Kanji, while intimidating, are far from impossible to learn.
I would even argue that they make Japanese easier to learn, and I now regret that I was ever so stressed about learning them. So much mental effort wasted.
This article explains:
- What kanji are
- The best way to learn them
- Conflicting theories about the best way to learn them
- Answers to the recurring questions I’ve been answering about kanji over the last decade
You’ve got this.
The Japanese writing system
Spoken languages are made up of sounds, which are called phonemes.
In English, we use letters to represent phonemes.
kaaten no sukima kara umi ga mieru
I can see the ocean through a gap in the curtains.
In Japanese, they use kana to represent phonemes.
カーテンのすきまからうみがみえる。
I can see the ocean through a gap in the curtains.
There are two types of kana: hiragana and katakana.
Hiragana are versatile, general-purpose characters.
カーテンのすきまからうみがみえる。
I can see the ocean through a gap in the curtains.
Katakana are often used for foreign loan words, or to show emphasis.
カーテンのすきまからうみがみえる。
I can see the ocean through a gap in the curtains.
There are also characters that contain meanings, in addition to representing a variety of possible sounds.
カーテンの隙間から海が見える。
I can see the ocean through a gap in the curtains.
These characters are called kanji.
Kanji were imported to Japan from China hundreds of years ago.
Sometimes one kanji represents an entire word.
海 (sea; ocean)
Other times, multiple kanji combine to form a single word.
隙間 (gap; opening; crack)
Kanji can also pair up with hiragana to create a word.
見える (to be visible; to be in sight)
All in all, kanji add a lot of flavor to Japanese. And you might just find yourself falling in love with them.
In total, there are 46 individual hiragana and katakana used today. These can be learned pretty quickly — many manage it under under a week or two.
Kanji will take a little longer.
To be considered literate, about 2,000 kanji need to be learned.
It sounds like a lot, but picking up kanji is a natural byproduct of any efficient Japanese study method. (A lot more on that below.)
Kanji are your friend, not your enemy.
Kanji make learning Japanese words a lot easier.
来 (come)
年 (year)
Thanks to kanji, you'll often be able to guess the meanings of words.
来年 (rainen // next year)
Knowing kanji can help you guess the pronunciation of words, too.
来年 (rainen // next year)
来月 (raigetsu // next month)
来週 (raishuu // next week)
However, kanji can have multiple readings.
来る (kuru // to come)
来年 (rainen // next year)
Many Japanese learning materials avoid using kanji in places a native speaker would use them.
カーテンのすきまからうみがみえる。
I can see the ocean through a gap in the curtains.
This is counterproductive.
Not only does it make the language more difficult to read, it significantly slows down a learner's reading comprehension improvement.
Try to find a study material (NativShark, for example) that write sentences the way native speakers do:
カーテンの隙間から海が見える。
I can see the ocean through a gap in the curtains.
Bonus points if that material only teaches you 1 new concept at at time, like we do at NativShark.
My messy path to learning kanji
I’ve made pretty much every mistake possible when it comes to learning kanji.
I started by attempting rote memorization (because that’s what my Japanese teacher told me to do).
Dozens of hours later, I felt like I was getting nowhere, and I switched to learning with mnemonics, following the Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji system (more on that later).
Hundreds of hours later, I still felt like I was getting nowhere, and I gave up completely for about 2 years.
Then I followed a partial mnemonic method, supplementing with words for every standard reading of a kanji listed in the dictionary. This took hundreds of hours, and it did work… but a solid proportion of those hours was spent learning words that nobody uses! Also, I forgot all my mnemonics in the couple of years that followed.
If I could do it over, I would do NONE of these things.
Ultimately, I just got used to seeing kanji in words in specific contexts while in Japan or consuming various forms of Japanese media. This meant forgetting all of my mnemonics, most of those useless words, and just developing a natural ability to read, the same way that a native speaker does. That is, I learned via “sight acquisition”.
Great advice no one follows
If I could somehow go back in time and meet my younger self, just as I was getting started on my Japanese-learning journey, I would tell him:
You will be intimidated by the prospect of learning kanji, but this is a waste of mental bandwidth. If you study Japanese content that is written the same way it’s written for native speakers — i.e. no dumbed-down textbook material — you can’t not learn kanji. Your brain is amazing at recognizing patterns. A “pattern” is not just the arrangement of strokes in a single kanji. It is the context that surrounds the character as well: strokes < kanji < words < sentences < context. Show up consistently and have faith. The pieces will fall together in the end.
My younger self probably wouldn’t listen to me.
Instead, he’d probably make the same mistakes all over again:
- Making kanji the main focus of studies, instead of Japanese as a whole
- Switching kanji study methods every few weeks when he got frustrated and impatient
- Buying every book, app, and course that promised it would solve his (self-imposed) kanji woes
And after all of this, if he somehow managed to stick it out and continue learning Japanese, he would eventually learn kanji (albeit with a lot of wasted time thrown in), and he would learn them the same way every native speaker and highly proficient user of the language learns them: By sight.
Japanese people do NOT learn kanji by rote
If you talk to a Japanese person, they’ll usually tell you that they learned kanji by writing them over and over again hundreds of times while in elementary, junior high, and high school.
In some cases, they might even recommend that you do the same. (Run!)
While these are things that they did in order to learn kanji, this is not how they actually learned them. Instead, they saw each of the most common characters thousands of times in thousands of contexts.
Consider these English phrases:
- all’s well that _____ well
- over my _____ body
- head over _____ in love
- all that glitters isn’t _____
If you’re a native speaker of English, you probably know that the missing words are “ends”, “dead”, “heels”, and “gold”. Your brain recognizes that these four words fit into these four patterns — patterns which it has encountered over and over again throughout the course of your life.
Kanji are no different. Your brain will start to learn contexts which tend to surround a given character.
The other day in our Discord community, someone said:
The only difference between 未 and 末 is the length of the top horizontal line. When it’s shorter it means something like “not yet”, and when it’s longer it means something like “(at the) end”.
未 vs 末
When you’re just starting out with learning kanji, you think that you need to memorize which of the two has the shorter line and which has the longer line. I did the same, and I probably had some ridiculous mnemonic phrase to help me remember each one.
It turns out that I didn’t need to do this because 未 (not yet) almost always comes at the beginning of a word, and 末 ((at the) end) almost always comes at the end of a word:
未 = not yet
未来 (mirai // the future)
未成年 (miseinen //minor; underage)
未満 (miman // less than)
未熟 (mijuku // not ripe)
末 = (at the) end
週末 (shuumatsu // end of the week)
月末 (getsumatsu // end of the month)
年末 (nenmatsu // end of the year)
始末 (shimatsu // dealing with; disposing of)
Furthermore, when you see these words, they are in contexts in which the word itself can be more easily remembered, like we saw with “ends”, “dead”, “heels”, and “gold” above.
But those Japanese words have lots of complex lines and stuff! They’re more difficult to read than English words!
Maybe. But part of this stance is native-language bias. After all, data on reading speeds of English vs Chinese, for example, show that they are read at about the same speeds. It’s hard to argue that the text itself is more difficult if average people read it at the same speed across languages.
It’s not about the number of lines/strokes in a character: our brains learn the characters and words as a whole without us trying.
This happens in English, too. When an adult native speaker of English sees words like these, they don’t “read” them letter by letter:
- the
- could
- should
- might
- was
- did
- how
- when
- went
- fast
You’ve seen those words so many times that the entire word is an image in your mind. For the same reason, you can probably read this:
It deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. The olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht soem ltteers be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
The same thing happens with Japanese words, regardless of how “complicated” the characters in them may be.
It stands to reason, therefore, that:
If you see kanji in enough words in enough contexts, your brain will naturally learn to recognize them.
It’s what happened for me, regardless of all the shenanigans I did trying to learn kanji, and it’s what happens for every person who can read Japanese at a high level.
The challenge, then, is getting exposed to enough written Japanese in natural contexts that you can build up your “sight vocabulary”. If you’re reading a book that only writes sentences in hiragana and katakana because you’re “not ready” for intimidating kanji, it’s slowing down your progress toward real literacy.
The problem with only learning kanji by sight
You’ll probably feel stressed that it’s not working.
The issue with kanji is that they feel impossible to learn for a very long time. Even after you’ve learned to recognize several hundred characters, just about every sentence still has characters you don’t know.
→ So you can’t read.
→ → So you feel like you’re not making progress.
Next thing you know, you’re reading blog posts about how to learn kanji, hoping you’ll find that magic kanji-learning potion that just solves all of your problems. (Hi!)
Because of this, it can be helpful to incorporate some kind of kanji-specific learning activity into your broader Japanese studies. Additionally, you want to filter your exposure to kanji so that new sentences rarely have more than 1 unknown character.
In other words:
- At least look at the “meanings” of individual kanji, then use mnemonics for them if it makes you feel better. Don’t stress on this part as being very important.
- Study with a material that (usually) only introduces 1 new concept at a time, like NativShark.
#1 is the reason we opted to include a mnemonic based system in our learning materials at NativShark:
王 (king) + 里 (countryside village) = 理 (logic)
But we also tell people that they are welcome to archive (i.e. skip) kanji cards or to just hit the smiley face every time they show up in reviews (so the system knows you don’t need to be reminded of it too often).
Wait a second!
Aren’t you the guy who made learning kanji by mnemonics really popular?
Right. About that.
Well, it was first made popular by a guy named James Heisig with his book Remembering the Kanji way back in 1977. In many ways, he pioneered the movement of splitting all kanji into primitive elements and then putting those elements together to make stories that help you remember the kanji.
For example, 味 is the kanji for “flavor” or “taste”.
The left side is 口 (mouth), which is a pictographic character that resembles a mouth:
口 (mouth)
And the right side is 未 (not yet), which we just talked about above. This is 木 (tree) (another pictographic character) with an extra (short!) horizontal line at the top:
未 (not yet)
Put those two together, and you get 味 (flavor; taste):
味 (flavor; taste)
Level 1 mnemonics
In his book, Heisig writes:
When a tree has not yet finished growing, it produces fruit with a full flavor. When the official taster (the professional mouth to the left) determines that full flavor has been reached, the tree is pruned back so that it remains permanently not yet grown. A neat little agricultural trick and an easy way to see the sense of flavor hidden in this character.
I spent at least a couple hundred hours following the advice of Heisig’s book when I was first learning Japanese. And at the end of that couple hundred hours… I didn’t remember all that many characters.
The mnemonics just weren’t sticking.
Level 2 mnemonics
A couple of years later, I came back to Heisig’s mnemonic system, and I made my own, shorter mnemonics, like this:
A mouth has not yet experienced all the delicious flavors cooking can offer.
This worked better. And we actually use mnemonics like this on NativShark, although at least in our system you can hover over keywords to see which part it’s referring to:
I say it worked “better”, but it still didn’t work all that well. And I ended up going down a deep rabbit hole regarding mnemonics, memory palaces, and generally amazing feats of memory. That led to my monster blog post titled Hacking the Kanji: 2,200 Kanji in 97 Days, which helped to make this site popular in its early days.
The short and sweet version:
- If you place mnemonics in real-life contexts, they are easier to remember.
- You can use such mnemonics to power through 20~30 new kanji per day.
- If you’re consistent, you end up knowing the meanings of all 2200 or so general-use kanji within 97 days.
Level 3 mnemonics
I encouraged people to power up their mnemonics by utilizing their spatial memory, which tends to be amazing. It’s hard to remember the wordy, abstract descriptions in Heisig’s book. Sure, he encourages readers to create “clear and distinct images” for their mnemonics, but I really didn’t seem to have that ability… unless I was placing things in my existing spatial memory.
To give an example of this, you might use this exact same mnemonic:
A mouth has not yet experienced all the delicious flavors cooking can offer.
But you picture yourself saying, thinking, and experiencing this phrase in a place that you know very well. For example, maybe you picture this while at your grandmother’s house looking over a huge feast arrayed before you.
Level 4 mnemonics
It’s hard to place abstract elements like 未 (not yet) into mnemonics, so you can also have specific image- or character-based things for such an element. For example, Heisig talks about a tree that’s “not yet” ripe. Well, you could picture the tiny baby lemon tree your mom planted in her garden. And then you could have a concrete mnemonic like:
Mouths sprouted on the lemons on my mom’s not-yet ripe tree, but I tasted them anyway so I could find out their flavor.
This is assuming that your mom actually has at least a garden and a specific place this tree can (be imagined to) exist. As a result, your brain will remember it much more easily. Additionally, it’s a bit of a shocking/gross image, which is easier to remember.
Level 5 mnemonics
You can take it even a step further and assign your own characters as unique elements for mnemonics. For example, instead of something abstract like “not yet” for 未, when using this in mnemonics to build other kanji, you could ascribe it a concrete, image-rich name like, say, “Peter Pan” (who is forever “not yet” grown). This makes it even easier to create a memorable mnemonic:
A giant Peter Pan grabbed me and put me in his mouth to see what I tasted like, what my flavor is.
And you picture this scene in a specific place you know, such as halfway down the path from your front door to your mailbox. You can even string together multiple mnemonics. So another kanji’s mnemonic would take place at the mailbox and another would take place at the front door.
Doing this is fun.
And that’s a problem.
Because you end up spending hundreds of hours making mnemonics to remember kanji meanings when the original goal was just to make yourself less stressed about the fact that you don’t “know” many of the kanji you see in words.
That said, it does work if you actually spend 2-4 hours per day every single day for three months straight. That’s why I originally recommended it all those years ago. I had success doing something similar, after all.
But in the years that followed, I spoke to thousands of people using mnemonic methods as a primary study activity, and it became clear that the vast majority didn’t finish in the time allotted, and as a result they weren’t alleviating their fears about learning kanji, which is the main benefit of “knowing” all their meanings.
Even worse, they were delaying their learning of Japanese as a whole.
It’s much easier to just learn natural Japanese in rich contexts and let your reading ability develop organically.
And you can supplement with some mnemonic cards if that makes you feel better, although doing so is optional.
The takeaway
1. Read natural Japanese in rich contexts. This could be sentences in a platform like NativShark or (ideally when you’re not an absolute beginner, which would be somewhere after Unit 100 in NativShark, for reference) your favorite media, such as manga, video games, blog posts, etc. Avoid materials that omit kanji to make it “easier”, since that will slow down your build-up of sight vocabulary.
2. Don’t worry about it too much. And certainly don’t make it the primary focus of your studies. If you’re studying written Japanese in natural, context-rich settings, you will learn kanji. It happens even faster if you have a resource that filters unknown concepts to keep you from getting overwhelmed and challenges you to recall kanji meanings and readings in your reviews. NativShark is one example of this.
3. Enjoy yourself. Now that I am comfortable reading Japanese and hardly give any thought to kanji, I regret that I was so stressed about it in the early years. There are so many fascinating moments when you realize that kanji A + kanji B = word C, which has a meaning that makes sense based on the kanji in it, and it’s just so thrilling as a learner of the language. Savor these moments because you’ll get to experience fewer and fewer of them as you get better.
FAQ’s
Why do they use kanji in Japanese?
The illustrious Empress Suiko (depicted above) sent a bunch of her minions to China back around 600 A.D. Said minions brought back stuff with characters on it. That's why the Chinese word for Chinese characters, 漢字 (hanzi), is the same as the Japanese word for Chinese characters, 漢字 (kanji). (漢字 becomes 汉字 in simplified Chinese.)
You’re probably starting to guess why written Japanese is a bit all-over-the-place. They took Chinese characters and tried to smash Japanese into them. Then later they added some of their own characters — hiragana and katakana — so that it would all make a bit more sense.
Why don’t they just get rid of kanji, like they did in Korean?
A valid question. There are a few reasons this hasn’t happened.
First, Japanese has no spaces, so it would be very hard to read it without kanji, which make it much easier to tell where one word starts and another begins. (This will make sense once you’ve been exposed to a number of sentences.)
So? Add spaces then!
If Japanese were only written using kana (with spaces), then there would be a ton of homonyms — words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. This isn’t so much of a problem in spoken Japanese thanks to situational context and things like intonation, but it would be problematic with written Japanese.
I still think written Japanese would work fine without kanji.
Yeah, maybe. And Spanish would work fine without a subjunctive mood. English would work fine without a glut of synonyms for common words. But people who use these languages at a high level don’t want to get rid of these features. To do so would be to lose a bit of the soul of the language.
Additionally, I’ve met some Japanese people who seem to take pride in the fact that their writing system is intimidating to speakers of other languages. And it’s hard to argue with the fact that kanji can be very aesthetically pleasing.
In my personal experience, I’ll say that I find learning Korean much more difficult than learning Japanese because there are no kanji to help me guess and recall the meanings of words. It just seems like a big jumble of thousands of words that all sound the same!
Are radicals and elements the same thing?
Not quite. 部首 (bushu // radicals) are the official “parts” used in most kanji. Native Japanese speakers in Japan use these when describing or studying kanji, as well.
“Elements”, on the other hand, are a non-official division of the parts used in kanji. Non-native speakers of the language have often found it easier to divide kanji into their own assortment of “parts”, as they find the official list of radicals to be a little lacking.
Compared to the 214 official radicals, for example, Heisig’s book contains about 350 elements, which he calls “primitive elements”.
What about onyomi and kunyomi readings?
Remember how kanji was originally made for Chinese, not Japanese? Well, as a result, a lot of characters have to wear multiple hats — they show up in words derived from other languages (namely, Chinese) and words that originated in Japan.
Consequently, one character may be pronounced a number of different ways. These pronunciations are called "readings." They are divided into two categories: onyomi (readings derived from Chinese) and kunyomi (readings derived from Japanese).
For example:
The onyomi of 食 is ショク (shoku), as we see in the word 定食 (teishoku // set meal).The kunyomi of 食 is is た.べる (ta.beru), as we see in the word 食べる (taberu // to eat).
Onyomi (Chinese-derived readings) are typically written in katakana when they appear in dictionaries, which is why I wrote ショク (shoku) and not しょく (shoku).
Kunyomi (native Japanese readings) are typically delineated from the rest of the word in which they appear using a period, which is why I wrote た.べる (ta.beru) with a period inside of it — to show that た- (ta-) is the kunyomi of the word 食べる (taberu // to eat).
Wait a second. Are you telling me I have to learn two or more different pronunciations in addition to hard-to-pin-down meanings of 2,000+ characters?!?!?!
Kind of. But it sounds worse than it is. Honestly.
The thing is, studying onyomi and kunyomi is an obscene waste of time, and no student should worry about them. Notice that I said “studying” and not “learning.” You will learn the (useful) onyomi and kunyomi of kanji organically by encountering them in actual words.
You will know that た.べる (ta.beru) is a kunyomi of 食 by learning the word 食べる (taberu // to eat). Similarly, you will learn that ショク (shoku) is onyomi by learning a word like 定食 (teishoku // set meal). We’ve set up NativShark so that this happens quite naturally and without you thinking about it too much.
Memorizing kanji readings in isolation is a waste of time.
食 serves as a good example as to why this is the case. If you look up 食 in a dictionary, you'll find two onyomi, ショク (shoku) and ジキ (jiki), and four kunyomi, く.う (ku.u), く.らう (ku.rau), た.べる (ta.beru), and は.む (ha.mu).
There is not a practical way to use this information.
Do people actually say these readings? When? In what words? Are they useful words?
We need context to know this!
For the onyomi of 食：
- ショク (shoku) appears dozens of times in common vocabulary, such as in the word 定食 (teishoku // set meal).
- ジキ (jiki) appears in the word 断食 (danjiki // fasting (i.e. not eating)), which is a little bit obscure. You don’t see it in many other common words.
For the kunyomi of 食：
- く.う (ku.u) appears in 食う (kuu // to eat), which is common in spoken language and is a little crude-sounding (so it tends to get neglected in most traditional learning materials).
- く.らう (ku.rau) shows up in the word 食らう (ku.rau // to eat; to receive (e.g. a punch)), which can also sound crude, depending on how it’s used.
- た.べる (ta.beru) appears in the extraordinarily common verb 食べる (taberu // to eat).
- は.む (ha.mu) is used in the word 食む (hamu // to eat (fodder, grass, etc.)), which 99% of people will never need to know.
If we had just learned all of these readings out of a dictionary, it wouldn’t make us better at Japanese. Instead, we’d need to learn the readings in vocabulary (like those introduced above) and to learn those vocabulary in sentences in specific contexts. Readings that don’t appear in common words can be ignored… until we get to a high enough level that we start learning obscure words and readings. And when that happens, it will already feel effortless to do so.
You will learn readings without even trying, as long as you are studying natural written Japanese.
Should I learn each kanji’s stroke order?
Yes and no.
There is a predetermined order in which you’re supposed to write each stroke of a kanji. This is known as its “stroke order”.
If you try to write a kanji by hand without following the proper stroke order, it might end up looking just a little bit “off”.
Luckily, there are patterns for stroke orders, so you don’t need to memorize individual ones for each kanji.
Generally, you’ll go from top to bottom, writing from left to right.
There is a bit more nuance to it, which you can pick up naturally by writing many characters following a guide of some kind. You can find fun workbooks for this kind of thing if writing by hand is of interest to you as a hobby.
Otherwise, you can just write them out with your finger each time you encounter a new one, assuming you’re using a material like NativShark which shows you the stroke order for a kanji the first time you see it.
After a while, incorrect stroke orders will just start to feel wrong.
Should I be able to write each kanji by hand?
If you know the stroke order, you can already write any kanji while looking at it. So if you need to write something by hand for some strange reason, you can bring it up on your phone and just copy it.
It’s not necessary to be able to write kanji by hand from memory, with a couple exceptions:
- Your name, if it has kanji in it (e.g. because you have Japanese family name)
- Your address in Japan
Outside of these examples, you’ll almost never need to recall how to write kanji by hand from memory, even if you live in Japan. If you attend a traditional school, however, they’ll probably make you write a lot of things by hand from memory — a waste of students’ precious time, if you ask me.
What’s the context of that Japanese sentence at the beginning of the article?
The context would be:
A sentence from a novel.
カーテンの隙間から海が見える。
kaaten no sukima kara umi ga mieru.
I can see the ocean through a gap in the curtains.
Lit. “curtain + の + gap + from + sea + が + is visible.”
Based on that, you would know that saying this exact sentence in spoken language might result in you sounding a little strange. It depends on the context! But the one context in which we do know it is natural is in a sentence in a novel.
We actually have a very similar sentence in one of our NativShark Units:
My question isn’t answered here!
Then head over to our Discord community and ask it there. You’ll often get an answer within seconds.
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