Learning kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese, is notoriously difficult, but I don’t think it’s quite as bad as people make it out to be. I have been studying kanji for a little less than a year now and am quite happy with the progress I’m making, so I thought I’d share some some of the things that have worked for me (and those which didn’t).

The simplest method is brute force: memorize a kanji’s meanings and pronunciations, and then write it out enough times so that you instantly recognize its shape. This is how Japanese schoolchildren learn to write, but to learn all 3,000+ this can take a long time. But that’s to be expected. Keep in mind it takes a Japanese person nine years of education to reach this level. Still, this method has its uses, and I’ll get to that in a second.

Adults can learn kanji much faster than Japanese schoolchildren if they use the well-honed mental skills they already possess. The first to point this out was (I believe) James W. Heisig in his book Remembering the Kanji. Now everyone has their own opinion on Heisig’s method, as do I: avoid it like the plague. I speak from experience. When I started learning Japanese I thought I’d begin with the kanji and picked up this book (I had assumed, incorrectly, that this would be the hardest step in learning the language), but in the end all it did was work against me. I’ll get to what Heisig does right in a second, but first the flaws:

1. The meaning of kanji is overly simplified. Heisig insists on finding a single English key word to represent the intrinsic meaning of each kanji. While this works for some, it utterly fails for others (for example, 水 can mean not just WATER, but also WEDNESDAY or HYDROGEN);
2. The form is disassociated from the pronunciation. Heisig lists this as an advantage, but for me it did nothing more than force me to think in English and hinder my ability to later learn the pronunciations; and
3. No vocabulary or compounds are used. Studying the meaning of a character without regard to its actual use is of little practical value. Especially since the meaning has been simplified down to a single word (see #1) the ambiguity of English has been combined with the native ambiguity of Japanese, making the need for real examples all the more necessary (e.g., does 開 mean OPEN as in to open a door, to open a business, or as in open source software?).

But for all that Heisig did get two things right. Adults learn much better if they use their imaginative memories (once you picture 見 as a giant, legged eyeball running down a nudie beach, you’ll never forget it), and secondly the kanji should be learned in the order which makes the whole process easiest. Thankfully others have since worked to address these shortcomings, although the alternatives don’t get as much press. The book I would recommend is Kanji ABC by Andreas Foerster and Naoko Tamura. As with Heisig’s work the kanji are broken down into separate graphical units and the procedure is to make an imaginary story from them, and the characters are reordered from the jōyō kanji list so as to be easier to learn (e.g. to contrast characters which look similar). But unlike Remembering the Kanji, pronunciations are also given as are the multiple meanings of a kanji (when necessary), and easily confused kanji with similar pronunciations are grouped together.

Using Kanji ABC alone is not enough, however. I also recommend getting the Kanji Learner’s Dictionary from Kodansha. This’ll give you the pen forms for the kanji, their exact meaning alone and in compounds, a short but comprehensive list of vocabulary for each, as well as the totally awesome SKIP method for indexing kanji. (I could do another post on the wonders of the SKIP method alone… once you try it you’ll understand why).

Remember how I said the brute force method has its uses? Here’s why. The kanji in Kanji ABC are split into two groups, graphemes and regular characters. The regular characters you learn together in groups, augmented by the their entries in the Kanji Learner’s Dictionary. I’ve been unable to find a good method for learning the graphemes, so they must be learned by hand the old fashioned way . But at least there’s only a few hundred of them and are easily learned (you only have to remember how to write them and their English meaning).

This is the method I’ve settled on and have been using for a number of months now, and is what I recommend to my classmates. A lot of progress can be made with a good method and daily study habits: I’ve been trying to learn half a page per day (about 5 graphemes or kanji), and it’s working so far. Just remember not to focus solely on the kanji. If you don’t know how to use the kanji you’re learning, then you’re not actually learning anything. Kanji may seem daunting, but don’t focus on them to the exclusion of the rest of the language!