Question: How Should You Learn Kanji?

by

After telling you the Japanese learning industry was a failure when it comes to kanji learning, it’s only fair to come up with some solutions to this mess and help you out. Learning kanji is no laughing matter (it’s more of a crying matter, really), and there are a number of ways to go about it. Sure, I could give you my opinion (and I will), but I thought it would be even more valuable for you, the kanji learner, to hear it from 10 other J-blogger kanji experts as well. These are people who have studied kanji, made mistakes, overcome obstacles, found success, and can point you in the right direction. Everybody learns differently, and by hearing from various expert opinions, hopefully you’ll figure out how you should learn kanji too (and find some sweet new J-bloggers to follow!).

Julie from Julie In Japan

The best Kanji book I’ve been given is called ストーリーで覚える漢字300 (Story de Oboeru Kanji 300) by Fusako Beuckmann. Not only does it associate each Kanji part with an interesting story, but it helps with writing and piecing together common Kanji pairings. This book helped me a lot when I first started learning. The book is in English, Portugese, Korean and Spanish. ReadTheKanji is a fun and simple website that quizzes you and checks your progress. I recommend doing it for a short time every day. I also recommend joining Lang-8 and starting a journal for Japanese people to correct and comment on. I actually learned about both sites from Tofugu.

Also, I don’t know if you’d call it studying, but I learned a lot of Kanji from text messaging with friends. When I first learned the kana, my friends started sending me text messages in Japanese. First, the messages were all in Hiragana, but soon I began to recognize the most common Kanji characters. Now, I think I know about 600-700 Kanji, which is decent since I’ve never formally studied it. I’m going to try the JLPT test this year for the first time, so that is the biggest study motivation right now. [JulieInJapan]

Matt from AltJapan

Being a translator, I have reached a level of proficiency where I don’t need to study kanji on a daily basis like I once did. Back when I was a student I used a combo of flashcards and rote repetition (writing kanji, particularly those I had a hard time remembering, over and over again.) Mnemonic devices (associating them with little rhymes or whatever) can be a big help on that front too.

But rote study is not enough to make anything stick. You have to put yourself into a place where you are reading (and also hopefully writing) a certain amount of Japanese every day. Whether this means plowing through a newspaper, novel, magazine, manga, or favorite website doesn’t matter. It’s the act of actually using the information on a daily basis that locks it in. [AltJapan]

Thomas from NihonHacks

I don’t study kanji at all. I read books/magazines and play video games.

I did speed through Heisig a while back which gave me a nice foundation to guess word-meanings from, but I didn’t maintain it (boring).

Now I just read and learn kanji through exposure. Get books with a high picture/text ratio (ex, non-fiction books targeted at elementary school kids, on a topic you are interested in). Buy a Nintendo DS and get games that have a lot of text (Dragon Quest series, Sloane to MacHale no Nazo no Story). Read manga.

If you like science, I recommend Newton magazine. Crazy amount of colorful pictures, everything on every page is explained at least twice (text and picture captions), and not that many words on a page. [NihonHacks]

Jamaipanese from Jamaipanese

1. Start with the easy stuff and work your way up:
Too often persons studying kanji for various reasons try to skip the basic easy characters. Whether it is to impress friends, teachers or just to make it harder on yourself I can never really understand why. I am no kanji pro but characters like mountain, fire, four and book should be among the first kanji you learn.

2. Focus more on reading than writing:
Maybe my reasoning is flawed and it all depends on your reason for studying Japanese but I like to think that being able to recognize and read kanji is more important that writing them. Focus more and reading kanji and when it comes to writing it will only be a matter of remembering stroke order as the character will be stuck in your mind ready to be reproduced by your hands.

3. Practice and revise often:
What’s the reason for learning something in the first place if you don’t practice it and take steps to remember? Top class athletes work hard to keep themselves in top shape so why should be any different with Kanji? There is a crap load of revision tools available online and through various video games and phone applications.

Bonus tip

4: Stay inspired
Everyone has their reasons why they are studying Japanese, whether it be wanting to live and/or work in Japan, play imported video games, land a Japanese girlfriend/boyfriend. Focus on your inspiration and go for it! [Jamaipanese]

David from JapanDave

Best way to study the kanji is Heisig’s Remember the Kanji. At first glance, the book and method may seem a little crazy — but hear it out. The method divides kanji learning into two distinctive parts:

1) Learn how to draw the kanji from an English key word. That is, if you see the word “cat” you draw the kanji for cat. (猫)

2) Learn the pronunciations for the kanji. That is, when you see the kanji for cat (猫), you can immediately say Ah hah, that’s neko.

The idea here is that it’s far easier to learn when you are only doing one thing at a time.

That’s the theory. The actual way of learning is to simply make a story for each character that tells you how to draw it. That’s it.

Seems crazy, but it works amazingly well. The first chapter or so is available to download for free, so go give it a try. [JapanDave]

Brett from Rainbowhill Language Lab

You really have to grab kanji by both horns and pummel it into submission. There are as many ways to learn kanji as there are, well, kanji. You don’t have to try everything but definitely try enough to find out what works for you. Go for natural methods over contrived every time. Break it down into component parts, and build it back up again. Associate multiple meanings, and guess at new combinations. Above all, commit it to memory by learning to write. [Rainbowhill Language Lab]

Mike from Japan Is Doomed

I used ‘Basic Kanji Book I + II’ to get a basic grounding (500 kanji with all readings and useful compounds).

Since then, I’ve been adding them to my growing ‘pool’ of Kanji and vocab as I see them in the world, plus ones from school. It’s not the most thorough system but you do end up with mostly very useful knowledge. (No archaic readings or whatever). [Japan Is Doomed]

Michael from Michael John Grist

I tried all the ways I could think of to learn Kanji: brute force memorization with flash cards, kanji games like slime forest where you kill slimes by correctly naming kanji, trying to make up stories involving kanji particles and memorize them mnemonically, listing signs and place names around Tokyo and trying to memorize them (because they’d be useful and I see them a lot), but I think all of these efforts fell down for one main reason- I’m not so interested in Japanese culture. I think key to learning a language is learning what that language communicates- which is its unique culture. So I could bash my head against kanji all day, but I’m left with the demotivating fact after it all- what do I even want these kanji for? And I never have a good answer. [Michael John Grist]

Michael from Gakuranman

Kanji. They still remain the biggest stumbling block for me, alongside advanced vocabulary. Working as a translator of Japanese in Japan I am reading blocks of Japanese text everyday, and while it has been a fantastic way to improve my understanding of the language, it’s also highlighted some of my shortcomings. I’ve realized that in order to be able to write kanji, you really need to be using them, pen to paper style.

Many of the kanji I was comfortable with before now seem to shift around in that not-quite-there space of my mind. I know it, for sure, but I just couldn’t write it if pushed to. While this isn’t a great burden on me right now (I use a computer most days), it is embarrassing come letter writing time.

So my nugget of advice is to go back to school and use a pen and paper to learn your kanji. Forget Smart.fm for a moment (but use it for vocabulary!) – when you really want to internalize those characters, you need to be writing them. Verbalizing the meanings and readings as you practice those strokes is another good way to cement them into your mind. And remember – do it a little everyday! Nothing beats repetition. Good luck! [Gakuranman]

Mari from Mari’s Diary

I guess it would be fun to find a same kanji on different words, so that you may understand the meaning of kanji slowly. 運, 運用, 運行, 運転 etc,. so you will know 運 is related to something to do with carrying or handling. You don’t need to fight with thick books or text books, a peice of map is fine. You will know river, city, mountain, gulf etc with shape or graphic. After map, you can challenge to another piece of paper like super market ad. [Mari's Diary]

Koichi from Tofugu

Ha ha! I get the last spot because I was the last person to write something. Now, you already know the mistakes I think a lot of kanji learners make, so that should give you some idea, but let me give you a quick summary on how I think you should be learning your kanji.

Tip 1: Learn the radicals and use them to your advantage. By learning radicals you can avoid the whole “having to learn every single stroke” problem that only gets worse and worse the more you learn. Radicals cut down on the number of steps you have to take to memorize a particular kanji, and fewer steps will make your brain a happy brain.

Tip 2: Start with the simplest kanji in terms of complexity (and not the simplest kanji meaning) and work your way up. If you start with kanji of simpler build (i.e. learn 1-stroke kanji first, then 2-stroke, and so on), kanji will build on each other and you’ll be able to use simpler kanji to put together more complicated kanji, like the foundation to a building.

Tip 3: Consistency is key. Learning 5 kanji a day is way more effective than learning 50 kanji all at once, once a week. Take it a little bit at a time and you’ll know a lot of kanji in a relatively short period of time. 5 kanji per day will get you to 2000 kanji in 400 days (that’s just over a year… 2000 kanji takes most people 5, 6, 7+ years to get a grip on, because they aren’t consistent). If you have more time, up it to 10 a day, but I would definitely not go beyond that. The main thing is that you are consistent and create a schedule. Make it a habit, and don’t overdo it or you’ll end up burning out.

Tip 4: Find a resource / “way of learning” that works for you. What works for me, or for any of the people above me might not be a fit for you (but then again, it may be, and that’s great!). The more you know about yourself, and how you learn, the more effectively you’ll be able to learn kanji in the long run. Be careful not to let this become a crutch or an excuse, though. If you spend all your time thinking, “no, this won’t work for me, I better research more and more on how to learn” you’ll never make it. Take action and do. Make mistakes, and figure out through experience what works for you. If something doesn’t work, move on, but you’ll never know until you actually try. As (I think) Einstein said, “A good plan today is always better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” [Tofugu]

All that being said, I hope you find something that works for you.There are some fabulous ideas up above, and you’re sure to get something out of it. But heck, what am I thinking? There must be some kanji-learning gurus reading this as too (or at least people who have attempted at some point in their life to learn kanji). What has worked well for you? What hasn’t? Share them here and help your fellow kanji-learning-humans out. We all know that every kanji-learner could use whatever they can get.

Oh, and definitely take a look at the bloggers that contributed above. They have great j-blogs, and you’ll surely enjoy what they have to say if you’re reading the monkey-loving articles I do here.

P.S. If you know fewer than 12,000 kanji, you should subscribe to the Tofugu newsletter (or, if you’re already subscribed, you should check out Rainbowhill’s newsletter too, it’s good for Japanese-learners).

P.P.S. If you don’t have a silly kanji tattoo, you should follow Tofugu on Twitter as well.

Newer Comments →
  • http://kellydolljapan.blogspot.com/ KellyDoll

    This is a really great article! And as far as resources go, I agree with JapanDave that Heisig's “Remembering the Kanji” is the best way to learn the kanji. The method he teaches helped me learn hiragana and katakana alone within around 5 hours!

  • Chris

    Great inspiration! Thanks for another wonderful article.

  • http://pmthreads.livejournal.com/ Tiffany

    I'm agreeing with the “Remembering the Kanji” vote as well. I was able to learn the 2000+ kanji in that book in about 2 months with the help of the “Reviewing the Kanji” website ~ http://kanji.koohii.com

    The website gives you a place to store & share the mnemonic stories that you create for each kanji, so it's a great place to get inspiration for your stories as well. There are also a lot of tips in the comments ~ if the stroke order was wrong in an older addition of the book, suggestions for better keywords, etc. There is even an SRS built into site, though most people prefer to use Anki, and there are some other nice features around the site. I've also found a lot of great information for studying Japanese in the forums.

    The one downside ~ there are a lot of perverted stories shared, which started to really get old after about 1000. (And when people find a way to use so many radicals as a part of the male body, how are you really going to remember whether your story involved 'wood' or a 'rod' or 'flesh', etc. Ugghhh.) Fortunately, with Firefox you can install a script which will hide any stories that get over a certain # of reports (you set the #) ~ for me at least, it made the site so much more enjoyable.

  • kekoax

    I had never heard of that slime forest game but its sounds pretty interesting.

    I think I will be giving that a try.

  • http://blog.rainbowhill.com.au/ Rainbowhill

    Sounds like people start to run out of ideas after a thousand! Sometimes the crazier the mnemonic is the harder is sticks, but like yourself I'd get pretty tired of phallic references after a while. Japanese works really well for mnemonics, even in Japanese.

  • http://blog.rainbowhill.com.au/ Rainbowhill

    It really is interesting to see how others approach Kanji, and there is really no better way than to find out for your self by trying a few of ideas and seeing what works. Don't get stuck on any one method, as you progress you'll notice that some things start to work when they didn't before. It's all about adapting your learning style to the tools and methods you have available to you at the time.

    Thanks for the great post Koichi, introducing me to some new ideas and at least one new blog I hadn't seen before.

  • http://www.jamaipanese.com Jamaipanese

    woOt! I'm featured! Hope my quirky advice can be useful! ^^

  • moritheil

    It's fascinating to see everyone's take on this. I note that the different needs play a part – obviously a translator who needs to be converting business letters into Japanese needs writing much more than someone who primarily wants to be able to read the news in Japanese, or something similar.

  • http://JapanDave.com David LaSpina

    That's a good site.

    I think it's better to create your own story, though. Heisig may have mentioned that in his book (I'm unsure… haven't read it in awhile). It takes a little more effort than just copying someone else's, but it sticks in your mind much easier when it's completely your story.

  • Butterfly

    I think everyone here missed the most obvious tip concerning Kanji learning:
    Start soon and learn the kanji you can actually use at your current language level.

    I'm still a beginner, but reading Koichis “Learn the simple kanji first!”-tip strikes me as somewhat strange. Sure, it's propably easy to remember those kanji while you're learning them – but if they are words that have a difficult meaning or are far above your current level of understanding and you can't use them in a sentence… well, I don't see the sense in that, since you're most likely to forget them as fast as you learnt them, because you're never using them. No use in learning something you have no connection to.

    What I'm doing is trying to learn the kanji of the vocabulary that we're learning in class and that I can actually use in sentences and, since we just learnt the vocab, are likely to come up very often in the currenct chapter of our book (皆の日本語１) and in class. Sure, I'm getting a mixture of simple and pretty hard kanji that way and have to adept to that – but I'm at least able to actually USE these kanji and read them in a text that I am able to understand.

    Maybe this tip isn't as important for advanced learners, but I think as a beginner you should definitley give it a try. It worked pretty good so far for me.

    Also, I recommend using Anki for learning Kanji. What I'm doing is, I create 2 cards for every kanji:
    1) Kanji “recognition”, that is a card with just the kanji on it and I have to say the word it means
    2) Kanji “recall”, I write the word in hiragana and have to recall the kanji that is used. If I can remember it, I write it down once to memorize the writing and then check whether I was right or not.

    Ah, also, I'm not learning all the readings of a single kanji at once – I learn them as they come, as part of the vocabulary I'm currently studying.

    These things work pretty good for me :)

  • http://twitter.com/richfowler Rich Fowler

    1. Use whatever works for you.
    2. If it doesn't work for you, find something that does.
    3. Anything will work if you're willing to stick with it.

    I thought Heisig sounded like total BS until I tried it. But it worked, so I used it. Everything I had tried before just didn't do it for me– too much to remember all at the same time, so stuff fell through the cracks. Writing a character over and over didn't work. But making the character a “living thing” in my brain made it stick. Go figure.

    I used paper cards the first go-round. Big mistake. I used Fabrice's kanji.koohii.com site the second go-round a couple of months later. Finished it in 2 months. You could also use Anki, but Fabrice's site has stories to fire your creativity when you're stuck. (You will get stuck.)

    If you do Heisig, you need to make the stories as personal as possible, and as memorable as possible. Don't be afraid to turn some of the radicals into fictional characters if it makes it easier. It's all silly-putty for your brain. (Linguists may weep here, but that's their problem.)

    The second volume of Heisig *didn't* work for me, so I switched to Kanji Odyssey. I like how they break down kanji into chunks of 5 logically-related kanji, either by meaning, or by association. So you take your chunk of 5 kanji, and learn some of the words and learn the main on/kun yomi from them, rather than learning it in a vacuum.

    I use sentences to learn the vocab. As with on/kun yomi, vocab in a vaccuum is dangerous, because while “domicile” can also mean “home,” or “house,” you don't say, “Let's go to your domicile” all the time, because you sound like a alien or a fed. We need context.

    KO has a good collection of example sentences, although they can be long and sometimes weird, and can introduce kanji you don't know yet way too soon. You can just bite the bullet and learn the new vocab, or find better sentences. (I usually bite the bullet. I learn a lot of useful vocab that way.)

    I usually use the yahoo.co.jp dictionary for extra, shorter sentences, or mine smart.fm for sentences when yahoo doesn't work, or alc.co.jp's “dictionary” when all else fails. Dump it all in Anki, lather, rinse, learn. The English keywords fall away with time.

    Here's how it all works for me. Take 映 for example. It's the えい in 映画 (えいが; eiga; “movie”), but it's also the うつ in 映る (うつる; utsuru; “to be reflected”). 画 you'll quickly find out isn't just the が in 映画 (えいが; eiga; “movie”), but it's also かく in 計画 (けいかく; keikaku; “plan”) and also in 企画 (きかく; kikaku; “project”)… so you will eventually start forgetting keywords and just remember the kanji by their on/kun from the words you use.

  • Sheepy

    Oh wow…Koichi, I LOVE this article. I am feeling the community love. Involving other prominent figures in the Japanese community is such a great idea.

    On the kanji subject. I picked up close to 500 in a month through Heisig's RTK1. However this is more half gained as I only know a basic meaning and no readings.

    However as it was said above me, this is a really good base to work from, and it gives you a lot of confidence, almost demystifying Kanji. No EVERY Kanji looks simple to me. (also the approach Koichi takes)

    I've looked into furthering study with a lot of methods and what I like the sound of most is sentence mining, that is using an SRS combined with exposing yourself to native content. (Kanji oddysey has also peaked my interest.)

    Keep up the great articles!

  • http://twitter.com/richfowler Rich Fowler

    If you're interested in Kanji Odyssey, there has been a TON of discussion about it on the kanji.koohii.com forums. Lots of love and some hate for it. It's not a perfect resource (no one resource is), but I like it more than the others that I've tried.

    The main gripes with KO are:

    1. The sentences often drag in advanced kanji way too early. But you can just tackle them and grab sentences for them from yahoo.co.jp and just learn them as well. (If you've already finished RTK1, you'll be okay.)

    2. The sentences tend to be long, so may need to break them up. But this can be a good thing, in that you get more example sentences. (Long sentences will bog down your reviews. This comes from experience.)

    3. Not every vocab word gets an example sentence– but that's what yahoo.co.jp's dictionaries are for.

    4. The sentences are a little dull. Well, I can't help you with that. A lot of them sound like they came out of the business section of a newspaper. On the upside, I find that it's a lot easier to watch the NHK news now. When they ambush the screen with all of those political and economic vocab words, I laugh at them. “Ha! I recognize you all now! You can't fool me!” (TV-Japan rocks.)

  • http://pmthreads.livenournal.com/ Tiffany Harvey

    I agree. I rarely ever used someone else's story, but they usually sparked an idea for my own. While mine would end up being completely different from the shared stories, I wouldn't have thought of it without seeing the ideas others were throwing around. Or it would have at least taken me a *lot* longer to come up with something!

  • JackiJinx

    Ack! I completely forgot to post on this. Last week, I printed out this article along with the Kanji mistakes and history blog posts for my study group. They seemed to like them and they're pretty useful.

    Keep up the good posts! ^_^

  • JackiJinx

    Ack! I completely forgot to post on this. Last week, I printed out this article along with the Kanji mistakes and history blog posts for my study group. They seemed to like them and they're pretty useful.

    Keep up the good posts! ^_^

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    Wow, I'm loving the kanji week articles. I've been stuck on learning kanji for a while, and I'm glad there are plenty of alternatives to learning than repitition. Where can I find that book, Story de Oboeru Kanji??

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  • Angie Reynolds89

    For learning the radicals I have been using your radical cheat sheet and the Smart.FM application. But I have to ask, are those the real meanings of the radicals or are they just ways of remembering them?

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  • MarkDV

    alljapaneseallthetime.com
    pretty much just Heisig + Anki

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  • Domdit

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  • Aaron

    Personally I rarely use my own story simply because of the time it takes.  In the time I take to think up a story that I know will stick, I could have repeated the other user’s story in my head a ton of times.  Not to mention that spaced repetition by itself almost completely removes the need for a story to be initially memorable.

  • http://www.jgeeks.com/ JGeeks

    I like and can identify with a lot of these posts — I really like the comment about “grabbing kanji by the horns and pummeling it.” Sometimes I think it pummels me more! I personally have a four-part approach to learning, which I center on Jouyou kanji sets. Basically it’s memorize context, test, and read, read, read! I outline my approach here: http://www.jgeeks.com/?p=1594. If you don’t accept links in your blog, please delete and run my post without it.

    Thanks for this post. I will add it to sites that I follow! 

  • Peter Livingston

    Just what I was looking for…

    I got pointed to this video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aROA4KqQSM4

    … and now I have the full version. Learned 30 kanji in the first sitting, and have not looked back.

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  • Markmcginty

    What works for me is reading a kanji’s on and kun yomi with example sentences into a voicerecorder and listening to them every day, writing the readings and their sentences out into a writing pad.

    The sentences I use are either adapted from the texbook I get the kanji from (JBP 3) or the White Rabbit flashcards I’m using in conjuction with JBP 3 and/ or my furigana dictionary that has example sentences. This way I can usefully tailor my sentences to practice and reinforce contemporary grammar and vocab from my textbook and flashcards. Reinforces and reviews things really well.

    The sentences are all written in basic hiragana and katakana except the kanji to be learnt which is written in its true form or any other part of a sentence I may already know its kanji for.

    When I write it’s into my a4 graph paper ‘writing out’ practice pad- the back of the pad being where I write out while the front of the pad has the ‘index’ of each new kanji with their readings and sentences. Eventually the pad meets in the middle and I continue on to a new pad, keeping my old indexes and exercises up on the shelf.  

    So this way I am able to first read the kanji from the textbook/ flashcards, then speak them into my voicerecorder, then listen to them every day and write them out in full sentences.

    As the readings sink in, complement the repetative listening practice with free reading from newpapers, magazines, manga to test yourself (the bilingual Hiragana Times is good).   

    This method’s very effective for me and I should think it would work with all general study Japanese textbooks eg Genki, Minna etc, from basic to intermediate.

  • belgand

    For me written Japanese breaks down into a couple of parts: kana is pronunciation and thankfully it actually works, reading is, well, reading comprehension it’s the same in any language, writing kanji is spelling. What’s interesting about this is that it’s actually a bit easier than English in some respects, mainly because we generally have to know both spelling AND pronunciation by heart. It also means that typing is a bit easier in Japanese since IMEs do some of the work for you roughly, but not quite, analogous to using English spellcheck.

    Now, does this mean that you don’t need to be able to write kanji correctly? Not quite, but what it does mean is that it’s not quite so bad as you think it is, you’re just a terrible speller. A skill we as a society find so daunting that doing it well is a form of competition. High stroke counts got you down? Have you compared it to writing words in English? Take a little time and pay attention to how many strokes you need to make to write that word. “Pronunciation”, to pick at random from something I just typed, is about 17 strokes! Slightly fewer in cursive.

    I won’t even start in on all of the awful grammar that many people use, but get away with on a daily basis.

    It all came to me when I was working assiduously on getting my hiragana to come out perfectly, getting the balance just right, making the lines clear and well-shaped… and then I glance over at something that I’d written in English. The language I’ve been speaking and reading and writing for my entire life and I noticed just how terrible my penmanship was. How squashed my letters are, how my loops are always dented on one side, the way my ’8′s have the bottom loop so crushed in and the top so oddly slanted that I’ve had people mistake them for ’7′s. 

    So don’t let it get you down. You can only barely speak, read, write, and err… draw English as it is.

    P.S. I personally prefer a version of David’s system. First learning vocabulary as hiragana and then once I know the word moderately well (about a week or so) learning it as kanji. This way I learn something useful that I can put into practice immediately and when I learn the kanji I’m associating it with the Japanese word, not an English translation of a Japanese word. This fits in with my earlier assertions. We all know plenty of words that we can use and speak at a much higher level of functionality than we can easily spell (it’s usually French loanwords for me, like “connoisseur” (which I totally just spelled wrong until the spellcheck caught it)). This is also the way a native would learn language. They already know the vocabulary (at least for common, everyday things), they just need to learn how to write it down… and then learn how to write it all over again in bastardized Chinese.

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  • coffeenmusic

    I have been memorizing Kanji for around 6 months now using Heisig’s Remember the Kanji book and the free Anki flash card program and they both work great. I agree with the fact that you must study every day consistently. I like to wake up early and study while drinking coffee. I started with Anki giving me 5 new Kanji every day and am now up to 8 a day. This takes over an hour to run through the deck from front to back and then back to front for writing. It also helps a lot that Anki syncs with smartphones, so you can study any time.

  • boomfantasticbaby

    While I could recognize some basic kanji before, now I want to study it more seriously. I like to have variety so I have a kanji reference book, kanji writing book, Japanese manga & magazine, kanji flashcards, and now Tales of Vesperia Japanese edition. Quite frankly, so far the videogame has most of my attention. TOV has the characters speaking as well as dialogue shown on screen, and it doesn’t move until I press a button.
    So, I started out transcribing the text based on what I could read and hear. Since I was working on my laptop, it was right by me the whole time. I had jisho.org open and looked at the kanji I didn’t know, and found them with the radical approach and added them in with the rest of the transcription. This helped a lot. While it was a pain in the butt for some kanji, the system of looking for radicals in kanji got easier. It even helped me with familiarity and just seeing how often a certain character was used. While I foolishly had this transcription on Evernote and somehow accidentally deleted all of it, I got a little ticked, said whatever, and continued to play the game. So it wasn’t a waste of time for me.

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