Difficult Kanji: How To Learn Hard Kanji Fast
Many Japanese learners have to take on the task of learning kanji. It is an inevitable step in the process of learning Japanese. Even if you are not aiming at mastering all 1,945 joyo kanji, you still will probably come across a few kanji which you find particularly hard to remember or write. There are a few varieties of difficult kanji and I will teach you right now how to deal with them so that you will never forget them and will always be able to write them.
Some kanji are difficult to learn because they are too complicated. If this is the case, what you want to do is break the kanji down to its radicals. Make an association for each radical, maybe there is the “water” radical and the “person” radical in the kanji. You can make up whatever association you like depending on what the radical looks like to you. After you have broken the kanji down, make a story that incorporates all of these associations for the radicals as well as the meaning of the entire kanji itself. In this way, the story that you create will hold all of the pieces of the kanji together. The crazier or stranger the story, the better. These types of stories seem to be the easiest to remember. You will find that the next time you try to write the kanji, it will be much easier to remember, after having done this process.
Another type of difficulty Japanese learners have when learning kanji characters is confusing similar looking kanji. Again, in this case, what you’ll want to do is take the similar looking kanji and break down each one. What is most likely is that the two kanji are different by only one or two radicals. If that is the case, simply make a different story for each character involving the respective radical that is different. If you do this, you will have no trouble at all the next time you need to write one or the other.
If you are having trouble creating stories or attaching meanings to the radicals in the kanji, a great resource to go to is James Heisig’s kanji books. You can find these books on amazon.com and they are terrific because not only does Heisig introduce all of the characters but he does it in a systematic fashion so that you learn all 1,945 joyo kanji in an organized manner. It is truly a great book if you are interested.
Also, if you are trying to learn Japanese to an advanced level, I highly recommend taking a look at the book I’ve writte on language learning. It will cut down your study time significantly and have you learning Japanese faster than ever, so do yourself a favor and definitely check it out.
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Best Way To Remember Kanji
Many 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.
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 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.
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How Many Kanji Should I Learn Per Day?
I 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!
Easy Way To Learn Kanji Radicals
Learners of the Japanese language, especially the kanji, often find it helpful to learn the radicals that make up each kanji so that they can learn more complex kanji much quicker. So, what is the easiest way to learn these kanji radicals?
In my opinion, if you are truly interested in learning the kanji radicals in a systematic way, the best place to go to is the Heisig books. James Heisig came up with a clever systematic approach to learning all government recommended 1,945 joyo kanji. So, not only does he teach you the radicals that make up each kanji, but he also teaches you all the kanji themselves. His method depends mainly on introducing the kanji by their respective radicals and by using made up stories to remember the individual parts of each kanji.
This method works not only because it is systematic in its radical introduction approach but also because using clever stories to remember each part of the kanji is a great way of dissecting and memorizing the kanji for the long term.
Many people have reported great success using the Heisig method, so if you are interested, you may want to buy his book off of Amazon.com. Otherwise, you may find it hard to keep track of all the radicals and learn the kanji from them in an organized manner.
I hope this article has helped you. However, if you are interested in learning the Japanese language as quickly as possible, as well, you may be interested in my book. 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!