Kanji can make life difficult. Living in Japan or trying to enjoy manga or books can present giant walls of squiggles separating you from finding a location, getting lunch, or enjoying free time and hobbies. Kanji can seem like this huge, single unapproachable behemoth; something to be put off as long as possible or something to take piece meal and dealt with the help of tools. … Continue reading →
RTK is one of the top used tools to learn kanji these days in the Japanese learner community. Some people love it. Some people hate it. That’s fine. But either way, it teaches you Japanese, right? Japanese is made up of kanji, and RTK teaches you the kanji? Yes? No? Maybe? A recent discussion here in the comments section about RTK has produced some really … Continue reading →
Foreigners are proud of their kanji ability. As they should be. You worked your ass off to learn the thousands of characters and made them your own. So sometimes when you are with Japanese people, you can’t help but want to show off just a tiny bit. Especially when you get complimented on merely saying こんにちは. Now some people think the trick is to be … Continue reading →
I was asked advice recently about doing the Jalup Beginner and Intermediate decks, right from the beginning, without ever touching Heisig’s Remembering The Kanji (RTK). RTK is a major recommendation on the site, and the guidance is to do RTK concurrently with your 1000 J-E sentences. But you have a problem: You hate doing RTK. You can’t get through it and it is killing your … Continue reading →
You get it. Kanji is hard. One kanji has multiple readings depending on what word it appears in and where it appears in that word. You can learn the rules, or you can get used to them just by seeing them used in massive frequency. Eventually things get easier. This site has a comic series about Japanese homophones (words that sound the same but mean … Continue reading →
What are 音記号(おんきごう)？ 音記号 (or 音の記号) are the phonetic components of kanji that represent its pronunciation. If you are familiar with these phonetic components then you can approximate the reading of new kanji, even if you have not seen the kanji before. For example, consider these kanji 静、清、 and 晴. They each have different skip radicals (部首 ぶしゅ), but they share the same 音記号, the kanji component 青. These kanji … Continue reading →
Ever stare at kanji so long and hard that your eyes started to go blurry and you begin having kanji hallucinations? No, not yet?! Don’t worry. You’ll have them one day. But until then, there are 錯覚 (さっかく) or optical illusions to provide some action. Kanji are already magical, but combine them in certain patterns that follow optical illusion rules, and they help bend your … Continue reading →
I think all Japanese learners develop a deep love for kanji eventually. While you may not feel that way just yet, as your Japanese grows with your kanji knowledge, so does a strong everlasting bond. But even more than this, you learn how key kanji is to unlocking the essence of the language. The more, the better. And so comes an important question asked by … Continue reading →
