Writing Out 100,000 Kanji
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 just add up silently over the weeks, months, and years. But what if you created your own kanji writing montage video showing you producing every one of these little beasts multiple times?
That’s what one man set out to do.
The following video is around 3 years old, but I just stumbled across it now, and think it deserves way more attention.
Enjoy 100,000 kanji, beautifully filmed, beautifully written, beautifully soundtracked, and just plain inspiring. Extreme bonus points to him for starting off the video with a nice little nod to Anki.
Now you know what it’s like when kanji becomes your world. But hey, at least he’s not living in this world below:
If you had to guess, how many kanji do you think you have written in total since starting to study Japanese?
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
Just checked my anki, i’ve only done 40,000 on my RTK. Almost half way though! hahah
Though it will take forever to reach those figures, since my review numbers have drastically reduced and I don’t add kanji anymore.
You’ll just have to start writing out sentences!
Perfect videos. The first one made me want to write kanji and the second one made me laugh out loud.
We’re waiting for your 100k video!
信じられない!
信じるか信じないかはあなた次第!
Achievement Unlocked: 25000 Kanji written out.
Just finished today!
おー!凄いじゃん。2万5千字でもよく頑張ったね。
All of that effort and yet his handwriting never improved.
I could say the same thing about my English handwriting…
One part of my final art project consisted of making the 1000 paper cranes from all my sheets of written kanji, to represent the toil I undertake, chasing the dream of Japanese fluency.
I was quite happy with the results, but unfortunately another part of my project didn’t dry sufficiently well and infested half my project with toxic mold at some point between marking and pick-up. :(
I just stumbled across this post, and checked my Anki kanji deck stats. 108,430 card reviews, and I have written out pretty much all of them. That is a lot of writing! I probably got over the 100,000 threshold sometime in October. It took about two years to get to this point.
That is impressive :) And I’m sure it’s done amazing things for your Japanese!