How Do Japanese Kids Learn Kanji
ByYou may be curious about how Japanese children learn kanji in Japan. As you may already know, there are 1,945 government recommended joyo kanji that are necessary to learn in order to read everyday materials like newspapers, magazines, etc. How do Japanese kids learn all these kanji?
Starting from 1st grade, Japanese children begin to learn how to read and write kanji. Every year after, they learn more and more kanji. In fact, even in high school, Japanese students are still learning kanji.
The list of kanji that is taught in each grade is set and begins with the simpler kanji and moves on to the more advanced ones as the children get older and progress through the grade levels. In this manner, by the time a Japanese child has graduated from high school, he or she will have covered all 1,945 joyo kanji as recommended by the government and will be able to read newspapers.
If you are learning Japanese or are interested in learning all of the Japanese kanji characters, you may think that learning the kanji in the same way and system that a Japanese child learns them is a good idea. I would recommend not doing this. The reason is because Japanese children are usually at a different level of speech than adult foreigners. For example, as a learner of Japanese, you may not know some of the words that are introduced at the first, second and third grade levels while on the other hand, some of the more advanced kanji, like the kanji for “eat”, “drink”, etc. you may want to know but are not introduced until much later because they are more complicated.
For this reason, it makes sense to learn the kanji in a different way that will be faster and better for someone learning Japanese as a foreigner. If you are interested in learning kanji, I would highly suggest using James Heisig’s method. You can find his books on amazon.com. Additionally, you may want to read some of the other articles I have written about kanji for more tips. If you’re also interested in learning the Japanese language in the fastest way possible, I highly suggest taking a look at the book I’ve written.
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!
