Learning Kanji

This is where things get tricky for a while. You see, written and spoken Japanese are essentially two separate languages. Knowing how a word sounds will tell you absolutely nothing about how it is written, and vice versa. And you can’t “just learn kanji, stupid” because with very few exceptions knowing some possible readings and meanings of a kanji is not going to allow you to actually read nor understand words you don’t already know that contain said kanji. A kanji is basically just a picture. Or rather, every written word is a picture: and most of them consist of several kanji. Or kanji plus kana of course (in which case the kana part would be referred to as okurigana) but kana being there isn’t going to help you much if the kanji part is unknown to you. In similar fashion: knowing how some of the kanji characters can be read and interpreted will not enable you to read new words phonetically, let alone understand what kind of final meaning is implied by most kanji compounds (which, if it’s a word you don’t know, can always be interpreted in dozens of completely different ways). In order to be able to read complete words — you need to know those specific words. There is no other way, no system behind it that you can master to unlock the “Japanese reading skill”: kanji is not really an alphabet. Or at least not a one that can be just read. Readings are implied, and are subject to interpretation (which actually does vary in different parts of Japan). Even extensive knowledge of all kanji characters wouldn’t help much: what you need to know is combinations of them. You need to know the words, not the kanji. By words I mostly mean 熟語 of course (jukugo, kanji compounds), but Japanese also has a lot of words with okurigana (mainly verbs and adjectives) that use the same kanji, but different kana (and in some cases different readings of that same kanji too), and have very different meanings and don’t follow any particular patterns (like the somewhat predictable 自動詞 / 他動詞 patterns, for example). So you wouldn’t be able to differentiate between what they mean using your oh-so-valuable extensive kanji knowledge… unless you just remember. 探(さが)す and 探(さぐ)る come to mind. So it’s not just the compounds: it’s all words in general that you just have to remember, one-by-one.

Don’t get me wrong though, knowing various stuff about various kanji is cool: it allows you to appreciate the language and the culture on a substantially deeper level. All I’m saying is that knowledge about the kanji of the word and knowledge of the word don’t come in the same package. At all. I really need you to understand that before not even just giving you any kanji learning recommendation, but actually making the whole idea a choice: something you in fact may want to consider not bothering with (meaning, separately studying kanji). I told you things are getting tricky, right? Well, I have finally became my own worst enemy: a highly questionable language guru. AJATT&associates all push for no grammar, and I am about to push for no kanji. Controversial enough?

This is going to be your situation. You’ve gone through a few grammar books, maybe. You realize you can’t read for shit anyways. You decide to learn at least some kanji before attempting any reading (because you tried and you couldn’t, like, pretty much at all). Well, yeah, you could do that. In fact, you probably should. There is never (unfortunately) a good excuse not to know at least some of the basic ones. Even if you went to the lowest class of a Japanese language school, they would look at you as a mentally deficient one if you didn’t know words/kanji like 木、人、日、月、etc (about 100-150 super basic ones). So your choices are:

1. Remembering the Kanji
   There is this relatively popular book about kanji being heavily promoted by ajatt&co called Remembering the Kanji (RTK for close friends and family). Its method does precisely that and absolutely nothing more. You’ll just be familiar with how most kanji look and know one (lol) meaning for each (because it’s the only way to remember them all in a reasonable amount of time). By itself — absolutely useless information, but technically all it’s intended to do is ease you into the process of looking up and memorizing words in kanji (something you’ll be doing all the time) you’d otherwise have no point of reference for, and therefore (in theory) they would be much more difficult to remember. I’ve never tried this method and don’t really want to. I sincerely doubt the author speaks any Japanese (or Chinese, for that matter), because the original idea behind RTK was to give the non-Chinese learners of Japanese the same advantage the Chinese-speaking learners have. To close the gap, so to speak. Which (the advantage), was spectacularly misidentified as familiarity with kanji. How can you miss such a giant target is beyond me. The author clearly had no idea what he was talking about. The advantage does exist, and it’s huge. Gigantic, even. But it isn’t familiarity with the alphabet. It is the fact that Chinese and Japanese share most 熟語, most of which have the same meaning, too. How little do you have to know about not only Japanese (of which I assume the author is some kind of guru?) but also Chinese to not understand how reading them works? According to his logic, I assume he speaks most European languages too, since he is already familiar with most of their alphabets. What a legend.
   
   Studying kanji is like a separate discipline that has almost nothing to do with studying Japanese itself. “Remembering” kanji… I dunno, it might help a little bit, might not help at all. It’s an option to consider, I suppose? From what I heard, it takes about 2-3 months to “remember” all the kanji you won’t be able to use anyway for the foreseeable future until you forget most of them unless you read and memorize words (so just do the last part, you know, the part that will actually enable you to use the language you’re learning). I guess that means about 2500? Or maybe 4000? Again, no idea.
   
   All I know is that you will never be in this kind of situation: “Oh poor me… If only I knew what this kanji meant I would’ve been able to understand this word. not read though: just understand. for some reason I don’t care about the phonetic part of this language”. In 99.99% of cases — no. Even if the ultimate meaning of the word is related to the combination of meanings of its kanji characters — there could be dozens of potential interpretations of a given combination and you’ll never guess the correct one. Here, I give you two words: “human” and “murder”. Well, what meaning do they make? Homicide? Murderer? Dead body? A homicide victim? A person who “screams murder”? Shall I go on? Not everything is as straightforward as “bread”, “human”, and “make”. Let’s talk politics. 政治 せいじ. Ok, so you remembered™ 政 as “politics”, good for you. But let me guess, you probably remembered™ 治 as “heal” or “repair”, right? So wtf is it in the end? politics+repair… Could it mean “a political reform”, perhaps? No? Confusing much? How are you supposed to interpret that as just “politics”? By learning the damn word, and not just remembering™ its individual kanji. Trust me, by the time you know most of the words, you will know most of the kanji. However, it doesn’t work the other way around. Not even a little bit.
   
   Ok, so you keep staring at an unfamiliar word. You may not have any available, but at least hypothetically what would be your options? You can of course try guessing the word’s meaning from context, but for that you don’t need any familiarity with its kanji™: in order to do that you need to know the rest (or most) of the words in the sentence. Yet again — no matter how we rotate it, the solution keeps coming back to having to know words, and not just being familiar with characters. One English word per kanji doesn’t even translate to its meaning btw: that’s why I call it familiarity rather than knowing the meaning. One kanji can have several absolutely different meanings, or just like the, you know, words themselves, a kanji can represent a concept/idea that in English can only be described with maybe a dozen sentences, not just one word. And you are just going to assign one word to it and somehow be able to use that “knowledge” to… do what, even?
   
   Doing several months of RTK™ does nothing for you in the long run: the meta game of learning written Japanese is word memorization. You may think that’s way too shallow, surface level approach, but any Japanese learner can tell you that’s literally all there is to it. When you see a word you don’t know: it is never about the meaning of its kanji. You can, however, try to derive both reading and meaning from the kanji’s radicals even if you are seeing these kanji for the first time. Both guesses can only be made if you have enough knowledge of words (熟語), and not just what the damn characters mean (which doesn’t even matter in over half the words). And in relation to the hypothetical situation I’ve just described: shall I repeat that when it comes to readings RTK ignores that part completely? And shall I restate that one English word of “meaning” does not describe even 50% of what most kanji stand for? In tons of cases you’d actually need several Japanese words to describe them. And those Japanese words combined would require dozens of English words if you were to describe them all in English. What exactly are you getting from that one English word you are remembering™? And what about all the different kanji that mean literally the same thing? Are you going to remember 止 as “stop” and 留 as… What? Not moving? Or maybe Russian ruble? Yeah that’ll do you good in the long run. And 停 as what? Halt? But 止 isn’t? Wow, it’s almost like remembering kanji separately from words makes absolutely no sense and is a complete waste of time.

2. (trying and failing to) Actually Remember (some) Kanji
   (before losing your mind and giving up)™
   Studying kanji (readings+meanings), one at a time, pretty much the same way you would do words (talked about later), giving up after about 400-600, exhausted and frustrated moving on to reading and pure word memorization. This was pretty much my path. I don’t recommend wasting time on the first part. The reason I finally gave up was because between knowing about 300 and 600 kanji there was little to no difference in my (terrible) reading ability. At that time I was intensively becoming more and more busy with various grownup life bs, so as soon as I started to suspect a substantial lack of connection between reading ability and kanji familiarity I decided to stop studying kanji as part of daily routine. I have been slightly less unhappy ever since.

3. Be smart and value your time
   Studying the first 100 or so kanji (probably about 300, to be honest) and happily moving on to reading and word memorization. I recommend you do that.

4. the Not Worth It™ option
   Keep on studying 2000+ kanji in parallel to all your other Japanese activities until you are more or less done with either life or Japanese. That was my initial plan. I don’t recommend it: it would consume way too much of your time in the long run — the time you’d be MUCH BETTER OFF spending reading and memorizing words. If you want to properly learn all* kanji it would probably take about 2 years of doing literally nothing else full-time, but probably even longer. However, if you did that… you would probably earn one monster of a vocab? So I guess if Japanese application of Chinese characters is literally the most interesting thing in the world for you, I wouldn’t say there are no benefits to studying it.
   *2000 is a lie: you’re going to need significantly more if you plan on hitting that elusive reading fluency, especially if Japanese names is something you want to be able to work with, like, at all. You should be aware, however, that knowing all kanji is not something most native Japanese speakers expect even from each other, let alone a stupid filthy gaijin. And even though a regular Japanese person can obviously read a crap ton more than 2200 kanji — it is quite a painful, and definitely not very fun process for them when things get really kanji-heavy (not unlike how reading without furigana feels to you now). Oh, at some point MattVSJapan could read better than some natives? Yeah, well, he specifically trained himself with SRS to know all the obscure kanji most Japanese people see maybe once a year if not even less often. Once he starts living a normal life he will quickly forget most of the 10000000+ obsolete kanji he once learned for literally no reason and his reading ability will gradually go down to a normal Japanese person’s level, which isn’t really all that high

The only point in continuing studying kanji after you know about 200 that contributes to your reading ability is that you’ll be picking up vocab along your studies. Useful? Yes. The most productive application of your study time? No, not really.

Regarding sources to get your first couple hundred kanji from — just use whatever you can find (as long at it’s not wanikani, duolingo, or any other obvious scam website). Internet search can probably point you towards tools that are slightly less outdated than what I can think of, so here are some just very fundamental things:

• Offline dictionaries can be useful: definitely get imiwa? if you have an iOS device. All offline dictionaries on Android are equally terrible, so I just use —>
• Jisho.org is your new best friend. All information on anything word- or kanji- related can be found in this online dictionary. A bunch of grammar as well, actually.
• Kanji flashcards are much more useful than kanji books. The sets I used (and still do occasionally, on rare days when I don’t quite feel miserable enough) are from White Rabbit Press: can’t say too many bad things about them, although now I would’ve preferred to have something a bit more interesting and made for Japanese people. Always choose a set of flashcards over any kind of kanji book.

If you’re using a good set of flashcard, you don’t need to worry about the following thing. However, if you’re going to be manually looking up kanji through the power of the internet, there are several kanji orders you need to be aware of:

• By frequency of use. Don’t. Maybe after you know a few hundred, but this is definitely not the optimal place to start.
• By grade (order in which kanji are taught in Japanese schools). Probably the best place to start. In fact, this is pretty much the only officially existing order that makes sense and is also an actual order! Divided into grades (obviously) which you can use as milestones.
• By JLPT level. I never cared about JLPT and neither should you. My condolences if you are forced to take it at some point. This isn’t really an order but simply a way of organizing “all” kanji into 5 categories (levels). Inside the categories there is obviously no order: JLPT was designed for testing, not ordering. Designed shittily btw: tons or kanji you’ll be knowing by heart after just a few months of reading have somehow landed in N2 and N1 (levels go from N5 to N1), and if after a year of reading you take a look at N3 and even N4 kanji lists you are pretty much guaranteed to find something you have never seen before. Fuck JLPT.
• Jōyō kanji. You will be seeing this word a lot, so I guess it is sort of important to know what it is. This term refers to all “official” kanji, a government-curated kanji roster, so to speak. The jouyou (常用) part literally means normal/standard use. It’s just a list tho, not an order. Its order is pretty much random, depending on where (and when) you find it. I suggest wikipedia. If you think there would be like this big and beautiful official government website made just to list all 常用漢字 — think again.