!

I was born in the Tokyo area, and lived there until age 5, when my parents moved to London. I was already reading by that age (see my English Twitter page for a photo of me reading intently at around age 3 or 4...though I'm not sure if I was actually comprehending anything!), but of course mostly kana-base pictured books and such.

For the next 4 years, I attended regular schools in England and didn't learn much Japanese. Then we moved to the U.S., in the summer when I was age 10. My parents knew we'd be returning to Japan the next year, so they wanted to put me in the Saturday Japanese school.

My mother sat me down with a simple book, and told me to read. To her horror, she discovered that I could barely read at all. So, she had a correspondence course for overseas Japanese kids sent over - for grades 1 through 4. From June to September, she sat me down every day, making me go through the correspondence course. The kanji was especially difficult - she made me practice those characters, over and over and over again.

I really hated this...it was summer, and I wanted to be playing with my new friends! I remember threatening to jump out of the window of our 5th floor apartment several times. But my mother perservered. By the time September rolled around, the Japanese Saturday school was not sure that I could keep up with the other 4th grade level kids, but I could, just barely. (I hated going to that school anyway for other reasons, but that's another story.)

The next year, we did indeed return to Japan. Once again the regular elementary school near our new home wasn't sure that I was ready to jump into the 2nd term 5th grade, but they put me in anyway. I remember feeling very strange and foreign for the first few weeks, but after that I really had little problem. I could keep up fine with all the lessons. And that summer of intensive drilling by my mother was what brought me up to speed, despite all the grief I gave her. (One of these days I'll remember to thank my mom for that.)

So you see, I'm living proof so to speak that pencil-on-paper drilling really works! It's hard and boring, but really sticks.

*This post was inspired by this question on Ask Metafilter, where there are suggestions for online learning resources. I haven't tried any of them myself but maybe you'll find one there to suit you.

Comments

[zeptimius]

Do you know if there is a list online somewhere of the 2500 kanji most used in newspaper, ordered by frequency? The site http://jisho.org gives the 'newspaper ranking' for a given kanji, but not a list of kanji by this ranking.
I cross-referenced the first-grade kanji from the list you mention above with jisho.org, and found that some of them (like the kanji for 'shellfish') are ranked very low on the 2500 list.

[maki]

I don't know if such a list exists - I haven't found it online. It would not be a formal list, unlike the educational ones I've linked to. Generally speaking though, a general news item can be read with the kanji learned up to grade 6, supplemented by some specialized terminology kanji for, for instance the Nikkei Shimbun (for business and economics etc.) For all general reading the 1016 characters learned in grade school should be in anyone's kanji vocabulary.

[Eve]

Thank you SO MUCH for this post!

Having gone about learning Japanese purely by self-study, it's taken me a while to figure out that sitting down with my kanji book (which is, "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters," by Kenneth G. Henshall) and repeatedly writing out the kanji while memorizing the stroke order and then the various readings and meanings is truly the best way to learn. I think that the muscle memory you mentioned is especially important since I also have the problem of being able to read a kanji but then having no idea how to write it...

For some reason a lot of people seem to look down on the method of "rote memorization"... but it WORKS. My kanji book suggest various mnemonics to help remember kanji, and I've seen other kanji books that use pictures, but they never made that much sense to me and made it a lot more difficult than I think the basic task should be. I guess people have become used to thinking that everything should be quick and easy these days, from weight loss to learning languages...

Ah, I almost forgot, according to most sources it seems that there are 1945 "official" kanji that must be learned in order to be considered fluent.

[maki]

1945 makes sense, if you add the elementary school + junior high level kanji. (Keeping in mind that mandatory education in Japan ends at 15, or the 3rd year of junior high/middle school, though the vast majority of people go on to finish high school or or an equivalent vocational school at minimum.)

[Matt Brown]

I'd like to try one of those 1st-year renshuu books, but I don't have a Japanese bookstore near me. Is there an online store that has them? I don't have a problem buying from Amazon.jp, but I can't read well enough to select the book I need. :)

[yoko]

I wish my mom sat me down and forced me to learn kanji when I was ten! I went to Saturday Japanese school when I was a kid, too, and hated it. I faked my way through it, but I was so far behind that I despaired of ever learning Japanese properly.

I very much agree with Eve-- drilling is the only way to memorize kanji.

Now, after several classes under my belt, I kind of feel like Charly from Flowers for Algernon-- I look at the papers I wrote for these classes, and can't read them. If I'm not constantly reading and writing Japanese, it doesn't stick. Which frustrates me even more. :( I should re-commit to having the jouyou kanji memorized.

[Matt]

Yoko, the Flowers of Algernon comparison is beautiful! It brings tears to my eyes. I took 3 years of (fairly intensive) Japanese, and looking back at my writings from back then I feel exactly the same way!

[maki]

The first Matt: JBox.com has a lot of study aids for Japanese learners, and their site is all in English. Check out the list in the sidebar for their top sellers for example. Their prices are more than at Amazon JP but I guess that is the price to pay for English customer service from Japan :P

[maki]

yoko: those Saturday school were horrible, weren't they? I'm sure a lot of kids have bad memories of them... :/

[Matt Brown]

maki: Thanks so much. I will check it out. :)

[Loretta]

Whilst I have a long way to go before I can say I have fully learned the characters, know all the different meanings and their on & kun readings, I’m having a lot of success, and taking a great deal of pleasure, with learning how to actually write and recognise kanji using James Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji”

It’s a mnemonic method which relies on you making up and remembering stories. It’s not a method I would recommend for a small child, but for adults (particularly those who already use mnemonic methods and are comfortable and happy with metaphors and word association stories) it’s a very useful tool that, certainly for me, takes almost all of the drudgery and repetition away from kanji learning.
PDF samples of the book with the initial chapters can be found for free on the internet – I’d suggest trying to learn at least 200 kanji with this method using the samples before committing yourself to purchasing the books.
Personally, I find it takes me much longer to cut out and paste together a simple flash card of a kanji than to learn the kanji itself with this system.

[Lisaz]

maki, I cannot agree with you more. Same is true for Chinese characters. In fact, we have created a system to generate the handwriting worksheets for offline practice. Here is an example:

http://www.archchinese.com/sample_worksheet_stroke_sequence_diagonal.pdf

With some minor updates, we could create similar Kanji worksheets for Japanese learners.

[Dena]

I agree with this statement 100%. As a 日本語　の　学生, I learned kanji in my classes. Only when I started to master the line sequences did I really understand it. Writing them and understanding how the line sequences go also help a lot too when you need to use a kanji dictionary and need to look it up. But I really couldn't see some fast way to learn them online or memorize them like you would vocabulary.

[Philip Seyfi]

In my opinion the best way to learn kanji is in context. Whether you use a flashcard program (ex. my http://nihongoup.com/ game or Anki) or write them down on paper it's meaningless to learn all the readings of each kanji and move on. I think that it's much better to learn fewer readings and to concentrate on their uses in compounds instead. Then, when you'll see a compound word (which is the way the kanji are used most of the time) you won't think about each character's reading separately -- you'll read it as a whole.

[Rene Rencontre]

Of course you are right, you have to write the characters with your hands to learn it better and for the websites are not the place for this, may be I am just old fashioned :(

[Jenny]

Your story is the perfect example of why I feel Japanese is time consuming but not difficult. You know how it is for the rest of us English speakers, because you lived in English speaking countries.

I have those notebooks you mentioned and have been trying to get back into writing kanji myself. It gets boring after awhile, but at least I'm learning the proper way to write the kanji.

What helps me is I love to draw, and I feel writing kanji is like drawing. ;)

[Tiffany Harvey]

I'm going to 2nd the recommendation for Heisig's book, "Remembering the Kanji". I was able to get through the 2042 kanji in about 2.5 months with his book and the Reviewing the Kanji website (where you can record your mnemonic stories, and read others' stories). You learn how to recognize and write the kanji (in the correct stroke order), associating them with an English keyword - learning additional meanings and how to read them comes later.

[Rosina Price]

How did you do that? I have been looking for ages for a programme to write kanji stroke by stroke so I can make up booklets for my classes so they can have kanji practice books that follow my work scheme. Up till now I have been physically copying and then cutting and pasting from various commercial workbooks. Very time consuming and probaby breaking copyright law.Rosina

[俺さ。。。]

Nah, sorry, but rote drilling of Kanji is the absolute worst method for learning them. You ignore the logic of the characters and make a mount everest over a small hump of how difficult chinese characters really are. I used Heisig's remembering the kanji and then used the method to learn further kanji, and I've learned 4, 000 kanji in the last 6 months.

[俺さ。。。]

Also, someone else said they used paper flashcards for Remembering the Kanji, yeah, don't do that. Use Anki, an SRS: http://ichi2.net/anki
This is the site I've used to reach fluency at Japanese, which will take you through the whole process: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com
Furthermore, this site will give you great stories for all the kanji in RTK1 + 3: http://kanji.koohii.com

[London Caller]

This is so true. :)

The problem we face these days, is that we rely on modern technology too much.
Most people find it hard to go back to the traditional way, ie, learning by heart!

Kanji is not as simple as ABC, literally. You just can't spell it out like that.

[feloneouscat]

In our late 40's we started CD courses on Japanese. Sadly, I'm now in my 50's and can barely read kana, much less kanji :(

To be fair, learning at the age of 10 is far easier than at the age of 50 - not just new things, but language. Our brains are, literally, sponges at that age - they have yet to lateralize (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function). Beyond the age of 20, it IS far more rote memorization.

And to think I was a kid who never wanted to learn a foreign language! LOL

[Kabir Arora]

Very Nice Post!! And i completely agree with it.. I am currently living in japan and studying Japanese.
For those who are looking, let me tell you in a month or so, you can cover about 300 Kanjis easily. There are a couple of books I use which are especially helpful
For the basic 500 kanjis, try getting your hands on Elementary Kanji 1 & 2, the pdf of these can be found somewhere online
After these, you can move onto Intermediate Kanji 1 & 2; completing all of these would take somewhere between 3-6 months, but they give great practice and the best part is that the Elementary books are somewhat in English, so not easy to understand with useful writing exercises :)
I accidentally landed here searching for some useful Japanese expressions myself, and I finding it a very interesting place to know many things :))

[Kori]

I'm a little torn here. I half agree but then again I have to disagree. While memorizing each character stroke by stroke is an excellent way to learn the character, it is not by any means the only way. And in fact, doing that alone is going to screw you over.

Most English speaking people, and maybe even Japanese natives, who are studying Japanese probably are not aware (at least when they are beginning) that there are radicals and components that make up each character.

They memorize each character for what it looks like and can't seem to gather any meaning from it at all because they memorized it by writing it stroke for stroke. And this simply doesn't work - it leaves people, like you, feeling frustrated and hopeless and gives a complete lack of explanation as to why that character means what it does.

For instance, I could tell you that 惑 (delusion) is made up of 戈 (spear) and 口 (mouth), which make 或 (possibility), with 心 (heart) on the bottom. Knowing these radicals I created the mnemonic for myself, "When there are many possibilities in the heart you feel like you're trapped in delusion." And since I know this Kanji's meaning, I can easily pull compounds off the top of my head such as 惑星 (planet, or "delusion-star") or 惑う (まど・う, to be puzzled). I have tons of analysis like these on my blog here.

My point is that I most certainly didn't waste my time writing each character down to remember how it looked or what it meant. I spent time FIRST learning radicals and components and then seeing how Kanji are built together. Then I used Kanji I'd learned to learn vocabulary terms at the same time. And to be honest, is there even a real-life application for writing the Kanji anymore, other than for artistic purposes? Everything is sent through the internet or is printed from a machine.

But of course, to each their own, and if writing out characters over and over and over again helps you (it never did for me), go for it.

[maki]

Not sure who exactly you are addressing in your comment, but I never said that you should not know the meaning of radicals. They are a great way to get the essence of what a character means, especially when you are not familiar with it. However, I stand by my opinion that the best way to learn kanji characters properly is by writing them out. People may not write as much by hand anymore but that is not the point.

[Rachel]

First of all, I have to say that I definitely agree with the idea of writing kanji. Not only does stroke order differentiate one character from another, but by writing you also develop muscle memory, making it easier to remember the kanji and to see how more complicated kanji can be made up of or include simpler kanji. Now, one thing I don't necessarily agree is the idea of learning all of the meanings and readings for a kanji. (I know it wasn't mentioned in the article, but I've seen it in the comments). I really don't think it's useful, or even sensible. Japanese people don't remember all of the readings. You don't even do that for a word in English, or Spanish, or whatever your native language is. Take the word "down". There are so many different ways that the word could be used, depending on context, but when you read the word "down", you don't think of all of those meanings. You just think of what you need to know for that situation. The same should go for kanji: don't worry about learning every meaning and word it could be used in. Just understand the basic idea behind the kanji, and only think about what reading to use based on the vocabulary word in context.

[JGeeks]

I agree with this article to an extent. I do agree that at some point a leaner simply has to put the time and effort into memorizing kanji. You are correct — there's no easy way to do that, no quick solution. Just some good old fashioned hard work.

But that's only part of the picture. Kanji also must be learned in context. Simply reading a lot while studying kanji will help with this a lot, or at least it's helped me. The two combined put new kanji into my vocabulary and then demonstrate to me how they are used.

I don't know if I would dismiss technology too much. Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun is a great game for the Nintendo DS — in which players can learn kanji by writing them with the system's stylus. I've played a few kanji games, and to me this is the most useful for non-Japanese. It also allows you to see them used in words and in sentences, and forces the user to use correct stroke order. I've recently been using Skritter as well, which features kanji flashcards that you draw with a mouse or a stylus to answer. Again correct stroke order is necessary to correctly answer the flashcard.

I also take issue with the notion that you know what it's like to be an English speaker learning Japanese. If you lived until age 5 in Tokyo, you have had a completely different experience than someone learning from scratch, especially at an older age. Growing up in Japan would have given you at least a rudimentary understanding of the language, which means you would have a context to put characters into when learning.

For those of use who didn't grow up in Japan, we require that context in some other form. That's why rote memorization alone won't help the foreign learner in kanji — though like I said, I agree with you that it is important, and that drawing them is not only helpful, but essential.

[katrina]

Thank you for all the advice! :D

[katrina]

Hi~ :D I searched 漢字練習帳 in Amazon jp and this was the result> http://www.amazon.co.jp/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/376-6889202-1165249?__mk_ja_JP=%83J%83%5E%83J%83i&url=search-alias%3Denglish-books&field-keywords=%8A%BF%8E%9A%97%FB%8FK%92%A0&x=16&y=27 But I don't know which among them I should buy...:( Please help me...:(