How Many Kanji Should I Learn Per Day?
ByI was recently asked, how many kanji should I learn a day? Well, let’s do a few calculations…
If you are interested in becoming functionally competent in Japanese, you’ll probably need to cover the government recommended 1,945 joyo kanji. These are the kanji you need to know in order to read newspaper and general texts. If a kanji outside of these 1,945 joyo kanji is used in a newspaper or other such text, the furigana (pronunciation of the kanji written in hiragana) is displayed above the kanji so you should have no problem.
So, let’s say you want to learn all 1,945 joyo kanji. You probably could get by with learning about 1,500 but for our calculations, we’ll use 1,945. Interestingly, most Japanese learners see kanji as an insurmountable feat. However, if we break it down…
If you had only one year to study all the characters, you could learn them all by studying 5.3 per day. That’s basically 5 kanji per day. That’s not so hard, is it? Chances are though that you’ll be studying Japanese for longer than one year to reach fluency and most likely you won’t need a lot of the characters until later in your studies.
So, if you studied for two years, you’d need to learn only 2.6 per day. So, only two or three per day. Again, that’s not really all that bad, is it?
And if you’re studying Japanese for longer, the number could drop even lower… to perhaps even one per day!
So, as for the number of kanji you should be studying per day, as long as you’re learning anywhere from one to five per day, you should be fine! Just make sure you keep learning everyday and that you also review.
The review may be the hardest part since after you’ve learned a kanji one day, you may soon forget it unless you properly review it at the right time interval. The proper way to do this is outside the focus of this article but it’s a topic I cover in my book. If you’re serious about learning Japanese to a high level, you’ll definitely want to check it out.
If you want the fastest method to learn a language so that you will become fluent in a foreign language in a matter of months, learn thousands of words without worrying about forgetting them, master grammar and do all of this in an enjoyable, painless manner then you need to read Learn That Language Now!
