Fastest Way to Learn Japanese Kanji
Learning kanji is often seen by beginners as the biggest roadblock towards learning Japanese. After all, Japanese people learn 2000+ characters over the course of 12 years of schooling. How is a foreign language learner supposed to compete?
In this guide, I’ll introduce you to the fastest and most efficient way of learning kanji. But before that, let’s briefly go over some common methods and discuss their strengths and limitations to see where they can be improved.
Not learning kanji immediately
In this approach, no separate effort is made to learn kanji at the beginning of your language journey. You simply learn new kanji as and when you come across them. This means that you can start learning words and attempt to read right away.
However, sooner or later you’ll encounter complex characters that have several distinct parts, such as 解 or 敵. Coming across many such vastly different characters too quickly can overwhelm you.
Additionally, since you’ll be memorizing characters through just their form, you’ll frequently mix up kanji that look very similar. Eg. 待 and 持 or 延 and 廷.
Learning kanji like the Japanese
Memorizing kanji characters the way they’re taught to Japanese school kids may seem like a good idea in principle. At every stage of progress, you’ll have learning and reading materials that suit your level. You’ll simultaneously learn new words, their constituent kanji characters and how the characters are written and read.
However, this can also prove to be a lot of unrelated and disconnected information to learn all at once. Don’t forget that Japanese students learn through rote memorization over the course of several years of schooling. You probably don’t have so much time.
Japanese children are forced to learn kanji based on the simplicity of its meaning and its frequency of use. It’s more efficient to learn according to the simplicity of a character’s written form and its similarity to other characters you know already know. If your eventual goal is to be fluent enough to read newspapers, etc. then you’ll have to learn a lot of kanji anyway and the order of learning won’t matter.
Remembering the Kanji
This book, Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig, introduces us to the most efficient method of memorizing kanji. It overcomes the shortcomings of the previous methods and is a technique optimized for Japanese foreign language learners.
Let’s define some terms that will help us to understand the method:
Jōyō (lit.“standard use”) kanji list: This is a list of 2,136 characters defined by the Japanese ministry of education as a baseline for literacy. All official documents such as the constitution and newspapers like NHK are limited to the characters in the list. Thus, many rare characters are included for being in the constitution. At the same time, several common characters are excluded.
Kunyomi and onyomi readings: Many kanji characters in Japanese have at least two different ways of being read or pronounced. There’s the native reading called kunyomi, while onyomi (lit. “sound reading) is based on adopted Chinese reading.
Radicals: Radicals in a kanji character refer to the individual parts that make up the whole character. These parts could be characters in their own right, or show up only as part of other characters. For example, 休 consists of 亻(人 ) and 木.
Primitives: A primitive is defined by Heisig to be a part of a kanji that is found repeatedly across several characters. A primitive can be a single radical or be made up of multiple radicals.
What is the goal of Heisig’s method?
“Remembering the kanji” is too nebulous a statement. The devil’s in the details. Heisig’s method is clear-cut in its goal: to remember a keyword meaning for every the kanji in the jōyō list, along with how to recall and write the kanji.
Understanding this goal is central to understanding the method’s strengths as well as its shortcomings.
How does Heisig’s method work?
- First, pictographic primitives such as 山 (mountain) or 川 (stream) are learnt.
- These are used as building blocks to learn more primitives and characters by the following process: A given character is broken into its constituent primitives. The meanings of these primitives are used to create a story that’ll help you to remember the meaning of the character. For example, 伏 (prostrate) can be broken into 人 (person) and 犬 (dog). Thus, a story such as ‘dogs prostrate in front of their human owners’ can be used to remember this character.
The entire book follows this process of introducing primitives and using them to learn new characters over and over, with complexity increasing at a steady pace. This is effective because the vast majority of kanji characters used in Japanese can be broken down in this fashion. There are only a handful of characters that are so unique that they can’t be decomposed.
This video explains and showcases the method in action. It’s what first introduced me to the method.
Advantages
- Optimal learning process: The mind learns by intuitively connecting related concepts together to form new knowledge. It’s why analogies are so effective at explaining. In contrast, rote-learning is cumbersome and slow. The method is designed with this fact in mind. Kanji are learnt in an order where it is easy to connect the new characters to the primitives and characters you already know.
- Exponential progress: Since you’ll learn kanji by breaking them into their primitives, it stands to reason that the more primitives you know, the more kanji you can learn. As you progress through the book and add more knowledge of kanji and primitives to your repertoire, your ability to learn new characters will grow exponentially. You’ll be able to progress at increasingly rapid rates.
- Creativity: Learning kanji this way enables you to express and utilize your creativity. The stories you create and how you name certain primitives can be uniquely individual to you. This can arguably make learning kanji fun (as demonstrated in the video above as well). Compare this to the monotonous drawl on rote-memorization which involves no imagination.
Limitations
- All or nothing: Characters are ordered according to their similarity to each other, instead of frequency of use. This means you can’t start learning words or reading until you’ve completed the whole book. For example, the common 私 isn’t learnt until you’re more than half-way through.
- Inclusion of some unnecessary characters: Remembering the Kanji is based on the jōyō list which contains many practically unnecessary characters. It’s not practical to know beforehand which aren’t common or which to skip. Even otherwise, skipping is ill-advised since later characters require you to know ones that came before.
- Exclusion of some common characters: Following the previous point, many commonly used characters are absent because they’re not a part of the jōyō list. The most common examples can be found here (page in Japanese).
- Not really learning the meanings: Many kanji characters have multiple meanings that can be quite different. However, Heisig only assigns a single keyword for these, since the objective is to use the keywords mainly as a mental mechanism to recall kanji. Thus you might be confused by the inclusion of a kanji in a word until you uncover its other meanings.
- Not learning the readings: The method streamlines learning kanji to just its keyword and written form. Onyomi and kunyomi learning are completely ignored. This has been done since learning readings without the context of any words can be challenging and unintuitive to remember anyway. Instead, the strategy espoused is to learn the readings through learning vocabulary, after you’ve built a foundational knowledge of kanji.
Why does it look like there are more cons than pros?
I’ve mainly gone into great detail about the limitations of the method so that it’s clear what you can expect from it. The fact is that the Heisig method is the best method for accomplishing the stated goal of learning the jōyō kanji as quickly as possible.
Most of the cons can be easily accounted for and will become irrelevant eventually, as you progress in learning Japanese. Put simply, the method is so fast that once you’re done, you’ll have more than enough to time to make up for what you skipped or missed by following it.
Ready to start learning some Kanji? Check out Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig.
