I feel stupid asking this question but I have to. Lately I’ve going through media and collecting kanji I don’t know with their meanings (I don’t care about most readings right now) in a spreadsheet to review later through Anki. This includes many kanji combinations and their meanings.
Would it be better to instead study the individual kanji rather than the kanji combinations I see in media? I feel like there’s a limitless amount of kanji combinations to keep track of right now. Even though I could see patterns occasionally, sometimes it confuses me how the same kanji reads differently with another and I don’t know how I could memorize it all without brute force.
by icyserene
15 comments
It’s generally better to learn a meaning and the most common kun and on yomi meanings when you pick up a new kanji.
Learning kanji “on their own” doesn’t accomplish a whole lot. Kanji are used to write words. They’re also useful as a device to remember meaningful components of words – for example, “oh, *sui* as in 水, bet it’s water-related”, and I think they’re beautiful in their own right. But fundamentally, “knowing kanji” means being able to read and write. Learning to read and write vocabulary contributes to your Japanese skills. “Learning kanji” apart from words they’re used in is more like learning *about* Japanese than learning Japanese.
(That said, some people do prefer to just get “learning the kanji” out of the way by associating them all with some general meaning and reading(s). To me this seems pretty roundabout, but if it works it works. The fact remains, though, that there a whole lot of kanji which a Japanese native would only know as “oh, the one used to write (word)”, not “oh, it means (whatever)”.)
When learning vocab you’ll just learn the various readings a kanji will have over time anyway. It might seem like a lot at first but its definitely the more time efficient method. If you learn kanji individually without any vocab attached, you’ll then have to learn the vocab after anyway. By learning vocab your kinda killing two birds with one stone. For instance you’ll learn words like:
生活 – seikatsu
生き物 – Ikimono
And you’ll just pick up that 生 can be pronounced either ‘sei’ or ‘i’, which will then help you guess new words you come across.
By attaching vocab to your learning aswell it becomes a lot more interesting too, so you’ll be more likely to stick with it.
I recommend trying a combination of learning words that contain kanji you are studying and trying to learn the kanj in isolation.
Some kanji have just one or two readings and are easy to learn, but some have multiple on- and multiple kun- readings, and are very hard to learn.
In the former case, memorizing the kanji and readings will be enough. In the latter case, learning the vocal that contains those kanji will be better for giving you an overall understanding of the meaning of the kanji as well as how the relevant interpretation is derived from a kanji.
For example, 生 is a simple kanji in itself, but can mean, in no particular order, life, fresh (and by association“unprocessed”), grow, create, and birth.
Anything that gives you exposure, including going through media of course, will increase your familiarization with kanji and their usage, which will eventually lead to memorization and being able to use it fully.
Good luck, and take it one step at a time.
I think you should just learn words and the characters that are used to write said word. If you learn enough words you will eventually be able to infer the readings of new words using characters you know as well as infer the general meaning of the word.
Personally, I find the concept of “kanji meanings” quite suspect. Individual kanji rarely have a single simple meaning, and in practice the general impression of a character is based on what words it is used in in practice in Japanese. Japanese resources for characters are always based on referencing words that use a character (for baby name suggestion sites they do write more general descriptions of the character meaning, but that’s more about the impression a character gives in the context of a name and name kanji are a whole different beast to regular kanji usage in Japanese). “Kanji meaning” resources in English are more harmful than helpful in my view, because they are trying to translate a general feeling into a foreign language in a way that is hard to do well and learning those “meanings” doesn’t help you much when you encounter an unknown word in Japanese. Just learning words and picking it up yourself is a better use of time in my view.
Kanji readings are somewhat suspect as well, because while there is a lot of regularity in how kanji are read (outside of names) there are many words that use characters in ways that are outside of the common lists of readings for the character. 生 has dozens of readings listed on dictionary sites, but 生憎 (not a very uncommon word) is read as あいにく and “あい” is not on any list of readings for 生 because it only comes up in this one word. Maybe character readings make sense as a concept in Chinese, but the way that kanji were imported into Japanese makes learning individual words more useful than learning abstract information about how characters might be read in general. Even if you learned all of the dozens of readings of 生 in isolation, that wouldn’t help you when you actually have to read a word, because each word usually has only one correct reading and the only way of knowing it is to know that word.
I did RTK when I first started learning Japanese and I don’t think it was very helpful long-term. Yes, it may have helped with distinguishing characters at the start but knowing characters without knowing words doesn’t help you with reading actual Japanese. You need to learn words, and I ended up progressively learning characters as I learned words.
Just learn how words are written. Learning kanji on their own is a waste of time unless you want to write them by hand
Make sure you can read it in context too – not just vocab mining but use the full sentence or an example sentence
As a vietnamese with a bliss of our vocab consist of what would be 60-80% of kanji words written in alphabet, so it wasn’t hard to figure out the meaning once i’ve got the basic down using sino-viet words and kanji i learned in my japanese class.
I believe there is this 2000 or 4000 常用漢字表 out there somewhere on the internet, I went to a Japanese language school in Vietnam, and for months on end we basically got rammed all that Kanji into our head through writing, on physical paper, down to the strokes, and I think this is how the Japanese kids do it too, and they did that for like years during their elementary and middle school. The process is tedious at first but once you get the basic of the 常用, everything else just clicks after a while. And I very recommend learning Kanji through writing it down rather than only “have a look at it” through Anki. Maybe the better way to go about this is before you click for the answer in Anki, write it down first (1 to 3 times) with correct stroke order, it will help you remember it longer, and also help for later once you see a new kanji, you can also immediately imagine how to write it, and easy to look up stuff on the dictionary too with the chinese handwriting keyboard
Just directly memorized words in the way it should be, with kanji
I use this great android app “kanji study”, which has writing practices (useful to learn stroke order ngl), flashcard study, reading practice and quizes. For me, it is really good and I use it daily. I try to learn most common words with those kanjis too, I find it useful
> Would it be better to instead study the individual kanji rather than the kanji combinations I see in media?
No, that would be the wrong way.
They’re not, but for the purpose of learning, just consider them letters or something. When you see a new word in English, you don’t do deep research on the role of the letter “H”. You just learn the word, and learn how “H” is pronounced in that word.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but the same goes for here.
Overall:
Studying any way works well enough if you put the time in, so long as you don’t read things wrong (you’ll form bad habits which are annoying). I’ve been half assedly trying for years so I think I can offer some advice.
Pros and Cons:
If you study kanji in isolation properly then I can assure you, you can start to read things you don’t know the meaning of. However you probably won’t know the meaning of the words and it’s less fun.
If you only study vocab to learn to read, it’s more fun, but you can run into the issue where you start not looking at kanji properly, misreading things and have no idea how to read a combo you’ve not seen before.
Some of my experience:
I finished Heiseigs remembering the kanji 2 months ago, went to Japan again, but this time started studying how I am now and feel like my Kanji improved very rapidly.
The down side is I’m giving up on a lot of the 2000 Mnemonics I made, and opting to make ones using the Japanese vocab and readings for the kanji. And I find a more logical style works better for me, instead of Heiseigs round about approach. I can tell you no matter what you do with mnemnonics and radical definitions it will be messy. Kanji are just messy.
So after 10 years of anime, I’m going through the free Renshuu’s vocab and doing individual kanji in the Kanji Study App (Free alternative is probably something like Kanji Dojo). Two SRS softwares are a lot to juggle but I think it’s working. In my kanji app I only do sentence quizzes, with a mix of inputs. Then for renshuu I just do vocab mcqs, cause I don’t need the grammar and I like how easy it is compared to just typical flashcards.
Recommendations:
Either way, read a lot and you’ll be right.
You can practice writing kanji to help you get accustomed to them if flashcards aren’t working and breaking them into radicals is good too.
TLDR: Don’t learn Kanji individually, it will ruined your life.
With that out of the way, let’s get into why you shouldn’t do it. I’m also facing the same issue as you on the reading but I would hesitate to learn them individually and learn all of their readings. First,doing this is basically impossible for a regular human being unless you have photographic memory. If a kanji is with hiragana then you’ll use the kun reading and sometimes even though they have the same kanji, the kun reading doesn’t necessarily change over to another with different hiragana. So just learn them on a base my base cases. For kanji that’s with other kanji,IE sticking them together without any hiraganas, then you’ll use the on reading. For on reading, usually there’s a main reading for it and although it does the same thing as the kun reading, it isn’t as frequent as kun readings where you can’t bring over the reading. So I personally believe that you should memorize the main reading of the on readings. It’s usually the first one on jisho if you’re using it. Now for meaning wise, although jisho has “meanings” for them, that’s not going to stick on for too long. Take it from me. I’m Chinese and if you don’t know, kanji is basically borrowed from Chinese with a few changes but what both have in common is that individual kanji most of the time, don’t really tell you the actual meaning of that word. Of course not all of them but it’s best to just leave it. I personally don’t even know so individual kanji’s meaning even though it literally the same in Chinese, and the Chinese one doesn’t necessarily tell you what it means, and most of the time, it’s not going to have a meaning, Chinese is based on multiple “kanji” sticking together to make words with meanings and Japanese is the same, they literally took what Chinese does with it and just tweaks it a little with the meaning and the writings but the basis principle stays. I know it’s a new thing for people who don’t have these weird writings that individually have meanings to it but most of the time, it’s just the same just with a few added “words” that have meanings on it beforehand.
A lot of people here recommend to just learn words, not kanji. Let me give a different perspective: I think it is VERY helpful to learn kanji and their meaning as well as their most important on and kun yomi reading. I believe the best approach is to learn an individual kanji and 2-5 words associated with it, which represent the most common readings.
For me, not spending time with kanji individually meant that they all started to look the same really fast. Learning kanji individually gave me the opportunity to really look at the radicals it consists of and the general meaning of the kanji helps me to guess the meaning of words I don’t know. Also: since I know what e.g. the on-yomi of a kanji is, I can guess it’s reading in new words as well. Looking at the on- and kun-yomi beforehand also gave me a sense of how many different readings there are, which made it easier down the road for me.
I do think everyone needs to find a system which works for them, so if you feel it might be beneficial to you to learn individual kanji, just give it a try! You can always go back to not doing it 🙂
In the beginning I felt like kanji was too hard, so I decided to just learn by ear for a while and come back to it.
After a few months of doing flashcards, I found I could read a bit of kanji just from seeing it every day. Just words like 私 and 新しい at first, but then more and more. I wasn’t even trying to learn it, it just happened.
When I started doing some flashcard training as well, I found that in a couple of weeks I could quickly identify a few hundred characters. After 300 or so, it stopped feeling easy and started feeling like a grind.
Which I think means I just need to keep getting lots of exposure to wrtten Japanese as I study the grammar and vocab.
I do find it’s a lot easier to learn words if I can already identify the characters. It isn’t completely necessary though.
IDK if this is the “right” way to study it, I know I’m making progress though.