hi i'm alivia and welcome to my channel where i'm going to be helping japanese learners get
through the beginner steps of learning japanese and today i want to talk about how i learn kanji
now if you're an absolute beginner and you don't know what kanji is i also made a video
that explains how the japanese writing system works so you can check that out in the box below
and now let's get on with the video so if you do know what kanji is you'll know that it is
an important part of the japanese writing system and that you absolutely need to know it if you
are learning japanese the only places you'll find absolutely no kanji is going to be for beginner
japanese learners who don't know kanji yet but even children's books will have kanji it's only
foreign language learners who will not see kanji at the very beginning kanji is also necessary if
you plan on taking the jlpt because you need to know a lot of kanji to be able to pass the test
the jlpt is the japanese language proficiency test and there are five levels at the first level
you need to know around 100 kanji so i'll pop up here how many kanji that you need to know for each
level and you'll see that you need to know quite a lot at the higher levels so if that's something
that you are interested in taking you're going to need to figure out a way that you are going to be
learning kanji consistently over a long period of time to be able to know all of those kanji
and a fun fact is that kanji are actually chinese characters that were brought into japanese
and there are over 50 000 kanji but don't worry you don't need to know all of them
a regular amount for a native japanese speaker is somewhere between two to three thousand
so most of them are not actually used every day so the way that i learn kanji is using an online
website called wanikani and wanikani will teach you the meanings and the pronunciation or reading
of over 2000 kanji as well as 6000 vocabulary words which use those kanji and you'll be able
to learn all this in the span of one to two years using their system the way that wanikani works is
that it teaches you kanji from the most simple looking kanji to the more complex looking kanji
so you start with kanji that have the least amount of lines and then you move to the ones
that use more lines and the reason it does this is so that it is easier for you as a japanese learner
because you've probably never really seen kanji before and you probably don't know how
to recognize more than maybe five so the reason it does this is so that you can get used to looking
at kanji and recognizing them there are other ways to learn kanji and a lot of them will teach
you kanji from the most frequently used kanji to less frequently use kanji and there's pros
and cons to this and the main con is that a lot of really frequently used kanji look really confusing
for japanese children it's not gonna be very hard because they've seen kanji growing up and
they probably already recognize a lot of them so when they're learning kanji at school it's not
from a blank slate but if you are absolutely new to japanese and you aren't familiar with kanji i
find the order that wanikani teaches the kanji to be a lot easier to digest because even though you
might be learning some more advanced words at the beginning the symbols are simple and it's going to
be easier for you to recognize and another thing is if you are going to be reading japanese which
i recommend that you do you will be picking up on those really frequently used kanji pretty quickly
because you will see it a lot in your reading so i really like the way that wanikani teaches from the
most simple looking kanji to the more difficult looking kanji and the way that wanikani will
teach you these kanji is by breaking the kanji down into these smaller parts called radicals
and radicals are basically just small shapes that are frequently used in lots of different kanji
it's kind of similar to like in english how both eyes and j's have a little dot over top it's
just a symbol that we see in different letters and it's kind of like the same thing it's just
a shape that you will see in many kanji so being able to recognize them will help you remember what
the kanji is overall if you can figure out what those smaller parts are so for example this is
both a radical and a kanji it means sun or day but this symbol is often seen in a lot of other kanji
these smaller parts don't necessarily translate into what the kanji means but you will be giving
the kanji meaning through the radicals through these things called mnemonics
so mnemonics are basically these stories that you will tell yourself that help your memory and help
you learn the kanji and it really helps it's a lot more effective than just looking at something and
trying to remember it instead you're going to give your brain something to stick to something
to make that initial connection to so that you can remember the word and this is one of the most
valuable parts of wanikani every radical will be given a name and you will use that name to tell a
story about the kanji that the radical is in and this will help you remember what the kanji means
over time you'll forget what the mnemonic is once you understand what the kanji is and can recognize
it but it really helps when you're first learning because you'll have something to work off of
because remember you're going to need to know 2000 kanji so that is a lot this just makes it easier
for you to remember i found a lot of other ways would also break the kanji down into different
radicals but they would expect me to make my own mnemonics and i cannot do that for the life of me
i find it too time consuming and i'm just not willing to do it so i really like that wanikani
just gives me the mnemonics and i don't have to do any effort on my own part if there's a mnemonic
that i don't like there is an option to write your own mnemonic but i usually just use what they give
me and once you learn this kanji then you'll also learn vocabulary words that use the same kanji
to help reinforce your memory so many kanji by themselves are words but you can also combine
kanji with other kanji to make new words sort of like compound words in english so i really like
this about wanikani and i find a lot of other methods to learn kanji don't do this so i will
learn the kanji and then i will learn multiple different words that use that kanji so using
wanikani is pretty straightforward to use you will basically do some lessons every day to learn new
radicals kanji or vocabulary and then you will do reviews so you'll review any material that you
previously learned and then you just do that every day and when you're doing your reviews you're not
reviewing every single thing you've ever learned because wanikani is a spaced repetition system
or an srs an srs system is basically a way to train your long-term memory so if you were doing
paper flash cards you would have this big stack and every day you would review them but with
wanikani instead it will show you words depending on how well you know them so it will save you
time because you won't have to review every single thing you've ever learned every single day because
that's not very efficient instead it will show you words based on how well you're doing so words that
are very new you'll see pretty frequently and as you get to know them you will start to space out
hence spaced when those reviews are so at first you'll learn a word and you'll see it every couple
of days but then it will become every couple of weeks and then every couple of months making this
interval between when you see a word longer this trains your long-term memory and makes you able to
remember it for the long term because you could review every word every single day but remember
we're learning 2 000 words and 6 000 vocabulary so it's just not feasible so instead we're only
reviewing what we need to review before we forget them but we're pushing the limits to train our
long-term memory so some people when they want to learn kanji they also want to learn how to
write the kanji and i'm not personally one of those people i am really trying to focus all
my energy into understanding japanese working on my comprehension level i think when you're first
starting out it is fun to learn a couple of dozen kanji and how to write them and learn all about
what stroke order is and just learn how kanji are written but it's just not something
that's a priority for me right now i find that learning kanji is already a really hard process
but if writing is something that interests you you can definitely practice your writing while using
wanikani so if you wanted to while you're doing your reviews you could just have a sheet of paper
next to your computer and you could just practice writing each kanji as you're doing your reviews
and just know when you are starting wanikani it does start out slow and that's just because you're
not going to have very many reviews in your review cycle and some people get a bit frustrated with
this because they're really excited to learn all this kanji and they want to learn as much as they
can as fast as they can this is because everything that you learn you have to review on another day
so if you try and cram learning 50 new words in one day you have to review all those 50 words
on a different day as well as any other reviews that happen to fall on that same day so wanikani
does restrict how fast you can go so that in the future you don't have an overwhelming amount of
things to review so if you are trying wanikani and that's the only reason you don't like it
keep going because you will have many reviews every day in a couple of weeks so there are 60
levels and each level takes at least seven days to pass so the fastest you can go through all of
wanikani is in just over a year but i think a more realistic amount of time that will take people
is between one to two years if you go at max speed it is doable and there are people who have done it
but i think it will be very overwhelming and you won't be able to focus on other parts of your
japanese learning so wanikani is a paid service which is a deterrent for some people because
you can definitely learn kanji for free but i really find wanikani's service really valuable
and i don't mind paying for it at all i find that it's really helping me learn my kanji and i don't
think i would be able to do it without their hand holding so it is nine dollars a month or it is 89
a year you know that's kind of like a spotify membership i think it's super worth it i'm using
wanikani every single day and really getting a lot of use out of it so i think it's completely
worth it so if you're interested you can try the free trial where you get the first three levels
for free it takes about two to three weeks to get through and then you can decide at the end if it's
something that you want to stick with or not i really love it i think that it has really given me
a consistent way to learn my kanji a really sustainable way to learn my kanji there are free
ways to learn kanji that exists so if wanikani isn't for you or you just don't have the money
you can still definitely learn kanji other ways you know it's not one size fits all other people
really like other methods so if you're trying something else to learn kanji i'd love to hear
what you're using and why you really like it but i really like how wanikani works and i think it
really works for me so i have no problem paying for that service like i find right now with words
that i've been studying for a really long time as soon as i see it i've already typed in what
the pronunciation is and i didn't even go through my brain so i think that's really good that i'm
getting that really reflexive memory happening so now before we end the video i just want to
remind you that kanji is a really important part of japanese but knowing kanji does not mean you're
fluent you still need to learn how to read how to comprehend how to listen to the language how
to speak the language how to write the language so definitely use some type of system to learn your
kanji but you do need to go beyond it at some point you do need to apply what you're learning
learning in the wanikani system or any system will give you that initial recognition of the
word but it's only through actually seeing it in japanese writing that it's going to stick in your
mind for the long term so down below i'd love to hear what system you're using to learn your kanji
how many kanji do you know so far how's it going and if there's anything else that you're having
trouble with in your japanese journey that i could make a video about and that's all i have for today