Konnichiyall! Today we’re going to talk about every Japanese learner’s favorite word: kanji.
Whether you read that sentence ironically or not might depend on how far along you are in your studies. To the new learner of Japanese, kanji is very often, if not always, the most frustrating, baffling, and ridiculous-seeming part of the language.
Kanji, or the thousands upon thousands of Chinese characters that came to Japan back in the fifth century and really stuck around, are the bane of many Japanese learners’ existences. Although they’ve been simplified and changed to suit the needs of the Japanese over time, they’re still a pain to learn.
And, considering that from these original kanji the Japanese managed to pull out not one, but TWO phonetic character systems (first katakana, which later developed into hiragana), you might be thinking - WHY?!? Why the hell did kanji stick around?? WHY THE MADNESS?!
Or maybe that was just me.
My Rocky Start with Kanji Learning
To be very honest, for the first bit of my studies, I barely learned any kanji at all. In six months, I maybe had 50-100 under my belt. Out of over 2000 basic characters. At partial fault was the aforementioned annoyance. I didn’t buy into the idea that kanji had a point, because I didn’t see a problem that adding some spaces to the language and writing in hiragana couldn’t fix.
I know what you’re thinking. No one is going to change a whole writing system because you had a better idea, and also you’re probably not the first person to suggest just adding some spaces between words for the love of god please—
I knew this. However, not to trivialize death or anything, but I feel like I absolutely went through the 5 stages of grief when it came to my kanji studies.
Anger that I’d have to commit so much time and memory to learning kanji, denial of the fact that I actually couldn’t get by on just hiragana, bargaining that if I just learned like 100 or 200, that would probably help a lot, right?
And depression when it definitely did not, in fact, help that much.
The thing that kicked me into the final acceptance phase was meeting my girlfriend. When we started dating six months into my first year here, I realized that I’d probably be staying in Japan a bit longer than I’d originally planned. And if I was going to make a real life here, I realized I’d need to improve my Japanese on all fronts. This helped me see that there was no way out but through if I wanted to ever stop having to translate photos of every unfamiliar product in the grocery store.
So, I did what any good girlfriend would do, and I buckled down. The first thing I did was search for alternative study methods. I had been trying to learn kanji out of an old book by writing them down repetitively in a notebook. This is a traditional method, and also the method that Japanese students use to learn kanji themselves. If it’s a method that works for you, that’s awesome. That hand to brain connection is really great for learning.
However, it wasn’t working for me, because I could never motivate myself to actually open the damn book and write down the kanji. I’d practice maybe once or twice a week maximum. But this doesn’t work with kanji. Unless someone has a photographic memory, kanji should be practiced pretty much every day. At such a low frequency, I could never advance, because I was always reviewing the stuff I’d already forgotten from last time.
So to start with, I found an app with a built in review system, which was an absolute game changer for me. Automating the review system was what allowed me to get over that sticking point that I hit after learning the basic kanji, and start to really learn and remember things. The specific app I was using also allowed me to write the kanji with my finger on the page, which was great for my writing and also for my memory.
I learned using this app until about mid-way through the N3 level. Unfortunately, eventually an update was released that changed the automatic review system, and the frequency of review wasn’t high enough for me to effectively remember new items, so I don’t use it anymore. I haven't used it in a long time, so I can no longer say whether or not it works well now - it might be worth a shot, especially if being able to write matters a lot to you!
Even though I stopped using it, what stuck with me from that app was the importance of automated revision. In my search for another method that would allow me to entrust my kanji review management to a more responsible entity, I stumbled across WaniKani.
Switching to a Spaced Repetition System - Wanikani
For those that haven’t heard of WaniKani, it’s a kanji learning website built on an automatic Spaced Repetition System (SRS). SRS is a simple study system in which newly learned items, as well as difficult to remember items, are shown more frequently. As you review items correctly, the time between each review increases. However, if you make a mistake, the time interval for reviewing that item again decreases, and you'll review it sooner to help you remember it. These time spaces have of course been researched and optimized.
SRS is a great study method for anything that requires memorizing a lot of information, so it’s wonderful for kanji. As someone who majored in the sciences in college, I also wish I’d had some sort of SRS system for biology. I feel like I’d actually remember some biology now if I hadn’t just crammed mass amounts of information before tests and never reviewed it again.
Anyway, back to WaniKani. If you do your WaniKani everyday, you can learn the basic 2000 kanji and about 6000 vocabulary words in under two years. Given that Japanese students learn about 1000 kanji in their elementary school studies, and continue to learn kanji until they graduate high school, this is a pretty sweet deal. I think that WaniKani is probably the fastest system out there to actually learn kanji.
I started it in May 2021, and I’ve now (November 2022) learned over 1225 kanji through WaniKani. By ‘learned the kanji’ I mean that I know the meaning, the kunyomi (Japanese reading), the onyomi (Chinese reading), and know multiple vocabulary that use these kanji.
However, you can absolutely do it faster or slower than this! Whatever suits your needs. The pace of WaniKani is super controllable by doing more or fewer of the new lessons at a time. For example, I seem to struggle a bit with getting motivated to study kanji right after the JLPT. For both the N3 and N2 levels, from the time I take the exam until the results are released about 2 months later, I have a hard time keeping up with the reviews, so I slow down a lot during these times.
As I type this, I have 93 reviews that I plan to do today, but I've been putting off those 20 new vocabulary lessons in order to keep the review number slightly down.
Wanikani's Pricing
Unlike a lot of the methods I suggest, WaniKani is not free. So, while it is definitely possible to progress through WaniKani at your own pace, it can be a race against the clock depending on how much money you’re willing to drop on your kanji studies. Basically, they offer three options for payment:
Monthly at $9/month
Yearly at $89/year
Lifetime for a one-time purchase of $299
As an English teacher in Japan, you may not be surprised to learn that I am not loaded, and $299 was a little steep for me. I also liked the idea of the yearly time limit, because it would motivate me to learn as much as I could before my subscription ran out. Thus, I opted for the yearly plan.
I’m now in my second year, so I’ve currently paid $178 for my kanji studies. To me, it’s worth this price to learn kanji in two years, and even if I stopped now, I’d say I’ve gotten my money’s worth. I’m currently on level 36/60, so I probably won’t be able to complete all the levels by next June. At that point, I plan to either switch to monthly, or buy a third year, depending on how much I’ve got left. Even at three years on the yearly plan, it’s still cheaper than lifetime, which is why I chose it. However, I have a friend who prefers to progress at a slower and stress-free pace, and they really like the lifetime subscription because Japanese study can be treated more like a hobby without any impending deadlines.
In the end, it’s all up to personal preference and financial situation. In today’s age, it’s possible to learn kanji entirely for free on the Internet by just looking up “2000 basic kanji”. However, I’m not nearly that disciplined. I need the review management, the daunting subscription expiration, and systematic learning that WaniKani provides, so I choose to pay. In other areas of my Japanese studies, I don't fork over much money, or any at all. It's all about balance.
The good news is that you don’t have to decide based just on my post. WaniKani offers the first three levels as a free trial, which allows you to learn about 80 kanji and 200 vocab words, which is just about enough to pass the JLPT N5. It’s comparable to the amount of kanji you’d learn in your first semester or school year of formal Japanese classes at the high school or university level.
Wanikani's Drawbacks
There are, as with any system, some drawbacks to WaniKani.
First and foremost, it doesn't teach you how to write. This is a reading-only system that is indeed skipping a large part of the full kanji-learning experience. I'd argue that in today's age of technology based communication, reading is a lot more important than writing, but there's no way around the fact that WaniKani sacrifices writing for speed.
Next, one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard comes from learners who are not beginners, but have been studying Japanese for some time and can already read several hundred kanji. With WaniKani, you must start at level one, from the very basic kanji. There’s no way to test out of simpler kanji levels.
There is a reason for this. The whole system functions on mnemonics (silly stories to help you remember things). These mnemonics are based on the radicals (the different pieces of each kanji). You must learn their system’s name for each radical, so you can understand the stories they build with them later on to help you remember kanji.
At first, this feels so annoying. Especially because there are real names for these radicals in Japanese, and the WaniKani names are only sometimes related to them at best. That being said, once you get to the 20s and 30s levels, you start to learn a lot of kanji that look almost the same, and the only difference will be one small part. At these levels, I’m so glad that I have these silly mnemonics to help me keep track of 7 different kanji that all have the same right side.
However, this doesn’t take away the fact that I did have to restudy a lot of kanji I already knew, because I started WaniKani when I was already around the N3 level. It was annoying, and the first level especially felt slow-moving as I learned the first radicals.
But also, in the end, I now know these kanji a lot better than I did having only learned them from a book. For example, studying from a book left me so confused about using the kunyomi (Japanese) reading of a kanji versus the onyomi (Chinese) reading. For anyone reading this who isn’t yet familiar with kanji, almost all of them have 2+ different ways to read them, depending on the context. WaniKani helped me understand when to use which reading in a way that no other system had. Additionally, even when I was studying kanji I already knew, I often learned a lot of new vocabulary that used these kanji that I hadn’t previously known, so I never had a feeling of WaniKani being 100% review.
The other complaint I sometimes hear about WaniKani is that while it teaches you the readings, it doesn’t necessarily teach you to read (as in, there aren’t longer passages or things to practice with, and sometimes even the example sentences aren’t super useful). However, WaniKani also acknowledges this. They remind you frequently in their level-up emails that even kanji that you’ve supposedly burned into your brain to the point that you no longer need to review can be forgotten without exposure, and that the way to fix this is by just reading actual material.
Graded readers, children’s books, manga, JLPT passages, whatever. WaniKani will certainly help with understanding the readings and meanings of the kanji and words, but a significantly increased reading speed will ultimately come from practicing reading itself.
The Bottom Line About Using WaniKani for Japanese Studies
WaniKani, just like anything, is a tool. It’s a super useful tool that has helped me learn kanji very quickly, but ultimately it isn’t magic. It requires hard work, and it isn’t a fix-all solution to the hurdle of reading in Japanese.
Drawbacks aside, I really recommend WaniKani for anyone under an N2 level. My understanding of kanji has skyrocketed over the last year and a half, and at level 36 I generally have relatively few troubles understanding things like my work emails, my mail, manga, etc. I’m not yet at the level of reading novels written for adults (i.e. no furigana), but I know I’m on the right track to getting there. In regards to the JLPT, I really had no troubles with the kanji section on the N3 and N2.
I truly believe this is one of the fastest ways out there to learn not only the basic 2000 kanji, but also to drastically increase one’s vocabulary. The automated management of optimal kanji and vocabulary review times is well worth the money. If you’ve been struggling with teaching yourself kanji, definitely give WaniKani’s free levels a try. This system really changed my relationship to the Japanese character system and helped me overcome the seemingly-impossible hurdle of reading. Kanji is now something I really enjoy, and I hope it can become this way for you too!
Do you want more tips on how to self-study Japanese? Here are some of my go-to study and practice methods:
That’s all for now! Good luck with your studies, and wherever you are in the kanji stages of grief, remember that there’s a light at the end of the basic 2000 tunnel.
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またね！