How Do Japanese Kids Learn Kanji
You 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!
Ways To Remember Japanese Characters
I was asked recently some ways to remember Japanese characters. Of course, the Japanese kanji are large in number and it’s quite a feat to remember all 1,945 government recommended joyo kanji. So, let’s go over some tips to help you out.
Probably the easiest way to remember new Japanese characters, or kanji, is not to write them out a hundreds times by rote, but rather to create some kind of clever story to remember all the elements. You can break down each kanji character in to its radicals and then analyze it that way piece by piece. You will find that some radicals easily fit into certain elements. For example, you might look at one radical as representing “person” and another radical as representing “water”. Then you can begin to create stories to help you remember the characters involving these various parts of the kanji.
I’ve found that the stranger and crazier the stories, the better. The more wild your imagination, the easier it will be to remember the story, and thus the kanji character. Not only do you remember all the characters from now on, but the process of making a story for each one is also a fun one.
However, along these lines of creating stories, you may want to do it in a systematic matter so everything stays organized and you can memorize the characters by their radical groups. A very good place to learn the characters systematically using this radical story system is written by James Hesig in his kanji books. You can find his books on amazon.com and I highly recommend them if you are interested in learning all 1,945 joyo kanji. His systematic approach definitely makes the overwhelming feat more manageable.
I hope this article has helped you! If you are serious about learning Japanese to a high level, then you would probably be interested in the book I’ve written that shows you the fastest way to fluency so you don’t waste any time.
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!
How Many Kanji Should I Learn?
Often, learners of the Japanese language wonder, how many kanji should I learn? Unless you are an academic or professor of Japanese, you probably don’t need to even learn the government recommended 1,945 joyo kanji.
The truth is that these days, when you need to write Japanese, you will be using a computer. In that case, all you need to do is recognize the correct kanji characters when you enter in the Japanese pronunciation of the words you are trying to write. If you happen to be living in Japan and need to write something without the aid of a computer, most likely you’ll have a cell phone and you will be able to look up words that way. In fact, many native Japanese do just this when they forget a kanji or are unsure of how to write it.
Realistically, if you are serious about learning Japanese, you should probably shoot for learning to recognize and read about 1,500 characters and be able to write 500 kanji from memory. For most people and situations, this should be more than enough kanji for your everyday life. On the other hand, if you are training for a specialized occupation or if you are planning on doing a lot more reading and studying than the average person, you may need to learn more kanji. In that case, you should try to learn the government recommended 1,945 joyo kanji.
I hope this has helped you. If you are serious about fluency in Japanese, you may be interested in reading my book that I have written to provide you with the fastest way to fluency as well as help you circumvent the same mistakes I made over 10 years of language study.
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!
Japanese Alphabet
Hiragana is a phonetic alphabet consisting of 46 characters. Hiragana is used in the Japanese writing system to represent grammar and particles. For example, hiragana would be used to denote that a verb is in the past tense or not and so on. Some nouns are also written using hiragana.
Katakana is also a phonetic alphabet consisting of 46 characters. Katakana is used in the Japanese writing system to represent sounds and words from foreign languages. Additionally, katakana can be used instead of hiragana or katakana to denote stress on a particular word.
Kanji is a character set consisting of thousands of characters. The government has limited the characters to 1,945 kanji for daily use and calls this the “joyo” kanji set. Each kanji character has multiple readings depending on the other kanji it is paired up with or the word it is being used in. Kanji is perhaps the biggest obstacle for foreigners who wish to master Japanese. Kanji is necessary in order to read and write Japanese.
If you are interested in learning a language like Japanese, you may be interested in my book which teaches you the best way to approach learning and the fastest way to fluency.
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!
The Best Way To Learn Japanese Written Language
You may be interested in learning how to read and write Japanese, that is, the three “alphabets” Japanese uses, hiragana, katakana and kanji. So, what is the best way to approach the Japanese written language?
As I said before, three “alphabets” make up Japanese. The first, hiragana, is used mostly for grammar denoting things like past tense or present tense. It is also used for the particles in Japanese. Katakana is often used for sounds and foreign words. Both Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic alphabet systems. Both alphabets have under 100 characters.
Kanji on the other hand is the beast that most Japanese learners have trouble with. In order to become “literate” in Japanese, you need to learn the government recommended 1,945 joyo kanji. Kanji, of course, is not phonetic and you need to learn the multiple readings for each character.
This may sound particularly difficult. Well, it is, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. You most likely do not need to learn all 1,945 kanji and furthermore, you probably don’t have to learn how to write them all. Since everyone uses computers these days, it is most important that you know how to recognize the important characters so that after you type in the Japanese sounds, you can select the correct characters on your screen.
In fact, many young Japanese these days have trouble with kanji themselves and often end up resorting to using their cell phones to look up characters if they happen to forget them and are away from a computer. So, don’t feel bad about kanji yourself.
Now, what is the best way to approach learning the written language of Japanese? First, you should learn hiragana and katakana. As I said before, they are both phonetic alphabets and each have less than 100 characters so they can be learned pretty quickly. Since they are used fairly often in Japanese, the are very important and you will be using them quite a bit.
So the real problem is kanji. In my opinion, the best way to approach the study of kanji is by repeated exposure. If you’re learning Japanese for the long term, you may be interested in a systematic approach like the Heisig method which teaches you kanji by introducing them through their smaller “radical” parts. Nonetheless, I think it’s important that you get repeated exposure to kanji in order to learn them quickly and efficiently.
The whole process of the best way to get repeated exposure is out of the scope of this article but I cover it in depth in my book which you may be interested in taking a look at if you are serious about learning the Japanese language or any foreign language for that matter. Suffice it to say, you should set up some system to review the kanji you come across.
I hope this article gave you some help in your pursuit of the written language in Japanese. 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!