Studying kanji without drowning
Why the character count is the wrong thing to focus on, and what to do instead.
Kanji is where most learners stall. Roughly 2,000 characters are needed for general literacy, each with several readings, and the number alone is enough to make people quit before starting.
Learn words, not characters
The most common mistake is treating kanji as a list to memorise in isolation: the character, then its meanings, then all its readings. This is slow and it does not stick, because readings only make sense inside words.
Learn the components
Kanji are built from a few hundred recurring parts. Once you can see them, complex characters stop being arbitrary.
| Character | Parts | Reading of the whole |
|---|---|---|
| 休 | 人 (person) + 木 (tree) | rest: someone leaning on a tree |
| 明 | 日 (sun) + 月 (moon) | bright |
| 林 | 木 + 木 | woods |
| 森 | 木 + 木 + 木 | forest |
Spaced repetition, in small doses
A review app that shows you cards as you are about to forget them is the single most efficient tool available. The trap is volume: adding fifty new cards a day produces an unmanageable review load within a fortnight.
- Ten new items a day is sustainable for most people, and twenty is ambitious. Fifty a day is how people end up quitting.
- Reviews are not optional: skipping them for a week undoes the scheduling entirely.
- Always review words in context, not bare characters.
Read things
Flashcards maintain what you have met; reading is what teaches. Graded readers, NHK Easy News, product packaging, menus, game menus set to Japanese, anything where you meet a character you half-know and have to resolve it. That resolution is what makes it permanent.