Job Discussion Forums

[ghost]

I just spent 3 weeks intensive study at a Language school in Fukuoka (www.genkijacs.com) where the classes were taught using mostly hiragana/katakana for the beginning levels.

Has anyone learnt kanji, and how long did it take you to learn 100/300/500 kanji or more, and what was the method you used to learn the kanji?

I noticed that even without knowing kanji, around 25% of everything written in newspapers etc, seems to be in 'kana' and on t.v. in japan, when subtitles are used, they are also generally in kana and not kanji, or they are a mix.

Finally, how far can you get with just knowledge of the kana?

I have found learning Japanese to be easier compared with Korean. The only complication, I found, was getting the particles mixed up. Pronunciation of Japanese is a cinch compared with Mandarin and also easier than Korean. In Japan, people understand foreigners who massacre their language - not so in China, Taiwan or Korea, in my experience.

Ghost in Korea

[southofreality]

[Apsara]

No-one has learnt all the kanji, it's a lifelong study! I personally think being able to read kanji is invaluable for living in Japan. The problem is many words, verb and adjectives particularly, are a mix of hiragana and kanji, and just being able to read the kana suffix doesn't help you much with the meaning. This includes subtitles on TV.

In my opinion around 500 kanji is a good base to start to make sense of what you are seeing around you, read street signs and food labels in the supermarket etc.

Don't worry too much about learning to write them, unless you are writing them every day you will just forget them anyway. Reading is much easier and more likely to stick in my experience. How long it takes you to learn that many is really an individual thing- how long you spend studying, how good your visual memory is etc.

[Zzonkmiles]

Learning kanji is very important, IMO.

There are about 300 that you should definitely learn, as they are the most commonly used ones (directions, basic objects, common verbs and adjectives, common foods, etc.).

Being able to understand kanji will make it MUCH easier for you to type messages on your keitai and get around in restaurants and handling your business in general. From a quality of life standpoint, knowing kanji will make your daily life in Japan a lot more manageable because you will be more self-sufficient. Also, one hiragana compound may have multiple meanings, but being able to match those readings with the appropriate kanji will make it easier for you to be understood.

Most place names/station names are written in kanji, but not always with hiragana. And if you can write kanji, it makes filling out forms easier, such as at the post office when you have to write your address.

How long it takes to learn them depends on your study habits and how much Japanese you use outside of work. It took me about three years to learn about 1200 kanji, but there are many people who learned more kanji faster. Others can barely recognize the kanji for various numbers and days of the week. It's up to you. But the person who said it should be a lifelong process was spot on.

[Wintermute]

I've been studying Japanese since 2004 but started taking it seriously about 2 years ago. Within that period I managed to go from 300 kanji to about 1000 now. It takes a while but it's like a snowball, once you start it builds upon itself. It's fun becoming fluent in the language as well because you can interact more naturally with Japanese people. Just go slow and try not to get frustrated (it will definitely happen). Start with with basics (i.e. nouns, verbs and adjectives) and go from there.

[amphivera]

A good resource for the study of basic kanji are the Kanji drill (kanji doriru) books that can be found in any Japanese bookstore. These are the books that Japanese junior school kids use and are located with all the other kids study materials. There's actually a fixed set of kanji that Japanese students are required to learn between grades 1-6. I recall that there's something like 81 kanji in the first grade set and it goes up from there. I would start with those because it's high-frequency stuff. Learning the most basic kanji will allow you to acquire more complex ones quicker because you'll be familiar with the bushu and other kanji components. It should also give you a system for retaining new kanji.

All in all it takes a lot of effort but I think it's well worth it if you have any long-term interest in Japan.

[ironopolis]

Lots of good advice already given above, but one point I'd emphasize is that NO-ONE has learnt all the kanji, and that includes the Japanese themselves.

Just like many native English speakers are really poor at spelling words they certainly should've learnt at school, likewise there are many Japanese around who can no longer write, or sometimes even read, many of the roughly 2000 kanji they should have learnt at school - yet of course they still manage perfectly well in their everyday lives. Also similar to how many of us have deteriorating spelling abilities due to spell-checkers making us lazy, many Japanese are forgetting how to write kanji because their keitai or the space bar on their keyboard does it for them. I make this point not to put down Japanese abilities in their own language, but just as a bit of encouragement to anyone who thinks it's an impossible task.

Just my personal experience here, but I'm not sure I'd agree that there's little point learning to write them. Obviously, we all have different ways of remembering things, and it's certainly true that with the advent of computers and keitais you rarely need to write kanji. However, I found that practising writing kanji down in the correct stroke order, was THE way to remember them, especially the more complex characters.

[Hoser]

I'm up to about 200 kanji now (almost). I learned the first 100 for the Level 4 test but I did that a while ago. I just started studying kanji seriously again last month. I bought the kanji cards which I find to be extremely helpful. It really helps when you want to give yourself a quick test. It also makes it a lot easier to learn. I don't want to burn out so I've given myself the nice, slow paced task of 20 kanji a week. It doesn't sound like a lot but that's 80 kanji a month and 1000 in a year.

[Apsara]

Ironopolis on thinking about it I definitely agree that practicing writing the kanji and learning how they are formed is a great exercise early on- I did plenty of that at high school in NZ, and for the first 500 kanji or more it is invaluable.

Now I'm studying towards JLPT 1 and have about 400 more to go to reach the 2,000 or so I need to be able to read for the exam, I find that writing them out doesn't help me a lot, although I usually write them out once or twice while making vocab lists. Learning kanji as part of the words they are usually found in and seeing/ hearing those words in context is what really makes them stick these days.

[Hoser]

All the kanji so far I've also learned how to write. This may be just me but personally, I feel that if I know how to write the kanji then that just makes my chances even better that I'll be able to read it when I need to. I can't see how it could hurt.

[ironopolis]

[Vince]

I can't give a meaningful estimate of how long it took me to learn the few hundred kanji I knew, because I didn't study consistently. I learned some by cracking the books and devising drills, and others by regular exposure or on one-off occasions.

I think the programs at colleges like ICU or Sophia are the best option for power-learning kanji with the most structure and support. Not everybody can swing that. Next would probably be the commercial language schools like ARC Academy.

The mix of kanji and kana you see is how the language is written. To put it simply, the core concept of a word is usually written in kanji, and the grammatical variation is in kana. For example, yomu (to read) is written with yo-, the core concept of reading, in kanji and -mu, the tag for simple present tense, in hiragana. So learning only kana will help you to understand that something will, can, or did happen, but you won't know what will, can, or did happen.

The basic body of general use kanji is called the joyo kanji. There are 1,945 of these as established by the Ministry of Education. High school students are expected to know these, but conversations I've had with my students led me to believe that the average person doesn't retain much more than half. You can probably do okay with the 500 most common kanji if you aren't doing things that require a lot of literacy. The joyo kanji are listed in descending order of frequency of use, so you'd basically want to go down the list until you reach your literacy needs.

I liked fretting over all the Japanese kanji I still had to learn, then getting students from China who rolled their eyes at the Japanese's comparatively meager selection of kanji. Seriously, I loved watching them write in their beautiful Chinese cursive.

[Apsara]

[Vince]

[fluffyhamster]

The Japanese may seem to forget how to write some kanji sometimes, but they'd probably recognize (read) them easily enough. I suppose it's a bit like forgetting some English spellings (but quite a bit worse, especially if the forgotten bit isn't much of a phonetic).