2.5 a defense of kanji: at some point it all comes together
celebrating completing all 60 levels of Wanikani, the kanji learning app
I use a method called WaniKani to study Japanese kanji characters. It’s a browser-based app that uses spaced repetition to drill kanji characters and associated Japanese vocabulary, and there are also some user-created scripts and apps that you can use to go through the materials conveniently on your phone. The first three levels are free so that you can try it out, and after that it’s $9/month, $89/year, and $299/lifetime (they run a lifetime sale every January, when you can save $100, but I’ve read that you can message the Wanikani staff for a 20% discount off the annual fee if it’s still mid-year).
I’ve been using it since 2019. I dug around in my email archives and found that I registered for an account in January 2019 but then did very little with it until January 2020 when I guess I realized that I really might be able to up my kanji reading skills if I stuck with it. And then the pandemic hit, and I found myself processing my stress by obsessively going through all the easy levels at a rapid clip.
And at the start of 2024 I finally finished learning all 2000+ characters!
WaniKani has 60 levels, at the end of which you are supposedly able to recognize over 2000 characters and 6000 vocabulary words. I’m now able to read pretty smoothly, although I still have my handy-dandy Yomiwa Japanese dictionary app on hand, and I use Japanese subtitles on my Netflix dramas in order to make sense of Japanese words that I don’t actually know but could guess if I saw the characters (thank you, Chinese radical system).
However, even though my mother is from Japan, my first language was Japanese, and I spent years studying Japanese as a kid and in college, note that I was still not able to easily read a newspaper or a book! My stretch limit was manga, which sometimes has kanji readings noted on the sides of the characters. And of course, the manga visuals help a lot toward comprehension.
Given all of this, it’s frustrating that I’ve been using WaniKani religiously since 2020 and I’m STILL feeling like a raw beginner. I STILL can’t understand all the words I hear and read. My own mother regularly uses words I don’t know. It’s gut-wrenching if I’m having a bad day and I think too hard about it. I’m pretty smart, and I do have a talent for pattern recognition, so learning Arabic was fun for me, for example. Following that, I think I should have been able to learn this damned language better by now.
However, lately things have been coming together in terms of my comprehension, and along those lines I wanted to give a plug for a focus on kanji learning. I think a lot of people get confused, frustrated, or misunderstand the role of kanji in Japanese, and in an effort to hurry and become as functional as possible as quickly as possible, probably drop kanji study after they are able to do most of what they want to do, such as order food or ask for directions while traveling in Japan.
I understand this, because I was one of those people. I had a head start in the spoken language because of my mom, and I could fool people into thinking I knew more than I did. And when I read manga I can pick up context clues from the artwork. My WaniKani activities got drilled into place because of the pandemic, to the point where my nightly review session is now a habit that I pretty much never violate. But I know people who don’t move forward with kanji study because it feels never-ending, and at some point the more obscure characters (and WaniKani also drills you on vocabulary using the kanji you’ve learned, which can also feel burdensome and random) seem useless.
Also, the Japanese language has very few sounds, so you find that they get repeated over and over again. For example, I just went to the popular online dictionary at Jisho.org and looked up the sound combination “kan.” According to Jisho, there are 353 ways that I can write that combination of sounds using a kanji character. Most of the time, the sound “kan” will be combined with another character (or two or three) to create a word or phrase, and there will also be a huge number of characters for those possible sounds. When you realize that you will never know every single way to write every single sound, it feels pointless to keep going. And that’s when I believe many people stop trying.
So if you started to study kanji and then decided it was a crazy, impossible task, I get it. For many years, I muddled along with the kanji I could remember from my Japanese school days as a kid, and if I didn’t know something I would skip it. I didn’t want to bother to look it up most of the time, because in the days before the internet and smartphones, using a kanji dictionary was the biggest headache. You had to look up radicals and count strokes, and it took forever. There’s a sort-of Victorian-era fantasy of the scholar at his desk (he was probably a man, another annoyance!) pouring through dictionaries, painfully translating away, that was presented to me when I was a kid. It was supposed to make you feel learned and scholarly. Nope, it sucked and I avoided it. I remember my father (who fancied himself a translator and occasionally made money at it) making admiring speeches about his Nelson’s kanji dictionary. Yes, but look at what you had to do to find one darn character in this book!
First you had to go to the radical chart inside the cover. Let’s say I come across this character in my reading: 海 and I don’t know what it is. First, I have to look at the left-hand side of the character. That’s the radical that gives the character its meaning (or maybe “family” of meanings). It has three strokes, so I go to the inside cover of Nelson’s and look at all the radicals listed under “3.” I find the radical and it says “85” so I turn to that section of the dictionary. Then in order to find that specific character I have to count the number of strokes on the right-hand side of the character (in other words, all the strokes minus the radical strokes). There are six strokes on the right-hand side so I go through all the six-stroke characters (there’s a shortcut, you can look at the side of the page and it will tell you what radical you are looking at and how many non-radical strokes are on that page).
I don’t have to do that anymore. Once upon a time, that was the only way to look up a character, but there are lots of methods now. If you like using a radical-based print dictionary, it definitely works. But you can also take a picture and use Google Translate, or you can use Yomiwa’s camera function for a “live” translation of anything you are looking at. My current favorite method is to select the “finger” icon among the Yomiwa dictionary search options and trace the character in the space. It then presents me with options that I can choose from. This method works for me because I grew up writing Japanese (badly) and am generally proficient with strokes and stroke order when I copy characters, but the Yomiwa dictionary is pretty forgiving of terrible handwriting. Give it a try!
But I’ve found the best way for me is to simply do the work and STUDY slowly over time. Overall it’s just a lot less grief; each individual encounter doesn’t feel fraught so that I don’t get upset and give up. And that’s because WaniKani uses spaced repetition, where it will keep bringing up old characters from previous reviews in order to get them fixed into your brain. Eventually you’ll encounter almost everything you’d encounter in the wild, and it’s just a lot less annoying on a per-character basis. Otherwise I find I end up looking up the same characters repeatedly because it’s not enough for me to look it up once, so over the long run WaniKani saves me time and grief by passively presenting me with characters I’ve learned in the past. You can also use a flashcard app like Anki and create your own kanji study flashcards. The Anki app will use spaced repetition also, but I’ve been using WaniKani in order to avoid creating my own flashcards.
WaniKani is a fixed number of characters, around 2000. This is close to the number of characters that the average Japanese high school student will have learned over the course of many years of study, but it’s safe to say that many Japanese will also forget a bunch of those characters if they don’t read a lot, and certainly they will forget how to write them if they mostly type on their phones or laptops rather than write with a pen. You’ll remember the ones you use, and that’s the same for everyone who studies this infuriating language. Additionally, many Japanese will need to learn and use far more than this basic 2000 since there are always specialized vocabularies for different kinds of work and study, and of course there are always those people who want to read pre-war books that use kanji that have been modernized or removed from today’s school curriculum. My mother still uses old characters like those, and when I read her writing I always have to pause and mentally ask myself what the modern versions might be. But fortunately, I don’t have to learn them, because no one does anymore.
At least in my case, the WaniKani ecosystem is a closed system where it will keep showing me the same 2000 characters over and over again. If you just accept that this is a lengthy, often boring process, you can keep your irritation and frustration down to a low level. For me, that’s been the key to getting this far: don’t think too hard about it, just do it.
I really think studying kanji opens up the Japanese language in a way that nothing else does. For one thing, you can guess at the meaning of words when you recognize the characters. Even if you only know one of a group of characters, that can be enough to give you the gist of a sentence or paragraph.
For another, depending on what you spend your time reading, you will see the same ones repeatedly. Over time, those are the ones you will remember easily. I often don’t know what English words mean if I’m reading something not in my area of interest, so it’s no different in Japanese.
Another useful aspect of studying kanji is that Japanese newscasts and many variety shows have a non-stop “ticker” of text running along the bottom (or sometimes off to the side). When I don’t know the words the speaker is using, I pause the broadcast and read the captions. I also sometimes use Japanese closed captioning on Netflix shows when available, because it can be easier to figure out unknown vocabulary when you see the words.
Also, the more you learn, the easier it actually feels. It’s similar to the way you interpret words like telephone, telegram, telecommute, telekinesis—they’re all related, and you don’t have to think too hard to know how or why they’re similar. If you know a similar kanji character, you can guess at the unknown character in front of you. The more you know, the more you start to mentally group and visualize characters with similar or related meanings.
I personally find kanji study to be much easier than grammar study! It’s hard to study and retain a grammar construction because you’d have to encounter it “in the wild” to really know if you understand it, or you’d have to deliberately use it yourself repeatedly (and get corrected repeatedly) to make sure you know exactly how to use it. Kanji is comparatively so much easier than that, because all you have to do it see it over and over again, which you probably will.
I hope that instead of scaring you away from kanji study (or Japanese study!), I’ve made a case for why kanji study actually makes the other un-fun parts of Japanese study less awful. If you just chip away at it without stress, it can actually be one of the more rewarding aspects of Japanese study. You’ll be able to make good guesses at what’s on sale at the shops, what the newscaster is talking about, and you’ll be able to read iconography on maps and diagrams so much more easily. It’s not all that bad, seriously! It just takes time, the way that your years of education in your own language took time. Have a go at it and see what happens!
Good morning! I completely agree with you that it’s a big mistake to not start with kanji. In terms of language learning begin in Japanese is pretty simple. It’s when it gets to the intermediate level where things get really serious and if you didn’t have a focus on characters and writing it’s going to hold you back so badly. I also think people make a mistake who don’t study keigo. Since it is used as part of grammar. There’s also something incredibly peaceful and relaxing about studying calligraphy and writing it. It was part of my life that I loved for many years was my daily practice. I’ve also been perfectly happy to let it all go since coming home!
Good point! I also think kanji learning should come at the beginning. And keigo! I have heard so many people say that they dislike keigo (honorifics) but it's part of everything. I studied a bit of Korean and absolutely love their different levels of honorifics. Even when I watch a k-drama I get so many clues about subtext from noticing the level of language. It's a mistake to try to separate language into components like kana/kanji, it doesn't work that way. I am constantly surprised by what I understand because I learned the kanji!