Learning kanji and then immediately being able to use them feels great. This is especially true when your method is learning kanji separately from your other studying. For example, when you see a kanji in Kanji Kingdom, you are learning an English keyword, and refreshing yourself on the English meanings of all the other kanji you’ve learned. But this isn’t engaging you in a lot … Continue reading →
You’ve finished some kind of kanji-focused flash card deck and learned all 2000+ kanji. Congrats, you’ve done well. “Freedom!” may be your first thought. You never have to look at them again. You soon realize that you should not stop your kanji reviews just because you finished learning them all. This defeats the entire purpose of using spaced repetition flash cards to retain kanji knowledge in … Continue reading →
Ever think to yourself “there aren’t enough kanji to study. I want more!” You were probably disappointed to find out that Japan isn’t still churning out new kanji. New words that come into existence are created either using older kanji (当て字) or katakana. Even if a new kanji somehow magically came into being, computers would not be able to handle them. So you are stuck … Continue reading →
Every serious learner is going to have to learn kanji one day whether you like it or not (you’ll like it eventually, trust me). While there are plenty of ways to learn kanji depending on your tastes, they fall into 2 categories. 1. Learn kanji separately (ex. Kanji Kingdom, RTK, WaniKani, etc) 2. Learn kanji naturally, as part of whatever Japanese you are learning (through … Continue reading →
Everyone who studies Japanese to be able to watch anime would love to be able to study Japanese with and through that anime. While I wanted to do the same, I had no idea how to approach this. I’m a fan of a little known anime series called Naruto. A while ago I tried an experiment with some friends (also Naruto fans) where I had … Continue reading →
I recently mentioned in my personal story that I struggled greatly with RTK and that ended up taking me 11 months to finish RTK1. I thought I’d take some time to talk about a few of the difficulties I faced in greater depth, and share the strategies I ultimately used to overcome them. Anyway, let’s jump right into the good stuff. Bring your stories to … Continue reading →
Everyone starts off writing in hiragana. It’s easy to learn, easy to write, and easy to remember. But you know that you can’t just hang out in the kiddie pool the rest of your Japanese life. You have to replace your ugly all-hiragana sentences with the fine presence that is kanji. The logical thought would be: “if there is kanji for a word, use it.” … Continue reading →
Everyone here has written out kanji, over and over, long into the dark and desolate night. There are around 2000 kanji you need to learn, so even if you wrote every kanji out only once, that would already be… well 2000 kanji. Write them out 50 times each and that’s 100,000. Most people don’t keep track of how many kanji they write out. The numbers … Continue reading →
