Is Isolated Kanji Learning Possible?

[Raconteur]

Nearly a decade ago, I had a chance to study elementary Japanese. The biggest hurdle I faced while learning Japanese was Kanji. In the classroom setting, Kanji was introduced at a rapid pace – we were expected to blindly memorize them, brute force, without understanding why or how the various pieces fit together. At some point along the way I discovered James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji method. While encouraged by his approach to introducing Kanji, I found it all but impossible to keep up with classroom-sanctioned Kanji while also making steady progress on Heisig's list. Eventually, unable to devote as much time as I'd like to learning this demanding language, I gave up. What discouraged me the most was Kanji, which I kept forgetting and confusing.

Fast forward to today...

Regrettably, I can't make the time to learn Japanese these days. There's also another language I need to focus on first. That being said, in 5 years or so I would really like to start (re)learning 日本語 at full speed.

Question is, can I do something in the meantime to facilitate the learning of Japanese later on? This is where the the idea of isolating Kanji learning comes in. While I can't tackle Japanese in a meaningful way right now, I could easily take the time to learn 10 new Kanji per week (+SRS review). This much is possible.

Given 5 years (261 weeks) I could cover all the Jōyō kanji and then some. And if I push that number to 11.5/week (on average) I can do all of the 3007 Kanji covered by Remembering the Kanji vol. 1-3.

Learning Kanji (especially at a pace of 1 or 2 per day) would not be very time consuming, and I can feasibly fit it into my schedule for the next 5 years. That being said, is it possible or sensible to do it this way? This is the main question I have for the community here. Given that I don't fully comprehend the complexity of the Japanese language I can't answer it for myself.

The second question is, if it is possible, how would you go about the Kanji learning quest - in other words, what would you link these logographic characters to and how would you go about learning them?

Only way I can think of would be to learn the Kanji alongside Heisig's keywords (with SRS as the main tool and pen/paper for practice). This would leave out the complexity of on'yomi, kun'yomi, jūbako, and so on for later.

What do you think?

[dampingwire]

Question is, can I do something in the meantime to facilitate the learning of Japanese later on? This is where the the idea of isolating Kanji learning comes in. While I can't tackle Japanese in a meaningful way right now, I could easily take the time to learn 10 new Kanji per week (+SRS review). This much is possible.

I use https://kanji.koohii.com/ (which is based on Heisig, but you get to use other people's memory hooks, if you like them). There are also various anki decks floating around, if you prefer that approach.

Learning Kanji (especially at a pace of 1 or 2 per day) would not be very time consuming, and I can feasibly fit it into my schedule for the next 5 years. That being said, is it possible or sensible to do it this way? This is the main question I have for the community here. Given that I don't fully comprehend the complexity of the Japanese language I can't answer it for myself.

I imagine that you'll get varying opinions. I've used it and, for me, it works. Other people hate the whole idea and prefer to learn kanji as they learn the vocab.

Only way I can think of would be to learn the Kanji alongside Heisig's keywords (with SRS as the main tool and pen/paper for practice). This would leave out the complexity of on'yomi, kun'yomi, jūbako, and so on for later.

I found that as I was learning them, writing them out was very helpful. I've since stopped and I think my recognition has suffered. Certainly the Heisig method is only intended to teach you the kanji, not all the associated "baggage". I've picked up the readings (to some extent, at least) through vocabulary. But having the kanji (mostly) in my head has helped me enormously with that.

If I were starting again, I might be tempted to find a common word or two for each kanji as I learn them. I did that for the hiragana and I think it helped (although the scale of the two tasks just doesn't compare ...).

[AndyMeg]

I had a similar problem with japanese. Early in my studies I got a really bad experience related with kanjis and it made me get stuck in the written japanese part. I'm focusing on korean for now, but from time to time I take small breaks and study kanji.

What I'm using for my study of kanji is an Android app called "Kanji Study". I chose the option of dividing the kanjis in the same groups as the Kanken (漢字検定) and I've been studying the kanjis for level 10. For now I'm just focusing on meanings and handwriting. First I used these test options:

- Multiple choice
- Test on meanings
- Don't show readings
- Never pause
- No time limit
- Repeat questions with wrong answers until I get them right

The test shows the results with a percentage of "precision". My goal was to get a score of 100% precision. When I finally achieved that, I moved on to a different kind of test. I divided the 80 kanjis of Kanken level 10 into subgroups of 10 kanjis each. For each subgroup I chose the following test options:

- Test on handwriting
- Show meanings
- Don't show readings
- Normal detection of strokes
- Repeat until I get the kanji right from beginning to end (right direction, right order of the strokes)

You can try the app for free and then, if you like it, you can upgrade to be able to make custom groups and study all the available kanji. I really like this app.

[lichtrausch]

I'll spare the forum another rant against Heisig, but I would make two suggestions. Getting a solid grasp of the very manageable amount of radicals is extremely helpful, and fortunately they even have real underlying etymologies for aiding memorization. And second, I think it would help if you used a little bit of your kanji time for learning the rest of the language. Trying to learn the kanji while hardly knowing any Japanese is kind of like trying to grow a bunch of fruit on a tree with no branches. It doesn't give your fruit anything to hang on to and be nurtured by.

[Teango]

I recall that Khatz recommended learning the 2,136 jōyō kanji first, before tackling anything else in Japanese (you'll probably find more details or links to this on his AJATT overview page). I haven't tried out this approach fully myself (the truth is I started but quickly fizzled out), but would be interested to hear from people who have given it a good go at least. One of the first things I did do, however, was to learn some everyday phrases that incorporate frequently used kanji (as well as important sign posts you'd be likely to see everywhere in Japan), along with the set of 214 traditional radicals used to form most of the kanji (and a few interesting bonus variants as loose change besides). I think that isolated kanji learning is indeed possible, but I agree with lichtrausch that learning the radicals first, along with some basic Japanese phrases and structure to hang new words and kanji on, would offer a better initial return on investment and be a good place to start.

[Kamlari]

I don’t learn kanji, I learn WORDS in TEXTS (Japanese audio + transcript + translation).

0. learn ABOUT Japanese
1. learn your strokes
2. learn your stroke order rules
3. learn your katakana
https://kakijun.jp/main/main_etc_kana.html
4. learn your kanji components
http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1R

Just remember the names of the components in the correct stroke order.
ツ、冖、子、です。（学）.mp3
くノ一 (女).mp3
横、縦。 （十）.mp3
ゆみへん、縦。（引）.mp3
「田」、「力」。（男）.mp3
口、ひとあし。（兄）.mp3
「二」、縦、左はらい、右はらい。（未）.mp3
女偏、「未」。（妹）.mp3
「ソ」、「弓」、縦、「ノ」。(弟).mp3

[Kamlari]

Here's a sample in action:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_ ... Action.wmv

[lavengro]

Good question Raconteur and I am very interested in the answers as I am in the process of proceeding in roughly the same manner you contemplate taking up: currently I am learning 5 kanji a day from Heisig's RTK, then reviewing on a RTK Memrise course (https://www.memrise.com/course/43670/re ... -volume-1/). Strictly speaking, I am re-learning at this point, as I had previously worked some years ago through the first 300 or so Kanji - once I am into entirely-new terrain, I may wind up learning less per day. While I am determined this time to push through the entire first volume (RTK1), I am interested in hearing about other approaches as well.

I am aware there is a diversity of opinions about the usefulness of the RTK approach, including some strongly held negative views by some (here and elsewhere) who are in a position to speak from experience. But for me, I am keen on the approach. I accept there may be more efficient ways to go about it, but I enjoy the Heisig approach at least to this point, and it is a relatively easy thing to knock off each day. If my job or world peace or something depended on my learning Japanese as quickly and as coldly-efficiently as possible, I might be looking to another approach but that it is not the metric by which I measure my language learning engagements.

[unrelatedwaffle]

The best advice I can give you is to learn the kanji for words you already know. It will be so much easier to learn the reading and the meaning if you can connect it to prior knowledge. I also find it easier to learn a kanji's meaning if I learn its foundational vocabulary word first, as in, the vocab word that has the same meaning as the kanji. For example, 見's foundational vocabulary word is 見る, which has the same meaning as the kanji. Don't start with something like 発見, because it's used more abstractly. Going from concrete meaning --> abstract meaning is much, much easier and is how children learn their native language. YMMV once you get to really low frequency/non jouyou kanji, because the foundational words are usually obsolete, but I still think this method is helpful in the majority of cases.

Another thing I learned over the years is not to try to memorize all the on readings at once. It will just frustrate you and overwhelm you. Learn readings along with vocab. Eventually you'll develop intuition about the likely reading of a kanji in an unfamiliar word, but it's okay to get it wrong. Japanese people do all the time.

A method that might click for you is to learn kanji in the order that Japanese school children do. This is roughly a frequency based approach, since first-graders are learning kanji that appear in basic words they would know. http://kanjicards.org/kanji-lists.html has a "by grade" section. Learn words with the target kanji that are at your level. So don't jump in with N1 level vocab just to learn 日.

You'll get there. Keep working!

[Cainntear]

Isolated vocab "learning" is limited, in my opinion, but not useless. I have got a lot out of learning isolated vocabulary early on in my learning, but I see it almost as a sort of "pre-learning" -- you never master the item that way, but you do sort of "file" it in some way that makes it easier to learn properly later.

I had an interesting experience when after learning Gaelic for a while I went back to a software package I had used early on in my learning. I was trying to batter through it as quick as possible without stopping and thinking too much. Suddenly the word "eye" came up on screen, and I completely blocked. My conscious brain recognised "eye" and knew what it represented, and I knew the Gaelic equivalent (sùil) pretty well, but my unconscious brain wouldn't let me process it right. Because there was no context, it wouldn't let me disambiguate between the homophones eye, I, aye (yes) and ay/aye (mostly archaic, but still relatively common in Scotland: always). Despite the fact that none of the other forms are homographs of "eye", my brain's language centre didn't care -- it decided it couldn't be sure what the word meant so it wouldn't process it. When I was starting out, that wouldn't have been a problem, but somewhere along the line, I started processing the Gaelic correctly and the task actually became more difficult.

So learn things in isolation if you need to, but remember that it won't get you much further than the very start.