Best Way To Remember Kanji
ByMany Japanese learners are interested in the best way to remember kanji. As you may already know, there are 1,945 joyo government recommended kanji and this can be quite a task to try and remember them all! In this article, I’ll teach you a few tricks so that you will be remembering kanji in no time.
The first thing you will want to do when you encounter a kanji you want to remember is to break the kanji down to its radicals. Once you have broken it down to its smaller pieces, you can look at each radical and make a representation for it. You can use water for the radical that represents water and people for the radical that looks like a person. After you have the pieces there, you can then make a creative story using these small pieces that involve the meaning or reading of the kanji. In this way, it makes it easier for your brain to remember the character.
The best stories seem to be the ones that are the strangest or craziest. I suppose that a more interesting story is easier to remember so when you make your own stories, you’ll want to try to think of something very exciting to you.
As you can see, this method does not use any rote memorization or repetition of writing. Many teachers urge students to learn kanji by writing out the character hundreds of times. Unfortunately, this is not a very efficient way and frankly, it’s quite boring to the student, too! The story method is much, much quicker and more fun, in my opinion.
Furthermore, if you feel that this method will work for you, you may want to approach it in a systematic way. James Heisig in his kanji books does a great way of introducing all 1,945 joyo kanji by their radicals and he also includes many stories for you to use to get you started. If you’re interested, you can find his books on amazon.com
In any case, I hope this article has helped you out on your path to mastering kanji. If you are serious about learning the Japanese language, you may be interested in the book I’ve written that will turboboost you to fluency.
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